One of the most provocative dreams was that of a businessman in Florida, disturbed by the vivid reality of the dream, and a guilty conscience. He had heard of [Edgar] Cayce through a neighbor, whose health had been aided by one of Cayce's distant readings, and was delighted that he wouldn't have to lift an arm to get help--just send the dream in with a request for an interpretation.

With meticulous detail, the dreamer, a married man with two children, described a nightmarish dream:

"I was standing in the backyard of my home--had my coat on. I felt something inside the cloth on the cuff of my left-hand sleeve. I worked it out, but it was fastened in the cloth and broke off as it came out, leaving part in. It proved to be a cocoon, and where broken a small black spider came out. The cocoon was black and left a great number of eggs--small ones--on my coat sleeve, which I began to pull off.

The spider grew fast and ran away, speaking plain English as it ran, but what I do not remember, except that it was saying something about its mother.

The next time I saw it, it was a large black spider which I seemed to know was the same one grown up, almost as large as my fist--had a red spot on it, otherwise was a deep black.

At this time it had gotten into my house and had built a web all the way across the back inside the house and was comfortably watching me. I took a broom, knocked it down and out of the house, thinking I'd killed it, but it did more talking at that time.

The next time I saw it it had built a long web from the ground, on the outside of the house in the backyard, near where I first got it out of my sleeve--and it was running up toward the eave fast when it saw me. I couldn't reach it but threw my straw hat in front of it and cut the web and the spider fell to the ground, talking again, and that time I hacked it to pieces with my knife."

I copied the dream, and took it to a distinguished psychoanalyst, who had studied with the first of the great dream merchants--Sigmund Freud. I told him none of the particulars of the dream. It might have been dreamed yesterday or the day before, for all he knew. I did not tell him that Cayce had already made an interpretation--in fact, made it some thirty-five years before.

The learned psychoanalyst studied the dream text carefully, and then gave his analysis. The dreamer, he said, was destructively obsessed with the thought of breaking up his home. His views of women, including his wife, had been formed from a childhood resentment of his mother, and this transference was behind the breakup--the web or cocoon being the nest or home, the spider the obvious home-breaker, himself.

After he finished, I showed him the Cayce reading. He had heard vaguely of Cayce, and he read the Cayce interpretation with interest, inasmuch as he accepted the psychic as having been scientifically established. "In my work with Dr. Freud," he said, "there were many examples of clairvoyant and precognitive dreams. It even made a believer of Freud."

Cayce's report, intriguingly, tallied with that of the psychoanalyst's, only Cayce's delved far more extensively--and prophetically--into the home situation. He clearly saw the dreamer straying from his marital vows and warned that continuation of a clandestine relationship would ruin both home and business...

Cayce had no way of consciously knowing that the businessman had entangled himself in a financial way with his secretary, who had brought some shady backing into the business enterprise. Originally, as it developed, their relationship had been confined to business, but then had developed until he was, in fact, considering leaving his wife and family.

At this point, as Cayce saw, there was still time to withdraw...

"Prepare self. Meet the conditions as a man, not as a weakling--and remember those duties that the body owes first to those to whom the sacred vows were given, and to whom the entity and body owes its position in every sense; as well as the duty that is obligatory to the body or those to whom the entity, the body, should act in the sense of the defender, rather than bringing through such relations those dark underhanded sayings, as are seen, as said by that one who would undermine, as well as are being said by those whom the body may feel such relations are hidden from; yet these have grown to such extent as may present a menace to the very heart and soul of the body of this entity."

"Beware! Beware!"

However, following a divorce, he did marry the other woman. He was now so impressed by Cayce's insight, that with his newfound wife he took himself to Virginia Beach to place himself at the disposal of the mystic. Cayce could give him no advice except to profit by the mistakes of the first marriage. He started a new business in the North, consulted Cayce regularly, and managed maritally and business-wise, until his death recently.