It was in the winter of 1917-1918. I had moved, not long before, into a house in North Buckinghamshire with my wife and two children, the elder a boy of not quite four years old. It was a very charming house with a family ghost, but none of us ever saw a ghost there. The elder boy was sleeping in his parents' bedroom when the thing happened. This was not his usual custom, but we had had burst water-pipes a couple of nights earlier and his nursery floor was still damp. The boy, however, was usually no trouble at night so we were the more surprised when he woke crying in the small hours of that morning.

We spoke to him, of course, and asked him what was the matter, but the only reply we could get out of him was the sentence, several times repeated: 'Poor Mrs. Timms; poor Mrs Timms.' After which he mercifully went to sleep again.

No great matter, that. Naturally we took it for granted that he had been dreaming, possibly about some story that he had been told--he was not, then, able to read.

And the next morning I tried, as ingeniously as I could, to find out what the dream had been about. I did not imagine that the dream had any unusual significance. I was just interested as a father and a dabbler in modern psychology. However, I got no valuable material on this occasion, because the boy had apparently no recollection whatever of having dreamed at all or, indeed, of having waked up in the night.

And, anyway, who was Mrs. Timms? I asked my wife, who said she had heard the name, and thought she was a friend of the woman from the village who came in to help now and again. But we knew no more about her than that, until we heard two or three days later that a certain Mrs. Timms living in the village had received a telegram from the War Office with the news that her son had been killed in France.

So far as I could fix the date, afterwards, young Timms had been killed on the day before my small son had waked in the night to express his sympathy for the woman he had almost certainly never seen or heard of.

SOURCE: The Dream World by Rodolphe L. Megroz, 1939, p104-5.

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