In 1953 my family moved from the Highlands of Scotland to the Borders, to my grandmother's house in a small village near Lockerbie. I was devastated at being torn away from the mountains, and fell into some kind of feral depression, like a dumb animal uprooted against its will.

That winter, and for some time thereafter, I had a recurring nightmare.

In the dream the morning is always dark and bleak with that damp unforgiving frost found only in the Lowlands. I set out, gloomy on my roller skates, for the strange new school.

Then, above me in the just-lightening sky, a huge aeroplane, bigger than any I've ever seen. I know then that it's going to fall on me, and so it does, slowly, fatefully, breaking into pieces. I'm in a field, roller-skating madly from side to side, staring up, trying desperately to dodge it, but over and over again the crossed T of that great tailplane spirals down to kill me.

Coincidence, of course, but the huge tailplane was there, on a frosted hillside far from the fuselage, between Lockerbie and my grandmother's village.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I judge whether things are coincidence by how common they are; how easy it is for chance to line up a dream with reality. This is no generic dream--or generic crash. Recurring dreams, all at the site of the bloodiest terrorist attack in British history--270 dead--and all her dreams show an oversize plane that didn't exist at the time. And of course that (house-sized) detail of the massive, severed jetliner chunk, falling where it did. Or rather, would in the future. There's also that little detail that it kills her on the ground; 11 of the Lockerbie victims were on the ground, an unusually high number; it's possible she even knew, in 1953, some of the people who'd die 35 years later by chunks of burning plane.

I'm not clear what she saw on the news; deadly debris fell in a miles-wide swath. The investigation determined that the chunk in the field was the nose; the tail fell on Rosebank Crescent, in the village. And the ground fatalities were in a third spot where the wings hit, loaded with aviation fuel, causing an inferno.

Nose of Pan Am flight 103 crashed near Tundergarth...

...several miles from the tail in Rosebank Crescent.

Fell says her nightmares of an air disaster in Lockerbie must be coincidence, but is this really a serious judgment that the parallels aren't close, or just reflexive denial prediction's ever possible? It's uncomfortable to face that such foresight could be real.

I have a different perspective of course; having logged hundreds of such unlikely "coincidences", I'm forced to accept that some dreams are predictive. The question for me becomes: what about this dream? And it looks pretty strong to me.

Even her errors are revealing. She dreamt the tail fell outside Lockerbie, matching her take on the initial news coverage, but not the facts. This fits the time-theory of JW Dunne, who argued that "ESP" is not the perception of anything spatially remote, but the foreseeing somehow of future life experience--including ordinary news reports, even if that news is mistaken. His Pelée is a spectacular example--he clearly foresaw a disaster in a dream, but with an error combining a newspaper's over-estimate of the deathtoll AND his own misreading of that inaccurate headline! Fell's Lockerbie nightmares look similar.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.75-6. Photos and crash details from Wikipedia and FBI.gov.

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