Occasionally there are examples of prevision which cannot be pushed aside without confessing an unscientific attitude. One day Maeterlinck, coming with a friend upon an event which he recognized as the exact pattern of a previous dream, detailed the ensuing occurrences in advance so accurately that his companion was completely mystified. The famous author tells us of the strange incident in Something About Myself. At that moment Kipling was overwhelmed with awed amazement, suddenly recalling that these identical details of scene, action and word had occurred to him in a dream six weeks earlier. Freud probably contributed more than anyone else to the understanding of dreams, enabling us to recognize their equivalents in our wakeful thoughts.
Dreams present many mysteries of telepathy, clairvoyance, prevision and retrovision.
The basic mystery of dreams, which embraces all the others and challenges us from even the most common typical dream, is in the fact that they are original, visual continuities. I recall the startling, vivid realism of a dream in which I lived through the horror of the bombing of a little Korean town. Skeptics may deny the more startling phenomena of dreams as things they have never personally observed, but failure to wonder at their basic mystery is outright avoidance of routine evidence. Every dream, and this is true of a mental image of any type even though it may be readily interpreted into its equivalent of wakeful thought, is a psychic phenomenon for which no explanation is available. In most cases we recognize certain words, persons, animals or objects.