Occasionally, I will get a call from a television producer to talk about my dreams. Most recently, HBO. The calls aren’t identical but they have similarities. They usually go something like this:
Producer: “Hello Dr. Paquette. We’d like to discuss having you on our program to discuss your precognitive dreams.”
Me: “Okay, sounds fine.”
Producer: “More specifically, we’d like to discuss one of your dreams about a plane crash where you warned people in advance and saved their lives.”
Me: That has never happened.”
Producer: “Sorry to trouble you.”
And that is where it ends. They always have this idea of what the dream is supposed to be about. It always involves a plane crash and some kind of heartwarming rescue or “passenger cheats death” scenario.
I do have dreams of future events in my dream journals. I also have dreams of future air disasters. I have never had a dream about an air disaster that prevented anything from happening to anyone. The dreams have enough detail to identify related events after the fact. They do not contain enough information to predict where or when they will occur.
Some complain of such dreams that they have no practical value, as if that discounts the curiosity of a dream of the future. In my case, they do have practical value. The value is that they have shown me with evidence that time is not what we think it is. We are taught that time is linear. It advances forward. It never retreats. Precognitive dreams tell us that either time does retreat or it doesn’t advance linearly.
Knowledge is valuable, even if that knowledge doesn’t prevent disasters.
From the journal, app 8/1/1988:
Someone brings me to a particular place so that I can see something. I interpret this person to be like a cab driver, or a guide of some kind. We stop in the road and he points up in the air, indicating that he wants me to look up. Some jets fly by fast and low in front of us. I see the wingtip of one of the planes nick the other one, sending both spinning out of control. One explodes into a massive fireball as big as a water tower globe and then careens towards the ground. At this point I realize there is a huge crowd of people watching the event from the ground. The plane that had exploded was falling straight towards this crowd in great big flaming, spinning chunks of twisted metal. It plows into the crowd, killing hundreds. I could see severed bloody body parts flying through the air as the main bulk of the plane came to rest amidst the worst carnage I'd ever seen. I wondered how many had died. As soon as I wondered this, it occurred to me that 568 people lost their lives in this disaster.
Comment
I told Kitty about the dream because of its vivid imagery and sensational aspects. For several days afterwards, I had a hard time shaking the image of the plane wreckage shredding all those hundreds of people. It seemed every time I closed my eyes, I could see it happening.
About two weeks later, on August 28, 1988 I was crossing the living room floor of our small Manhattan studio apartment when I caught a horrifying glimpse of my dream in the flesh on the evening news. They were playing the tape of a disaster that had happened at an air show at the US air base in Ramstein, Germany. Two stunt planes had collided in midair, sending one of them hurtling into a crowd of spectators. The video footage matched my dream perfectly; there was no mistaking it for what it was. I was thunderstruck. That week, Time magazine's cover story was the Ramstein disaster and led with a blurb on the number of persons killed/injured, it was the same as the number in my dream. The actual number determined later was considerably lower. 67 deaths and 346 injured. The crowd was approximately 300,000.
Bonus round: Sioux City 7/1/1989:
I am a business passenger on a big airplane bound for some Midwest city. I sit in a window seat and look outside when I realize that we are quite low to the ground. I have the sense that we are near Sioux City, Iowa but haven’t reached it yet. It looks like the pilot is trying to land the plane on the highway, but he misses and we fly over a cornfield to the side. The plane tips its wings in an effort to ascend, but one of the wingtips makes contact with the ground. The plane immediately cartwheels across the field just as I am overwhelmed by a powerful blast of heat from the rear of the plane. I look back to see a fountain of flame shooting up the fuselage straight for me. The heat is unbearable but I know I will be dead in a second, no more. Thousands of tiny sharp, burning bits of things fly through the cabin. I feel dozens or hundreds of these things burying themselves in my flesh or stinging me as they glance off. I wonder that this is what it feels like to die, that now I know.
Comment
A few weeks after the dream, United flight 232 was enroute from Denver to Chicago on the afternoon of July 19, 1989. Its second engine exploded, sending engine fragments into hydraulic lines, which were severed. The crew could not control any of the control surfaces due to the loss of hydraulics.
They were asked to land at nearby Sioux City airport. To steer the plane, they adjusted the throttle on engines mounted under the left and right wings. More throttle on the left wing forced a right turn, more throttle on the right and the plane turned left. The system did not work perfectly, causing the plane to favor right turns over left, forcing the plane to fly more than one full circles.
They got to within 12 miles of the Sioux City runway, flying over a highway as they approached. The pilot was unable to land the plane directly on the runway. They overshot it, then one wingtip touched the ground of a field just outside the airport. The plane cartwheeled, breaking up as it did so. There was a large explosion and the plane came to rest. Miraculously, 185 passengers, including the 4 flight crew, survived.