A Reverend D from Australia writes,

"My father had a friend named T with whom he often went shooting. One year they planned to go hunting on Good Friday. Both my mother and Mrs. T disliked the arrangement, feeling that it was quite out of keeping with that sacred day. However, both men were adamant and refused to change the day.

"At seven-thirty A.M., when Mr. T should have arrived at our home, he did not appear, so my brother was sent to make inquiries. On arriving at the T home he found Mrs. T pleading with her husband not to go. On the previous night she had had a dream in which she saw, as she stood at her front door, a cart being drawn by a white horse passing on its way to the hospital. In that cart was her husband.

"Mr. T, on seeing my brother, ignored her pleading and they left on the excursion. At noon they stopped near a stream of water. When Mr. T had eaten his sandwiches, he leaned forward to dip his lips in the water. As he did so, he pushed his gun and the trigger struck a stone and the gun exploded. He jumped back exclaiming, 'Oh, I'm shot!' My father laid him gently on his back, and went at once to get help. He found a man nearby with a horse, a white horse and cart. They lifted the injured man into the cart, and drove toward town.

"Nearing the outskirts, my father advised the driver to be careful and not to go up the street that passed the T house. He, however, missed the way and instead drove up that very street. As he neared the T home, Mrs. T was standing at the door. Seeing the cart, she collapsed.

"Mr. T died in the hospital that night."

EDITOR'S NOTES

Gun accident on a hunt? Likely.

Dying husband in a cart drawn by a white horse passing your front door by mistake? Unlikely.

The peculiar specificity of Mrs. T's nightmare (and it's typical of ESP accounts) tells us what precognition isn't. It's not weathercasting. If the unconscious were a supercomputer collecting subliminal subtleties and crunching probabilities, it might project broad trends and make guesses at some local events--"thunderstorms likely"--that strike the conscious as almost magical. But no weather model predicts individual lightning-bolts!

And Mrs. T's dream is a lightning-flash--a shocking future moment as detailed and real as ours, with no logical path leading there--just a trail of stupid mistakes. Not probabilities, improbabilities. Neither projection nor extrapolation, it's sensing an unlikely future as if it already exists

Must such a future be immutable? Mrs. T must have thought so when she saw opened her door, but other cases show that predictive dreamers can alter foreseen disasters. I have yet to see a theory of time that reconciles these two key facts that ESP tells us--a future pre-existing yet changeable if foreseen... sometimes... with effort.

And what sort of time-landscape does that change happen in?

SOURCE: Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa E. Rhine, 1961, p.181. Account untitled, author's name witheld; title & byline added to aid searching & indexing.

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