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The Future and Beyond – H F Saltmarsh

The case will be found in Mrs. Lyttelton's book, Some Cases of Prediction, It is given there in full on page 106 et seq. I will give only a very brief summary.

Mr. Calder, the Headmaster of the Grammar School at Goole, wrote to Mrs. Lyttelton, after her broadcast talk on precognition, giving a full account of two precognitive dreams experienced by his wife.

In 1928 he was appointed headmaster of Holmfirth Secondary School in Yorkshire. Before leaving Middlesex, where they then resided, Mrs. Calder, who had never been to Yorkshire, dreamed of an old grey stone house, set in a lovely valley through which ran a stream of clear but black-looking water. In their house-hunting near Holmfirth they came across the very house which Mrs. Calder had seen in her dream; they took it, or rather one half of it, and moved in in August 1922.

They found that the water of the stream was frequently discoloured by indigo from a near-by dye-works. In her dream Mrs. Calder had seen that only one half of the house was occupied and that outside the door of that half was a barrel which was used as a dog kennel. When they went to live there, though the other half was occupied, there was no barrel.

A year or so later, there was a change of tenants of the other half of the house. When the new people arrived they brought with them a dog and placed a barrel outside the door for its kennel. So much for the first dream.

In December 1930 Mr. Calder was appointed headmaster of Goole Grammar School, which, of course, meant another move. On 28th December Mrs. Calder dreamed of a dark red house standing on a corner of two streets. She described it to Mr. Calder next day and said that she felt convinced that they would have to live in it, though she was depressed at the prospect. Her precognition was fulfilled in every respect.

The confirmatory evidence of this case is excellent. Although there are several instances of persons having dreams of places they have never seen, but subsequently visit, this case is specially interesting in several respects. It is particularly detailed, and the two experiences are exactly similar in character in so far as they both refer to a house in which the dreamer is going to live. In the second dream, it might have been contemporary clairvoyance, but if so, why should Mrs Calder have had an image of that particular house? That in itself constitutes a precognition.

The detail of the colour of the stream in the first case is good. But perhaps the most interesting point about the case is that of the dog kennel. It really looks as though the prevision were dated. It was not an image of the appearance of the house as it was at the time of dream, or when Mr. and Mrs. Calder first went to live there, as one would have imagined it would be, but it was of its appearance at a later date. Why these queer details should be given is most puzzling; I cannot help feeling that if we could understand them, and be able to account for the trivialities which we so often find, we should be a long way towards solving the problem of precognition itself. This, then, is the representative sample of the kind of evidence which we have for precognition. I submit that it is of such quality and of such amount that it cannot lightly be set aside as mere coincidence or imaginative nonsense.