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covered, others weeping pitifully. "Who is dead in the White
House?" I demand of one of the soldiers. "The President," is his answer. "He
was killed by an assassin!" Then comes a loud burst of grief from the crowd,
which awakens me from my dream. I slept no more that night" (6).
In June 1914, Bishop Joseph Lanyi, the tutor of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, dreamed that the Archduke was going to be assassinated at Sarajevo and was so impressed by the dream that he not only wrote it down but he also drew a sketch of the incident. He desperately attempted to warn the Archduke but was unsuccessful. He felt so certain of the dream’s outcome that he proceeded to hold a Mass for him. When the Archduke was killed by an assassin’s bullet, the event became known as "the shot heard around the world," as it led to the beginning of World War I (7). Is there an inevitability to the outcome foreseen in a precognitive dream? The historian Herodotus recorded that Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia, had a dream that his son Atys would be killed by the point of an iron weapon. Croesus took elaborate precautions to insure that the event would not be fulfilled, including appointing a special guard to watch over his son. Atys was killed during a boar hunt by a javelin thrown by the guard who was watching out for his safety. Robert Morris, Sr., the father of the financier of the American Revolution, dreamed that he would be killed by a cannonball from a ship that he would visit. When a ceremonial event called for his visit to a ship, he made desperate efforts to avoid going on board. When the captain heard his reluctance was based upon a dream, he ridiculed Morris severely and assured him that no guns would be fired until he returned ashore. Following Morris’s shipboard visit, the captain ordered that a saluting gun should be fired only after he had raised his hand to indicate that the party had safely reached shore. Shortly afterwards, a fly landed on the captain’s nose and he instinctively raised his hand to brush it off. The crew thought this was their signal, and they fired off the saluting shot. A fragment of the shell hit Morris and fatally wounded him (11). A more recent example of a precognitive dream involving a highly unlikely event comes from Roy C. Sullivan, a Shenandoah National Park ranger. Sullivan is called "Lightning Rod" by his friends. He acquired this nickname the hard way—he has been struck by lightning five times. This unique distinction has earned him a listing in "Ripley’s Believe It or Not" and the Guinness Book of World Records. The first time he was struck by lightning was in April 1942, and the lightning bolt seared part of his leg and tore his 175
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