In Washington State a young woman was so upset by a terrifying dream one night that she had to wake her husband and tell him about it. She had dreamed that a large ornamental chandelier which hung over their baby's bed in the next room had fallen into the crib and crushed the baby to death. In the dream she could see herself and her husband standing amid the wreckage. The clock on the baby's dresser said 4:35. In the distance she could hear the rain on the windowpane and the wind blowing outside.

But her husband just laughed at her. He said it was a silly dream, to forget it and go back to sleep; and in a matter of moments he did just that himself. But she could not sleep.

Finally, still frightened, she got out of bed and went to the baby's room, got her and brought her back. On the way she stopped to look out the window, and saw a full moon, the weather calm and quite unlike the dream. Then, though feeling a little foolish, she got back into bed with the baby.

About two hours later they were wakened by a resounding crash. She jumped up, followed by her husband, and ran to the nursery. There, where the baby would have been lying, was the chandelier in the crib. They looked at each other and then at the clock. It stood at 4:35. Still a little skeptical they listened--to the sound of rain on the windowpane and wind howling outside.

EDITOR'S NOTE

We've all had nightmares, and accidents, and nightmares of accidents. But awake or dreaming, have you met a baby-crushing chandelier? And here we have two--one dream, one not. Go ahead, tell me that's coincidence. And don't weasel out of it by arguing the waking-world crash doesn't count because it failed to squash its baby. This bizarre dream spurred the dreamer to act, and that action saved her child. Call that luck, if you want to strain that word, but it's luck that functions evolutionarily just like a sixth sense. You might as well cave in and call it ESP--though of course the mere word explains nothing.

But framing a problem correctly is half the answer. Rather than stretching coincidence out of shape, or attacking witnesses, you can hunt for a model explaining such a sense--and even anecdotes like this can tell you a bit about the model needed. Futures can be foreseen, but time's not a simple linear track; this dreamer changed that future. So here's the real question: did this mother merely choose between timeforks (so other paths may exist out there where her baby died) or did she bend history's unique track, to save her child?

SOURCE: Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa E. Rhine, 1961, pp. 177-178. Account untitled, author's name witheld; title & byline added to aid searching & indexing.

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