Jung writes about J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, who, while serving in the Boer War in Africa in 1902, had a dream in which he seemed to be standing on a volcanic mountain that turned out, upon closer inspection, to be an island. He knew that it was threatened with “a catastrophic volcanic eruption.” He was terrified and wanted to alert the inhabitants. Four days later, he received in his mail a copy of The Daily Telegraph from England, with a headline announcing that 40,000 people had lost their lives when a volcano had erupted on the island of French Martinique. (Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p. 444)

When he had had his dream, his unconscious had already known about the eruption and all the deaths. His dream was telling his consciousness something that he had already known at a deeper level of conscious. The eruption, together with the subsequent destruction, was a major event and certainly one with strong feelings. We often receive messages of this sort from our unconscious before they are received by more conventional means.

I had a client once. Years before, she had been about to board an airplane to cross the English Channel. However, just then she thought she saw a newspaper headline saying that a plane had crashed crossing the channel. She refused to board the plane then, although everyone thought that she was crazy. She wasn’t. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.

I remember once, years ago, when Karen told me her dream in which an astronomer had just discovered a new comet. The next day, we read in the newspaper that a new comet, called Kohoutek, had been discovered on the very night that Karen had had her dream. Karen had apparently felt and shared the astronomer’s excitement and had thus learned from her dream of the arrival of this comet as it was being discovered halfway around the world.