Fourteen or fifteen years ago, about four days before the Navajos started to die, before the epidemic of the flu, I dreamt that in four days Navajos would start to die.

It was as if somebody in the dream came and said "you will know that it will rain in four days."

That caused the flu. This dream caused the Navajos to die.

EDITOR'S COMMENT

Some Navaho dreamers Lincoln interviewed requested anonymity, including R.T., because their dreams included heavy topics--hauntings and attacks by chindi, deaths predicted, and, perhaps worst of all, this--guilt over a plague that devastated the Navaho (just as with Covid, the 1918 flu pandemic had higher death rates for Native Americans.)

I've had enough predictive dreams to assume such a dream is a warning, and maybe tell friends to isolate... and perhaps, when it came true, I'd feel guilt I hadn't done more to warn people... but I wouldn't think I caused the disease. But that's just me. Other dreamers, shocked by their first such dream, often do worry they wished it, and somehow wishing caused it. Seer's guilt! Life-and-death warnings like R.T.'s can induce guilt as severe as a surgeon's guilt over patients lost.

I used to blame Freud for this--he did claim without proof that every dream's a repressed, shameful wish, never just (just!) a warning of things to come. But it predates Freud. An uneasy feeling that foresight implies causation has always run through dreamwork worldwide, shading into suspicion that you can ill-wish or curse others in dreams. Certainly that's true for more Navaho than just R.T.

ESP skeptics attribute wishful thinking to what they call believers (not, as would be fairer, experiencers), as if second sight is all fun and games. It's not. Paranormal experiences can not only feel creepy (violating boundaries) but guilt-inducing, as here.

RT is equating foresight with causation--and responsibility. I don't think he's to blame--but historically, he's not alone in this belief.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Dream in Primitive Cultures edited by Jackson Lincoln, 1935, pp 229 in 1970 reprint. Primary source: interview by Lincoln through translator (though RT knew some English), May 1932.

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