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Severed Head

Dreamed 1917/11/27 by Dr. Walter Franklin Prince

Walter Franklin Prince was one of America's leading psychical researchers. He was also a psychic himself and had many premonitions of future events. When he felt that a dream contained a valid premonition, he wrote it down and had his account witnessed by two other persons.

His "hands" dream is one of the most celebrated in the literature of psychic events.

During the night of November 27-28, 1917, Prince dreamed that a blond woman in her early thirties, slender and pretty, brought an order to him for her own death by beheading. As the light went out in the dream, she took one of his hands, and he sensed that the execution was taking place. He wrote: "I felt one hand (of mine) on the hair of the head, which was loose and severed from the body, and felt the moisture of blood." The fingers of his other hand had been "caught in her teeth, and the mouth opened and shut several times as the teeth refastened on my hand, and I was filled with the horror of the thought of a severed but living head."

When Prince woke up, he recorded the details of the dream in his diary and told his wife about it. Then he visited the offices of the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and gave the account of his dream to an officer of the ASPR.

The following morning, the 29th of November, Prince went to church with his wife, and on the way home saw this headline in the afternoon newspaper: HEAD SEVERED BY TRAIN AS WOMAN ENDS HER LIFE. A woman by the name of Hand had placed her head on a track of the Long Island Railroad, directly in front of a train coming out of the station. She was decapitated. She had left a note in her handbag stating that her head would continue to live after it had been severed from her body.

The accident happened at 11:15 PM on Wednesday night, less than twenty-four hours after Prince's dream. Mrs. Hand was thirty-one years old, was slender and pretty and had golden brown hair. The dream corresponded in other ways with the real event: the dramatization of the "hand" (the woman's name); the fact that she "ordered" her own death; death by decapitation; death occurring "in the dark"; the belief of Mrs. Hand that her head would continue to live, as it did in the dream. Two other significant details are that the suicide took place a short distance (six miles) from Dr. Prince's home and within twenty-four hours of the dream.

...the severed head dream is one of the most remarkable death-portent dreams on record, especially because of the careful steps taken to make the dream known before the event.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I think the last sentence doesn't go far enough, for two reasons:

  1. Skeptics argue that out of billions of dreams every night it's inevitable that some anticipate the next day's events. But the examples given are always fairly common. Be honest--how many times have you dreamt a severed, living head bites your hand? (and if it's more than zero, what's eating you?)
  2. How many of your dreams--indeed, of anyone's dreams--carry such conviction they're paranormal that you go register them with an organization researching ESP because you know proof will be needed? Somehow this dream flagged itself as an atypical dream type. That suggests a self-awareness on the part of the dreaming mind--an awareness quite as interesting to me as ESP!
Such flagging also suggests a dream motive or function: Dr. Prince wanted to prove parapsychology could be a science. His dreams shared (or at least respected) his interest, and assisted his research.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The New World of Dreams, Ralph Woods & Herbert Greenhouse, eds., 1974; p88-89.


LISTS AND LINKS: death - heads - hands - nightmares - dream research - puns & the power of names - suicide - trains - predictive dreams - ESP in general - self-flagging dreams - 25 years later, a 2nd unlikely dream gets notarized before proving to be predictive: Vacuum Dog - 50 years earlier, Alfred Maury's dreams assist his dream research, in: Guillotine

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