dreams were the channel of information for eight of them. One of these
individuals dreamed twice that he saw the Titanic floating keel
upwards, with her passengers and crew swimming about in the
water. However, he did not cancel his passage because of the
dreams and eventually did so only because a change of
business plans gave him a rational basis for the cancellation (9, 10).
On October 21, 1966, a massive coal-tip slid down a mountainside and engulfed the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 persons, mostly school children. By means of an appeal the following week in a national newspaper, an English psychiatrist, Dr. J.C. Barker, obtained a large number of reports from respondents, who felt they may have received paranormal information concerning this tragedy. After these various claims were carefully checked out, a residue of 35 cases remained which Barker felt seemed worthy of confidence. In 24 of these cases, the percipient had described his experience to someone else before the landslide had occurred. Dreams figured in 25 of the accounts. In one of these, the dreamer saw spelled out in great, brilliant letters the word A B E R F A N. In another dream, a telephone operator from Brighton talked helplessly to a child walking towards her, who was followed by a great billowing cloud of black dust or smoke. Apparently the clearest precognitive dream was that of a young girl, Eryl Mai Jones. She often tried to tell her mother about her dreams, but her mother tended to dismiss them. One morning, however, Eryl Mai finally managed to get her mother to listen to one of her dreams. In her dream, we go to school but there is no school there; something black has come down all over it. She told her mother, "Im not afraid to die, Mommy. Ill be with Peter and June." When the huge slag deposit slid down on the school two days later, Eryl Mai, Peter, and June were among the 118 children crushed or buried alive beneath the black heap (1). Can we utilize psychic dream warnings to prevent such horrible disasters? The London Evening Standard was so impressed by the apparently large number of psychic premonitions pointing towards the events at Aberfan that they undertook an effort to organize a premonitions registry. Over a hundred correct predictions were reported to have been sent in during the next two years. This idea stimulated enough interest so that three registries are now in existence: in London, in New York, and in Toronto. The address for the American one is: Central Premonitions Registry, Box 482, Times Square Station, New York, NY 10036. These registries have been confronted with a number of 177
|