Thanks so much for your lovely message, Deborah, and for reading this. This was my adopted mother, and the only reason she was staring at her toast was there was about to be an uncomfortable conversation. She was stunned that I had come in and talked about the girls being dead, because she and my dad were sitting there waiting for me to come to the kitchen so they could tell me, as he'd seen it in the paper that morning.

She had no clue about talking about feelings and of course having been quite abusive and insensitive (to say the least), she'd never had to deal with any sort of real emotional issue with me. It wasn't until I said about the dream that she stared at her plate, didn't want to look at me, knew I was about to get some terrible news.

She did say in the days following that incident, that she'd noticed for some time that I "knew" things - which was interesting. I wasn't even aware of it myself. I don't remember her words but the gist of it was that this scared her or freaked her out (she would NOT have used that phrase!).

My birth mother had some of this ability, though, and four of my children have it, too.

Thanks for your comments, Deborah. Interesting that you had those thoughts about my mum!