At age 23, before he became famous as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens had the following dream:

He saw a metal coffin resting on two chairs in his sister's sitting room. As he approached the coffin, he saw the body of his brother Henry. One detail in particular caught his attention: a bouquet of white flowers, with one crimson flower in the center, lying on Henry's chest.

A FEW DAYS LATER

The Mississippi riverboat on which Henry worked blew up. Many of the passengers and crew were killed instantly. When Clemens rushed to the scene of the accident, in Memphis, he found his brother lying unconscious on a mattress in an improvised hospital. There was some hope that Henry might pull through, but on the sixth night he died. When Clemens arrived at the room which was being used as a temporary morgue, he found that most of the dead were lying in plain wooden coffins, but there was one metal coffin lying on two chairs. Henry's struggle to survive had inspired such interest among the Memphis ladies that they had taken up a special collection and bought a metal casket for him. As Clemens approached his brother's casket, an elderly woman entered the room carrying a large bouquet of white flowers, in the center of which was one crimson rose, and laid them on Henry's chest.

NOTE

This account is from Robert van de Castle's OUR DREAMING MIND, the best compendium on the history of dreaming and dream research I've found.

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