By James Donahue

A news clip about a Wales police officer that dreamed where a missing deaf and dumb woman was accidentally trapped in a chimney flu prompted me to write this brief discourse on dreams and what goes on while we sleep.

It seems this woman was a housekeeper in the home where she lived. When she went missing one day in 1871, the homeowner summoned help from the local police.

That morning a man identified only as Inspector Strefford came to the house, walked straight down the cellar stairs, and found the woman stuck hard in an open flue. She had fallen there from the fireplace in the room above and because of her condition was unable to call for help.

The woman was stuck so fast it required the removal of a portion of the chimney to free her. Her life was saved because the inspector had a dream that led him right to her.

There is another story about a woman in Goderich, Ontario, who in the fall of 1913 dreamed of a terrible storm that would sink the steamship Wexford. This was of great concern to her because her son was about to board that ship for a trip to Goderich from Fort William, now known as Thunder Bay.

The dream was so vivid that the woman telegraphed her son, while the Wexford was still in port. In her cable she begged her son to leave the ship and wait for another passage. As the story is told, the son took her mother’s premonition seriously and gave up his berth. Unfortunately, a cousin, also in Fort William at the time, took his place.

The Wexford became one of a fleet of ships lost in the Great Storm of 1913.

I dream nearly every night, but like most people, I rarely remember my dreams. When I do remember them, however, it is because they were unusually vivid and sometimes connected to a warning.

One dream that I still recall involved a trip my wife and I were making in our car. In the dream we were on a blacktopped county road. As we approached an intersection we were stopped by a police officer standing in the middle of the road.

Eventually the officer waived us through. I wanted to turn left, but as I turned, the car seemed to go out of control and continued rolling into a ditch at the side of the road. In my dream I seemed to float out of the car to the ground, where I noticed a lot of oil dripping from under the engine. Then I noticed that the car was in a completely dilapidated condition. I felt sad that I had allowed the vehicle to fall in such a poor state of repair.

That was the extent of the dream. Yet it lingered in my mind the following day and troubled me enough that I spoke of it to the family. As we discussed the dream we concluded that it may have been a warning.

At the time we had just moved from Arizona back to Michigan. I was temporarily out of work, but my wife had taken a job in a town about 18 miles away. Consequently I was driving her to and from work every day.

Just to play safe we change our normal driving habits. For several months I took varied routes, some days drove faster or slower than usual, and if possible, stopped along the road unexpectedly. By tinkering with timelines, and being constantly alert for vehicles approaching from side roads, we may have avoided a premature death that fall.

It is theorized that there exists an astral world where we find the collective unconscious library of information that springs from the minds of humanity. It is from here that dreams sometimes warn us of future events. Because the sight of my accident alarmed me enough during my sleep, I remembered it after I woke and did something about it.

Thus we have stories about warnings from dreams that turn people away from planned trips on doomed aircraft and ships at the last moment. And it explains the woman who successfully stopped her son from boarding the Wexford before it sailed into the teeth of that 1913 storm.