Abra’s infancy premonition of the September 11 attacks is presented through a convergence of two parental dreams, a night of unexplained crying, and the moment the second hijacked jet struck the World Trade Center. At five months old, Abra could not explain what she experienced; instead, the event reached her parents as a pair of disturbing images that acquired meaning only when the news supplied their context.

The dreams

About five months after a disagreement over whether Abra’s caul mattered, Lucy Stone dreamed that her daughter was crying somewhere far from the family home on Richland Court. The dream shifted from a corridor lined with doors to rows of high-backed blue seats, suggesting that Lucy was aboard a plane or perhaps a train. She ran toward the sound and found Abra behind a bathroom door. The dream’s specific setting made the image of a child in peril feel like a threat in transit, though Lucy did not yet have any reason to connect it to a real journey or disaster. When she opened the door, she saw Abra on the floor, and the number 11 was written on the baby’s chest.

David Stone’s dream offered a different setting but likewise centered on a desperate attempt to reach his daughter. He chased Abra’s cries up an escalator moving down inside a burning mall. The flames did not produce smoke, and the people around him ran without helping the child. At the top, he found Abra lying on the floor, and the number 175 was written on her chest. Where Lucy’s dream placed Abra in a conveyance’s bathroom, David’s made the surrounding public space chaotic and dangerous. Neither dream provided an explanation; each supplied a number whose significance remained suspended until the following morning’s reports.

The crying and the attacks

The Stones woke together, at first taking the sound of crying for an echo of their dreams. Abra was awake in her crib beneath a Shrek mobile, crying continuously. Ordinary attempts to soothe her failed: a diaper change, feeding, carrying her along the hallway, and singing did not settle her. At two in the morning, Lucy called her grandmother, Concetta Reynolds, in Boston. Concetta asked about symptoms that might suggest a routine physical problem, but Lucy reported none that resolved the concern. By the time the family reached Bridgton Hospital, at about quarter to four, Abra was still crying at full volume.

The crying ended in close alignment with the attacks. John Dalton told David that a passenger jet had hit the World Trade Center and that no one believed it was an accident. The aircraft was American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. At that same time Abra abruptly stopped crying; by 9:04 she was asleep. The sequence gives the episode its decisive pattern: the number from Lucy’s dream matched Flight 11, the number from David’s matched Flight 175, and Abra’s prolonged distress ceased at the moment Flight 175 hit.

On the drive back to Anniston, Abra slept peacefully in her car seat while David and Lucy listened to the radio. David kept listening until a broadcaster listed the airlines and flight numbers, then silenced the news. The contrast between the continuing public catastrophe and the sudden quiet in their car makes the end of Abra’s crying both a precise point in the chronology and the parents’ most unsettling evidence. The dreams had preceded the attacks; the baby’s distress had continued through the night; and her sleep began at the second impact.

Recognition and significance

David later arranged the episode as a story for John Dalton, beginning with Abra’s marathon crying and then returning to the dreams. He stressed the correspondence between the numbers and the two aircraft, while acknowledging that the dreams did not tell him what the numbers meant beforehand. His account preserves that uncertainty: the correspondence seemed conclusive to him, but its mechanism remained unknown. Lucy, when David began to say that he had dreamed, told him that she had dreamed too. Their shared experience did not amount to an explanation, but it made the event harder to dismiss as an individual misremembering.

By the time the Stones crossed back into New Hampshire, David had begun to believe there might be something to the earlier discussion of Abra’s caul. The premonition therefore changes the family’s understanding of an unusual birth detail into a question about Abra’s abilities. It does not establish a general account of those abilities or clarify exactly how the dreams and crying were connected. Instead, its force lies in the alignment of separate details: two parents dreaming different flight numbers, a five-month-old’s unexplained crying, the attacks’ reported flight numbers, and a sudden end to the crying at 9:03. The event is both a family crisis experienced before its meaning is known and a retrospective recognition shaped by the public news that follows.