Spy with a Bun
Dreamed 1918 by Miss C, as told by J.W. Dunne
INTRODUCTION
Before World War One, J.W. Dunne had spontaneous predictive dreams. He concluded they weren't products of a sixth sense, but were mishmashes of elements pulled both from his recent past and near future, as if the dreaming mind doesn't even distinguish them!
By the end of the war, Dunne started his famous experiment--methodically writing both dream and day events, and reading the sequence both forward and back to fool his biased waking brain into scoring the correlations fairly. He found it exhausting, but ultimately successful--dream experiences before waking ones so specific and similar even his engineer-trained skepticism had to concede his dreams just ignored waking-world time.
Then like any good scientist, he tried replication. He was careful not to seek believers in ESP. His subjects were naïve, often poor dream-recallers (at the start; they all improved, just from writing them down.) Here's one, Miss C.
--Chris Wayan
SPY WITH A BUN
I then asked my cousin, Miss C., to try. She was positive that she had never had any experience of this kind, and was sure that, as a general rule, she dreamed very little. She proved excellent at recovering the lost dreams, and good at noting detail. But at first she was very weak at perceiving connections, even with past events. She could not, for example, understand how a dream of walking on roofs could be connected with the experience of climbing about the roof of a bungalow with me on the previous day, though she had not been on a roof of any sort for years.
She obtained, however, on the eighth day, the following first-class result:
Immediately upon her arrival at a certain country hotel she was told of a curious person staying there whom all the guests suspected, having made up their minds that she was a German. (This was during the last stages of the war.) Shortly afterwards she met this person -- for the first time -- in the hotel grounds. These are rather uncommon. They extend a long way, contain numbers of large, rare trees, and would certainly be taken for public gardens by anyone who did not know that they belonged to the hotel.
The supposed German was dressed in a black skirt with a black-and-white striped blouse, and had her hair scraped back in a 'bun' on the top of her head.
My cousin's dream was that a German woman, dressed in a black skirt, with a black-and-white striped blouse, and having her hair scraped back in a 'bun' on the top of her head, met her in a public garden. My cousin suspected her of being a spy.The dream occurred about two days before the event. (The record is undated, but was in my hands when the confirmatory event took place.)
SOURCE: J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927; 2001 reprint; pp.48-9). Passage untitled in original.
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