Dreams: What You Didn't Know About Them! Part-2

President Lincoln's Dream

When President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 on April 14th a man related a dream that the President had had about ten days before he died. He related this dream to the President’s wife. The President had dreamed of people sobbing somewhere in the Whitehouse. He experienced an eerie atmosphere around him. After listening to the distressing sounds of people crying for some time, the President got out of his bed to find the location of the source of these sounds. After wandering a little he arrived at the East Room where he found his own dead body surrounded with people with sad faces.

His body was ready for funeral. When the President really died his body was actually kept in the East Room, just the way he had said, he had seen in the dream. We can deny some of such incidents by calling them coincidences, but the number is so high that it is difficult to disprove them all.

In April 1960, a bizarre incident happened. This incident explained beyond doubt that there is something like precognition and that some people have actually predicted deaths with the help of dreams. The strangest fact is that the details of these dreams match so much with the real incidents succeeding them that coincidence is out of question. Johanna Bravant had a dream in which she saw herself, her husband, sister and brother in law, taking a stroll. She suddenly came across a dead body that was wearing her dress. When she turned toward others she realized that her sister was missing. In the next frame of her dream she was alone. Then she realized that she was standing on a bridge which had two other bridges on its either side. She woke up with a strange feeling. She related this dream to her husband and his friend. After about a month she was intimated that her sister was missing .When she went out in search of her she came across a bridge which was like the one she had seen in her dream. It was then that she realized that something had gone wrong with her sister. Her sister had died in reality. When her body was discovered, she was wearing Johanna’s dress as Johanna had seen in her dream. There was no question of fraud in this incident as there was no apparent motive, as well as due to the fact that she had already told this dream to her husband and his friend. Also, there was no question of coincidence. Incidents like these force us to believe in the existence of phenomena like precognition.

Dreams carry so many mysteries with them that they have become one of the most perplexing phenomena and pose a real challenge to the researchers. One of the strangest accounts related to dreams is that of Mrs. Boulton who often had a dream in which she used to visit a house. In 1883 she and her husband decided to live in Scotland. Her husband bought a house that belonged to the aristocratic Lady Beresford.

The lady told Mr. Boulton that the house was haunted and that she had seen the ghost of a woman many a time in her bedroom, though the ghost was harmless. Mrs. Boulton came to England after her husband had bought the house. She was absolutely stunned to see that it was the same house that she had seen in her dreams so many times. When she met Lady Beresford, the Lady recognized Mrs. Boulton at once and said she was the ghost that Lady Beresford had seen so many times in her bed room. Enigmatic cases like this one stand tall even today loudly pronouncing the mysterious aspect of dreams.

The skeptic and negative approach of science in subjects like these has put impediments in their research. But if serious research is done in this field we cannot imagine what secrets might be revealed. The famous writer Mark Twain had a dream in which he vividly saw his brother’s dead body in a coffin. All that he had seen in his dream came true when his brother actually died.

This whole incident can be explained with the help of a theory put forward by a Dutch physicist Fredrick Van Eden in 1904. According to him, when we are sound asleep, a process can take place in our body. Our spirit can leave our body for some time. Many of us have had this experience. Sometimes, for example, we have dreams of flying in the air; we also have a sensation of weightlessness, which are due to the free floating of our spirit away from its bodily bounds. In our dreams we also have a sensation of falling down, after which we wake up. Fredrick explained that this happens when our spirit returns to our body. When the spirit of Mrs. Boulton left her body and wandered free from all bounds, in the rooms of Lady Beresford’s house, she used to dream of the Lady’s house, and at the same time Lady Beresford used to see her ethereal apparition.

Many times it has happened that people have seen dreams that have helped them to earn fortunes. A person named Christopher Knape, lived in Berlin, Germany, in the Eighteenth Century. One night in August 1776, he had a dream that he was walking in a street when he saw some numbers of winning lottery tickets. One of those numbers had been already purchased by him. He bought the rest of the tickets that he could remember from his dream. All f them proved to, be winning tickets. Similarly eight years back he had dreamed that the numbers purchased by him had been pronounced as winning numbers. The next day his dream turned out to be true as both the numbers that he had bought turned out to be winners. Knape had many more such experiences, one of which was also concerning lottery. He had a dream that one of his friends had selected some numbers and was telling him that if he chose one of them, it would be a winner. In his dream he chose a number but the next day when he went out and purchased it, it had already been booked and actually turned out to be a winner.

There is so much unknown about the realm of sleep and the mysteries of dreams. The answers lie within us. All we need is the right orientation and the drive to find them.