Public disasters, like the loss of a liner at sea, are frequent in the history of dream prophecy, but undoubtedly prevision of individual death is the commonest form of dreaming the future, and the theme again enters the following record from a contemporary--a business man who preferred to remain anonymous:

For many years past my dream life has been a remarkable one. But I have been most reticent about it as I am a business man; and as you know, a business man must be very stolid and quite normal, and any suspicion of crankiness is bad for his reputation. So far I have kept the record of these things to my locked diary, and as long as I am in the commercial world I should not care to see my name connected with such a subject.

Of course I have the common nonsense-dreams, and the dreams in which the events of the day are jumbled together and form queer patterns like the fragments of coloured-glass in a kaleidoscope. But these special dreams have a distinctive feeling about them, a peculiar quality of emotion, which compel one to take them seriously. I will give you two examples.

I dreamt that a woman friend of mine was in great trouble--I saw her crying. There was nothing very striking about that, but the intense feeling which accompanied this dream convinced me that it meant something, and I made a note in my pocket-book (this was before I started my locked diary) 'Tears in ___'s eyes.'

This woman had two brothers in the war, one in India and one on the French front. Knowing the great risks in France, I felt very uneasy about this brother; but about three weeks after the dream my friend's father died.

Here is a similar case. I dreamt I was in a room with two of my friends. Suddenly one of them stood up and seemed to grow bigger, to dilate and grow luminous. He then seemed to pass through the wall into the next room. My remaining friend was greatly alarmed and I did my best to soothe him. Once more the peculiar quality or atmosphere of this dream forced me to note it carefully, and in my diary I have the actual dates of the dream and the death which followed three weeks later. And I did do my best to help my second friend bear the blow.

I could give a third example of this prevision of death... [Unclear if ellipsis is Business Man's, or from his editor RL Megroz.]

Some of my dreams are of a reassuring nature. I was threatened some years ago with a great calamity. If the event had occurred I should have been ruined, and you may imagine how I worried. But one night I dreamt that I was walking beneath a huge wave that was about to break and crush me. But gradually the wave grew thin, and finally melted into a mist, and I walked safely through it to the other side. That was the end of my worrying, for I knew that everything would come out right.

Postscript: in the third case I mentioned, the man was employed at our works. When one morning I arrived at the office and heard of his death, in an air raid, on the impulse of the moment I told some of the others of my dream, and I showed my note of it to one who was a relative. But I found that they began to regard me as queer and unbalanced, and so I found it advisable to keep these things to myself.

SOURCE: The Dream World by Rodolphe L. Megroz, p.217-9.

EDITOR'S NOTE, 2024

By now the World Dream Bank has about 750 dreams of this sort. But few contributors have been so frank about the social and financial risks of coming out of the closet about ESP (and yes, "closet" is deliberate; it's exactly analogous to sexual orientation.) I can defy that pressure only because I deliberately sought economic independence above all else--no boss to fire me! But most people who speak up face real risks.

Generations of censure has distorted both popular views and serious research, by making the evidence look scant and exotic--when it's normal and common as dirt, as experimenters like JW Dunne and Montague Ullman and taxonomists like Louisa Rhine have documented over the last century.

--Chris Wayan

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