September, 2008. Driving through the gathering gloom of a spring evening, Melbourne-based composer and cellist Zoë Barry was jolted into sudden hyper-alertness.

Something hit her car with a loud bang. She pulled over, shaken, arms tingling.

“It was very loud and it seemed to me that a big black form had hit the windscreen. Then the radio went to static for a few seconds,” she tells Limelight.

“My first instinct was that I had hit a bird or an animal. But there was nothing on the ground and nothing on the windscreen – no marks, no feathers or blood.”

A few seconds later, Barry says, a purple flash of light touched down on the road just in front of the car.

“I had the same physical experience again, a tingling in the arms that shot up from the steering wheel into my body and the radio went to static again. Then it dawned on me it must have been a lightning strike.”

About six months later, another lightning bolt struck Barry’s house. “It was like my body knew exactly what it was this time, that sensation. It was something I really didn’t want to feel. I remember leaping into the air and madly running on the...