Natural Disaster Dreams
Natural Disaster Dreams
(dreams)Some individuals seem to possess the ability to “tune in” to disasters that involve a large number of people. These sort of precognitive dreams have been associated with natural disasters that occur all over the world and have probably been experienced for ages. This phenomenon, however, has only been studied for a relatively short period of time.
On October 21, 1966, a massive mudslide engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan. This disaster—spurred on by coal mining activities—killed 144 people, most of whom were schoolchildren. After the incident occurred, a national paper appealed for information pertaining to any precognitive experiences that people had noticed. The appeal resulted in thirty-five cases being reported, twenty-four of which were told to someone else before the disaster occurred or before the appeal appeared in the paper. Twenty-five of the thirty-five instances specifically involved dreams. The most poignant of these was related by a young girl named Eryl Mai Jones. She tried to share her dreams with her mother on a regular basis, but her mother often dismissed them as pure fantasy. In this instance, she took the time to listen. This is the dream that Eryl described: “We go to school but there is no school there; something black has come down all over it.” She then said to her mother, “I’m not afraid to die mommy. I’ll be with Peter and Jane.” Eryl Jones was among the 118 children buried alive.
Ian Stevenson conducted an investigation into the precognitive dreams surrounding the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. He collected information from nineteen people who anticipated the sinking of the great ship, and several of them received their visions in the form of dreams. One man, who was supposed to be on the ship when it sank, dreamed twice that he saw the ship floating, keel up, with people swimming all around it. These dreams were not enough to make him cancel his voyage, but, as fate would have it, he ended up not taking the trip for other personal reasons.
President Franklin Roosevelt claimed to have experienced this type of precognitive natural disaster dream. On May 25, 1941, he dreamed that the Japanese were bombing New York City while he was safe in his home in Hyde Park. When the dream was analyzed, it was determined that it symbolized that the Japanese were capable of a direct assault on American soil but that the country would be able to withstand the damage.
While many such instances have been reported, they are usually retrospective in nature, opening them to doubt and debate. Premonition dreams can be put into five categories: coincidental, inferential, self-fulfilling, pseudo-anomalous, and anomalous. Coincidental dreams are just that: dreams that just happen to mimic something that occurs in real life. Inferential dreams are those in which the dreamer, given certain knowledge of events and facts, puts this information together correctly in a dream that then reflects real-life results. In self-fulfilling prophecy dreams, a person behaves a certain way because of something that he or she has dreamed, thus causing real life to reflect what occurred in the dream. The fourth category is pseudo-anomalous dreams. These are dreams that did not actually occur, but the person reports that they did; in other words, they are simply lies. The fifth category includes dreams that are apparently anomalous, or that are unexplainable in their accuracy, but that actually do seem to predict future disasters.