A family living in a remote area of Australia included three girls and a pair of twin boys, aged two and a half years. The father says:

"I worked from two o'clock in the afternoon until twelve midnight, sometimes an extra hour until one A.M. One night I found my wife sitting up with one of the twins in her lap, rocking him. He had a slight fever. We agreed that it was a touch of malaria. Malaria was not uncommon there and we were always prepared to treat it, usually with success without having to call a doctor. (The nearest one was twenty miles away.) I was satisfied and went to bed and to sleep.

"About daybreak or a little before I had a dream that our family physician came in and examined the boy and said he had diphtheria. I awoke, startled, and tiptoed into the room where my son and his mother were. She was still awake, he was sleeping peacefully, breathing naturally, and his temperature was normal. I went back to my room, but not to sleep. The memory of the dream kept nagging me. I 'reasoned' with myself that isolated as we were with no contacts between my children and other children, with no case of diphtheria anywhere within many miles reported, it was foolish for me to be disturbed because of the dream.

"After a while I could stand it no longer, but still I did not want to confess the reason for my concern to my wife. I went back to the room and asked my wife if the boy had indicated any pain in his throat. No. He had said he didn't hurt anywhere. Still I wanted to look at his throat. She took him up and, shining a Delco light down his throat, we made a thorough examination and found a tiny white spot about the size of a small pinhead. I phoned the doctor and I asked him if it was possible, in view of our isolation, that the boy might have diphtheria. He said that it sometimes happened that a case would show up apparently from nowhere, and that since it was a long drive and the tiny spot on one side of the throat was ground for suspicion, he would bring along enough antitoxin for all five of the children.

"It was about three hours after the spot was discovered before the doctor arrived. By that time the boy had fever again and the white spot had become a white patch and was on both sides. The doctor was satisfied it was diphtheria--took a smear and injected the antitoxin into all five of the children. The boy was critically ill for two or three days. The other boy and one of the girls had very mild cases, the two others suffered only the customary reaction from the antitoxin. The doctor told me that a few hours later would have been too late for the treatment to have saved his life."

SOURCE: Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa E. Rhine, 1961, p. 184-5. Account untitled, author's name witheld; title & byline added to aid searching & indexing.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites