Now this story is about people who are born with Sight: the ability to see things and perceive things. And it’s called being born with a veil or being born with, what you call it…a cowl. A cowl is a piece of skin, a piece of membrane in the birthing process that is sometimes covering the face of the baby. And it’s called a veil. Anyway, your grandmother, my mom, was born with one. My mom was born with a veil. At some points she said she could see different things…but after a while she lost it. Her last recollection of something happening was…she was in her house and she had a dream, it was more like a premonition. It was a dream about smoke and it was – she was dreaming it was at my sister’s house, right. So she woke up out the dream and immediately called my sister, you know. And what happened at that time was that my sister had fallen asleep and she had something on the fire and it was burning. There was smoke in her house, but my mom woke her up and she able to – it wasn’t a fire yet, but it was smoking, you know. So then she was able to turn it off and she said, “thank god,” because if my mom didn’t call her, the house would have really burned down. Actually, it was an apartment they were living in at the time. So that was the last incident she had recounted to me.

This is a folk belief held by my informant and many of my relatives on her side of the family. Honestly, I believe that people can have predictions and premonitions in dreams; I have heard of other people having them and I have had them myself. After telling me about the story of my grandmother having the premonition about smoke, my mother said that abilities like these are often passed down through families. She doesn’t have it and never did, but implied that it might skip generations. She views Sight as a gift, especially since it was able to save her sister by showing what could/would happen in the future instead of showing the tragedy at the time it was happening. She didn’t discuss why she thought my grandmother received and then lost the ability, but perhaps that is simply the nature of what we would call a supernatural gift.