Is it possible to change the fate or the fate of a person is predetermined? If you had a dream about impending death, should you try to prevent it, or should you accept death as inevitable?
If fate could not be changed, then the prediction bureau would only have to curtail its work and forget about this undertaking. Thousands of predictions could not have prevented the Aberfan tragedy. The Titanic would take a voyage and sank, even if the British government threatened the White Star Line with huge penalties. Both the master and the servant, for whom the white-faced lady came, simply had to get together and go to meet Death, since they knew that nothing could be changed.
But there is another theory. Many predictions are just warnings, and a person who treats them with attention can change fate. Sometimes only one oppressive feeling appears, but it is so strong that it is necessary to pay attention to it and take action. The locomotive engineer, who was in the car, once was seized by an inexplicable anxiety, which escalated into panic as the train began to pick up speed. Obeying an impulse, he stopped the train, and then it turned out that someone had disassembled the tracks on the section of the road along which the train was supposed to pass.
In other cases, in a vision or in a dream, a future tragedy is described in such detail that a person can intervene at the right time and prevent it. This type of prediction is distinguished by the presence of many details, while predictions of the “meeting in Samara” type lack them.
Even in cases where, looking back, we believe that everything was predetermined, it turns out that there were some hints, hidden or explicit, which for some reason were not taken seriously.
Death at the fifth hour
When a monarch or other statesman dreams that Death awaits him, he has every reason to worry. Famous people are often the victims of conspirators or psychopathic killers.
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After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Rome was enveloped in an atmosphere of fear, and the statesmen feared for their lives in earnest. Cinnah, Caesar's friend, had little cause for concern, although the situation around was tense. But Sinna had a disturbing dream, in which Caesar invited him to dinner, but he refused. Caesar insisted and finally took him by the hand and took him to "a very gloomy and dark place against his will."
The next morning it was announced that Caesar's body would be interred. Sinna was haunted by sleep, and he decided that he would not go to the funeral ceremony. Then he thought that he was still Caesar's friend and that it would be bad of him. Reluctantly, like Caesar himself on his fateful day in the Senate, Sinnah dressed and joined the crowd listening to Mark Antony's speech. At that moment, an angry crowd suddenly attacked him, and he was killed.
The murder happened by mistake. The previous speaker - also Sinn, - spoke unflatteringly about Caesar, and the crowd decided to punish him. Although Sinn had no reason to think that he might fall prey to an angry mob, he still needed to pay close attention to the warning he received in his dream. But the "meeting in Samara" was scheduled, and he had to join the crowd to accept death.
Emperor Domitian had much more reason to believe that he would be killed. Domitian, who ruled Rome at the end of the 1st century AD e., was a real tyrant and had many enemies who grinned at him.
Even in his youth, astrologers prophesied to Domitian that his end would be terrible, and even the day and hour of death was named. He tried to remain calm until the seer informed him that he would be killed at five o'clock on September 18, 96.
As the fateful date approached, Domitian grew more and more nervous. To intimidate potential murderers, he ordered the execution of his secretary Epaphroditius, and then his cousin Flavius. Then he ordered the gallery to be laid out with polished moonstone so that the assassins could be seen sneaking up.
On the night of September 17, Domitian had a prophetic dream, as if the goddess Minerva told him that she could no longer protect him and was leaving the chapel that he had dedicated to her. The emperor was so frightened that he jumped up with a wild cry in the middle of the night.
In the morning Domitian woke up in a cold sweat and refused to leave the well-guarded bedchamber. He sat on his bed constantly thinking about a sword that he could quickly pull out in case of danger. In his mind, he counted the minutes remaining until five hours.
In the end he was told that it was already five hours. The prophecy did not come true. Domitian breathed a sigh of relief and went to the next room to take a bath. But the emperor was stopped by Parthenius, the steward, who asked him to stay in the bedchamber, since a visitor had come with some important information regarding the conspiracy. Domitian was already feeling better, and he agreed to receive the visitor. Stephanie entered the room and stabbed him.
Did the prophecy come true? In truth, the shadow on the sundial had not yet reached five when Domitian got out of bed because he had been deceived. So the prophecy came true exactly. He knew only about the impending murder at the appointed hour, but knew nothing about the plans of the conspirators.
It is curious to note that the prophet Apollonius of Tyana at the time of the murder was making a speech in Ephesus, hundreds of kilometers from the borders of Rome. Suddenly he fell silent, looked down and said: "Hit the tyrant, hit!" He saw a vision in which Domitian was killed. Then he said: “Take courage, citizens; the tyrant is killed today. Yes, I swear by Athena, he was just killed, just as I say these words."
Meeting the killer
The thought of an upcoming meeting with Death, which appeared in a dream or vision, causes horror. Many people, famous and unknown, have had dreams in which a killer catches up with them, and after that they desperately try to avoid death.
One such case was described by Robert Dale Owen in the book "Footprints on the Border of Another World." The hero of the story is a locksmith's apprentice Claude Soller, who lived in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. Once Soller had a dream that he was stabbed to death by a bandit on the way from Hamburg to Bergedorf.
The young man was not going to go to Bergedorf, but sleep haunted him, and he told the master about him. This was his big mistake, as the master not only laughed at the apprentice, but also began to urge him to check. The master had to give the money to his brother, who lived in Bergedorf, and he decided to entrust this matter to the unfortunate student. He tried to object, but it was all in vain.
From Hamburg to the village of Billwerder, Claude walked trembling with fear, shuddering nervously and looking around. Having reached the village without incident, he came to the headman and told him his dream, asking him to give him a guide. The headman instructed a worker to go with Claude and make sure nothing happened to him.
The journeyman never made it to Bergedorf. The next day he was found in the forest with his throat cut. The worker-guide was caught and charged with murder, to which he confessed. The young man confessed to him that he was carrying money, and he had a plan of murder.
The moral of the story is this: keep predictions about your fate to yourself. If the journeyman had not told the dream to the master, he would not have ordered him to go to Bergedorf. Then the young man shared his fears with the headman and thereby hastened his end.
It is not known who sent the prophetic dream to Claude Soller, but this someone knew that Claude would climb into the noose himself, although there was no hint of this in the dream.
The threat hanging over the child
The emotional connection between mother and child is so strong that mothers often feel that the child is in trouble and try to prevent tragedy.
Louise Ryne mentions a young mother who once had a dream that a large chandelier in the nursery fell on a sleeping child and killed him. In the dream, the clock showed four thirty-five in the morning.
The woman woke up in horror and told her husband her dream, but he thought that she was needlessly worried about trifles. But the woman could not sleep, she went to the nursery, took the child from the crib to her room. A storm raged in her sleep, but it was so quiet outside that she began to think that her husband was right. Still, she didn't want to tempt fate.
Two hours later, there was a loud noise in the next room. The couple jumped up and rushed into the nursery. It turned out that the chandelier had fallen on the cradle. The clock was exactly four thirty-five. Outside the window it was raining and the wind was roaring.
In an article for The Journal, the publication of the American Society for Psychical Research, Ian Stevenson speaks of a warning given to another mother. She dreamed in a dream that she was entering the nursery and saw that her daughter was sitting on the windowsill with one leg dangling. When the child lost his balance and began to fall, the mother woke up in horror and ran into the nursery. The girl slept peacefully.
Subsequently, the mother did not forget about her dream and often looked into Vivien's room. However, she was convinced that the child was still too young to climb onto the windowsill on her own. One afternoon she went out into the yard to hang out the laundry to dry, thinking that Vivienne would follow her as usual. But when she turned around, the girl was gone. She ran upstairs: Vivienne was sitting on the windowsill in exactly the same position in which she had seen her in her dream. The girl began to fall, but her mother managed to grab her.
Somehow Vivienne was able to get out of bed and climb onto the windowsill. Curiously, she was wearing the same clothes as in the dream - a jumpsuit and white sandals. Another coincidence: the sun was shining through the west window of the children's room at exactly the same angle as in the dream.
Maeterlinck, in his book "The Unknown Guest", spoke of the voice that helped the mother to save her daughter. The girl, who loved to look at the passing trains, went for a walk to the seashore. She sat right behind a dam near the train tracks and looked at the trains.
Almost immediately, as the daughter left, the mother heard a voice: "Bring her back, otherwise the irreparable will happen." The frightened mother told the maid to go after her daughter. A few moments after the maid took the girl away, the train derailed and crashed into the dam, just in the place where she liked to sit.
Anticipating tragic news
A friend of the English writer John Priestley argued that he often foresees disasters, with the name of the victim, a well-known person, superimposed, like a title, on the image. Three weeks before the Duke of Kent was killed in a plane crash during the Second World War, a man "saw" a plane crashing into the ground with the words "Duke of Kent" on it. Two days before the death of the movie star in a car accident, he had a vision of the accident in the form of frames from the film. The credits included the name of the actor "Bonar Collino".
Apparently, Priestley's friend had an extraordinary flair for accidents and a strong emotional connection with famous people. It would be of great interest to the London Bureau of Prediction if it existed at that time.
In the case described by Priestley in Man and Time, a woman dreamed of a railroad disaster, which was later reported on the radio. In the dream, the woman and her husband were riding something like a "motor-carriage" train, but they saw the engine and the driver through the window as if it were a bus. The train suddenly stopped, the driver got out and looked under the wheels, after which the train started, but without the driver and finally stopped abruptly.
When the woman recounted the dream to her family, they laughed at her because it was obvious that the train could not move on its own. But in the evening the announcer announced on the radio that a very strange incident had occurred in the south of France. Events developed exactly as in a dream, and an uncontrollable train went for some time without a driver. Apparently, the woman "intercepted" a radio message from the future and dramatized it in her dream. The combination of a motor carriage and a train is possibly associated with some event in the woman's personal life.
In the book Some Cases of Predictions, Dame Edith Littleton told about a woman who dreamed of two ships colliding. The voice said that a photograph from the crash site would appear in the London Daily Mail in two weeks. Two weeks later, the woman opened the newspaper and saw a picture already familiar to her from a dream.
The same book describes the case of Eileen Garrett, who foresaw the crash of the R-101 airship. A few days before the accident, she had a dream in which the airship was pressed to the ground, after which it caught fire and exploded. Exactly the same dream she had a week later. On October 5, 1930, R-101 crashed at Beauvais en route to India. A photo appeared in the newspapers, which she had already seen in a dream: the airship crashed into the western slope of the mountain, while its nose was slightly lowered.
On October 3, two days before the disaster, another woman dreamed of an airship crash. The dream featured an officer on horseback with a company of soldiers. A day after the crash, a photograph of the crash site appeared in the London Times, with an officer in the foreground.
N. Nepomniachtchi