Our Dreams Can Reflect Out-Of-Body Travels And Warnings About Future Events

By James Donahue

There is a television series about a woman in Phoenix, Arizona, who dreamed of crimes in her area and assisted the police in solving them. As we understand it, the stories are based on a real-life psychic who actually worked with the police in helping to solve crimes.

Readers of this site may have read the personal story of the mystery woman found frozen and unclothed in a snow bank near Lexington, Michigan, when I was working as a crime reporter in that area some years ago. The case so baffled the police that a Detroit area psychic was asked to help in resolving the case.

I was reminded of these events when I spotted a news clip about a police officer that dreamed where a missing deaf and dumb woman was accidentally trapped in a chimney flu in Wales.

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.

During my Great Lakes shipwreck research, I ran into 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 are 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 saw that the car wrecked. 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 my family. After some discussion, we identified this as a warning of an impending serious traffic accident.

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.

To avoid this accident we changed 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, I am convinced that we avoided a premature death that fall.

During our sleeping hours we all travel about in the astral. It seems that we leave our bodies when we sleep and sometimes dream about our adventures.

Swedish psychologist Carl Jung theorized that a collective unconscious library of all information, both past and future, exists on this plane of existence. If he was right, it is from here that dreams spring warning us of future events. Because the sight of my accident alarmed me enough during my sleep, I remembered it after I woke up 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.