Can You See The Future in Your Dreams?

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Alan was working when he complained of severe headaches and he wrote a note saying that

[00:00:05] [SPEAKER_01]: he thought there had been a train accident about an hour ago.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_01]: The train had the accident at 9.16pm and he had written the note at 10.15.

[00:00:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Get ready for a campfire story.

[00:00:21] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Edwin.

[00:00:22] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_02]: night.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_01]: So throw some wood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick.

[00:00:32] [SPEAKER_01]: We're telling you a campfire story tonight.

[00:00:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Here we are in the woods and we're talking about dreams, or specifically nightmares.

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_02]: It's nighttime and Edwin, you're going through a run through the canyon behind your house.

[00:00:54] [SPEAKER_02]: The moon is out.

[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_02]: Like it's just a surreal environment.

[00:00:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything is black and white.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_02]: You are running and you're running when suddenly you are stopped in your tracks by her.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Now everything is dim except for her.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_02]: She is glowing, mysterious, white, beautiful, terrifying.

[00:01:17] [SPEAKER_02]: She smiles and you turn and you run in panic until you wake up in a cold sweat.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_02]: It was just a dream.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_02]: It's still dark out, but you decide to roll over and get out of bed.

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_02]: You scream.

[00:01:32] [SPEAKER_02]: She is there standing above your bed, smiling.

[00:01:36] [SPEAKER_02]: You dash out of your room, down the stairs, out the garage, feet pummeling the asphalt

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_02]: as you run down the road.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_02]: But then she is there in front of you again, smiling.

[00:01:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Scared out of your wits, you stop and you wake up in your bed in a cold sweat.

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_02]: It was just a dream.

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_02]: It's dark out.

[00:01:58] [SPEAKER_02]: You decide to roll over and get out of bed.

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_02]: You scream.

[00:02:02] [SPEAKER_02]: She is there again, standing above your bed, smiling.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_02]: You dash out of the room, down the stairs, out the garage, feet pummeling the asphalt

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_02]: as you run down the road.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_02]: But then she's there in front of you again, smiling.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Scared out of your wits, you stop and she glides away and begins to scream.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_02]: She begins to smile and talk to a group of your friends on the side of the road.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_02]: You try to scream at them and you wake up in a cold sweat.

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_02]: It was just a dream.

[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_02]: It's dark out, but you decide to roll over and get out of bed.

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_02]: You scream.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_02]: She is there again, standing above your bed, smiling.

[00:02:48] [SPEAKER_02]: You dash out of the room, down the stairs, out the garage, feet pummeling asphalt as you run down the road.

[00:02:56] [SPEAKER_02]: But then she is there, standing with your friends, smiling and talking.

[00:03:02] [SPEAKER_02]: You try to warn them, but she just turns to smile at you.

[00:03:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And you wake up in a cold sweat.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_01]: See, fooled me once.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Twice.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Three times.

[00:03:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, we got like 10 more of these.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Five.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_01]: All right.

[00:03:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Six.

[00:03:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Seven.

[00:03:22] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[00:03:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Was that actually waking up or was it like...

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you actually woke up this time.

[00:03:27] [SPEAKER_02]: So now you're awake.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_02]: But you're traumatized.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_01]: I had that dream within a dream thing once.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah?

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_01]: I woke up thinking that I had missed school.

[00:03:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Ah, that's a classic one.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And then you just keep waking up.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then I woke up and then I was like, oh.

[00:03:42] [SPEAKER_00]: Now I woke up.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, nightmares are pretty common.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_02]: But the most common nightmare is actually about falling.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_02]: Have you ever had one of those?

[00:03:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, man.

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_01]: With the relief you feel once you wake up.

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.

[00:03:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the second is being chased.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Third, death dream where you die.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Fourth, feeling lost.

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Fifth, feeling trapped.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Teeth falling out.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_00]: I've had that.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Is also a big one.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_02]: And I've had that one.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Waking up late is a common one.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_00]: Yep, I've had that.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Loved one passing.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's ones that make sense.

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Visited by a deceased friend and family.

[00:04:25] [SPEAKER_02]: Feeling unprepared for an exam.

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Your spouse leaving you.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Inability to find your car.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_02]: I feel like I have that dream once a week for some reason.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Technology malfunction.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Have that one.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes I can't text in a dream.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like I really need to text for some reason.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Have you had dreams with social media?

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, this whole topic started because I was having a weird dream about Apple podcast comments.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_02]: Where I was like in my dream I was reading Apple podcast comments and someone had just written sad.

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_01]: I remember having MySpace like notification dreams back in the day.

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, and going bald is on the bottom of the list.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I've had?

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Losing my eyesight.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, interesting.

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.

[00:05:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Losing a finger also.

[00:05:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, malformation of your body is one of them.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_01]: I've had dreams of not car crashes but like almost like near misses.

[00:05:21] [SPEAKER_01]: They feel so real.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.

[00:05:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Pretty intense.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_01]: I barely have dreams anymore.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I rarely.

[00:05:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, really?

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I barely have dreams.

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_02]: I have them every fucking night, man.

[00:05:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Really?

[00:05:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:05:33] [SPEAKER_01]: That must get exhausting.

[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_02]: It's exhausting.

[00:05:35] [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of them now are like Robert disappearing.

[00:05:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's fair.

[00:05:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, okay.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_01]: So there was this guy.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_01]: He was a psychiatrist.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: He was educated in Cambridge.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_01]: He was also very into clairvoyance, aka sensitivity to certain things that makes them able to tell the future, right?

[00:05:58] [SPEAKER_01]: His name was John Barker.

[00:05:59] [SPEAKER_01]: He went to the newspaper, The Evening Standard, and he pitched this idea to them.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_01]: You see, he thought that there were people out there that could sense disasters and things like that.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And if he could get them to write in the premonitions and if it turned out to be true, they would have an accurate record of people actually predicting the future.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_01]: The editors were like, heck yeah, sounds good.

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Let's do it.

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And then the letters and phone calls started coming in.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_01]: They ended up getting 732 in total.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_01]: 18 of them, though, just 18, seemed to be true.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Out of the ones that were true, the majority of those came from only two people.

[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_01]: The odds of that happening are pretty low of two people just nailing it because it's like, whoa, okay, so you probably know something, right?

[00:06:44] [SPEAKER_01]: So these two people were probably what he thought were clairvoyant.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Kathleen Lorna Milton and Alan Hencher.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Kathleen was a ballet teacher, quite wealthy.

[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_01]: Alan was a switchboard operator.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_01]: When he would get a premonition, he would also get strong headaches and they started happening after he got in a car accident.

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, John Barker learned of these people for his project.

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But these two people had already had this for a while.

[00:07:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Like they kind of knew this of themselves already that they could predict the future.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_01]: In March of 1967, the book review that I found in The Guardian on this book that was written about all these cases.

[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_01]: They talked about this thing where Alan called the Evening Standard and told them about this premonition that there was going to be a plane crash with 123 deaths, which is pretty accurate, right?

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_01]: And then Swiss Airline Globe Air, the flight from Thailand to Switzerland, burst into flames.

[00:07:43] [SPEAKER_01]: 126 people died.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I think there was one survivor that was uninjured.

[00:07:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.

[00:07:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And then three of them survived, but they were injured.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so back to John Barker, right? The psychiatrist.

[00:07:54] [SPEAKER_01]: His idea for this project was that he wanted it to be a type of warning system.

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_01]: But there were some weird time-space continuum things.

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_01]: It's like if somebody tells you that this is going to happen, doesn't it mean that it's going to happen?

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Like can't really change it?

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Or like if you try to change it, that's what causes it?

[00:08:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:08:12] [SPEAKER_01]: How could you even prevent that?

[00:08:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Like if you say a plane crash, it's like, oh, that's going to happen.

[00:08:18] [SPEAKER_01]: BBC Radio 4, the group has a box set about these premonitions like in a whole series in case people want to go into them.

[00:08:25] [SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, the most famous one of these cases was the Aberfan disaster.

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_01]: The disasters would trigger the premonitions project.

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Turns out in October 1966, there was this enormous, and I'm saying huge landslide that just fell over a school and like a row of houses in this town.

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_01]: It killed 144 people, mainly children.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_01]: And in the book review that I read, they mentioned this, that this triggered it all.

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_01]: But there had been several reports before this landslide.

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And they were pretty creepy.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Like one of them, there was this 10-year-old girl, Errol Mae Jones, who had told her mother the night before that she had this dream.

[00:09:12] [SPEAKER_01]: And she said, Mommy, last night I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there.

[00:09:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Something black had come down all over it.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And then there was another one, an 8-year-old boy, Paul Davies.

[00:09:26] [SPEAKER_01]: He had drawn a picture of a group of figures digging the hillside.

[00:09:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And above it, there were the words, The End.

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Both of them, Paul and Errol, died in the disaster.

[00:09:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my God.

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:09:39] What?

[00:09:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and John Barker was obviously moved by this when he heard it.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_01]: So he was like, okay, let's start the premonitions bureau.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And then April 1967, Kathleen, one of the premonition top dogs in the project, the clairvoyant, the one that knows what's up,

[00:09:54] [SPEAKER_01]: sent in a vision saying that an astronaut who was heading to the moon, this is going to end in tragedy,

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_01]: she saw an image of a petrified astronaut crouched inside a spherical spacecraft.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's like really eerie to me.

[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_02]: It's a terrifying image.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't like it.

[00:10:09] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't like that at all.

[00:10:10] [SPEAKER_01]: It was weird because they had a plan, but the government didn't say what they planned on doing exactly.

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_01]: People just knew that there was a launch and they were going to try to get to the moon.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_01]: But it really wasn't even a moon mission.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov, a cosmonaut, since they're Russian,

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_01]: they're not really astronauts, they're cosmonauts,

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_01]: they were going around Earth, the orbit was going around Earth,

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_01]: they were going to send in another one to connect

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_01]: and then the astronauts were going to go into one spaceship, come back down to Earth.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_01]: That was the mission.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_01]: But there was a lot of things that went wrong as they were heading up there,

[00:10:43] [SPEAKER_01]: like the second launch just couldn't go through, so they're like, hey, you know what? Come back.

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_01]: There's no other spacecraft, just come back.

[00:10:50] [SPEAKER_01]: He tried two times, both times he kind of failed, like the thing just kept skipping.

[00:10:54] [SPEAKER_01]: By the way, it's like kind of going into the water, so imagine like you need to get there at an angle.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Skipped, went back out, couldn't get into Earth.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_01]: The third time he did, he finally crossed, he was going down, but the parachute didn't open.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_01]: And it crashed.

[00:11:10] [SPEAKER_01]: And the article said that he died from the fire, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure the fall.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, hopefully it was quick.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, hopefully he didn't feel anything and just kind of, there we go, we're gone.

[00:11:25] [SPEAKER_01]: So she was right, the one that she said, this is going to end in tragedy.

[00:11:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And there was other premonitions in there, the assassination of Robert Kennedy,

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_01]: it was Kathleen also who couldn't get the image out of her mind.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_01]: She was like, something's going to happen.

[00:11:37] [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like history is going to repeat itself.

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_01]: This guy's going to die.

[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And then, yeah, it happened.

[00:11:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And then there was one where both Kathleen and Alan, both clairvoyants, part of this project,

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_01]: predicted the same thing, and it was the hither green rail crash.

[00:11:54] [SPEAKER_01]: It all started with Alan, right?

[00:11:55] [SPEAKER_01]: It was October 11th, 1967, and Alan told John Barker that there would be a mainline rail crash.

[00:12:01] [SPEAKER_01]: Three weeks later, on the 1st of November, Kathleen wrote to John Barker saying that she was feeling depressed

[00:12:07] [SPEAKER_01]: and had visions of a crash, quote, maybe a railway, a station, people involved, waiting in the station,

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_01]: and the words, Charing Cross.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_01]: About a month after that, the train between Hastings and Charing Cross jumped off the rails,

[00:12:23] [SPEAKER_01]: four carriages flipped, two of them had their sides ripped off, windows were smashed, it was a disaster.

[00:12:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And when it happened, Alan was working when he complained of severe headaches,

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_01]: and he wrote a note saying that he thought there had been a train accident about an hour ago.

[00:12:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And that was almost exact.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_01]: The train had the accident at 9.16 p.m., and he had written the note at 10.15.

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Jeez.

[00:12:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Do you believe in premonitions?

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I think they're interesting because, you know, I've had a few, but I think I also...

[00:12:56] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, I told you about my premonition dream.

[00:12:58] [SPEAKER_01]: What, the cheating?

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but I think you kind of know it with those kind of things.

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_02]: But random stuff like, oh, a plane is going to crash or a train is going to flip.

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_02]: And the example of that woman, the man being frozen out in space or whatever,

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_02]: that's like the opposite of what happened to him.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_02]: He did die, but he didn't get stuck out in space.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_02]: He crashed to Earth.

[00:13:20] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's interesting the ability to interpret those images.

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_01]: It might be also like an odds thing because if you're constantly seeing things,

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_01]: like you're going to get a match.

[00:13:35] [SPEAKER_01]: But then there are some, like for example these, right?

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_01]: You get hundreds of premonitions sent in.

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And then a few of them happen to be true,

[00:13:44] [SPEAKER_01]: and it's the same two people that are getting them right.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_01]: So I mean that tells me maybe there is something to it.

[00:13:49] [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's so much stuff we don't understand in the world.

[00:13:53] [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, the movie Final Destination?

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_01]: That thing creeped me out.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_01]: And whenever I see any memes about the truck with the log.

[00:14:05] [SPEAKER_02]: That was immediately what I thought of.

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_02]: It's just always driving behind the log truck.

[00:14:10] [SPEAKER_01]: If you know, you know.

[00:14:12] [SPEAKER_01]: If you don't, let us keep this inside joke amongst the millennials.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And also, you know, you don't need to see it.

[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_02]: You don't really need the trauma if you don't have it already.

[00:14:22] [SPEAKER_02]: So you don't need to see Final Destination.

[00:14:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Don't.

[00:14:26] [SPEAKER_02]: One, two, three, four, five.

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to see the roller coasters, electricity ladders.

[00:14:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Death will find you no matter what.

[00:14:35] [SPEAKER_02]: There's no escaping it.

[00:14:39] [SPEAKER_02]: We have a fan corner.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_00]: Fan corner.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Fan, fan corner.

[00:14:44] [SPEAKER_00]: You need to leave us comments.

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_00]: Leave us comments.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Basically, this comment kind of spurred the whole topic of today's show.

[00:14:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Because this is from Tara.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my God, I just had a dream that my neighbor was hiding a dead body in his bed.

[00:14:58] [SPEAKER_02]: After listening to your newest podcast.

[00:15:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And then there's a bunch of emojis of the girl hitting herself in the face.

[00:15:04] [SPEAKER_02]: And then going, ah.

[00:15:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And then crying, tilty face emoji.

[00:15:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for the nightmare, Michelle and Edwin.

[00:15:10] [SPEAKER_02]: LOL.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Love you guys.

[00:15:14] [SPEAKER_02]: I love that.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, anyway.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Write in, let us know what you think of the show.

[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we're always open to themes.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_02]: So, let us know if you have any themes, ideas for an episode.

[00:15:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And, well, we're still working on our outro, guys.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, we'll put out the fire that never goes out.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman.

[00:15:38] [SPEAKER_01]: And Edwin Covarrubias.

[00:15:39] [SPEAKER_01]: This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Voorhees Wendell of VW Sound.

[00:15:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Make sure you follow us wherever you get your pod.