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Patterns of Prophecy – Alan Vaughan

In April 1968, when in Freiburg, I began to record dreams regularly in an effort to see if my of them would eventually prove precognitive. A dream recorded on April 25 seemed a little bizarre:

My wife and I were in a hotel room with a couple of other people, having something like a party. There was a little difficulty - the manageress said we had to leave by a certain hour, so we did. I spotted a building I felt was the Bollingen Foundation and entered the building. I was just in time for a lecture, which I found a little silly; it was given in German, English, and Dutch. The lady next to me had a conversation with me in German, complaining that she couldn't understand the speaker. I explained that he was then talking in Dutch. . . . I then returned to the hotel, and again we were told by what hour we must leave.

Two months before I had been in Utrecht Holland, to visit the sensitive Gerard Croiset. During this time I had picked up a few Dutch words.

 On May 4, Croiset visited the Freiburg Institute to make some predictions for a "chair test" experiment in Zurich on May 6. This experiment, sponsored (surprisingly) by the Rosicrucians, was a type Croiset had often done before. Croiset would describe in detail a person who at a later date would be chosen by chance from a large audience. Professor Bender and others from the Institute witnessed Croiset's predictions, which were tape recorded, and I was invited to go to Zurich on the test night of May 6 to verify any results.

I had never been in Zurich before so I first went to find the building where the experiment was to take place, and then my wife and I took a room in a small hotel nearby. The manageress lay great emphasis on the fact that the hotel closed its doors at midnight.

At the lecture hall, a lecture written in German by Croiset was read by someone else. And then Croiset started talking himself, repeating his predictions for the person who would be chosen by chance in a few minutes. Croiset's German was difficult to understand for the Swiss, especially since he kept throwing in Dutch words and even a few English words-such as tape recorder instead of Tonbandgerat. At one point a woman seated next to me on the stage asked me in German if I knew what a certain word was that Croiset had spoken.

By sheer luck, I knew the word, which was Dutch, and I explained it to her. The chair test itself was successful, if a bit confused. Croiset hit a great many details of the life of a woman whose number came up and who came onto the stage. Then a man came on the stage to translate into proper German what Croiset was saying. Oddly enough, at this point Croiset's predictions shifted to describe this man.

The Rosicrucians applauded the success of the experiment, and then a few of us went with Croiset to a nearby restaurant where we had a party. My wife and I had to leave early, however, in order to get back to our hotel by midnight-the hour set by the manageress. The incorrect detail in the dream of the building being the Bollingen Foundation was partially due to my confusion between the Jung Institute in Zurich and the Bollingen Foundation in the United States, which sponsored Jungian studies. But certainly I have never before nor since attended a lecture in which Dutch, German, and English were confused.