Fourteen or fifteen years ago, about four days before the Navajos started to die, before the epidemic of the flu, I dreamt that in four days Navajos would start to die.

It was as if somebody in the dream came and said "you will know that it will rain in four days."

That caused the flu. This dream caused the Navajos to die.

EDITOR'S COMMENT

Some Navaho dreamers Lincoln interviewed requested anonymity, like R.T., because their dreams included heavy topics--hauntings and attacks by chindi, deaths predicted, and, perhaps worst of all, this--guilt over a plague that devastated the Navaho (just as with Covid, the 1918 flu pandemic had higher death rates for Native Americans.)

I've had enough predictive dreams to assume such dreams are warnings; I might tell friends to prepare; and once the dream came true, I might feel guilt I hadn't done more to help others. But I wouldn't think I caused the disease. Dreamers like RT, though, shocked by a warning dream, often do worry the dream reveals a wish, and the wish caused harm. Two types of seer's guilt!

I used to blame Freud for RT-ish guilt. Freud did talk as if every dream's a repressed, ugly wish, never just (just?!) a warning of trouble to come. But Freud wasn't the first--not by centuries. An uneasy feeling that foresight is really causation has always run through dreamwork worldwide, shading into suspicion that you can ill-wish or curse others in dreams. The idea that even unconscious malice can summon evil has deep pancultural roots. I'm not sure even I dismiss it totally; I just see no reason to suspect RT. Not with a killer virus sweeping the world!

I'm biased by my experience. My dad once dreamed he chopped up several people. Next morning, shaken, he worried what malice was inside him, under the civilized surface. Not a witchcraft belief system, but Freudian. Yet I and at least two other relatives dreamed of murder too, all simultaneously. Why'd we all turn creepily Freudian only that night? Well, the morning paper reported that In a campground near us, a madman had chopped up campers. The killler was still at large, so to me the nightmares were useful warnings to stay alert the next day. But if you reject ESP, you can mistake practical warning dreams for ill-wishing--or ill-causing.

Skeptics call psychic dreams wishful thinking, as if we childishly cling to magic because it's all fun and games. It's not. Regardless of your belief system, paranormal dreams can not only be horrifying, but, as here, induce lasting guilt.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Dream in Primitive Cultures edited by Jackson Lincoln, 1935, pp 229 in 1970 reprint. Primary source: interview by Lincoln through translator (though RT knew some English), May 1932.

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