HAUNTED WIRRAL: The strange world of dreams

In this latest tale, Tom explores the strange case of the world of dreams...

In the lifetime of a person who has lived an average lifespan, he or she will spend about 230,000 hours asleep, which means you spend approximately a third of your life in that mysterious realm of dreams and altered consciousness which has confounded scientists for centuries.

Joseph, in the Bible’s Book of Genesis was deemed to be a great prophet because he was able to decode the strange worrying dream of the Pharaoh of Egypt concerning seven fat cows and seven lean ones.

The Pharaoh’s magicians and high priests could not unravel the meaning of the dream, but Joseph said the dream meant that Egypt would enjoy seven bountiful harvests followed by seven years of famine and drought, so the Pharaoh immediately ordered his farmers to stockpile grain and create a spare reservoir of water in preparation for the hard times envisaged.

After this famous dream interpretation, Joseph was elevated to become a vizier – the highest official in Egypt to serve the Pharaoh.

Thousands of years later, Sigmund Freud was elevated from a neurologist to an international star when he practically invented psychoanalysis in the 1890s and became an official (and an exceedingly well-paid) dream interpreter.

Despite scientific analysis, the dreaming mind continues to defy the laws of physics.

How, for example, can people dream of future events or of incidents in the present happening miles away?

A case in point is mentioned in a press report for June 10, 1935.

On the death of their mother, a brother and sister in Bebington quarrelled and the brother went abroad.

Months later, the sister had a dream on a Friday evening in which her deceased mother appeared to her in a strange azure satin dress and said: "Go to my grave and you will meet your brother – go tomorrow – you must talk to him again!"

The sister went to the grave in Bebington Cemetery – and there was her brother at the graveside.

He told her he was there because of a strange dream he’d had on Friday night: "Mother appeared in the dream in a pale blue dress, and she said: 'Go to my grave and you will meet your sister – go tomorrow – you must talk to her again’"

Brother and sister made up and remained close for the rest of their lives, and all because of a dream.

Another dream concerning someone’s late mother occurred at Birkenhead in 1960.

A midwife named Christine was asleep at her home on Portland Street when she had a vivid dream of her late mother, Winifred – who had also been a midwife.

Christine’s mother told her to go at once to a girl who was in labour at a house on Grange Road West, and kept emphasising the number of this house.

Christine awoke and told her husband about the realistic dream but he just said, "Ah, you had cheese on toast for supper; that’s caused it. Go back to sleep."

The same dream played in Christine’s mind two more times and her mother was livid at her for not doing as she said.

Christine felt that her mother had really visited her somehow, and so at 3.15am she sneaked out her bed and drove in her Morris Minor to the address she’d dreamt of on Grange Road West, and a young girl named Susan answered the door with tears in her eyes.

She thought it was her father calling.

She explained that her older sister, Patricia, who was just sixteen, was upstairs – about to have a baby - with no one to attend her.

She’d run away from her Liverpool home months ago after getting 'into trouble'.

Christine went upstairs and with the help of Susan, she delivered Patricia’s baby boy and convinced the girl to go to hospital.

Christine’s husband was dumfounded when he realised his mother-in-law apparently had contacted Christine in a dream.

The most chilling case of a psychic dream concerns a 40-year-old Birkenhead woman named Celia, who woke up screaming one night in 1968 and almost throttled her milkman husband Brian, who was trying to get some precious sleep before his working day started – at 3.30am.

Celia said that she had seen a ghastly murder in a dream in which a smart-suited man with red hair had strangled and raped a woman.

The whole thing was too realistic to have been a dream, Celia maintained, and she’d had these dream warnings before.

The dreams went on, night after night, and Celia, who was very good at drawing, sketched a picture of the red-headed murderer in his black suit, white shirt and royal blue tie.

"He’s got a Scottish accent," Celia told her bemused husband, "and Brian, he knows I’ve seen him in the dreams because he’s psychic too and he’s come down here to look for me."

"What? All the way from Scotland? You’re going worse, you are," Brian told her.

"It’s all in the mind – all these crime series you’re watching on the telly and that."

However, on the following morning, Brian saw a red-haired man with a blue tie and black suit standing outside his home on Price Street, and he looked like the man Celia had sketched.

"Nice morning isn’t it?" The stranger said to Brian in a Scottish accent.

He was also seen following Celia to the shops and after a week of this, Brian reported him to the police.

A policeman who looked at the sketch of the stalker remarked that he looked like the identikit picture of 'Bible John' – a mysterious religiously-motivated serial strangler and rapist wanted in Scotland.

He was never captured.

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