I was on trek in the heart of the Drakensberg, and by chance called for twenty-four hours at a village which I had never visited before, and as a matter of fact, have never visited since. Towards the afternoon of the day that I was there, a native rode into the village, on a dead-beat horse, inquiring for the white priest. On his being brought to me, he exclaimed "Thou art the man, my father!" and forthwith asked me to go into the hut.

Within, he told me that he was a Mosuto from the far south, naming a distant district that I knew although I did not know the village. He said he had dreamed that he was to seek out this village, and finally myself; that he had been told that he had but six days in which to make the journey; and that he was to give me this. Thereupon he placed in my hand a golden sovereign.

That is the end of it. He did not want to become a Christian, and could not see that he had been 'called' to be converted. I had not good work particularly languishing for want of a sovereign, and I did not give him a Bible. No one in the place knew him, and he said he had not been there before. Certainly I had not been near his village, and I had not even come along any part of his road. Also, if he had been a day late, he would not have found me there; and he made nothing out of his journey save only that he shared my evening meal.

We went our several ways in the dawn. Maybe we shall meet again in the dusk and understand a little better. In the meantime I confess that this remains the most curious, the most unexplained, the most trivial, and the most bewildering incident that I have known even amongst a people of dreams.

SOURCE: The Dream in Primitive Cultures edited by Jackson Lincoln, 1935, p.332 in 1970 reprint. Primary source: Robert Keable, "A People of Dreams," The Hibbert Journal, April 1921, pp. 522-31.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Keable fishes for a motive or purpose for this dream, and comes up empty. But his imagination seems limited to his job: he only considers charity, conversion, and spreading his faith by giving the man a Bible. But outside the small campfire of his imagination lurk other possibilities. Here are three.

1. The unnamed dreamer has it confirmed in the clearest fashion that his dreams are prophetic; the mysterious preacher he'd never met is not only in the village predicted, but says he was only there for one night! In future, that dreamer will act on his dreams. Lives transformed? Lives saved? We don't know. But you can't seriously propose such a dream-quest fulfilled had zero effect.

2. Keable is touched by mystery. He was clearly interested in dreams already, but here he's handed a truly strange one about himself. It's going to change him personally, and probably his approach to his work. He's not going to be a cut-and-paste, doctrinaire Christian. What of those he ministered to? Zero cascade effects?

3. Keable publishes. It gets reprinted in a scholarly study, The Dream in Primitive Cultures, which Jung read (it's mentioned in his Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern). I read Jung, and now you're reading me. Am I seriously saying this anonymous dreamer may have wanted to affect dream research? Spreading the shamanic word through a preacher whose faith tries to erase it? Delicious irony, and yes, I am suggesting just that. Looking over the long history of dream research I see dreams that actively try to contribute or correct waking models of dreams.

   Alfred Maury's famous dream Guillotine came when he was researching dreams within a conceptual box the dream challenged. My similar Fanfare Foreseen came when I was doing similar dream-experiments and doubting predictive dreams. Jung's early dream Spectre of the Brocken hands him a model of the conscious and unconscious that his whole theory's built on--not that he ever fully credited the dream. But he did credit his dream of cellars and skulls for helping him break from Freud's simplistic model. Frederick Greenwood was groping toward a theory of the unconscious before Freud when he dreamed Her Hand on the Mantel and He Has Repented, both prodding him to enlarge his theoretical box. Not that he did!

   But you might.

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