premonition

One of the things that causes many psychiatrists and psychologists to become convinced that their peer C.G. Jung was a madman is Jung's belief that dreams can sometimes foretell future events. "(D)reams can have an anticipatory or prognostic aspect," he wrote in "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams" (Ch. 5, p. 117), "and their interpreter would be well advised to take this aspect into account, particularly when an obviously meaningful dream does not yield a context sufficient to explain it. Such a dream often comes right out of the blue, and one wonders what could have prompted it."

And he gives examples of what he believes were such dream portents, of which there are also numerous historical or mythological examples, such as Joseph's interpretation of the Pharaoh's portentous dream of years of plenty followed by years of famine in Genesis.

I've told the story elsewhere of how I once accurately divined the future in a card reading I did for myself, whose analysis I wrote down at the time it occurred. This was the prediction of my separation and divorce from my wife of 25 years, and the disturbing, and, to my mind, frightening reading took place four years before the event. Now a card reading is not a dream, of course, but I've long believed that the cards can serve as a bridge between the conscious and subconscious minds.

Until now I had not been aware of any accurate predictions I may have dreamt, but I now realize that I once dreamed a premonition of death which came true. I didn't recognize it for what it was at the time, or or even for years after the death occurred. Even though I wrote it down when it happened, my conscious expression of its symbolism and images misses their meaning. In this dream:

I was at the old Spanish mission church at San Miguel, California, which has one of the best preserved early 19th-century churches on the continent. While there I visited a side chapel of the type so common in the old mission churches, which I said was at "the back of the church," near the rear of the nave and the front entrance to the building. I referred to it in my account as "kind of a storage room or cloak room" and observed that "Numerous people" were "milling around" in there.

Now I had been to side chapels in mission churches before, and knew that they were often crowded, but not with the living. Many of these small chambers at any given time contain photographs and other memorial artifacts of any number of the departed, along with dozens of burning candles that have been lit in their memory. Those were the people who were "milling around" symbolically in what I mistook for a "storage room," and after noting that "I don't know any of them," I saw "a cardboard box with V.J.'s name written large on its side."

V.J. was one of my favorite students, a lovely and intelligent girl enrolled in one or another of my classes for three of her four years in high school. I dreamt this strange, ominous, and completely unrecognized portent of her coming death, which I clearly saw boxed up with her name on it and waiting to be opened, on November 20, 1997, which was the year she graduated, in early summer 1998.

V.J. met her death in a Saturday night head-on collision on a two-lane rural road in Tulare County, an all-too frequent occurrence in those parts whenever weekends and alcohol combine to victimize the innocent. That happened either the year I retired or the year immediately before that -- I can't remember. She was in her mid-twenties by that time, and left a daughter and the rest of her family behind.

I find it neither surprising nor alarming that I saw this beforehand, nor am I surprised that I misinterpreted this fairly straightforward sequence so thoroughly.

Painting: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions of Civil War) by Salvador Dali.

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