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From Opening Heaven’s Door – Patricia Pearson

Max Bone had a vivid and distinctive nightmare that spurred him to do something that remains unique in his life experience. The dream concerned a house his father had bought, which he was planning to convert into an office.

 "I awoke in terror," Bone told me, "in the early hours of one morning, after having what seemed like a nightmare, but the content of which had a noticeably different and unusual quality. It had been very windy that night, and I had dreamt that I was outside the rear of this property in Borough Road, standing on the pavement, and facing directly towards the rear yard gate. This green painted wooden-panelled yard gate off the street was unfastened, and was opening, then banging shut again, and again, in the wind.

I approached the gate and the gate opened, the peeling paint and grain of the grey and denatured timber was shown in incredible detail. As the gate swung open revealing the small backyard, I noticed that the white half-panel kitchen door had been pushed completely open, leaving just a dark rectangular hole in the wall. The top pane of the small kitchen window was also broken, and partly open. As I moved through the open gate, and across the yard towards the empty door, fear started to build in me.

My vision centered on the small kitchen step. As I reached the threshold I was looking right down at the step, and the fear became incredible, and as I began to cross the threshold I woke up in terror.

The next morning (I believe it was a Sunday morning), I still recalled the dream in detail, and I did something unusual-I acted on the dream (I have never acted on a dream before or since this event).

I immediately went downstairs and told Dad about the dream whilst he was having his breakfast. I explained the dream's unusual quality and made clear that I believed that something had happened to the property, pestering him to drive over to it immediately.

Dad finished his breakfast, and decided to indulge me, as he hadn't checked on the house for a while anyway. My two elder brothers overhearing the story, and I think sensing something exciting, wanted to come along too. So my dad, myself and my brothers drove over to the house. We pulled up at the rear of the property, opposite the green gate, which was indeed blowing open and shut in the wind. When we all saw this, both my brothers turned to look at me in the car, and pulled 'spooky' faces at me.

We left the car and entered the backyard through the gate, to find the kitchen door wide open; it had been pushed right back against the kitchen units so that it was not visible, just like in my dream. The top pane of the kitchen window was also broken and slightly open, again just as in my dream.

We entered the house to find water gushing through the ground floor ceilings, and the beginnings of mould on the dining room carpet.

It became clear that the house had been broken into some days before, and the thieves had been returning to remove fixtures, fittings, and lead piping over some period of time. We secured the house and turned off the water. Dad refused to talk about the incident for many years although he does talk about it now. My two brothers found the whole affair creepy and unsettling and recall the incident to this day.

l have thought deeply about the incident for the whole of my life, and drawn the best conclusions I can to explain [it.]

Bone …… doesn't think he actually went out of body in his dream.  He suspects that he saw, somehow, what the thieves saw, tapping into their perception of the back of the house. He doesn't accept that the dream was a coincidence. I pressed him about why he couldn't accept it as coincidence, and he said it was the distinctive nature of the dream.

My dreams tend to be sort of 'softer,' still plenty of visual detail but they don't have the hard-edged detail of this dream. I had absolutely no problem in recalling the dream and remembering I needed to do something about it. That's not typical in my experience. It was almost as if the memory had been lodged somewhere it shouldn't really be lodged. Almost as if 'raw' unprocessed imagery had been laid down, accidentally bypassing my normal visual pre-processing, having what I considered to be almost silly levels of recorded detail, like the peeling paint on the gate.