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Herbert B Greenhouse – Premonitions:  A leap into the Future

THE GREEN TRAIN AND TROLLEY

One of the most striking cases in Mrs. Hellstrom's diary is her dream of an accident between a street-car and a railroad train. Mrs. Hellstrom was so impressed with the many unusual aspects of the case that she sent a description of it to two Swedish scientists and to Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University.

March 26, 1954. I dreamed this morning about a street-car accident. The dream had the character of precognition and was in colour. But I can't understand how it can come true because it was a collision between a street-car and a green railway car. . .
I had the feeling that Bo and I were flying over Stockholm. I looked down and thought we were somewhere in the neighborhood of Kungstradgarden [a park] . . . I said to myself, "The green one ran into #4 from the back. There was a motorcar and it was his fault." I saw an ordinary blue tram of the no 4 type, and a green train run into the tram. . .

In the dream the green railway car was

"driven to one side by the impact and came to rest at right angles to tram #4."

Mrs. Hellstrom thought that a careless automobile driver had caused the accident and told this to a policeman.  When she awoke, she made a sketch of the accident.  Mrs. Hellstrom was puzzled by the green railway car, as all the train carriages were painted in different shades of brown. However, in June of the same year she visited a friend and noted with surprise that the train included a new green car, the first she had ever seen on this line. The conductor told her that the railroad had ordered five or six such green cars, better equipped and more modern than the brown ones.

"I feel almost sure," she then wrote in her diary, "that the accident will happen when the train from Djursholm [a suburb of Stockholm] and the # 4 trolley meet at Valhallavagen [a street in Stockholm]. This is a place where there have been accidents between autos and trains but so far as I know, never with a trolley, and in any case, never with a green Djursholm car."

Just as Mrs. Hellstrom had predicted, on March 4, 1956, there was a collision at Valhallavagen between a train with green cars from Djursholm and a no 4 trolley. Accidents involving a street-car and a train were so rare that a railway employee who had been working for the company thirty-three years had never known of one:

I herewith confirm that the train from Djursholm, since I started working for the Stockholm-Djursholm Railway Company in the year 1923, has not been involved in a collision with a tram until the accident of March 4th, 1956. . .Djursholm, September l2th, 1958 - Eric Panzar, Stationmaster

Another significant detail was that the dream had specifically shown tram  no 4, as distinguished from other street-cars, in the accident. A further correspondence between the dream and the reality was that the vehicles came to rest at right angles to each other. The sketch of the accident made by the police was almost identical to that drawn by Mrs. Hellstrom after her dream.

The fifth item of interest, one that was very puzzling to Mrs. Hellstrom, was the appearance of the auto in the dream and her anxiety to inform the police that the driver had caused the dream-accident. Although there was no auto involved in the real accident. Mrs. Hellstrom recalled that about twenty-five years before, she had been made uneasy by a drunken driver just ahead of her car on a London road. The other driver's car turned over on its side, and Mrs. Hellstrom had gone to an English policeman and offered to be a witness against the man.

I herewith confirm that her (Mrs. Hellstrom's) reports and statements concerning the car accident in London at the beginning of 1930 are in accordance with the actual facts.  (signed) Bo Hellstrom

The dream thus combined events of the past with those of the future accident. The seer's emotional link to the past accident stirred precognition of another accident involving the trolley and the train. As a thoughtful observer of her premonitory dreams, she noticed that, in such a dream,

"the details at the beginning very often are right when the happening occurs. At the end of the dream, however, when the conscious mind gradually returns, the details sometimes become vague and indistinct and will very likely turn out to be wrong."