Sir Victor Goddard was posted to India in 1943, to administer the air forces of SEAC (South East Asia Command). He remained in the role until 1946 when he became the RAF's representative in Washington.

In January 1946, Goddard was at a party in Shanghai when he heard another officer tell a dream in which Goddard was killed in a plane crash. In the dream an aircraft was carrying Goddard, two other men and a woman, when it experienced difficulties with atmospheric icing, and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains.

That night Goddard was persuaded to take two men and a woman on the Douglas Dakota transport flying to Tokyo. As in the dream, the plane iced over and was forced to make a crash-landing on the Japanese island of Sado; the crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains, resembled that described in the dream.

Unlike the dream, however, no one was injured.

(Wikipedia, 20223/12/25, edited a bit for brevity; but compare with Norman Mackenzie's account in Dreams and Dreaming (1965; p.139):

"The night before he was due to fly from Shanghai to Tokyo, Goddard overheard an acquaintance describing a dream in which Goddard's plane crashed. Goddard noted with relief that the dream was at least inaccurate in giving the number of passengers as seven--but next day, other passengers came to make up the required number. The plan crashed but all the passengers escaped alive."

These last-minute passengers in Mackenzie's version add drama--"The dream's wrong, I'm safe... oops!"--but also make it harder to explain away the dream as a mere logical extrapolation from a flier's knowledge of local conditions--winter, long flight. Predicting unexpected passengers goes beyond that.

But is Mackenzie right?

The 1955 film The Night My Number Came Up depicts the incident. It shows at least seven passengers not four, as per Mackenzie (the lone woman in the party is on the left, by the window).

Goddard's only reported complaint about inaccuracies in the film was that Michael Redgrave played Goddard with too much feeling as they crashed. Stiff upper lip, you know.

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