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Miss B dreams of a man with three brown cows - An Experiment with Time
Identifier
025890
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME BY J. W. DUNNE [SECOND EDITION]
A young woman, whom I will call Miss B., good- naturedly agreed to [be a subject for experiment] . I selected her mainly because she was an extremely normal individual, who had never had any sort of "psychical" experience, and who (this was the great thing) believed that she practically never dreamed at all. Indeed, she assured me that it would be useless for her to experiment, as she had only had some six or seven dreams in the whole course of her life.
The morning after the first night she came to me and told me that it was quite hopeless. She had tried to remember her dreams the very instant she woke; but there had been nothing to remember.
So I told her not to bother about looking for memories of dreams, but to endeavour instead to recollect of what she had been thinking at the moment of waking, and, after she had got that, to try to recall why she had been thinking it. That worked; as I had known it would; and on each of the next six mornings she was able to remember that she had had one short dream.
Counting the experiment as starting from the first dream, she obtained, on the sixth day, the following result.
Waiting at Plymouth Station for a train, she walked up to one end of a platform and came upon a five- or six-barred gate leading on to a road. As she reached the gate a man passed on the other side, driving three brown cows. He was holding the stick out over the cows in a peculiar fashion, — as if it were a fishing-rod.
In the dream, she walked up a path she knew, and found, to her great surprise, that it ended in a five- or six-barred gate which had no business to be there. The gate was just like the one at the station, and, as she reached it, the man and the three brown cows passed on the other side, exactly as in the waking experience, the man holding out the stick fishing-rod fashion over the cows, and the whole group being arranged just like the group she saw.
The dream occurred the morning before the waking experience.
The blending of the "past" image of the path with the "future" image of the gate provided an excellent specimen of integration.