A woman from Massachusetts had a dream that came true about three months later. As she says, it did not foretell death or an accident, "but something so screwy it didn't seem possible.

"In this vivid dream it seemed that my mother and I were sleeping together (something that we never did. We had separate households about five miles apart). Mother was wakened during the night by the baby whimpering and lit a cigarette. While holding the flaming match she saw a bedbug scurry up the wall. She exclaimed, 'Good Lord, look!' and her hand automatically went out and she held the lighted match under the bug. She lit another match and looked at the mattress we were lying on and found more of the insects. Using a flashlight so as not to arouse the baby, she and I picked the bugs off the mattress and dropped them into an ashtray which held lighted match sticks.

"We approached the baby's crib with the flashlight and arrived in time to see a bug scurry across the cheek of my very young daughter. Horrified, we put on the overhead light and spent the rest of the night looking for the common bedbug.

"About three months later my husband went out of town for the weekend. My father had recently gotten a new job working nights, so knowing that both my mother and I were alone I called her, invited her for the evening and to sleep overnight. Something I never did before or since. We retired around eleven and slept. During the night we were awakened by the baby whimpering. While making soothing noises from the bed to calm the baby, my mother lit a cigarette and--you know the rest!

"I can't explain the dream, but I can the bugs.

"My husband and I had had a week's vacation at an old farmhouse in New Hampshire. There was a bed for us, but we had to bring the baby's crib with us. I found out later, after my house was overrun, that the farmhouse had had bedbugs for years, and that we had probably carried them home to our house in the baby's crib without even knowing. Let me tell you, after my mother and I actually found those things (and I still shudder) we spent the next day dragging mattresses out on the lawn, spraying and more spraying. It took a little while but we finally got them all out of the house and have never had anything resembling them since.

"But how do you explain such a dream in the first place? We still laugh over it."

The question of how such a dream can be explained is baffling "in the first place." But the first step, of course, is the recognition that such precognitive experiences do occur. Those who felt content to think of the grand-scale Old Testament prophecies as miraculous, and not subject to scientific explanation, could hardly feel that a miraculous rather than a scientific explanation should be demanded in the case of the foreseeing of an infestation of bedbugs.

Yet that case, in its comparatively unimportant and/personal character, is typical of ESP experiences that come in this third group, the precognitive type of ESP [neither telepathy nor clairvoyance]. As already said, these experiences are not mainly concerned with the fate of peoples, of governments, wars or the rumors of wars, but instead have to do with the ordinary doings of ordinary people.

--Louisa E. Rhine

EDITOR'S NOTE

Before Rhine, most books on predictive dreams were full of death and disaster. But we selectively recall and talk up the spectacular (and gruesome). The accounts sent to the World Dream Bank, like Rhine's, are mostly ordinary and personal.

I excerpted this account for another reason: three months is an unusually long-term prediction. WDB accounts fit J.W. Dunne's model--most of the predictive dreams are quite short-term. Long-term dreams are both less common and harder to verify, so accounts are rare. I wanted to reassure readers with apparent long-term predictive dreams that they're not alone.

--Chris Wayan

Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa E. Rhine, 1961, p. 36-7. Account untitled and author's name witheld; Bedbugs and Anonymous #29 are my additions for indexing only.

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