Does telepathy exist? ('Telepathy is impossible. All people who believe they have telepathic experiences are mentally ill' - Dr Geoffrey Lloyd, one of Britain's most senior psychiatrists - who just happens to be the "big chief" of my local hospital's psychiatric department)

My father was an identical twin - so were his sisters. Two pairs of identical twins in the same family. In fact my grandmother gave birth to 4 sets of identical twins - and she herself was a (non-identical) twin. One day, in the 50s, my aunt, for no apparent reason, suddenly became very distressed, burst into tears and had to be sent home from work. The next day she was "back to normal". A week or so later she got a letter from her identical twin in Vancouver, Canada. At the precise time my aunt had her "sudden breakdown" here in the UK, her twin sister in Vancouver was being told by a doctor that they expected her son to die from menigitis (he didn't).

One afternoon my uncle, my father's twin brother, turned up at our house unexpectedly: "Something's happened to Dave" he said. We did not know where my father, a builder, was working. Several hours later he was brought home in an ambulance. He had had a bad fall. At the exact time of his fall his twin brother had experienced a sudden "sense of fear" whilst at his factory job.

My mother was talking to me. Halfway through a sentence the doorbell rang. Three weeks later, when I was alone in a room, this incomplete sentence passed through my mind - at which point my mother entered the room and continued from where she'd left off.

I suddenly woke up. It was 4 am - someone had died. My mind was full of thoughts about my cousin (who I hadn't seen for months). An image of fear, panic, screaming. Later that day I learned that my cousin's husband had been killed in a car crash on the motorway when the driver fell asleep. The time given was "around 4 in the morning".

One day images of fire woke me up. For several days these images "haunted" me - to the point where I walked 20 miles into the hills and slept in the woods. In the morning my mind had cleared. Some weeks later I heard that someone I had been very friendly with but hadn't seen for 6 months had been badly burned in a house fire - and lingered for several days before dying.

Strong thoughts about my ex-wife began. I sat looking at my telephone: "Phone the hospital" repeatedly ran though my mind- but which hospital? After about 20 minutes I decided to ring a mental hospital she'd been in three years earlier (before I met her). As I leaned forward to get up out of my chair my phone rang. It was her ringing from the hospital. She'd been walking up and down a corridor waiting for use of the phone. She wanted me to help her. (I did - but that's another story)