Can your dreams predict the future? The intriguing book that examines the psychology of the paranormal

By RICHARD WISEMAN,

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Last updated at 2:11 PM on 26th February 2011 

Aberfan is a small village in South Wales. In the Sixties, 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.

Although some of the waste from the mining operation had been stored underground, much of it had been piled on the steep hillsides surrounding the village.

Throughout October 1966, heavy rain lashed down on the area and seeped into the porous sandstone of the hills. Unfortunately, no one realised the water was then flowing into several hidden springs and slowly transforming the pit waste into soft slurry.

Just after nine o’clock on the morning of October 21, the side of the hill subsided and half a million tons of debris started to move rapidly towards the village.

Although some of the material came to a halt on the lower parts of the hill, much of it slid into Aberfan and smashed into the village school. A handful of children were pulled out alive during the first hour or so of the rescue effort, but no other survivors emerged.

In all, 116 schoolchildren and 28 adults lost their lives in the tragedy.

Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide.

Barker had a long-standing 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.

To find out, he arranged for a 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 more than half of the respondents claiming their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream.

One of the most striking experiences was submitted by the parents of a ten-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 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 Barnstaple, Devon, said 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.

Another respondent, Mrs GE from Sidcup, Kent, said a week before the landslide she dreamed about a group of screaming children being covered by an avalanche of coal.

Two months before the tragedy, Mrs SB, from London, dreamed about a school on a hillside, an avalanche and children losing their lives. And so the list went on.

Abraham Lincoln (left) reportedly dreamed about an assassination two weeks before being shot dead. Mark Twain (right) dreamed of his brother’s corpse lying in a coffin just a few weeks before he was killed in an explosion

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