ln 1987, when I was researching for my novel Dreamer, I spent eight months attending a weekly dream therapy group in North London, at which we were taught how to remember and analyse our dreams... [I]n December 1987... Georgina and I had gone to Zermatt in Switzerland for a skiing holiday. On our first night there I told her she might dream more vividly than normal as this was the first night of our holiday and to wake me if she had any dream she could recall, so I could write it down before it faded. (I habitually slept with a notepad beside my bed at this time.)

At around six in the morning she shook me, and told me she'd had a very strange and extraordinarily vivid dream:

in the dream she was in a hospital, doing a ward round with a nurse. They stopped in front of a bed, in which lay a young man in a business suit. The nurse told Georgina that this man had had an accident and injured his neck The nurse said the hospital had a new form of treatment which involved giving him eight injections into his neck, and then asked Georgina to perform these injections.

Georgina replied that she was not a nurse or a doctor, but was a lawyer. The nurse said that did not matter, and suddenly became more concerned about whether the young man would be able to afford the cost of the injections. Georgina told her that she knew this man and that he was extremely rich and would have no problems paying.

Georgina then proceeded to give him the eight injections. When she had finished, he leapt out of bed, opened a window and climbed out on to a grid of electric power lines, which were the overhead lines of a railway beneath the hospital window.

Then Georgina woke up.

We spent that day skiing, and in the evening went to a bar called Le Mazot, a regular haunt of Brits in Zermatt. We'd only been there a few minutes, when in walked a friend of ours, an extremely successful twenty-four-year-old commodity broker, and a classic (although extremely bright and charming) sharp-suited, seriously rich 1980s yuppie.

He was rubbing his neck, and informed us that he was in agony. He'd had a bad fall skiing earlier in the day, injuring his neck, and had immediately gone to the clinic. There the doctor informed him that they had a new treatment for this kind of injury and proceeded to give him eight injections in his neck. The doctor then followed this with electric shock treatment!

When Georgina told our friend of her dream, he was stunned. Later that evening I showed him the notes I had written on my pad and we subsequently spent many hours discussing it, trying to come to an explanation.

We have never reached one. Sure, it could have been coincidence, but I don't think so. I think sometimes coincidence is too easy an explanation. I believe that people do at times have genuine precognition and this could well have been one. And I think the explanation for the whole phenomenon of precognition lies in how we understand and view time. Maybe one day we will learn that linear time is as much a symbolic representation of the actuality as the images in our dreams.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Between the lines, one gets the amusing impression Georgina tolerates Peter's little enthusiasms but doesn't share them; he wants her to wake him so he can write down her dreams? What, she can't write? Or can't be bothered!

And yet her dream was so intense that she did it--woke him to tell it.

Does it matter that we only have the dream second-hand? Even if Peter wrote it down wrong, or Georgina had made it up as a prank, the couple did later find those notes predicted their friend's accident and treatment; a skeptic asserting fraud would only be shifting this from "dream" to "fake dream" while conceding its predictive success! To explain that away, a skeptic must call Peter lying or delusional--the same accusation our skeptic must make of first-hand accounts of predictive dreams too specific to dismiss as coincidence.

And yet, every experienced dream-journalist I've met or read (I'll quantify "experienced" as "recorded over 1000 dreams" or "kept at it a year or more") has had at least one like Georgina's. Skeptics tend to be poor recallers, or dabblers who've written a few dozen dreams--or a few hundred. Get a decent sample before you scoff!

O Serious Dreamworker, get used to such scoffing. I got told I was either lying or delusional by friends, family and Ursula Le Guin. In a dream-hostile culture, mockery's a sure bet. But so's ESP. Do your night work, and both will come.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.117-9

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