Dreams Come True?

One night last week on the island of Hawaii, a Territorial Forester named Leslie W. Bryan had a vivid dream. In it he saw a dirty, ragged, wretched soldier at a certain lonely spot on the slopes of Mauna Loa. Before daylight Forester Bryan was on his way to that spot. He knew that for a week an alarm had been out for Private Edward Deal, missing from an Army rest camp. Sure enough, at the spot he had seen in his dream, Forester Bryan found dirty, ragged, wretched Private Deal, saved his life.

One theory about such prophetic dreams, which make frequent news-stories, is that they are simple-minded fables. Quite different is the elaborate, long-pondered theory of John William Dunne, British soldier, engineer, sportsman and aeronautical inventor.* Nearly 40 years ago John William Dunne began to have dreams which waking experiences later confirmed. He dreamed, for example, that his watch had stopped at a certain time, woke to find that it had indeed stopped at that time. He had prophetic dreams of the Martinique volcano explosion and earthquake, of the arrival in Khartoum of a Cape-to-Cairo expedition, of a tragic factory fire in Paris. No gull for swamis and crystal-gazers, Soldier Dunne thought he might be falsely imagining, when he read of some event in a newspaper, that he had previously dreamed of it.

To check up on his mind, Mr. Dunne took to writing down as much as he could recall of his dreams as soon as he woke up. With practice at this he found he was able to recall more & more of his dream-stuff. He persuaded friends to try it. A few of them declared that they never had any dreams. But when they tried jotting down what they could remember while still in the half-doze of waking, they were often able to recall a good deal, were usually amazed hours later at what they had scribbled.

With his morning notes to prove that some of his dreams were really more or less accurate previsions of phenomena experienced later, Dunne began to think about the sort of world in which such things could happen. He adopted the deterministic universe cherished by many a philosopher and scientist from Plato to Einstein*;a universe in which Future and Past are both parts of a unified reality, and in which the distinction between them is a purely mental one. In the preoccupied waking state, reasoned Philosopher Dunne, the mind has no contact with the "future" in sleep, when it wanders more freely, it does.

*An Experiment with Time -- Macmillan (1927).

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