My parents bought me and my sister very pricy tickets to a play in San Francisco. But I nod off, and wake to find my bedroom clock says I have just an hour to curtain time; if I leap in my car and drive like a maniac and get lucky parking I can just make it.

But when I hurry into the kitchen to grab a snack to eat on the road... the kitchen clock says it's an hour later! I check the time on my phone. Yep, my bedroom clock is wrong by one hour, and the curtain's rising... just... about... now.

If I go, I'll arrive at intermission and see only the second act. Is it worth a stressful trip for that? Not at all sure...

NEXT MORNING

Wake. The clock by my bed says I have plenty of time to get to my doctor's appointment. But the sun looks oddly high. Check the time on my phone.

The dream was right! An hour off. Yet it was right the day before. A power failure in the night must have set it back an hour. That's possible--it's an analog antique with an electric motor driving traditional clock gears that I've kept because it's cheerful (I painted it yellow and red when I was a kid), easy to read, and pretty accurate; except that after an outage, it just resumes counting from the time power was lost. But to account for such a huge error, the outage would have to be a full hour--rare here.

I rush to my appointment and still arrive late. But without the dream warning my clock was off, I'd have missed it entirely.

So... subliminal awareness that the neighborhood went dark? I'm in a back bedroom where streetlights don't reach, so detecting that through closed curtains AND closed eyelids stretches my credulity. But the alternative is some sixth sense. Bet that stretches yours.

In any case, the accuracy about the amount of down time suggests an impressive coordination between the dream-scripter noticing the outage (however it managed) and a very good internal clock. Not just the fact of the error, but its exact size. Useful!

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