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Aberfan is a small village in South Wales. In the 1960s, many of those living there worked at a nearby colliery that had been built to exploit the large amount of high quality coal in the area. Much of the waste from the mining operation had been piled on the steep hillsides surrounding the vill­age, and throughout October 1966 heavy rain lashed down on the area and seeped into the porous sandstone of the hills. No one realised that the water was then flowing into several hidden springs and slowly transforming the pit waste into soft slurry. 

Just after nine o’clock on 21 October, the side of the hill subsided and half a million tons of debris started to rapidly move towards the village. Much of it slid into Aberfan and smashed into the village school, filling several classrooms with a 10m (33ft)-deep mass of slurry. The pupils had left the school assembly hall a few moments before, having sung the hymn “All things bright and beautiful”, and so were just arriving in their classrooms when the landslide hit. Parents and police rushed to the school and frantically began digging through the rubble. Although a handful of children were pulled out alive, 139 schoolchildren and five teachers lost their lives in the tragedy. 

Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide. Barker had a longstanding interest in the para­normal and wondered whether the extreme nature of events in Aberfan might have caused large numbers of people to experience a premonition about the tragedy. He arranged for the Evening Standard newspaper to ask any readers who thought they had foreseen the Aberfan disaster to get in touch. He received 60 letters from across England and Wales, with over half of the respondents claiming that their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream. 

One of the most striking experiences was submitted by the parents of a 10-year-old child who perished in the tragedy. The day before the landslide, their daughter described dreaming about trying to go to school, but said that there was “no school there” because “something black had come down all over it”. In another example, Mrs MH, a 54-year-old woman from Barnstable, said that the night before the tragedy she had dreamed that a group of children were trapped in a rectangular room. In her dream, the end of the room was blocked by several wooden bars and the children were trying to climb over the bars. Mrs MH was sufficiently worried by the dream to telephone her son and daughter-in-law and tell them to take special care of their two small daughters. And so the list went on. 

Believing that you have seen the future in a dream is surprisingly common, with recent surveys suggesting that around a third of the population experience this phenomenon at some point in their lives. But are people really getting a glimpse of things to come? Throughout history, this question has taxed the minds of many of the world’s greatest thinkers. However, it is only in the last century or so that researchers have come up with explanations. 

Starting in the 1950s, sleep researchers began inviting people to spend the night in special laboratories, monitoring them as they entered the land of nod, waking them up whenever they had had a dream, and asking them to describe what was going through their minds. The work has yielded many important insights into dreaming. Almost everyone dreams in colour. Although some dreams are bizarre, many involve everyday chores such as doing the washing-up, filling in tax forms, or vacuuming. If you creep up on someone who is dreaming and quietly play some music, shine a light onto their face or spray them with water, they are very likely to incorporate the stimuli into their dreams. However, perhaps the most important revelation was that you have many more dreams than you might think. 

Sleep scientists quickly discovered that you have an average of about four dreams each night, with each one lasting around 20 minutes. You then forget the vast majority of them when you wake up, leaving you with the impression that you dream far less than is actually the case. Most of the time, the dreams are unrelated to events that happen the following day and so you forget about them. However, once in a while one of the dreams will correspond to one of the events and will help trigger a memory of the dream. Under these circumstances, it is easy to convince yourself that your dream magically predicted the future. Interesting, but only a small part of the story. 


"OTHER THAN THAT, DID YOU ENJOY THE PLAY, MRS LINCOLN?"

Open almost any book on the paranormal and you will soon discover that President Abraham Lincoln once had one of the most famous precognitive dreams in history. According to the story, in early April 1865 Lincoln went to close friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and explained that he had recently had a rather unsettling dream. During the dream Lincoln had felt a “death-like stillness” in his body and heard weeping from a downstairs room in the White House. After searching the building, he arrived at the East Room and came across a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. A crowd of people were gazing mournfully at the body. When Lincoln asked who had died, he was told that it was the President, and that he had been assassinated. 

Two weeks after the dream, Lincoln and his wife went to see a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. A short time after the start of the play, Lincoln was shot dead by prominent actor and Confederate supp­orter John Wilkes Booth. 

Once again, sleep research may provide an explanation for the case. In the late 1960s, researchers carried out a groundbreaking experiment with a group of patients who were attending therapy sess­ions to help them cope with the psycho­logical effects of undergoing major surgery. The researchers monitored the patients’ dreams over the course of several nights and discovered that when they had attended a therapy session during the day they were far more likely to dream about their medical problems. For example, one patient was having a tough time coping with the drainage tubes resulting from his surgery. After spending time at a therapy session talking about the issue, he was espec­ially likely to have dreams that involved him continually inserting tubes into himself and others. In short, the patients’ dreams tended to reflect their anxieties. Similar studies have revealed the same effect. The content of our dreams is not only affected by events in our surroundings, but also often reflects whatever is worrying our minds. 

Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell has argued that this might explain Lincoln’s experience. Nickell has noted that even the briefest of glances through the history books reveals that Lincoln would have had every reason to be anxious about the poss­ibility of being assassinated. Just before his first inauguration, he was advised to avoid travelling through Baltimore because his aides had uncovered an assassination plot there, and during his time in office he had received several death threats: on one espec­ially memorable occasion, an incompetent would-be assassin fired a shot through his top hat. Seen in the light of these findings, Lincoln’s famous dream suddenly looks less paranormal. 

The same concept may also explain one of the most striking examples of alleged precognition about the Aberfan disaster. At the start of this article, I described how one of the young girls who would later perish in the tragedy told her parents that she had dreamed about “something black” coming down over her school and the school no longer being there. For several years before the disaster, the local authorities had expressed considerable concern about the wisdom of placing large amounts of mining debris on the hillside, but their worries had been ignored by those running the mine. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is possible that the young girl’s dream may have been reflecting these anxieties. 

But what about the other cases in which people produced evidence that they had described their dream before the tragedy occurred, and where the dream did not seem to reflect their anxieties and concerns? To investigate, we need to move away from the science of sleep and into the heady world of statistics. 

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers assoc­iated with these seemingly super­natural experiences. First, let’s select a random person from Britain and call him Brian. Next, let’s make a few assumptions about Brian. Let’s assume that Brian dreams each night of his life from age 15 to 75. There are 365 days in each year, so those 60 years of dreaming will ensure that Brian experiences 21,900 nights of dreams. Let’s also assume that an event like the Aberfan disaster will only happen once in each generation, and randomly assign it to one day. Now, let’s assume that Brian will only remember dreaming about the type of terr­ible events associated with such tragedies once in his entire life. The chances of Brian having his ‘disaster’ dream the night before the actual tragedy is about a massive 22,000 to 1. Little wonder that Brian would be surprised if it happened to him. 

However, here comes the sneaky bit. When Brian is thinking about the chances of the event happening to him he is being very self-centred. In the 1960s, there were around 45 million people in Britain, and this same set of events could have happened to any of them. Given that we have already calculated that the chances of any one of them having the ‘disaster’ dream one night and the tragedy happening the following day is about 22,000 to 1, we would expect 1 person in every 22,000, or roughly 2,000 people, to have this amazing experience in each generation. To say that this group’s dreams are accurate is like shooting an arrow into a field, drawing a target around it after it has landed and saying, “Wow, what are the chances of that?” 

The principle is known as the ‘Law of Large Numbers’, and states that unusual events are likely to happen when there are lots of opportunities for that event. It is exactly the same with any national lottery. The chances of any one person hitting the jackpot is millions to one, but still it happ­ens as regular as clockwork each week because such a large number of people buy tickets. 

For genuine evidence of premonitions then, the situation is even worse than we have imagined. Our example only concerned people dreaming about the Aberfan tragedy. In reality, national and international bad fortune happens on an almost daily basis. Aeroplane crashes, tsunamis, assassinations, serial killers, earthquakes, kidnappings, acts of terrorism, and so on. Given that people often dream about doom and gloom, the numbers quickly stack up and acts of apparent prophecy are inevitable. 

The science of sleep and the study of statistics suggest that precognitive dreams are due to selective remembering, anxiety, and the law of large numbers. Of course, it could always be argued that although these explanations are true of many apparently precognitive dreams, some others are still genuinely supernatural. The bad news is that although testing this sounds simple in theory, it’s tricky in practice. It’s no good asking people to get in touch after a national disaster or tragedy because they are likely to report just one of many dreams that they have had, or be part of the group of people who happened to get lucky via the law of large numbers. Also, you can’t ask people to dream about an event that is in any way predictable. Instead, you have to record lots of people’s prophecies before an unpredictable event has happened. According to the law of large numbers, you would end up with a huge range of predictions, with just a small sliver of them subsequently proving correct. In contrast, those with a para­normal bent would predict that this would produce a surprisingly large number of the premonitions that point to one particular future. The good news is that such a study has already been carried out. 

In 1927, 25-year-old American Air Mail pilot Charles Lindbergh achieved international fame by making the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Two years later, Lindbergh married author Anne Spencer Morrow, and the two of them continued to attract huge amounts of publicity by setting several additional flying records, including being the first people to fly from Africa to South America, and pioneering exploration of polar air routes from North America to Asia. In 1930, the Lindberghs had their first child, Charles Lindbergh Jr, and moved into a large secluded mansion in Hopewell, New Jersey. 

On 1 March 1932, the Lindberghs’ world changed forever. At around 10pm, the Lindberghs’ nurse rushed to Charles Sr and told him that Charles Jr had been taken from his room, and that the kidnappers had left a ransom note demanding 50,000 dollars. Lindbergh quickly grabbed a gun and searched the grounds. He discovered the homemade ladder that had been used to climb into the child’s second-storey room, but found no sign of his son. The police were called and Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf took charge of the case, organising a massive search effort. The Lindberghs’ fame resulted in the case generating an enormous amount of publicity, with one journalist referr­ing to it as “the biggest story since the Resurrection”. 

A few days after the news of the kid­napping broke, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray decided to use the high profile case to study the accuracy of precognit­ive dreaming. He persuaded a national newspaper to ask their readers to submit any premonitions about the case that had appeared in their dreams. Word of Murray’s study spread from one newspaper to another, resulting in the psychologist eventually receiving over 1,300 responses. To properly assess the replies, Murray was forced to wait two years until the crime was solved. 

Within a few days of his son’s disappear­ance, Lindbergh made various public appeals for the kidnapper to start negotiat­ions. None of them elicited a response. However, when retired schoolteacher John Condon placed an article in a newspaper making it clear that he was willing to act as a go-between and add an additional 1,000 dollars to the ransom, he received a series of notes from the alleged kidnapper. On the second of April, one note asked Condon to meet in a Bronx cemetery and to hand over 50,000 dollars in gold certificates in exchange for inform­ation about the child’s location. Condon collected the certificates from Lindbergh, handed them over at the meeting, and was told that the child could be found on a boat that was moored along the Massachusetts coast. Lindbergh flew over the region for days but failed to find the alleged boat. 

On 12 May 1932, a truck driver pulled over to the side of a road a few miles from the Lindbergh home and walked into a grove of trees to relieve himself. There he chanced upon the corpse of Charles Lindbergh Jr, buried in a hastily prepared shallow grave. The baby’s skull was badly fractured, and his left leg and both hands were missing. A coroner’s examination later showed that the baby had been dead for about two months, and that his death was due to a blow on the head. 

For over two years, the police struggled to solve the crime. Then, in September 1934, a petrol station attendant became suspicious when a customer paid for five gallons of petrol with a ten dollar gold certificate. The attendant took a note of the customer’s number plate and passed it on to the authorities. The police identified the vehicle’s owner as Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an illegal German immigrant then working as a carpenter. Police searched Hauptmann’s house, discovered ,000 of the ransom money, and promptly arrested him. During Hauptmann’s trial, the prosecution showed that his handwriting matched the ransom notes sent to Condon, and that the floorboards in his house were made of the same wood as the ladder discovered at the Lindbergh’s house. After an 11-hour deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict and Hauptmann was sent­enced to death. 

Case closed, Murray set to work. He examined his collection of alleged premon­itions for three important pieces of information that would have helped the police investigat­ion enormously – the fact that the baby was dead, buried in a grave, and that the grave was near some trees. Only about five per cent of the responses sugg­ested that the baby was dead, and only four of the 1,300 responses mentioned that he was buried in a grave near some trees. In addition, none of them mentioned the ladder, extortion notes or ransom money. Exactly as predicted by the “dream premonitions are the work of normal, not paranormal forces” brigade, the respondents’ premonitions were all over the place, with only a handful of them containing information that subsequently proved to be accurate. Murray was forced to conclude that his findings did “not supp­ort the contention that distant events and dreams are causally related.” 

For thousands of years, people believed that their dreams could provide a fleeting glimpse of the future. Science has provided explanations for many of these alleged acts of prophecy. You dream far more than you think you do and only remember those dreams that appear to come true. Many of your dreams revolve around topics that make you feel anxious and so are more likely to be related to future events. Nearly everyone dreams, and so some of the many millions of dreams that take place each night will depict future events by chance alone. Carry out experiments that elimin­ate these factors and suddenly the sleeping mind cannot figure out what tomorrow will bring. There are many more mysteries of sleep waiting to be solved, but one thing is certain – for those who want to believe in the reality of the paranormal, the findings from the science of sleep are a nightmare.




PANEL: HOW TO CONTROL YOUR DREAMS
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner has come up with a simple but effective way of controlling your dreams. Wegner has carried out a great deal of work into the so-called “rebound effect”, wherein people who are asked not to think about a certain issue have a surprisingly hard time keeping it out of their mind. Wegner wondered whether the same effect could also be used to influence people’s dreams. To find out, he gathered together a group of participants, gave each of them two envelopes, and asked them to open one envelope just before they went to sleep at night and the other when they woke up in the morning.

The first envelope contained an unusual set of instructions. All of the participants were first asked to think of someone that they found especially attractive. Half of the participants were then instructed to spend five minutes trying not to think about this person, while the others were asked to think about their dream date. When everyone woke up in the morning they opened the second envelope and found another set of instructions. This time they were asked to describe any dreams that they had had during the night. Wegner discovered that particip­ants who had tried not to think about the person they found attractive were roughly twice as likely as the others to have dreamed about that person. The message is clear – if you want to have a particular person crop up in your dreams, spend five minutes trying not to think about that person before you nod off.




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