Many people have an uncanny ability to see into the future, or receive some kind of warning that a disaster was going to happen. They often do not know what to make of it themselves, and feel extremely uneasy. Premonitions have also saved many people, as they felt so bad about them that they just refuse to follow their plans, and end up narrowly averting disaster. Premonitions often come in forms of a dream, and they often occur repeatedly, until the person is so troubled by it that he believes that it is real and acts on it.

On the morning of Saturday, June 1, 1974, the movie Mrs. Lesley Brennan of England was watching was interrupted by a special bulletin announcing that an explosion had ripped through the Flixborough Nypro plant, a nearby chemical plant that produced materials used in nylon, and that several people had died. About noon that day, two friends paid her a visit, and she asked them if they had hear about the accident. They had not.

And neither had anybody else, because the explosion actually took place at 4:53 P.M. the death toll was twenty-eight, and many were injured. When they heard later newscasts about the explosion, the three women at first thought the newscasters were stating the details incorrectly. But a check of the paper the next day showed the actual time of the explosion.

Brennan could offer no explanation. Perhaps she had fallen asleep and actually dreamed the telecast. Whatever happened, she had relayed the story of the event to two friends almost five hours before it actually happened.

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Mark Twain was a serious student of the paranormal. His interest in the subject stemmed from personal experience, when in 1858, he precognised his brother’s death.

The writer was then working as a steersman on a packet travelling between New Orleans and St. Louis. One night while remaining ashore for a few days, he dreamt that his brother Henry was lying in a metal coffin dressed in one of Twain’s own suits. The coffin was suspended between two chairs, and a bouquet of flower, with a red rose in the centre, rested on his chest. The dream was so vivid that when he awoke, Twain did not realise that he had been sleeping and thought he was at home.

The dream had a tragic denouement two days later. While Twain remained in New Orleans, the packet on which he worked continued down the Mississippi. His brother also worked the boat and was continuing the journey when a boiler exploded. Henry was severely injured and taken to Memphis, where he died when the doctor accidentally injected him with too much morphine.

When Henry was prepared for burial, some kind ladies raised the money to procure a metal casket for him. His body was dressed in one of Twain’s suits. While the writer was mourning his brother’s death, a lady entered the room and placed a bouquet of flowers, with a red rose in the centre, on the chest of the deceased. When Mark Twain visited the house in which the body was housed, he saw in on two chairs, just like he had seen in his dream.

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Some premonitions come true and some do not, no matter how real and terrible the events they portray. Take, for instance, the case of the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who foretold his own assassination in a dream.

Lincoln recounted his nocturnal warning to a close friend, who left a written account for posterity. In his dream, said Lincoln, "there seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.

"No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I kept on until I arrived at the East Room and there I met a sickening surprise.

"Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin.’"

Within a few days of this dream, the president was dead, felled by the derringer of John Wilkes Booth. Mortally stricken, Lincoln was carried from Ford’s Theatre to a private house across the street. After his death, his body lay in state in the White House’s East Room, just as it had in Lincoln’s dream.

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Chris Sizemore says she had her most vivid psychic experience as a child, when her sister fell sick with pneumonia. At least everybody thought it was pneumonia, until Chris had a dream. She saw herself running down a green hill in a pasture. When she turned to climb up to slope again, Jesus appeared before her and said, "My child, your sister has diphtheria, not pneumonia. Go and tell your mother."

When Chris told her parents the story, they remained sceptical but finally summoned their physician. He re-examined the girl briefly before diagnosing the problem as diphtheria. Chris’s dream probably saved her sister’s life.

Her premonitions occurred throughout her life and focused mainly on her family. On one occasion, for instance, she had a vision in which her husband was electrocuted. She begged him not to go to work that day, and his replacement was sent to repair some power lines and was electrocuted on the job. Later, she became fearful when her daughter was scheduled to take the Salk polo vaccine. Her husband refused to take the premonition seriously and the girl was later injected with spoiled vaccine and became seriously ill, almost dying from the injection.

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One of the worst disasters in British history occurred in Wales on October 21, 1966, when a huge stockpile of coal refuse collapsed and buried a school in the small mining village of Aberfan. More than 140 people, including 128 school children, were killed.

During the weeks that followed, it became increasingly clear that some of the children, as well as other people througgout England had foreseen the tragedy. Thirty-five such cases, in fact, were collected by the British Psychiatrist J.C. Barker. One of his informants was a mother of a dead child. She told Barker that the day before the disaster, her daughter suddenly started talking about death, explaining why she was not afraid to die. Her mother was perplexed by her strange conversation, but did not realise the significance of the child’s remarks, which concerned an odd dream which she had just had.

"I dreamt I went to school," she told her mother, "and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it."

Even the child failed to recognise that the dream was a warning, and skipped off the school the next day, only to be killed two hours later.

A middle-aged woman from Plymouth, England, had experienced precognitions of the tragedy, too.

"I actually ‘saw’ the disaster the night before it happened," she related, "and the next day I had already told my next-door neighbour about it before the news was broadcast. First, I ‘saw’ an old schoolhouse nestling in a valley, then a Welsh miner, then an avalanche of coal hurling down a mountainside. Then for a while I saw some rescue operations taking place.

Of the many cases collected by Dr. Barker, most were symbolic dreams that tended to occur the week before the slide.

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Dream Headlines

On January 29, 1963, Mrs. John Walik of Long Beach, California suddenly bolted upright in bed – awakened by a terrifying nightmare that seemed unusually livid. She had dreamed of an airplane flying over water. It seemed to level off as it approached a landing strip a hundred feet away. But it suddenly dropped, bounced off the water, and veered into the ground, exploding into flames.

The details of the dream haunted Mrs. Walik. She had clearly "seen" that the plane was a big four-engined Constellation – the same kind of plane her husband flew as a navigator for Slick Airways.

Was the dream a warning that John Walik was in danger? As soon as the Slick Airways office opened that morning, Mrs. Walik called to see if her husband was safe. She was assured that no planes had crashed and that John, who was flying on a plane that was delivering freight to the West Coast, would be home in just a few days.

But Mrs. Walik was not reassured. As she told friends, neighbours and family – anyone who would listen – over the next few days, there was something different frightening about this dream, it seemed real.

On February 3, 1963, Mrs. Walik decided to check on her husband’s safety one more time. Again, the airline insisted that there had been no problems with his plane and that John would be landing at the San Francisco International Airport later that morning.

As soon as Mrs. Walik hung up the phone, the details of her dream came rushing back. The plane in her nightmare landed near water, she remembered, and to land at San Francisco International Airport, her husband’s plane would have to fly over the bay.

Quickly she redialled the Slick Airlines office. But before she could finish explaining her concern, her terrifying dream had come true. Her husband’s plane crashed beside a runway and began to burn. Five crew members were killed. Four others – including John Walik – survived.

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When Ruth Ammer fell asleep on a hot August afternoon in 1962, she was the wife of Syrian-American shoe repairman Joseph Ammer. But by the time she woke up, she had a terrible feeling that she was a widow.

Ruth had experienced a prophetic nightmare. As she later recounted to the police, she dreamed that her husband was in his shop when an assailant attacked him, striking over and over again with a hammer.

When Mr. Ammer failed to come home for lunch as he always did, Ruth began to worry even more about the dream. So she decided to pack Joe’s lunch and take it to his shop a few blocks away.

When Ruth arrived, she saw her nightmare come true. She found her husband bound with cobbler’s twine, beaten to death. The murder weapon, a hammer, lay nearby.

Although she gave the police of the description of the man she had seen in her dream, the officers were not particularly interested, until they learnt that a man who answered Mrs. Ammer’s description, down to the clothes he was wearing, had been spotted washing his bloody hands in a rest room shortly after Joseph’s murder.

Although her dream was not admissible as evidence at the murder trail of William Edmonds, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

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Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the British general staff during World War I and a member of Parliament, spent a jovial evening with his old friend, socialite Lady Londonderry and several others in June 1922. Then Lady Londonderry went to bed, but it was a fitful sleep. When her husband woke her up, she was screaming and wet with perspiration.

In a terrifying dream, she had watched Sir Henry die. She described how her friend took a taxi through the streets of London, stopping in front of his home. Then Sir Henry walked up his front door. As he started to unlock it, two assassins approached him, whipped pistols from under their coats and shot him at point-blank range. Then the gunmen raced down the street.

There was one detail that did not seem to make sense. Lady Londonderry had seen Sir Henry in his full-dress military uniform, but the gentleman’s customary attire was civilian clothes.

A little more than a week after the dream, Sir Henry Wilson was asked to unveil a war memorial at Paddington Station. For the occasion, he ware his full-dress miliatary uniform. After the dedication, he took a taxi home, where, he was shot to death by two armed murderers –a tragedy Lady Londonderry had foreseen in her terrible dream.

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When Jaime Castell, a Spanish hotel executive woke from an eerie dream, he thought better than to wake his six-month pregnant wife to tell her about it. there was no need to concern her with the knowledge imparted to him. The voice in his dream, had specifically mentioned the child she was carrying, saying that Castell will not live to see it. concerned by the portentous dream, Cartell took up an insurance policy for the value of more than 50000 pounds, payable to his wife upon his death.

A few weeks later, Castell was routinely driving home from work when he saw a car travelling from the opposite direction at more than 100 miles per hour. As Castell watched in terror, the speeding vehicle careened off the road, across the metal safety bar dividing the road’s lanes and flipped end over end into the air. It was the last thing Castell saw before the car landed on top of his own car. Both drivers were killed immediately.

Often an insurance company will rule an insurance policy invalid if it appears that the holder knew he was going to die. Due to the freakish nature of Castell’s accident, however, the company could not dispute the claim filed later and paid Castell’s wife as beneficiary.

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Edward Pearson, a self-proclaimed ‘unemployed prophet’ from Wales, awoke one morning in late November 1974 with a horrible premonition. Earthquakes in the British Isles, he knew, were as common as snow in July. Even so, Pearson had the impression that the city of Glasgow would soon be wrecked by a substantial tremor.

Seeing no alternative, he felt he must warn Glasgow’s citizens of the imminent quake. Although he lacked the necessary funds to travel to the city, he felt that the importance of his visit would convince the train’s guard to allow him on the train without a ticket.

Unfortunately for Pearson, the train authorities were not as understanding as he had expected and his passage was denied. His story was reported, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the following day. Three weeks later, however, when an earthquake rattled Glasgow, destroying numerous buildings in the city and the surrounding area, the newspapermen realised they had scoffed at a most accurate prediction.

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