A Field of Dreams

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on Mary Vincent who’s had more than one encounter with the unknown.

Everybody dreams. Some dreams are frightening, some are forgotten and some, like those of Mary Vincent of Kingston, Ontario, seem to predict the future.

Over the years, Mary’s dreams have given her a look at “the other side,” which she describes as just another dimension … a dimension eerily accessible to our own.

“This is something I don’t understand at all,” Mary said. “I have had dreams that took
me to the other side … but involve a big yellow door.”

Beyond this door may be the future – Mary has seen the future in her dreams.

“I dreamt that I was standing in my brother’s yard in the country and it was night,” she said. “My brother and his family, including my mother, were chasing horses trying to keep them out of the garden. The property next door kept horses and they had broken down the fence. It was pandemonium.”

Mary stood there, in her dream, watching but not participating.

“The next morning I was telling my husband about my dream when I got a call from my mother,” Mary said. “She started with, ‘you should see what happened here last night.’”

Mary’s mother told her exactly what she had seen in her dream, “point by point.”

Can we have prophetic dreams? There are endless stories of people who didn’t go on a doomed airplane/passenger ship/automobile because of a dream; Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, made eerily accurate predictions from a trance, and Nostradamus’ 452-year-old quatrains fascinate us today.

A Baylor University study showed 52 percent of people believe in prophetic dreams. Paranormal author Rosemary Ellen Guiley wrote in her book, “Dreamspeak: How To Understand the Messages in Your Dreams,” that we probably have more precognitive dreams than we realize. We’re simply not paying attention.

After the horse dream, Mary started paying attention. Her next dream took her across the Atlantic.

“I dreamt that I was on a dirt road in some country in Africa, riding in an open jeep,” she said. “There were other people on the jeep, all North Americans, but I didn’t seem to know them well.”

As the jeep sped down the road, Mary became more and more terrified as they approached a curve.

“Every time we came to a bend that there would be armed Africans jumping out ahead of us,” she said. “I felt two things primarily, fear and hunger. We were running because of some upheaval in the country and there had been some killings.”

Because of the intensity of the dream, Mary told her coworkers.

“I noticed one of the men staring at me with his mouth open,” she said. “He started telling me his daughter was in Africa and what I described was just what she had described having happened to her and the group she was with. He had lost contact with her for a few days and had contemplated going there.”

Mary, like the rest of her office, didn’t know the man’s daughter was in Africa.

“Being a private man, he had never mentioned anything to anyone,” she said.

Mary’s dreams also reach out to her neighbors. In a recent dream, she was in her bedroom – it wasn’t Mary’s bedroom, but it was in the dream.

“I heard somebody in the house,” she said. “I realized I was being robbed but I was too scared to go out of my room.”

She tried unsuccessfully to call 9-1-1 when she got a glimpse of the robber. He was about six-feet-tall, solidly built, had shoulder-length blonde hair and wore a blue plaid shirt.

“I didn’t think much more about this until a few days later a woman I walk my dog with once in awhile was telling me she had been robbed,” Mary said. “She said she was in her room sleeping and she had heard them but was too frightened to confront them.”

The thief took her purse and her car, but the description of the incident struck Mary.

“I realized it was my dream and I described the man I had seen,” Mary said. “She said she had seen the same man I described hanging around her street a few days before.”

Are precognitive dreams real? No one knows, but if your dreams are particularly vivid, it might be wise to pay attention.

“These dreams were strange because they were explicit,” she said. “They didn’t go off to strange things, or other fantasies, they stayed right on target and were crystal clear. I never had to try and remember them, they were right there.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

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