Seeng the future

One morning in 1974, a woman called Lesley Brennan was watching a film on television when she heard a new story. It was about an explosion at a factory at Flixborough, near her home in the north of England. Although there were no pictures, Mrs Brennan was worried because the story said that many people were dead or hurt. At lunchtime she told two friends about the terrible news. But later she discovered that the explosion happened around 5 pm, several hours after she had heard about it.

A man called Morgan Robertson wrote a book called Futility, about a very big ship called Titan, which sank after hitting an iceberg. The book appeared in 1898, fourteen years before the real ship Titanic went down in the icy waters of the North Atlantic! And this is only one of many Titanic stories.

After a terrible accident, some people always say that they knew it was going to happen. Train or plane passengers say that they chose not to travel on that day, but they cannot usually explain why.

An even stranger story is told about Winston Churchill, who escaped death in 1940, during the Second World War. When he got into the back of his car, he chose to sit on the opposite seat to his usual one. The car drove past an exploding bomb, and went over on two wheels but did not crash, because it was heavy on that side.

Religions often give special importance to people who can see the future, and the places where they live become special places. In Greece you can visit Delphi, where in 500 BC people went to ask about the future. The women who gave the answers probably ate plant leaves which made them dream. Dreams are often seen as a window into another world.

American president Abraham Lincoln dreamt that he saw a dead man in the White House. He asked who it was and they said it was the president. A few days later, Lincoln was shot and killed at the theatre.

In July 1904, the writer Rider Haggard wrote a letter to The Times newspaper. In it, he described a dream about his daughter’s black dog, Bob, dying beside water. Later the dog was found dead in a river.

Magicians say that there are many ways to see the future. They look at cards, tea leaves, or a glass ball, and tell us who we will marry, for example. Some of them have more success than others. The greatest was probably the sixteenth-century French doctor, Nostradamus. You can still read his mysterious writings and decide for yourself what you think.

(from Strange but True by Alison Baxter, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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