For several years Mrs Boulton had experienced a recurring dream in which she visited a house. She had no idea where it was but she could describe the place in detail. Then in 1883 she and her husband decided to spend some time in Scotland. Mr Boulton wanted a house that offered good fishing and shooting, and chose the home of the aristocratic Lady Berersford, which happened to be let at the time. The Boulton's son, who was in Scotland, made all the necessary arrangements.
Mr Boulton travelled up before his wife to sign the agreement and get settled in. Lady Beresford warned him that her bedroom had been haunted for some time by a 'little lady' -- a harmless ghost that need not alarm him. Mr Boulton was of a skeptical nature and replied that he would be delighted to meet the phantom. However, to his disappointment, his night passed undisturbed.
When his wife arrived she was astronished to recognize the house of her dreams. Almost everything corresponded except that the sitting room she was in her sleep led to a suite of rooms that the present house seemed to lack. However, it turned out that alternations had been made, and these rooms were now reached through a different door.
A few days later the Boultons visited Lady Beresford. The moment Mr. Boulton introduced his wife their landlady exclaimed, 'Why, you are the lady who haunts the bedroom!' This case is especially puzzling because it involves two kinds of paranormal activity. Mrs Boulton had foreknowledge of a house she would later occupy. Moreover, she seemed to acquire this knowledge not by clairvoyance, but by actually visiting the house in some kind of physical form, solid enough for her to be seen by its inhabitants and subsequently recognized. * Apparitions; Dreams
Barrkman, Henry, Ursula Dubosarsky, and Peter Marr. "Visions and Spirits in the Age of Reason." Almanac of the Uncanny. New York: Reader's Digest Association Inc., 1995. (page: 325.)
While I'm equally annoyed at people who say dreams and OBE's are one and the same either to dismiss it (as only dreaming) or just so they can say "I astral project every single night! Sometimes six or seven times a night!", I'm interested in the line between them —— whether it links or divides.
I was kind of suspicious that an account like the one above, that covers so many bases, wasn't making the rounds in paranormal enthusiasts' circles. When I ran key words through search engines years ago, there was really no site that mentioned it, let alone provided any more detail: was this story pieced together from epistles, or diaries, or what? I couldn’t even find these people’s first names!
It’s really too bad, since I had something like this happen to me, except it's not going to be as well-documented and I don't have the excuse of being deceased. Or, just not being the kind of person who records stuff like this in obsessive detail and chronology, because obviously I am that kind of person.
I remember having a dream about floating through the backstage and the wings of a ballet stage. This is ordinary, I dream a lot about theaters. Floating further into the wings on the other side, the scene cleanly changed into a view of flying high above a mall. This is slightly less ordinary for me, because I could see the line between the dream-settings go past me instead of just being somewhere else (as is more usual in my dreams.)
Later, in waking life, Sibling got a gig as a stage manager in a theater in town— a theater I'd never seen the backstage of. She asked me to deliver something, a prop she forgot back at our place, to her in the wings. When I got there, I saw a doorway that led out into the sky.
"That's some stupid architecture," I said. It was, too. This mall theater was on the third floor, and the doorway had no stairs leading up to it or anything. It just dropped off. If I looked down, though, I could see the green roofs or umbrella-things that I saw in my dream except clearer in the daylight (it was night in my dream of it.) I should have taken a picture before they boarded that stupid doorway up!
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