In the spring of 1902 I was encamped with the 6th Mounted Infantry near the ruins of Lindley, in the (then) Orange Free State. We had just come off trek, and mails and newspapers arrived but rarely.

There, one night, I had an unusually vivid and rather unpleasant dream.

I seemed to be standing on high ground--the upper slopes of some spur of a hill or mountain. The ground was of a curious white formation. Here and there in this were little fissures, and from these jets of vapour were spouting upward. In my dream I recognized the place as an island of which I had dreamed before--an island which was in imminent peril from a volcano.

And when I saw the vapour spouting from the ground, I gasped: "It's the island! Good Lord, the whole thing is going to blow up!" For I had memories of reading about Krakatoa, where the sea, making its way into the heart of a volcano through a submarine crevice, flashed into steam, and blew the whole mountain to pieces.

Forthwith I was seized with a frantic desire to save the four thousand (I knew the number) unsuspecting inhabitants. Obviously there was only one way of doing this, and that was to take them off in ships. There followed a most distressing nightmare, in which I was at a neighbouring island, trying to get the incredulous French authorities to despatch vessels of every and any description to remove the inhabitants of the threatened island. I was sent from one official to another; and finally woke myself by my own dream exertions, clinging to the heads of a team of horses drawing the carriage of one 'Monsieur Ie Maire', who was going out to dine and wanted me to return when his office would be open next day.

All through the dream the number of the people in danger obsessed my mind. I repeated it to every one I met, and, at the moment of waking, I was shouting to the 'Maire', "Listen! Four thousand people will be killed unless--"

One of the most terrible disasters in the annals of the world has befallen the once prosperous town of St Pierre, rhe commercial capital of the French island of Martinique in the West Indies. At eight o'clock on Thursday morning the volcano Mont Pelée which had been quiescent for a century etc., etc.

But there is no need to go over the story of the worst eruption in modern history.

In another column of the same paper was the following, the headlines being somewhat smaller:

There followed the report of the schooner Ocean Traveller, which had been obliged to leave St Vincent owing to a fall of sand from the volcano there, and had subsequently been unable to reach St Lucia owing to adverse currents opposite the ill-fated St Pierre. The paragraph contained these words:

'When she was about a mile off, the volcano Mont Pelée exploded.'

The narrator subsequently described how the mountain seemed to split open all down the side.

Needless to say, ships were busy for some time after, removing survivors to neighbouring islands.

There is one remark to be made here.

The number of people declared to be killed was not, as I had maintained throughout the dream, 4,000, but 40,000. I was out by a nought. But, when I read the paper, I read, in my haste, that number as 4,000; and, in telling the story subsequently, I always spoke of that printed figure as having been 4,000; and I did not know it was really 40,000 until I copied out the paragraph fifteen years later.

Now, when the next batch of papers arrived, these gave more exact estimates of what the actual loss of life had been; and I discovered that the true figure [c.28,000] had nothing in common with the arrangement of fours and noughts I had both dreamed of, and gathered from the first report. So my wonderful 'clairvoyant' vision had been wrong in its most insistent particular!

But it was clear that its wrongness was likely to prove a matter just as important as its rightness. For whence, in the dream, had I got that idea of 4,000? Clearly it must have come into my mind because of the newspaper paragraph.

This suggested the extremely unpleasant notion that the whole thing was what doctors call 'Identifying Paramnesia'; that I had never really had any such dream at all; but that, on reading the newspaper report, a false idea had sprung up in my mind to the effect that I had previously dreamed a dream containing all the details given in that paragraph.

...the dream had been precisely the sort of thing I might have expected to have experienced after reacting to the printed report--a perfectly ordinary dream based upon the personal experience of reading. How, then, could I be sure [such] dreams had not been false memories engendered by the act of reading?

But there was the watch business to be taken into account. That, certainly, could not be made to fit in with the new theory unless I were a great deal madder than I could bring myself to believe.

I was, however, absolutely satisfied that neither in the Cape to Cairo nor in the Mont Pelée dream had there been any 'astral-wandering', or any direct vision across leagues of space, or any 'messages' from the actors in the actual episodes represented. These dreams had been induced, either by the reading of the paragraphs, or else by telepathetic communications from the journalist in the Daily Telegraph office who had written those accounts. [i.e., no other sources would contain the error in the death toll.]

EDITOR'S NOTES

Dunne here takes advantage of a misread, inaccurate news story to argue convincingly that at least some dreams that had in prescientific times been labeled psychic, clairvoyant or telepathic are really predictive--not of the event, but of your own (near) future experience of reading or hearing the news. His only logical alternative is "identifying paramnesia", basically translating into plain English as "I'm so stupid I can't tell which came first, dream or news."

In his next major dream of this sort, Factory Fire in 1903, he disproved "identifying paramnesia" by writing the dream out before any newspapers came (in all his subsequent dream-experiments he kept careful records to make the real sequence undeniable.) This left him with only one hypothesis--time is not as one-way as we think.

The only flaw I see here is that Dunne overgeneralizes, see all dreams this way, instead of the more cautious at least some.

And that flaw, that all dreams and dreamers fit one model, is evident in Freud, Jung... indeed every dream researcher I've read. Except, of course, me.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Note how Dunne didn't dream he witnessed the eruption--he foresees it, though no one listens. That is, the dream brings up prediction as an issue. This looks suspiciously like the dream-producer is aware this isn't a simple anxiety or frustration nightmare. Many of my own apparently predictive dreams have hints of this sort, or even more explicit--they'll be set in the future, or contain talk of ESP. I've labeled these self-flagging dreams.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927; 2001 reprint; pp. 21-23)

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