It was quite a tough, upsetting weekend, parent-wise; I'm emotionally drained and exhausted, and that's all I want to write about that.

The Vox Question of the Day is: Have you ever had a dream that came true?

Yes, I have - actually, this happens to me fairly frequently. However, my dreams are usually quite low on the scale of earth-shattering revelations - along the order of me dreaming that my friend Tim, who doesn't have a motorcycle, comes over to my house on his bitchin' bike. Then a couple of months later, Tim e-mails everyone with pictures of his new motorcycle and it's exactly like the one my dream. I don't ascribe any great mysterious significance to these occurences; perhaps Tim has mentioned that he likes motorcycles, or he said to Alan that he was thinking of getting one and I subconsciously registered the comment even though he wasn't speaking to me. Then, since I know Tim, it takes no great intellectual leap to imagine that he'd get a Harley Road King instead of a Suzuki Katana.

That sort of thing isn't unusual for me, but there was one occasion almost five years ago when one of my dreams came true, but what made this one different was that I'd told a friend all about the dream in great detail after I dreamt it but before it came true. So it wasn't a matter of saying in hindsight, "I dreamed I had an office like this!", "I dreamed you bought that car!", "In my dream you were wearing a dress just like that!" - this time someone absolutely knew I'd had a presentient dream.

Here is some background, all factual: in Atlanta in 1987, a beautiful Buckhead socialite named Lita Sullivan answered the door to a florist. The floral delivery was a trick; she was shot and killed. Her estranged husband James was suspected of hiring a hit man to avoid a messy, expensive divorce. I was in college at the time and I'd heard about it, thought peripherally it was a terrible thing but didn't pay all that much attention, any more than any other local news.

Then in the summer of 2002, I saw something on televison about the case. Unsolved Mysteries did a segment, maybe it was a rerun of that, but I think it was Dominick Dunne, who did an episode of Power, Privilege and Justice about the murder; the television show put it in my head, I guess, and a few nights later I had my dream about James Sullivan.

The next day I went in to work and it occurred to me that my friend and co-worker Sheila very likely knew Lita Sullivan. There is a certain circle in Atlanta of elite, wealthy, prominent black families to which my friend belonged; Lita's parents (the McClintons) certainly qualified and I realized that Lita would have been the same age as Sheila - so I asked if they had been friends. Sheila answered that they weren't the closest, bestest, inseparable buds or anything but yes, they were friendly, ran in the same circles, went to the same schools, same dance class, same parties, that kind of thing, why?

I responded that of all things, I'd dreamed the night before that I'd seen James Sullivan and that he'd been captured, so this had me thinking about Lita, her family, etc.

Sheila wanted to know more details of my dream. Well, in my dream I'd been hanging out at an upscale beach resort and I'd spotted James Sullivan; within the dream I knew that I was recognizing a guy I normally wouldn't look at twice because I'd just seen the television recap of the murder case. So I was shadowing him all around this resort, up and down the beach into the bar, from the bar to the restaurant and trying to call to report him. I knew that wherever this resort was, we were outside the United States because my cell phone wouldn't work so I kept trying to use various pay and courtesy phones around the hotel complex.

Much of my dream consisted of me trying to place a phone call to report the sighting while not losing track of my quarry. I was having trouble with dialing codes (which I didn't know) and because I couldn't make the international operator or any of the hotel employees understand me (language barrier). I couldn't make the folks at the hotel understand what was going on, so it was up to me to keep following James and trying to call from various hotel phones. When I finally did get through to the U.S., they kept connecting me to 911 instead of the Atlanta police department, which frustrated me even more because I didn't need 911, I needed the detective assigned to the case. Finally, I called information for the number of Mr. & Mrs. McClinton (Lita's parents) which took several tries as James bounced around the pool, the bar, various places at the resort. I called Lita's parents hoping that I could make them understand that I wasn't some weirdo crank, which worried dream-me because I somehow knew that even though it was early afternoon where I was, it was like 4AM in Atlanta. I eventually got through, talked to her dad (Mr. Emory) who believed me and got in touch with the lead detective. In my dream, Lita's folks handled things from there and foreign police arrived to carry away James, kicking and screaming.

Sheila is interested in this kind of thing and wanted to quiz me further. Where was I? What did the place look like? I didn't know but I could offer more specifics: it was somewhere I'd never actually been, but not just an unfamiliar hotel - unfamiliar in a more 'large-scale' sense. What I mean is that no, it wasn't Fiesta Americana Cozumel Reef or Carambola in St. Croix or Atlantis in Nassau (all places I've stayed), but I was certain it wasn't anywhere in Mexico or the Virgin Islands or the Bahamas - somehow I felt sure that I'd know Mexico and the Caribbean when I saw them, even if I hadn't been to that exact beach - this was somewhere totally unfamiliar. I mentioned that it was a very white sandy beach (think more like Florida's Gulf Coast, not like Punalu'u). Also, there was the aforementioned language problem: I didn't speak the local language and although the locals seemed to want to speak English, it was so heavily accented that I couldn't understand it any more than I could have understood Coptic, which eliminated any number of European destinations. I had no idea what language the hotel employees in my dream were speaking, but I knew what it wasn't: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese...not that I'm fluent in all of those languages, but I'd recognize any of those if I heard them.

Sheila kept grilling me about that dream; she wanted me to remember something, anything, that would be a valuable tip but even though it'd be great to be Ms. Psychic Detective and bring miscreants to justice, realistically it didn't add up to much. While I was certain that James Sullivan was outside the U.S., that hardly took a dizzying intellect to surmise. And he was somewhere I'd never been before featuring a language unfamiliar to me. Gee, that's helpful. Here, Mr. Lead Detective, is a list of everywhere; now cross off all the places that speak Romance languages, cross off all the places I've been, and see all the places that you've got left - look for the ones that have upscale beach resorts with white-sand beaches lying within an afternoon time zone which corresponds to Atlanta in the wee small pre-dawn hours, and bingo! your fugitive is in one of 'em. Yeah. Watch out, Miss Cleo, right?

Here is the punch line, which Sheila and at least one other co-worker will confirm: one week to the day after I had that dream, after fifteen years on the lam, James Sullivan was arrested! He was on the run for a decade and a half, and one week after I dreamed of his arrest, it happened. James got busted in Cha-am, Thailand. Cha-am is Thailand's longest white sandy beach, kind of an exclusive secret as most tourists stay at Hua Hin. And as you might have surmised, Cha-am is not in Mexico, the Virgin Islands, the Caribbean, they don't speak French, Spanish, German, Italian but DO speak heavily accented English, and interestingly enough, when it's 3:00 in the afternoon in Bankok, it's 4 AM in Atlanta. Everything I knew or guessed about the place in my dream is correct, though it's more accurate in hindsight than it was helpful beforehand. Still, YES, I've had dreams that came true.

Here's a link to the trial coverage, if you're interested - he got life without parole. I can only hope my dreams of James in a squalid, cockroach-infested PMIA prison are as true as my dreams of white sandy Cha-am beaches. Pass the sunblock, and...y-a-w-n...