Today, the issue whether extra-sensory communication occurs in dreams - indeed, whether it occurs at all - remains in dispute. Yet both historically and in our own times, there is evidence of its occurrence which cannot be accounted for by chance coincidence. Although chance cannot be ruled out in individual cases, for the accounts as a whole it is an implausible explanation.

Often what is communicated is of little or no intrinsic interest - except as evidence of ESP, when its very triviality may strengthen the case. A good example has been given by one of the co-authors of Dream Telepathy (1973) - Alan Vaughan, recalling how in 1970 he watched Kurt Vonnegut, an author whose work he greatly admired, on a television programme. A couple of nights later he had a dream about Vonnegut. On an impulse, Vaughan wrote it out and sent it to him: ‘You were planning to leave soon on a trip. Then you mentioned that you were moving to an island named Jerome. (As far as I know there is no such place so perhaps the name Jerome or initial “J” has some related meaning?)’ A fortnight later he received Vonnegut’s reply. ‘Not bad. On the night of your dream, I had dinner with Jerome B. (an author of children’s books), and we talked about a trip I made, three days later, to an island named England.’

Granted that this was an instance of ESP, why should information of such unimportance have reached Vaughan? A hypothesis has been put forward recently by the psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald, harking back to Henri Bergson’s claim that the main function of the human brain is to act as a filter.

All of us are constantly being bombarded by messages from our senses; the brain seeks to ensure that only those most relevant to our needs get through. When we cross a road, our eyes and ears are tuned to pick up the presence of traffic; we see a tree on the other side, but are not aware of it; we hear birds singing, but are not aware of them. As sixth-sense communications have to a great extent been made redundant by the messages from the five more specialised senses, Bergson argued, they have even lower priority - in much the same way as the sense of smell in human beings has been largely made redundant.

Extra-sensory communications, Ehrenwald maintains, reach our conscious minds through the filter in two ways. One is ‘flaw-directed’. ESP messages are flowing in all the time; occasionally the filter fails in its function, and lets one through, though it may be of no importance. The other, however, is important. It is ‘need-directed’, and the filter mechanism may let it through for that reason.

The fact that the conscious mind is not intervening during sleep makes it easier for information from outside sources to slip through, occasionally to be recalled on waking. If this is accepted, the presumption is that communication between people who are close, by ties of family or love, will often be encountered in reports of dreams. It is. Accounts of one curious variety of inter-communication are particularly common: ‘shared’ dreams.
Shared dreams

In many cases, the dreamers appear to have picked up the thoughts of somebody close to them. In one of the accounts checked in the 1880s by Edmund Gurney for the SPR, Jean Eleanora Fielding, a clergyman’s wife, described how one night when she was sleeping badly, she whiled away the time recalling in detail her childhood home in Scotland, where she had not been for twenty years; and this had brought up recollections of a neighbour there, Harvey Brown. Her husband, who was asleep, knew her family home, but knew of Brown only by name. They had never spoken of Brown in all the twenty years. But ‘He and I awoke at 6. Before a word of any kind was said, he said to me, “I have had such a strange dream about Harvey Brown, and been at the old home, wandering about it.” ’

Mrs Naomi Harris of the Peabody Trust in London has told the Foundation of a rather similar experience; except that in her case she was the dreamer, and what she dreamed actually answered a question in her husband’s mind. In 1986 she had an unusually vivid dream about being shown around Kenwood House by Lady Iveagh. She knew of the Guinness connection with Kenwood House, but did not know whether any such person as a Lady Iveagh existed. Still, the dream was so realistic, and Lady Iveagh featured so strongly in it, that she mentioned it to her husband the next morning.

‘Thank goodness!’ was his reply. ‘That’s the name I have been trying and trying to remember!’ He, a doctor, during the previous day, and that night, had been racking his brains for the name in connection with one of his patients.

In these instances the sharing could be explained away as the product of chance coincidence, without too much stretching; but it becomes less plausible as the explanation for the type of ‘sharing’ recorded by another of Gurney’s collection, in the category which he thought ‘might reasonably be regarded as telepathic’. In January 1882, the Rev. A.B. McDougall, a scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, was staying in a house in Manchester when one night he felt ‘an unpleasantly cold something slithering down my right leg’. It turned out to be a rat. The following morning, 11 January, a cousin of his who happened to be staying in his room at his home came down to breakfast and recounted a marvellous dream in which a rat appeared to be eating off the extremities of my unfortunate self. My family laughed the matter off. However, on the 13th a letter was received from me giving an account of my unpleasant meeting with the rat and its subsequent capture. Then everyone present remembered the dream my cousin had told, certainly 48 hours before.

In some families, ‘sharing’ of the kind where husband and wife both have the same or a very similar dream the same night are so common that they almost cease to be remarked upon; unless, as in an example Jeremy Taylor has given in his Dream Work (1983), what is shared is far too odd to be put down to the fact that husbands and wives must occasionally be thinking, and consequently dreaming, along similar lines. Had both husband and wife been thinking about elephants, for both to dream of elephants would not have seemed strange; but one night they both had dreams involving full-sized elephants, with correspondingly large human hands at the ends of their forefeet. In my dream the elephant had been a woolly mammoth, while in Kath’s it had been a circus elephant, but in both dreams the elephants sat back on their haunches and waved their gigantic hands at us, in a gesture similar to hand gestures in a vaudeville routine.
Chance also offers an implausible explanation for a shared dream reported to the Foundation by Mrs M.R. Elliot, of Derby.

I was in a lovely house, sunny and open, lots of people about, in particular a young man who came to me and said ‘I love you.’1 replied ‘I love you, too.’ He had dark hair and brown eyes. I felt he was completely trustworthy and good.
When I met my mother, who lives nearby, she told me she had dreamed of a lovely young man who she met at a party who said ‘I love you’ and she replied ‘I love you, too.’ Her dream man even matched the description of mine.
Mrs Elliot could think of no logical reason why she and her mother should both have been in the same frame of mind at the time.

That dreams are so often shared among people close to each other has significant implications for psychology. It is possible, too, that sharing may indicate an unexpected or undeveloped closeness between people who do not know each other, as in a case recounted by Louisa Rhine in The Invisible Picture (1981).

A man in New Jersey dreamed he was out with a gun and a woman companion, a person whom he knew only slightly. He thought they were both shooting at different objects, but the targets that impressed him most were some cows in a field. He remembered the dream in the morning, partly because the woman was no one he was particularly interested in, but one of the people in his home town whom he knew only casually.

The next day he happened to meet her in a store. When she saw him she said she wanted to tell him about a ‘crazy’ dream she had about him the night before. ‘I was stunned for a moment when she said she had been dreaming that she and I were out shooting cows. ’

Might investigation have shown that there was some as yet unexplored affinity?

There are even weirder accounts of sharing, notably one culled from the classics by Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696).

A certain gentleman named Prestantius, had been entreating a Philosopher to solve him a doubt, which he absolutely refused to do. The night following, although Prestantius was broad awake, he saw the Philosopher standing full before him, who just explained his doubts to him, and went away the moment after he had done. When Prestantius met the Philosopher the next day, he asks him why, since no entreaties could prevail with him the day before, to answer his question, he came to him unasked, and at an unseasonable time of night, and opened every point to his satisfaction. To whom thus the Philosopher: ‘Upon my word it was not me that came to you; but in a dream I thought my own self that I was doing you such a service. ’

Hearing about an equally extraordinary case involving the Drummonds of Drumquaigh in Scotland and their dog Fanti, Andrew Lang took the trouble to have it confirmed by the family. Mrs Ogilvie, her son the Laird, and her eldest daughter were at home at the time; their two younger daughters away with friends.

One morning Miss Ogilvie came down to breakfast and said to her brother, ‘I had an odd dream; I dreamed Fanti went mad. ’

‘Well, that is odd,’ said her brother. ‘So did I. We had better not tell mother; it might make her nervous. ’

Miss Ogilvie went up after breakfast to see the older lady, who said, ‘Do turn out Fanti; I dreamed last night that he went mad and bit.’

In the afternoon the two younger sisters came home.

‘How did you enjoy yourselves?’ one of the others asked.

‘We didn’t sleep well. I was dreaming that Fanti went mad when Mary wakened me, and said she had dreamed Fanti went mad, and turned into a cat, and we threw him into the fire.’
Fanti did not go mad, living out the rest of his days in tranquillity. Knowing the family, Lang had no doubt that their account was genuine; but he was reluctantly to concede that it was nothing more than ‘a curiosity of coincidences’.
The most grotesque of all reported cases of dream sharing, though, is surely one which was related by Robert Graves. He had been discussing J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time with some friends; and, obeying Dunne’s instructions to record every detail of a remembered dream, he took care to record what he remembered of one which had left a vivid impression on him when he awoke. In it he had met Oscar Wilde in a cocktail bar with two other writers whom Graves disliked (but did not identify); an episode followed in the dream by a queer word appearing in capitals - ‘TELTOE, PELTOE, or TELSOE or something like that’ - which left him baffled.

The dream as a whole meant nothing to him, but he recounted it to his friends the following day. The day following that, a letter arrived for him from a total stranger, a Mr Roberts, forwarded from Islip where he had previously lived. It included the lines Attercop, the all-wise spider The poet at Islip scrawled - Re Oscar Wilde at the tipplers; Whistler, do let’s appreciate Walter Pater’s polish, deceit.

‘Somethingis wrong with these anagrams, I fancy,’ the letter continued. ‘I lack the monkey-wit to worry them out. What did you intend? I can think of dozens more. It must be pure chance.’

To Graves it was pure gibberish - except the first line, which came from one of his poems. Eventually it dawned on him that his correspondent must have assumed that ‘Attercop’ was an anagram, prompting him to try to find the meaning by trying out anagrams of the whole line. It was not an anagram. ‘Attercop’ is an old Scots word for spider (as the tale was originally told, it was ‘Bruce and the Attercop’).

‘But the business about Oscar Wilde,’ Graves told R.L. Megroz, who used the tale in The Dream World,- the two literary friends - a mad story originating with the anagrams -someone invaded my dream and the word teltoe, peltoe or telsoe seems to have been a residue of letters that Mr Roberts tried to make use of in an anagram by allowing them to form a proper name (and I had been to the trouble of trying to find the word in the Times Atlas and Larousse’s Dictionary of Namesl)

Roberts’ letter, Graves pointed out, had been posted two days before the dream, and arrived two days after it.

I was probably myself responsible for the whole incident. For I had written (but not published) a poem about the curious effect of anagrams, and had it strongly in my mind about the time that Roberts wrote his letter to me. In it I coined the word ‘Anagrammagic’. My wireless vibrations, it seems, somehow affected him while he was reading the Attercop poem, and his, in revenge, disturbed my dream.
If necessary, Graves concluded, he would furnish Megroz with proof, in the form of the documents and attestation by his friends.

Shared dreams, then, are flaw-directed in that they are not let through the brain’s filter on account of their importance. Yet it can be argued that they may be need-prompted, to some extent, when the sharing is between two people who are emotionally close to each other. And this lends them a significance which the trivial content so often obscures, in so far as they show that there is communication at a deeper level than conventional psychology has been prepared to recognise.

The existence of need-directed dreams is of even greater significance, indicating as it does the ability of the brain’s filter to recognise signals marked ‘urgent’. Reports of ‘crisis’ dreams, as they are sometimes described, fall into four main categories: ‘disaster’ dreams, which appear to have been triggered by some major calamity, such as a plane crash or an assassination; ‘farewell’ dreams, which provide a notification of the death of a relative or loved one; ‘call’ dreams, in which it is as if a telepathic link has been established by somebody who is longing to communicate with the recipient; and what might be described as ‘unfinished business’ dreams, where the vision of somebody who has died comes in a dream with a request for forgiveness, or for the righting of some wrong.

‘Disaster} dreams

The more calamitous the event, the more likely it should be that people will pick it up telepathically; and although this is not something which can be tested statistically, some support is lent to it by investigations such as the one pursued in the late 1950s by Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia into the sinking of the Titanic. Of the dreams which he records, one stands out from the rest.

A New York woman had a nightmare of her mother in a lifeboat so overcrowded that it was in danger of sinking. She related it to her husband the next morning, but as they assumed her mother was still in Europe, he reassured her. The next day they read of the sinking, and she found to her horror her mother’s name on the passenger list. As it happened, her mother survived. She had not told her daughter of her intention of sailing on the Titanic, hoping to surprise her. She described how in the lifeboat, at the time of her daughter’s dream, she had feared the worst, thinking that at any moment it would capsize; ‘and all the while her thoughts were concentrated on the daughter, whom she expected never to see again. ’ Graham Greene was one of the dreamers that night, though he does not feature in Stevenson’s collection. Describing how important dreams have been to him in A Sort of Life, Greene notes that they have often given him hints of dire events.

On the April night of the Titanic disaster, when I was five and it was Easter holiday time in Littlehampton, I dreamt of a shipwreck. One image of the dream has remained with me for more than sixty years: a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave. Again in 1921 I wrote home from my psychoanalyst’s: ‘A night or two ago I had a shipwreck dream, the ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. I didn’t think anything about it. We don’t have papers here as the usual thing, and it was not till yesterday, looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the Rowan in the Irish Sea. I looked at my dream diary and found that my dream had been Saturday night. The accident had happened just after Saturday midnight. ’ Again in 19441 dreamed of a VI missile some weeks before the first attack. It passed horizontally across the sky flaming at the tail in the very form it was to take.
Louisa Rhine has recorded how on 7 December 1941 a man who had been having a siesta in his Alabama home suddenly jumped to his feet and told his wife he had just heard the President announce that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Nonsense, she told him; he was dreaming. The radio had been on; if there had been any such announcement, she would have heard it. While they were arguing, there was a news ‘flash’ - Roosevelt had announced that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.

During the 1968 presidential election campaign, Louis Heren, the distinguished Foreign Editor of The Times, spent a couple of weeks covering the Oregon and California primaries, the main contenders being Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. As he has described in his account to the Koestler Foundation,

I did not particularly like Kennedy, he had a mean streak as well as the conviction that the Presidency was his by right, and I applauded - not in the columns of The Times, of course - when he lost to McCarthy in Oregon. It was a bitter blow for Kennedy, but California was the bigger state and he had more money than his rival. He campaigned like a man possessed, and it soon became apparent that he would win the State.

As this made the campaign there of less significance and interest than if there had been a chance of Kennedy’s losing, Heren returned to Washington, where he watched the coverage of the election the following Tuesday evening on television.

Knowing that I had a hard day ahead of me I went to bed before the inevitable result was announced. As usual I quickly fell asleep, but had a terrible nightmare. Somebody was trying to assassinate Kennedy, and I was trying to defend him, swinging my portable typewriter. I fell out of bed in a sweat; my wife comforted me, and then went downstairs to make a pot of tea. Being a good correspondent’s wife, she turned on the radio, as the announcer was saying that Kennedy had been killed.

Many disaster dreams can be attributed to chance, because such dreams are so common. But sometimes the coincidence of detail is impressive, as in a case recorded by G.N.M. Tyrrell in his Science and Psychical Phenomena (1938). One night in 1928 Dudley Walker, one of Tyrrell’s correspondents, dreamed he was present as an observer when a train crashed into a smaller one on the same line.

I saw the express and its coaches pitch and twist in the air, and the noise was terrible. Afterwards I walked beside the wreckage in the dim light of dawn viewing with a feeling of terror the huge overturned engine and smashed coaches. I was now amid an indescribable scene of horror with dead and injured people, and rescue workers everywhere.

Most of the bodies lying by the side of the track were those of women and girls. As I passed, with some unknown person leading me,

I saw one man’s body in a ghastly state, lifted out and laid on the side of an overturned coach.

A train accident actually occurred that night in a town a few miles from where Walker lived, the result of a collision between two trains of the kind he had seen. Of the eight people killed, seven were women, one of them a young girl, and a newspaper report noted that ‘one gruesome sight was that of a man’s body lying on top of one of the carriages.’ Nor could this be explained away by suggesting that Walker’s recollection of his dream had been influenced by the newspaper accounts. So shaken had he been by it that he had described it in detail to his mother when he came down for breakfast (which he was too shocked to eat); later, he had related it to his employer; and he had actually written an account of it before reports of the crash began to appear in the evening papers.

This is a common characteristic of the disaster category - a nightmare quality which makes a deeply disturbing impression upon the dreamers, especially if ordinarily they rarely remember their dreams. Reporting such an experience to the Foundation, Mrs Marion Yau of Cheadle in Cheshire has described how she awoke one night in 1967, ‘sweating profusely and in a terrible state; I was shaking, my heart was pounding very fast and I was very frightened.’ In this case, it was the husband who came to the rescue with a cup of tea. She told him she had witnessed a terrible sea disaster, ‘the ship listing to the side, oil pouring into the sea, waves lashing the ship, but most of all the struggling birds covered in oil fighting to stay above the waves. ’ The morning paper brought the news of the Toney Canyon disaster, the first one of its kind off the British coast, with its immense oil spillage from the crippled tanker, and its destructive consequence for sea birds.

‘Farewell* dreams

The second category of crisis dreams, also very commonly reported, are those which seem to anticipate a death notice in the newspapers. The dream performs this in various ways - sometimes showing the dead in their coffins, sometimes in visions as if the dead were coming to pay their last respects to the living. Although it is not uncommon to dream of the death of friends or relatives, in some cases the timing, where the dream coincides with the death, and in others the circumstantial detail, suggest clairvoyance.

The death of somebody well-known is often ‘seen’ in dreams, as in another of the Foundation’s cases. Mrs Marie L. Freeman was staying with her family in a chalet in Cornwall, when early one morning she dreamt that she saw Professor Bronowski - familiar through his television series - flying overhead, dressed quite normally. ‘He looked down at me and said “I died early this morning. ” I replied that I felt very sorry, but he just flew on.’ Mrs Freeman told her husband and her teenage children about the dream when they woke up. When her husband switched on the radio, they heard the announcement that Bronowski, whom she had never met, had died.

In many cases it can be argued that the dreamers could have subconsciously become aware that somebody was about to die; but when they have been living at a distance, for a long time, this becomes unlikely. Lying in his cabin during a fierce storm in the Pacific, in 1852, during one of his prolonged periods of exile, Giuseppe Garibaldi dreamed of his mother and a funeral. He had been away for months, and it was to be months before, on his return to Italy, he heard she had died on the night of his dream. Similarly Henry Morton Stanley, before he achieved lasting fame as an explorer, had been living for some years in America out of contact with his family in Wales, when he had a dream which made a profound impression on him. As he recalled in his Autobiography, while serving with the Confederate forces he had been captured at Shiloh, and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp near Chicago.

One morning in 1862 he was relaxing after completing his chores when, suddenly, I .felt a gentle stroke on the back of my neck, and in an instant, I was unconscious. The next moment I had a vivid view of the village of Tremeirchion, and the grassy slopes of the hills of Hiraddog, and I seemed to be hovering over the rook woods of Brynbella. I glided to the bed-chamber of my Aunt Mary. My aunt was in bed, and seemed sick unto death. I took a position by the side of the bed, and saw myself, with head bent down, listening to her parting words, which sounded regretful, as though conscience smote her for not having been so kind as she might have been, or had wished to be. I heard the boy say, believe you, aunt. It is neither your fault, nor mine. You were good and kind to me, and I knew you wished to be kinder; but things were so ordered that you had to be what you were. I also dearly wished to love you, but I was afraid to speak of it, lest you would check me, or say something that would offend me. I feel our parting was in this spirit. There is no need of regrets. You have done your duty to me, and you had children of your own, who required all your care. What has happened to me since, was decreed should happen. Farewell. ’

I put forth my hand and felt the clasp of the long thin hands of the sore-sick woman. I heard a murmur of farewell, and immediately I woke.
His aunt, Stanley found later, was dying in Wales at the time. ‘I believe,’ he commented, relating the story in his autobiography, that the soul of every human being has its attendant spirit - a nimble, delicate essence, whose method of action is by a subtle suggestion which it contrives to insinuate into the mind, whether asleep or awake. We are too gross to be capable of understanding the signification of the dream, the vision, or the sudden presage, or of divining the source of the premonition, or its import. We admit that we are liable to receive a fleeting picture of an act, or a figure, at any moment, but, except being struck by certain strange coincidences which happen to most of us, we seldom make an effort to unravel the mystery. The swift, darting messenger stamps an image on the mind, and displays a vision to the sleeper; and if, as sometimes follows, among tricks and twists of the errant mind, by reflex acts of memory, it happens to be a true representation of what is to happen, we are left to grope hopelessly as to the manner and meaning of it, for there is nothing tangible to lay hold of.

There are many things relating to my existence which are inexplicable to me, and probably it is best so; this death-bed scene, projected on my mind’s screen across four thousand five hundred miles of space, is one of these mysteries.
Apart from demonstrating affection, dream visions of the dying rarely perform any particular service - though the producer David Belasco, after whom the New York theatre is named, felt that he owed one of his most successful plays to his crisis dream of his mother.

One night, after a long and exhausting rehearsal, I went to bed, worn out, in my Newport home, and fell at once into a deep sleep. Almost immediately, however, I was awakened and attempted to rise, but could not, and was then greatly startled to see my dear mother (whom I knew to be in San Francisco) standing close by me. As I strove to speak and to sit up she smiled at me a loving reassuring smile, spoke my name - the name she called me in my boyhood - ‘Davy, Davy, Davy, ’ then, leaning down, seemed to kiss me; then drew away a little and said: ‘Do not grieve. All is well and I am happy;’ then moved toward the door and vanished.

The following day he told his family of his mother’s appearance, and said he was sure that she must have died.

A few hours later (I was still directing rehearsals of Zoza) I went to luncheon during a recess, with a member of my staff, who handed me some letters and telegrams which he had brought from the box-office of the theatre. Among them was a telegram telling me that my darling mother had died the night before, at about the time I had seen her in my room. Later I learned that just before she died she roused herself, smiled, and three times murmured, ‘Davy, Davy, Davy.’
‘Thought transference,’ Belasco felt, was an inadequate explanation. He was sure he had actually seen his mother, and this and other experiences had convinced him that ‘what we call supernatural is, after all, at most supernormal.’ This determined him to write a play on the subject and The Return of Peter Grimm (1911) was the profitable outcome.

A case where it was the details, rather than the precise timing, that were impressive, was provided, and vouched for, by Robert Dale Owen, in his Footfalls (1860). In 1836 Captain Clarke, in charge of a schooner trading between New York and Cuba, dreamed that he was present at the funeral of his grandmother in Lyme Regis; and all went as he would have expected it to do until, to his surprise, the procession did not go to the family burial place, but to a different part of the churchyard. There - according to Owen, who checked the story with Clarke - ‘he saw the open grave, partially filled with water, as from the rain; and looking into it, he particularly noticed floating in the water two drowned field-mice.’ Shaken by the dream, Clarke made a note of the date, and in due course found his grandmother had been buried on the same day. Later, his mother told him that the old lady had herself selected the place where she wanted to be buried; and it turned out to be where he had seen it in his dream. ‘Finally, on comparing notes with the old sexton, it appeared that the heavy rain of the morning had partially filled the grave, and that there were actually found in it two field-mice, drowned.’

The vision of Samuel Clemens - Mark Twain - of his brother Henry’s death in 1858 has often been cited as one of the most striking of crisis dreams. Henry was about twenty at this time; according to Samuel’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, he was ‘a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud’, and was training to become a pilot on one of the Mississippi steamboats; Samuel was to follow in his footsteps. One night while staying with his sister in St Louis, Samuel dreamt that he saw Henry lying in a metal coffin supported on two chairs in a living room, with a bouquet of white flowers, and one crimson flower, on his breast. He told his sister of his dream, but then put it aside - until he heard that the steamboat Henry was on had blown up, sixty miles below Memphis. When Samuel arrived, he saw his brother lying as in the dream, in a metal coffin, ‘lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson centre - a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet and in the centre of it was a single red rose. ’

It was easy for sceptics to claim that as a writer of popular fiction, Mark Twain was not to be relied upon. Had he not established his reputation, he might not have cared to tell the tale. How difficult it was, at that time, to publish such accounts without fear of derision was to be admitted by another firmly established author, Rider Haggard, who gave his account of a remarkable crisis dream in The Times in 1904. ‘Perhaps you will think with me that the following circumstances are worthy of record, if only for their scientific interest,’ he wrote. ‘It is principally because of this interest that, as such stories should not be told anonymously, I have made up my mind to publish it over my own name, though I am well aware that by so doing I may expose myself to a certain amount of ridicule and disbelief. ’

Twelve days before, he explained, on the Saturday night, he had had a nightmare.

I was awakened by my wife’s voice calling to me from her own bed upon the other side of the room. As I awoke, the nightmare itself, which had been long and vivid, faded from my brain. All I could remember of it was a sense of awful oppression and of desperate and terrified struggling for life such as the act of drowning would probably involve. But between the time that I heard my wife’s voice and the time that my consciousness answered to it, or so it seemed to me, I had another dream. I dreamed that a black retriever dog, a most amiable and intelligent beast named Bob which was the property of my eldest daughter, was lying on its side among brushwood, or rough growth of some sort, by water. My own personality in some mysterious way seemed to me to be arising from the body of the dog, which I knew quite surely to be Bob and no other, so much so that my head was against its head, which was lifted up at an unnatural angle.
In my vision the dog was trying to speak to me in words, and, failing, transmitted to my mind in an undefined fashion the knowledge that it was dying. Then everything vanished, and I woke to hear my wife asking me why on earth I was making those horrible and weird noises.

His wife told the story to the company over breakfast, and he confirmed it, but thought no more about it until he was told that the dog was missing. He then embarked on a search, finding the body of the dog floating against a weir more than a mile down the river nearby. Investigation revealed that a train had knocked it off the railway bridge into the river on the Saturday night.

‘Both in a judicial and a private capacity,’ Rider Haggard’s letter continues, I have been accustomed all my life to the investigation of evidence, and, if we may put aside our familiar friend ‘the long arm of coincidence’, which in this case would surely be strained to dislocation, I confess that that available upon this matter forces me to the following conclusions: The dog Bob, between whom and myself there existed a mutual attachment, either at the moment of his death, if his existence can conceivably have been prolonged till after 1 in the morning, or, as seems more probable, about three hours after the event, did succeed in calling my attention to its actual or recent plight by placing whatever portion of my being is capable of receiving such impulses when enchained by sleep, into its own terrible position. That subsequently, as that chain of sleep was being broken by the voice of my wife calling me back to a normal condition of our human existence, with some last despairing effort, while that indefinable part of me was being slowly withdrawn from it (it will be remembered that in my dream I seemed to rise from the dog), it spoke to me, first trying to make use of my own tongue, and, failing therein, by some subtle means of communication whereof I have no knowledge telling me that it was dying, for I saw no blood or wound which would suggest this to my mind.

Rider Haggard went on to speculate whether a form of telepathy had been responsible; or, as his dream appeared to have occurred three hours after the dog had been hit by the train, ‘it would seem that it must have been some non-bodily but surviving part of the life or of the spirit of the dog* (telepathy, at the time, had received a measure of recognition which was not yet extended to communications forward or backward in time). Whatever the interpretation of the facts - attested by all those concerned: his family, a vet, some railwaymen and so on - Rider Haggard felt that ‘it does seem to suggest that there is a more intimate ghostly connection between all members of the animal world, including man, than has hitherto been believed, at any rate by Western people; that they may be, in short, all of them different manifestations of some central, informing life, though inhabiting the universe in such various shapes.’

A dream of a death led one deep-dyed rationalist to begin to realise that his positivism had misled him about the nature of reality. One night in 1872 George J. Romanes, a Fellow of the Royal Society, had a dream which so disturbed him that he wrote it down, and told his wife the following morning:

I imagined that I was seated in the drawing-room near a table, about to read, when an old lady suddenly appeared seated on the other side, very near the table. She did not speak nor move, but she looked at me fixedly, and I looked at her in the same way for at least twenty minutes. I was very much struck with her appearance: she had white hair with very black eyebrows, and a penetrating expression. I did not recognise her all at once, and I thought she was a stranger. My attention was attracted in the direction of the door, which opened and (still in my dream) my aunt entered. Upon seeing the old lady she cried out with great surprise, and in a tone of reproach, ‘John, do you not know who that is?’ and without leaving me time to answer she added ‘It is your grandmother. ’

Romanes feared the worst, but heard nothing for some days. Then his father wrote to tell him of the sudden death of his grandmother; ‘it had taken place on the very night of my dream, ’ he recalled, ‘and at the same hour.’ He was prompted to take psychic phenomena seriously, and eventually to shed his positivist beliefs altogether.

‘Farewell’ dreams are still commonly reported. In Working with Dreams (1979) Montague Ullman and Nan Zimmerman record one from a woman who dreamed that when she answered the telephone by her bed it was her husband, with whom she had lived for over twenty years but had divorced five years earlier because of his alcoholism. Her bedroom dresser had twin mirrors, and while she was talking to him, he started walking out of one of them, fixing his tie.

I put the phone down, got out of bed (still dreaming), and I said ‘Roger, what are you doing here?’ He answered, ‘I just wanted to see you. ’

She woke up, feeling depressed. That morning her brother-in-law rang to tell her that her husband had died of a stroke during the night. ‘I believe he told me good-bye. ’

“Second Sight in Dreams” is an extract from The Power of Dreams by Brian Inglis