“In October, 1720, the Princess arrived at Paris, in good health and spirits; and occupied a furnished hotel, where soon after her arrival she was seized with a violent fever. She immediately sent for the King’s celebrated physician, the father of Helvetius. The physician came, and the Princess showed striking marks of astonishment. She was asked the reason of it, and gave for answer that the physician perfectly resembled the man whom she had seen at Warsaw in a dream; but added she, ‘I shall not die this time, for this is not the same apartment which I saw on that occasion in my dream.’
“The Princess was soon after completely restored, and appeared to have altogether forgotten her dream, when a new incident reminded her of it in a most forcible manner. She was dissatisfied with her lodgings at the hotel, and therefore requested that a dwelling might be prepared for her in a convent at Paris, which was accordingly done. The Princess removed to the convent, but scarcely had she entered the apartment destined for her, than she began to exclaim aloud: ‘It is all over with me; I shall not come out of this room again alive, for it is the same that I saw at Warsaw in my dream!’ She died in reality not long afterward in the same room, in the beginning of the year 1721, of an ulcer in the throat, occasioned by the drawing of a tooth.”
“This dream,” observes Jung Stilling, from whose work the account of it is transcribed, “proceeded from a good angel, who wished to attract the attention of the Princess to her approaching end.”
A dignitary of the Church of England, of rank and reputation, courteously furnishes the Editor with the following remarkable Dream, which occurred to himself,—alas! so completely fulfilled. Another account of the same, almost identical in terms, was sent to him from another quarter. But he prefers putting on record the former:[132]—
“My brother had left London for the country to preach and speak on behalf of a certain Church Society, to which he was officially attached. He was in his usual health, and I was therefore in no special anxiety about him. One night my wife woke me, finding that I was sobbing in my sleep, and asked me what it was. I said, ‘I have been to a strange place in my dream. It was a small village, and I went up to the door of an inn, if so it might be called, though it really was a decent public-house. A stout woman came to the door. I said to her, ‘Is my brother here?’ She said, ‘No, sir, he is gone.’ ‘Is his wife here?’ I went on to enquire. ‘No, sir, but his widow is.’ Then the distressing thought rushed upon me that my brother was dead: and I awoke sobbing.
“A few days after, I was summoned suddenly into the country. My brother returning from Huntingdon had been attacked with angina pectoris; and the pain was so intense that they left him at Caxton (a small village in the diocese of Ely), to which place on the following day he summoned his wife: and the next day, while they were seated together, she heard a sigh and he was gone.
“When I reached Caxton, it was the very same village to which I had gone in my dream. I went to the same house, was met and let in by the same woman; and found my brother dead, and his widow there.”
One of the most striking and well-authenticated cases of a Warning given in a Dream and acted upon, by which a grave temporal danger was actually averted, remains to be put on record now. The case is related with great simplicity by one who has carefully investigated the circumstances of both the dreams; and nothing is required on the Editor’s part, either to enlarge on any detail of it or to point its moral:—
“Knowing as I do intimately,” writes the correspondent in question, “the Widow of an Irish clergyman who was warned by a dream of the railway accident which took place a few years ago at Abergele, in North Wales, I give you gladly the following particulars:—
“About a fortnight before the accident occurred, my friend, the lady in question, had a dream in which her husband, who had been dead for three years, appeared to her, as she thought. This occurred on the night which followed the day on which she had settled and arranged with some friends to make a journey by railway. She dreamed that her husband was still living, and that she and he were walking on the sea-shore of North Wales, close to which the railway to Holyhead passes, when they came to a tunnel,[133] from which, all of a sudden, volumes of the blackest smoke were pouring out, and which became so dense that the sky was quite overcast. Alarmed at this, they hastily went forward together towards its mouth, when it seemed to be all on fire; the crackling and roar of which was quite unusual. In a moment or two the sounds of frantic cries of men and women wildly shrieking seemed to come from out of the mouth of the tunnel; and then, as if to add to the horror of what had already appeared, another train, full of people and at express speed, came up and dashed through smoke and flame into the tunnel itself. Upon this the lady awoke, and so deep an impression had the dream made (for it unhinged her for some days), that she resolved to postpone her journey, which she did. Had she gone at the time appointed and arranged, she and her friends would have travelled by the very train—the passengers of which were burnt by the explosion of petroleum.