TRANSCENDENCE

On September 11th, 2001, the whole world lived through the shock and horror of the Twin Towers falling. As did I. For the second time.

????????????I was familiar with the buildings, because in the late 1990s, I had worked as a summer associate at the law firm of Brown & Wood (later Sidley Austin Brown & Wood), which occupied the 56th to 60th floors in the North Tower. Working there had been one of the most exciting and formative experiences of my life. Afterwards, I returned to Germany, where I later worked at Deloitte & Touche. About a year before 9/11, I had a nightmare.

????????????I dreamt that I was in the stairwell of one of the towers. I hurried down the stairs along with countless other people, panicked. To protect myself from falling debris, I covered my head with my arms. At some point I realized that I was not going to make it and since I was already relatively far down, I decided to jump the remaining few feet. Then the tower fell forward, taking many other buildings with it like dominoes.

???????????I woke up, annoyed, because I had a strenuous day filled with tax lawyer’s exams ahead of me and only had a short while left to rest. While dozing off again, I thought to myself “please don’t let this nightmare continue.” All of a sudden, I was in the second tower. Again, I was running down the stairs of an overcrowded stairwell, feeling the pain of debris hitting me. Eventually, I cowered at the foot of the building, where I witnessed its collapse.

???????????Next, I tried to make my way to my hotel, located on the Upper East Side. My frantic efforts to leave the city were futile because the island of Manhattan had been shut down.

???????????To top it off, I dreamt of what seemed like a warning, namely that something unrelated, even much worse was going to happen in New York later.

???????????I rose, completely shaken. Like everyone else, I had had plenty of nightmares before, but this one was so devastating that in response, I picked up the phone and called my partner. I told him about my nightmare and assured him that “whatever happens, I will never go back to New York again, ever! Then I forgot the dream.

????????????A few months thereafter, I unexpectedly received a job offer in New York. I was thrilled and accepted. It had only been a few weeks after my arrival, when we received news at the office that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. My colleagues and I congregated around the television set and watched in horror as the buildings collapsed.

???????????In my dream, their fall had impacted buildings up to midtown, just north of Grand Central Station. My office was on Park Avenue and 57th Street, exactly that area. My apartment was located on the upper side, where, in my dream, my hotel had been. Manhattan was in lockdown, with all air travel suspended for a few days, making it impossible to leave the city. The main difference between my dream and reality was that the buildings actually collapsed onto themselves, rather than fall forward. I had not been aware of any planes or terrorism.

????????????When all of a sudden, I remembered my nightmare, I literally couldn’t believe it. But I had a witness. I had called someone right after and told him about it. But even with that witness, I was incredulous and, at times, doubted myself, just simply because there was no logical explanation for this pretty precise premonition. Maybe the event much worse than 9/11, is the Covid-19 pandemic. I almost hope so, rather than it being something even worse…

????????????I have hardly ever shared my premonition with anyone, let alone publicly. I’m an attorney, trained to soberly analyze and judge verifiable facts. Particularly for professional reasons, I’m not exactly eager to be perceived as a kook.

????????????My story may seem completely irrelevant. But it is not irrelevant to me, because it has made me realize that there are more things between heaven and earth than we can know or understand. This realization has inspired hope in me, and it is this hope that I would like to share with you on this 20th anniversary of September 11.

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