Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

In the posts below I have given many examples of dreams, visions or eerie voices that seemed to foretell a death:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Let us look at some additional cases of this type. The account below can be read in its original publication by scrolling to page 211 of the 1910 document here, or (more conveniently) in a 1914 book that quotes the account on the page here: 

"One night my mother woke my father suddenly, saying: 'Oh, Charles! I have had such a terrible dream! I dreamed that John Wilkes Booth shot me! It seemed that he sent me seats for a private box in a theater, and I took some young ladies with me. Between the acts he came to me, and asked me how I liked the play. I exclaimed, 'Why, John Booth! I am surprised that you could put such a questionable play upon the stage. I am mortified to think that I have brought young ladies to see it.' At that he raised a pistol, and shot me in the back of the neck. It seems as if I felt a pain there now.'  After a while my mother fell asleep, and dreamed the same thing a second time. The next morning came the terrible news which plunged the nation into grief and mourning. Almost at the hour of my mother's dream, President Lincoln was assassinated; shot, in the back of the neck, in a private box at a theater, by John Wilkes Booth."

One of the most famous dreams that seemed to foretell a death occurred to Abraham Lincoln. In his book Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 Ward Hill Lamon (a close associate of Lincoln) tells us on page 114 that he heard Lincoln tell of the dream, and that Lamon wrote down the details:

"But the most startling incident in the life of Mr. Lincoln was a dream he had only a few days before his assassination....I give it as nearly in his own words as I can, from notes which I made immediately after its recital. There were only two or three persons present."

On page 116 (after quoting some preliminary discussion with Lincoln) we read this account in which Lamon quotes Lincoln describing the dream:

 

"I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible...Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers. ' The President' was his answer ; ' he was killed by an assassin ! ' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night ; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

In a 1951 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, page 81, we read the following account of a dream that seemed to foretell a death:

"1. Mrs. Henrietta Block: Percipient had an unusually vivid dream that the manager of the bank where she was a depositor died suddenly of acute indigestion. 'I knew the manager by sight, but nothing of his personal or business characteristics.' She had seen him casually at the bank a week prior to the dream, at which time he seemed to be perfectly well. Because this dream was so vivid, she told her mother about it next morning. Two days later she learned that the bank manager had in fact died very suddenly of acute indigestion at about the time of the dream."

On page 89 of the same document we read another case of a dream that seemed to foretell a death:

"Mr. C. A. Nash: ... I will relate an occurrence that happened to me thirty-four years ago, which I believe saved my life or at least saved me from serious injury. In July, 1916, I was working on the Soo Line wheat elevator which was then being constructed and I worked on the steel gang which did the reinforcing, and most of our work was on ladders and scaffolds, as the elevator rose to a height of 200 feet....I am usually a sound sleeper, but that night I dreamed that I was back on the job and I saw the ladder to the 75-ft. scaffold break and a number of men killed and injured.  I told my folks about my dream Sunday morning and they asked me what 1 had eaten to give me such a nightmare. I even told Clarence Farber, a chum of mine, who worked with me, about the dream, but he laughed it off. We did not work Sunday, but on Monday I heeded the warning and stayed on the ground where I bent rods on the bending table. At 11:45 the foreman ordered me to go up on the dryer tank scaffold and help the men, but I told him that I had only a few rods left to bend and that the noon hour was only 15 minutes away. He excused me and got someone else to help. When the whistle blew for dinner at 12 o’clock, 14 men hurried to come down that ladder. It broke and 2 or 3 were killed and 6 or 7 badly injured. Dr. Noonan, who is still living, was called to the scene. He said that one man had his neck broken and another every bone in his body...The accident happened to the ladder I dreamed about.”

In the book The Voice Within : Premonitions of Sudden Death in Children by Richard Hardoin, we have some remarkable accounts of dreams, visions or voices that seemed to foretell a death.  We read this account of a mother whose child died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome):

"When I was carrying her, late in my pregnancy, I had a dream. I was asleep, but suddenly I seemed to be awake. I was floating above my body, and a woman wearing all white clothes was next to me. We looked down at my body and swollen belly and she said to me in a voice I will never forget, 'You know, you will not be allowed to keep that baby.' " 

The mother reported later seeing the same woman at the foot of her bed, saying, "It's time."  The woman immediately rushed the baby to the doctor, who found nothing. That night the baby died suddenly at home, from SIDS.  On page 35 we read this account by a mother whose child died suddenly:

"I was wide awake, working in my baby's closet, when I saw her image in a small white casket at the front of our church...The image went away, but recurred ten minutes later...When my daughter died and I went to the funeral home, my baby was placed in a small white casket identical to the one I had seen." 

The account on the next page is similar:

"In dreams that followed, Fran had sensations of a baby going up in the air whom she continually pulled back to earth. In her visions, this occurred in the living room of her own room. Fran's son did die in the exact location predicted in her dreams."

On page 45 we read this account from a mother identified as HD who lost a child to SIDS:

"She viewed her son's funeral during a dream which occurred one week before her baby's death. She stated, '(I) saw a casket being lowered. The top opened and the infant (my son) was inside.' When HD went to the the funeral parlor following the death, the only casket available was one identical to the one in her dream."

On page 51 we read of a mother who on the night of her child's death  saw a vision of the child's name on a tombstone. On page 63 we read of a man troubled by "nightly dreams of planes crashing" shortly before discovering that his daughter had died in a plane crash. On page 72 we read of a mother who had a dream of her son dying a week before the son died. On pages 73-74 we read of a mother who had a dream of someone taking her baby, who was wrapped in a dry cleaning bag. On that day her child suddenly died of SIDS.  On page 75 a parent says this: "Three days before Brian died, I had a dream that he would die on the bed at the  babysitter's house -- exactly where he did die."

On page 90 we have this sad, eerie account:

"Throughout my pregnancy, I dreamed five or six times that the baby's father would die before the baby was born. However, the night my baby died, I was sitting and looking at him in his bouncer, and he smiled at me and seemed to almost change to a bright yellow

color. I started to cry and said to my brother and my friend that I had a feeling he was going to die. I did not know when, and I didn't think that it would occur that evening. But I did feel it. And four hours later, when I woke up, he was dead beside me. Also, his father did die three days later of suicide." 

On page 115 a mother says, "Two nights before Andrew died, I had a vivid dream that one of our twin boys had died."  On page 117 we read, "Author Christopher Anderson, in his book Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, claims that Jackie had a reoccurring dream in which her son, John Jr., would die in an airplane crash."  That is exactly what happened. 

The paper "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants" is one that reported dreams that seemed to foretell a death, and many other hard-to-explain phenomena.  What is remarkable is the amount of hard-to-explain phenomena reported in such a small facility. Questions were asked of workers in Kingsley House, a small facility handling no more than 31 persons at a time, and reporting only about 13 deaths per year. We read of these results, coming from the ten who responded:

• "7 reported unconscious or confused residents who unexpectedly became lucid enough just before they died to interact with relatives and carers," a phenomena sometimes called "terminal lucidity."
• "6 reported dreams that help to prepare for death, and 2 reported dreams or visions that held significant meaning for the dying to help with unfinished business." The "Dreams" section of the paper on page 200 gives several examples, some involving dreams that seemed to foretell a death. 
• "5 reported the dying seeing dead relatives visiting just before death, and 4 reported the dying seeing dead relatives sitting on or near the bed."
• "4 reported the synchronistic appearance of birds or animals around or just before the time of death." 
• "4 reported a change of room temperature around the time of death," with one saying, "sometimes the room is freezing," and that "at other times it is really, really hot."
• "3 reported synchronistic events at the time of death, such as clocks stopping and bells ringing in rooms of those who had recently died."

Should you be concerned if you have some dream that may seem to suggest the idea of your own death? I would advise people not to be very worried if that happens. I know that for the past two years I have had very many dreams that very heavily suggest ideas of danger, death and life after death, including more than 300 dreams seeming to suggest the idea of life after death, as I describe here. So it is not true that dreams of this type only occur shortly before death. Furthermore, all of my many years of studies and remarkable experiences (such as what I discuss here, here, here, here and here) leave me very strongly with the idea that death is nothing to fear. But if you are someone with a spouse or children, and if you start to have dreams that seem to hint at the idea of your own death,  and you are young enough to buy it affordably, you might want to buy some life insurance to help the financial security of your loved ones. 

Postscript:  In the atheist-oriented Aeon magazine, we have an article by a writer who dreamed that his mother's friend came to him and reported that she had just died. Two weeks later he found out that this person had died two weeks earlier. We have here a case example of how certain people just throw away clues they should be paying attention to. A reasonable thing to do after having such an experience would be to start researching how often people have such experiences, which might lead you to posts such as this one. But our writer has apparently just discarded the important clue he was given. In his article he writes about other unrelated coincidences, and shows no signs that his experience has caused him to start researching how often other people have had experiences like he had.