A very unusual sequence of events
On December 12, 1989, I received a phone call from an old high school friend named Lisa Moore. The last time I’d seen Lisa was in 1980, my last day in high school. I graduated early, at age 14, by taking a test. This allowed me to start college immediately, which I did. It also severed all ties to people I knew in high school, including Lisa, who still had two years to go before they graduated.
Since then, I had moved across the country, from California to Maine, then to New York and new Jersey, where I was living when Lisa called. She knew my number because I had called her a few months earlier to get contact information from her for someone we both knew. With this as a background, it was unusual for her to call at all, but her purpose made it even more unusual.
“Andy, can you tell me if you’ve had any dreams about me recently?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Answer my question, and I’ll tell you.”
I thought about it and remembered thinking about Lisa in a recent dream.
“I might have. Do you mind if I run upstairs and get my journal? I’ll find the dream I’m thinking of and read it to you. How does that sound?”
“Fine.”
I went up and found the dream, from 11/28/1989, about ten days earlier. As I read through it, I felt queasy about the idea of repeating it to Lisa because it was unsettling. She said to go ahead. I read it off to her, but also elaborated verbally on some points, because the way I described them in the journal was a brief approximation of what I remembered. This is approximately what I said (journal entry combined with verbal elaboration):
11/28/1989:
In a particularly gruesome scene, it is Christmas at a relative's house. The dinner is to be two little animals, furry, and scared-like pigs or maybe even cats. I say “dinner” because I see a woman in a white smock like a chef carrying a tray with an animal, or two small animals on it. It is hard to tell if it is one animal or two because it is a mangled bloody furry mess, with fur sticking up straight and stiff like bristles.
The girls watch in horror as the woman in the smock walks up with a knife, separates the animals, puts the knife gently on the top of the neck of one while holding its body and then slowly presses down, slicing the head cleanly off the body. The head tilts forward, rests about 3/4" in front of the neck. A pool of blood rapidly collects. The pigs animals eyes are still open and appear to be consciously aware of what has transpired. The scene was silent and uncomfortably slow. This made the actions of the cook all the more graphic and horrible. The girl is moved to tears and so am I. I want to comfort her. She won't be eating, but they wanted her in the kitchen for some reason and that's why she saw.
The reason I thought of Lisa is that the sad girl looking through the door reminded me of her.
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After describing that weird scene, I asked Lisa if it made any sense to her.
“Yes, it does. On the night of your dream, my cat, Nikki, was run over by a car and nearly decapitated. I brought her to a veterinary hospital immediately in the hope they could save her. During surgery, Nikki was accidentally decapitated.”
I had mistaken the white surgical smock worn by the veterinary surgeon for a chef’s smock, a scalpel for a cooking knife, and the cat for an unknown animal (initially thought to be a very small bristly piglet because of the way the fur was sticking up), and the veterinary surgery for a kitchen.
My description of the dreams elements was good, but my identifications were off. Sort of like seeing a man named Arnold, when it is a man named Walter, based on the fact they have two arms, two legs, a head and torso, and a handlebar mustache. The description matches both men but he identification of the name is wrong.
The elements:
“Small animal on tray” (correct)
“Animal is mangled, bloody, fur sticking up like spikes” (correct)
“Might be two animals” (wrong, but head was dislocated and other limbs broken)
“Like a small piglet” (wrong, but this was because of the dried blood in the cat’s fur making it stick up like bristles on a pig.)
“Cook” (wrong. A surgeon, but dressed similar to a chef.)
“Dinner” (wrong. Cat on metal tray the size of dinner platter.)
Cuts animal’s head off intentionally. Wrong, but cat is decapitated by scalpel.
Girl’s face (Lisa) in window, sad, crying. True of Lisa’s reaction and she was present.
And now we get to the interesting part. I asked Lisa why she called me. Here, by the way, there is a conflict in the record. As I remember this, Lisa called me. However, in her letter written to me after the call, she says I called her. I believe she is mistaken for reasons that should be clear as I describe her answer.
“After Nikki died, I saw you in my room. You said that Nikki was in a better place and I didn’t have to worry about her. I expected you to call me after that, but you didn’t. After two weeks, I was out of patience and decided to call you.”
The key point is that she said that she saw me in her room in Santa Barbara while I was apparently dreaming about her in Weehawken, New Jersey.
It was this dream that made me aware that I might be dreaming about other people sometimes. Until this incident, I assumed that my dreams were either of my own future, or they were meaningless. After this dream, I learned to recognize when I was dreaming of a visit to someone else, and made efforts to verify those accounts by calling the person in question.
Usually, it was possible to verify these dreams, but not always. My success rate was around 75% the last time I checked, meaning that in one out of every four such dreams, the person on the other end denied the dream reflected an event in their life on the day in question. That said, I’ve had a couple of these witnesses call or write to me after my initial verification attempt to say that they’d remembered an event after my call that did match the dream. These were normally trivial events that they had attached no importance to.
Currently, there are 90 verified dreams like this out of 134 total. However, it has been more than a decade since I last coded the dreams, and I stopped making serious efforts to verify them in 1990, so the true current number is likely to be much larger. Regardless, the number of verified dreams like this that I do have is enough to make it what is likely the largest such collection in the literature.