Mr Titus Rivas, of Darrenhof 9, 6533 RT Nijmegen, The Netherlands, sends us this dream. About 4 o'clock in the morning of February 17 1983 I awoke from a strange dream that I had come home depressed at having arrived late for an examination. Almost in tears, I wanted to tell my father what had happened, but he interrupted me saying "Grandpa from Spain has died, so you and I have to prepare for a flight to Colmenar de Montemayor (a little village in the Spanish province of Salamanca, where my grandparents lived). My dream skipped some hours and we arrived in Colmenar. The first person I saw in the village was precisely my "dead" grandfather Cirilo Rivas. I asked him "How can this be possible, Grandpa; you're supposed to be dead". The bewildering answer was "Your grandpa is dead." So much for my dream. After awakening, I told my brother and my mother, and as there was no exam that I could miss that day, I forgot about it. That evening we got a telephone call from Spain to say that my grandmother - not my grandfather - had died. My father travelled to Spain next day to attend her funeral; but he went alone. Although my grandmother had not been in very good shape for some time, none of us in Holland had expected her to die. Both my brother and my mother have testified that the dream report corresponds accurately with what I told them that morning. The report set out above is derived from one written down on September 27 1984, and signed by my brother Esteban CM Rivas and my mother CCB Rivas-Wols. My own explanation is that the dream was indeed an instance of paranormal cognition. The fact that it was informed of the death of my grandfather rather than my grandmother can be interpreted in a least two ways: 1) Symbolically: though Granny died it was Grandpa who felt like "being dead", i.e. severely depressed, or numb, at losing her. 2) As an instance of misinterpretation of the message. Grandpa was the (probably unconscious) 'sender', bul I understood this as if he were the one who had died. In both cases it would be an example of telepathy with the living. This may be connected with the fact that Grandpa was the first to discover that his wife had died. Published in the SPR NEWSLETTER SUPPLEMENT, January 1990, page 11, Edited by Renee Haynes. Contact: titusrivas@hotmail.com |