Bad Dreams in the Future Tense

what good is it to predict tomorrow's disasters if nobody believes you until it's too late?

On a Three-Blanket Night in January 1972, a middle-aged woman in New York had a dream about George Wallace. It is not clear whether that woman was fond of Wallace or disliked him, or though about him at all. What is important that in her dream, she saw him wa onto a stage in a brown suit, surrounded by an enormous crowd. Suddenly, she sensed danger and heard her own voice say, "George Wallace will be shot." On May 15, 1972, Wallace could have done that information.

But then, what would he have done with it?

What would any of us do with such information, coming, as it does, from beyond left field--from out of the ball park, so to speak? I asked a New York cabdriver what he would do with surf information. He was from Brooklyn, so I figured he'd cut through the bullshit.

"I wouldn't want to hear it," he said. I asked him if he thought science should try to tap the mechanism in dreaming that produces foreknowledge.

He thought for a moment, then replied, "No, sir. You know why? We got enough problems that we know about without worrying about people's dreams. You know, a lot of people have bad, bad dreams, my friend. Some people wake up crying."

•

David Booth woke up crying on the night of May 24, 1979, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He'd just had the same bad dream for the tenth night in a row. It wasn't your average indigestion-caused monster-type nightmare, either--nothing that personal. And therein lay its horror for Booth, the slender, mustachioed 27-year-old manager of a Cincinnati car-rental agency. For in the dream, he was the helpless witness of a plane crash. Booth says it was the same, exactly the same, every time:

"I was standing beside this one-story building . . . and now I'm looking away from the corner of the building and I'm looking out over a field and there's, like, a line of trees going down and I look up in the air and there's an American Airlines jet, a great big thing, and the first thing that strikes me--that always struck me--was that it just wasn't making the noise it should be for being that close, you know?

"Then it starts to bank off to the right. And the left wing goes up in the air and it's going very slow. It wasn't like slow motion. It was just going slow, and then it just turned on its back and went straight down into the ground and exploded. . . ."

As he watched the explosion, as the sound thundered in his ears, he woke up. Crying. Ten nights consecutively.

After the third night--the night of May 17--Booth had been afraid to go to sleep. He was afraid to tell his wife, Pam, that something very spooky was going on. The next day, he drank coffee by the pot, which made him irritable both at home and at the agency. And that night, he dreamed it again. "On the fourth night, I got so drunk, so very drunk, in hopes that it would prevent me from dreaming, that I poured myself into bed. But the next morning, Saturday, just before I woke up, I had the dream again. It came in with me standing next to the building and ended with the explosion dying in my ears. And when I woke up, I didn't have a hangover. None. It was as though I hadn't touched a drop. I don't know how I can explain it. I felt as though I'd been taken over by something."

And Booth was finding out what everyone who ever saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers knows--you can't stay awake forever, even if you know that the moment you snooze, some eldritch horror awaits you. So, despite himself, he dozed again Sunday night, the 20th, and there he was again on the airfield, beside the building, watching the American Airlines jet floating too quietly through the air.

"And you have to try to understand that although I'm calling this thing a dream, it wasn't like a dream at all. Only someone who has had this happen to him will know what I mean when I say that it was real. There was no sense of unreality. Nothing like weird sounds, strange colors or me floating up in the air. It just felt like an everyday spring afternoon. As I remember it now, I remember it like you remember a real experience, not like you remember a dream. That's the difference. It's in my memory as a real experience. The only thing about it you might say was unusual is that I didn't have any sense of I when it happened. Like, I had no personality. I was just this pair of eyes and ears watching and listening."

On Monday, as soon as Booth got to work, he scanned every newspaper he could get his hands on for news of plane crashes. He kept the radio on and listened to each news broadcast with a pounding heart. In less than a week, his life had become a quiet horror because of a dream. And Monday night, despite his nerves, despite the coffee, despite the Late Show, he dreamed it again. "Very few people know what it is to be completely helpless. I mean the pain of it. You've got to want to help to feel really helpless, and that's how I felt on Tuesday morning when I went to work." But he tried. He really tried.

He called the local office of American Airlines to tell them about his dreams, but no one was available to listen. Then he called the FAA at the Greater Cincinnati Airport and managed to get through to Ray Pinkerton, the assistant manager for airway facilities. Pinkerton listened and took notes that would later verify Booth's account of the dreams. He says he respected the tremor he heard in Booth's voice. "He sounded so sincere, I just couldn't slough him off. He sounded truly concerned."

Pinkerton shrugs. "But what could I say? What could I do?" He and his assistant, supervisory electronics technician Paul Williams, tried, anyway. They called the regional FAA office in Atlanta that afternoon and reported all the details of the dream to Jack Barker, public-affairs officer.

"It sounded like any of a hundred dreams I've heard reported in my 25 years in the aviation business," Barker says. "People call in with them all the time, but what could we do? We didn't have a date, we didn't have a time, we didn't have a city. What could we do?" Well, frankly, he couldn't have done anything. So he didn't.

Booth first talked to Pinkerton and Williams on May 22nd. He had the dream again on the 23rd and the 24th. Each day, his foreboding deepened, and by Friday, May 25th, he was teetering on the edge of madness. "I was an emotional wreck. I went to work and I was jumping on everybody for nothing. I felt like I could start slamming my head against a wall and not stop. I went home early and as soon as I walked in the door, I sat down in my living room and started crying. I started complaining about my job to Pam, and I never complain to her. I felt like somebody I knew had died, but nobody had."

When he finished weeping, they went into the kitchen to eat dinner and turned on the television. They were watching The Rebels when the news of the plane crash flashed onscreen. That afternoon, at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, American Airlines flight 191, bound for Los Angeles with 271 passengers (including three Playboy employees and a Playboy contributor), lost an engine during take-off, rolled to the left and slammed to earth, exploding on impact. It was the worst domestic crash in history. Booth was stunned by an aerial photo showing the wreckage virtually atomized by the explosion. "I'd seen that crash," he says. "I'd seen the explosion. I called Paul Williams at the FAA and began just freaking out. He helped settle me down."

And when he finally got to sleep that night, David Booth did not dream.

Because of its thorough documentation, Booth's extraordinary dream was recounted in nearly every newspaper in the country. A series of photographs of the crash, taken by fantastic coincidence, showed the DC-10 descend, roll over, then disappear behind some buildings for only a moment. Then the fire-ball. Not every detail of Booth's dream matched the facts--for instance, he saw the plane bank to the right, whereas flight 191 banked to the left. But no one, not even the FAA, questions the uncanny similarity between major details of Booth's vision and the actual crash.

Two days after the tragedy, Booth was asked to appear on a Cleveland television show to talk about his dream. When he arrived, a strange thing happened.

"I felt agitated again, very agitated. The number 40 kept coming to me. I seemed to remember the number 40 being associated with the dream somehow, though there was no number 40 in the dream. Yet the number 40 had hung in the back of my mind for several days. I'd even mentioned it to Paul Williams. Then, suddenly, when I was introduced on this talk show, I felt very angry, forceful, and I'm not that kind of person. I started warning--and it was somewhat of a surprise to me--that there was something structurally wrong with the DC-10 and that if those aircraft weren't taken out of the air, there would be another DC-10 crash within 40 days caused by the same thing." Within two weeks of the crash, all DC-10s flying in the United States were grounded and inspected, and potentially lethal defects were found in several of them.

Yet when a vice-president for public (continued on page 114) Future Tense (continued from page 106) relations at American Airlines was asked what he might do the next time he received a report of a dream like Booth's that specified an American Airlines plane, he told reporters. "Absolutely nothing. I'd ignore it. We discount the occult here. It goes against everything scientific and logical to even discuss such a damn thing as a dream."

Booth had never been interested in the occult. And somehow, it's better that he hadn't. The great mystery and profound question posed by his dreams would only be obscured if he'd been calling himself the Grand Wizard of Cincinnati. Because this isn't a story about the Jeane Dixons and Edgar Cayces of the world. It's about you and me, guys like Booth and guys like Pinkerton, Williams and Barker, for whom theories about ESP and "other dimensions" are no more than just that--theories--until suddenly they collide horrifically with our staunch reality and we cry out, "What can I do?"

•

Perhaps you don't consider yourself psychic. But some parapsychologists say that the power of precognitive dreaming is latent in just about everyone. So why not you? Experiments with ordinary people have sometimes produced greater percentages of psychic accuracy than your average big-time soothsayer ever dreamed of (no pun intended).

Every night, more than 200,000,000 Americans hit the sack to sleep, perchance to dream. Odds are, sooner or later, somebody you know is going to see tomorrow before it gets here. It might be you. So what can you do if you wake up one morning absolutely certain that somewhere in the Midwestern United States a nuclear reactor is going to have a catastrophic fuel meltdown? The first thing you can do is immediately write down your dream and send it to Robert D. Nelson at the Central Premonition Registry. P.O. Box 482, Times Square Station, New York, New York 10036.

Blond, blue-eyed Robert Nelson, assistant to the vice-president of The New York Times, regularly leaves his office in the Times Building at lunch hour but doesn't go to eat right away. Instead, he heads south one block to 42nd Street, then west toward Times Square Station, walking as fast as his 41-year-old 5'8" frame will propel him. The sidewalk is crowded, the air is muggy and maybe because this particular day is a Monday, there is irritation on the face of nearly everyone he passes. Someone pushes Nelson into an orange-juice vendor's stand and the vendor, a young Italian with a Smile button on his T-shirt, yells, "Hey, what the fuck?" as oranges roll into the gutter. Nelson apologizes and keeps stepping. He's in a hurry. He has an appointment back at his office in an hour and this trip is eating up his lunchtime.

Between Eighth and Ninth avenues on 42nd Street, he turns into the Times Square Station. In a moment, he's slipping his key into P.O. Box 482. He removes several letters, looks through them and opens one. "Shit," he says, "I sure hope this doesn't happen." The letter reads:

Dear sirs,

Please note that the following events will take place within the next three years:

1. General Haig will become the 40th President of the United States.

2. Queen Elizabeth of England will die suddenly of a heart attack. There will be a downpour of rain that will seem to symbolize the sadness of the people.

3. President Sadat of Egypt will be successfully assassinated, making his body almost unrecognizable.

The letter was sent from East Haven, Connecticut. It's neatly typed on crisp bond paper. All the spelling and grammar are correct. One is struck by the writer's tone: He doesn't think, suspect or have a hunch that these things might happen. He is simply informing Nelson that they will happen. If somebody doesn't like it, he can go suck eggs. You have to respect that kind of letter. And Nelson does.

"Now, this is a damn good bunch of shots. Good detail. Like Sadat's body being mutilated, specifying a heart attack for the queen and the downpour of rain. Good stuff."

They're not all like that, of course. Many are vague, some obviously the navel ruminations of the mentally unhinged. But a surprising number of the predictions to the Central Premonition Registry are, like this one, remarkably specific and coherent. It's no wonder that many Americans have no patience with the vague predictions of professional psychics; we ourselves have far more balls when it comes to laying the future on the line.

Nelson can attest to that. As the founder and principal staff of the Central Premonition Registry, he's read more than 7500 predictions from the American masses and, take it from him. Jeane Dixon doesn't necessarily get any more hot tips on the futurity stakes than your uncle Erskine. In fact, the widely known psychics rarely send premonitions to the registry.

"Of course they don't send their predictions to me," Nelson laughs. "Even when they're 'right,' their descriptions are so vague that by the registry's standards, they often wouldn't be credited with having made a solid prediction. Take the Sadat prediction in this letter I just opened. It has key details. A lot of professional psychics avoid giving those kinds of little details. They'll say something like, 'If Sadat isn't careful in the forthcoming year, misfortune could befall him.' If he is assassinated, they can say they had a 'hit.' Also, if he breaks his leg or loses his wallet. Of course, if nothing happens to him, they can then justify the prediction by saying that he must have been careful. I may earn a lot of enmity from well-known psychics with that statement, but I think I can stand the vibes."

And what are those standards that professional psychics don't want to be judged by? Simply what you would expect: that a prognostication correspond in easily recognizable ways with an actual future event. The more correspondence of details, the stronger the hit, as Nelson calls accurate predictions. But don't assume from Nelson's statements that John Q. Public is all that accurate, either. In the 11 years he has been taking Mr. Public's prescient pulse, only 47 of the predictions the registry has received have qualified as hits.

But some of those are remarkable. Among them: the difficulties of Apollo 14 (shortened second moon walk, descent problem); the capturing of the Joseph Yablonski killers (including a description of the four of them, correctly identifying one as a blonde woman); the crash of Rocky Marciano's Cessna; a 1976 Guatemalan earthquake that killed thousands; the deaths of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Igor Stravinsky and Nikita Khrushchev; the shooting of George Wallace; the apparent suicide of Congressman William Mills.

A former Ohioan, Nelson became interested in psychic phenomena when he was a psychology major at Ohio (continued on page 118) Future Tense (continued from page 114) Wesleyan. He conducted his first experiments with his twin brother, who, says Nelson, was a gifted medium. But the idea for the registry wasn't born until Nelson settled in New York, took a job in the circulation department of The New York Times and, in his spare time, volunteered to work with Dr. Stanley Krippner, director of the dream laboratory in the psychiatry department of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. With the inspiration and guidance of Dr. Krippner (who, along with Dr. Montague Ullman, pioneered and made respectable research into the psychic possibilities of dream states), Nelson established the Central Premonition Registry in 1968.

Once a few newspaper articles informed the world of the registry's existence, predictions gradually began flowing into Nelson's P.O. box. As he and his wife, Nanci, monitored them, they found that they fell into 14 categories:

1. Prominent Persons--Injury or Death

2. Politics

3. War, International Relations

4. Air, Land, Sea Disasters

5. Natural Disasters and Fires and Blasts

6. Economics

7. Miscellaneous: Arts, Religion, Etc.

8. The Kennedys

9. Science/Medicine

10. Space Exploration/UFOs

11. Civil Unrest, Protests

12. Prominent Persons--Miscellaneous

13. Sports, Races, Lotteries

14. Crime--Kidnaps, Murder

Of the registry's 47 hits, spread over those categories, the largest number (nine) fall within the area of natural disasters, fires and explosions, followed by air, land and sea disasters and prominent persons, injury or death, each with seven. The only two accurate sports predictions are the Mets' victory in the 1969 world series and the win, place and show numbers in a 1976 horse race. Obviously, in the twilight zone, death is more important than baseball.

But what's more interesting about those 47 hits is that almost half of them came from only six people--the folks Nelson aptly calls his "heavy hitters." Of those six, only one could be called a professional psychic. The five others are a Cincinnati minister, a London voice instructor (the C.P.R. receives several predictions from other countries each month), a San Diego housewife, a hotel housekeeper in Onsted, Michigan, and an aide in a New York State mental hospital. Most of the hitters are like that. Ordinary folk. No swamis, no blackmagic weirdos. Just, as far as Nelson can tell, humble working people. Some of them are so humble that they record their predictions under code names like The Arc, The Queen or the man who registers his predictions under the name Greywolf.

•

There's something immediately likable about Greywolf, but rather than describe him, I'll let him describe himself. "I live in New York. I'm 52 years old, 5'11", I got almost all gray hair, but I use Formula 16 to keep it dark. Actually, my hair started getting white when I was 11. I'm married. I weigh about 245 pounds. I'm Puerto Rican, but I look Jewish, and I'm ugly as hell."

Greywolf doesn't want anybody to know much more than that, not because he's afraid of losing his reputation among the New York literati nor because his swami told him never to use his powers for personal gain. "I'm hiding out from my ex-wife," he admits.

It's a paradox that such an enormous hulk of a man could possess such a delicate power as precognitive clairvoyance, but then, if things were always what they appeared to be, life would have no mystery. And Greywolf is a mystery compounded. Because he has recorded five accurate predictions with the Central Premonition Registry, making him Nelson's number-one amateur heavy hitter.

Greywolf specializes in air disasters. And that's something you should know about multiple hitters. Many of them are particularly attuned to certain kinds of tragedies: the deaths of movie stars, assassination attempts, train derailments. It makes you wonder if maybe all of human history, past, present and future, isn't hooked into a suprasensory switchboard where each classifiable event has its own listing in the cosmic directory: Department of Earthquakes, Department of Million-Dollar Robberies, Department of Ax Murders, and so on.

Anyway, Greywolf has a hotline to the Department of Air Disasters, having predicted no fewer than four of them over the past ten years. And those are the documented, recorded predictions. He claims, without proof, that he has accurately foreseen twice that number of aircraft-related catastrophes but failed to register them for a variety of reasons. For instance, his very first extranormal experience was so frightening that it didn't occur to him that it might be a psychic event. "I didn't know what the hell had happened."

It was in 1962, concurrent with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Greywolf was then a more compact 220 and he worked out with weights regularly. He was in the middle of one such workout at a local gym when he began to feel unusually fatigued. "I lay down and I was groggy, out of it. I just passed out. I don't know how long I was out, but when I woke up it was as though I sort of half woke up. Like I was semiconscious. And as I became more conscious, the first thing I knew was, 'I am a pilot.' I felt goggles over my eyes. I saw the canopy of an airplane. I was cold. Very cold. I thought to myself, I can't breathe. If I don't get oxygen, I'm going to pass out. There were two oxygen bottles, one on either side of the cockpit. I began hitting the one on the right, slamming it with my fist, trying to get it to work. I couldn't get it to work. I slammed the other one with my elbow. I couldn't get them to work. My heart was pounding. I remember thinking, My God, I'm dying."

Two days later, he heard a radio report that a U-2 photographic spy plane had disappeared while flying a mission over Cuba. Two weeks later, he recalls, he found a small newspaper story, reporting that the U-2 plane had been found, crashed in the Andes. The body of the pilot had been recovered and an autopsy determined that before the plane crashed, he had already died from lack of oxygen in the freezing winter air at a high altitude.

The moment he laid eyes on the article, Greywolf experienced a peculiar rush known only to those who have seen premonitions come true: a jolt of immediate recognition, followed by a moment of slipping, sinking into a fathomless void because the rational mind refuses to compute what has happened. And then a surge of excitement that borders on the sexual, the desire to let others, someone, anyone who'll believe you, know that there is far more here than meets the eye. He sat down and composed a letter to an Air Force commander, recounting the synchronicity of his "vision," as he termed it then, and the actual U-2 crash.

Then, as he reread his letter, he experienced a downer also known only to those who've had premonitions: the realization that once you tell others what's happened to you, 99 percent of them (continued on page 223) Future Tense (continued from page 118) will begin wondering if you're all there. He destroyed the letter.

Instead of risking the reputation of his sanity both publicly and privately (his wife, an orthodox Catholic, had a very low tolerance for unorthodox weirdness), Greywolf kept his experience to himself and quietly went on a six-year occult reading binge, absorbing every bit of information he could find on psychic phenomena. During those years, he developed an interest in karate, and through karate discovered zazen, a Zen meditation in which one sits motionless before a blank white wall until he goes beyond boredom into a complete dissolution of ego consciousness. Zazen became a model for a psychic technique that Greywolf developed for his own experiments. He would relax in a chair and visualize a blank white screen and keep his attention focused there, careful not to let his own fantasies intrude on the void behind his eyes. He waited for spontaneous images. If he saw nothing after two or three minutes of deep and constant concentration, he stopped. The first few weeks he tried that experiment, he saw nothing he couldn't attribute to his own thought processes breaking through onto the screen. Again and again, nothing. Then, late in the evening of May 5, 1969, as he sat focusing on his mental screen, he saw something that felt alien, not a part of his own subconscious at all.

"I saw a small civilian aircraft with a long blue stripe and large numbers on the side flying through thick fog, coming in for a landing over rough terrain. It was flying low, at an angle. As she came down, one wheel hit the ground and the plane flipped over and hit a tree with tremendous impact. When the plane stopped moving, I could see the numbers clearly along its side. They started with the letter N, and then there were four numbers, followed by another letter. Then I saw a man lying down on the ground, half propped up by a tree. His head was falling forward on his chest, so I couldn't see his face, but I had the distinct impression that he was a fighter, a boxer. I seemed aware of his thoughts, and he was thinking something like, So this is what it's like to die."

When the series of images stopped, Greywolf, still uncertain that what he'd seen was a premonition, nonetheless wrote a detailed description of it, including the numbers he remembered seeing on the side of the small aircraft. Having recently learned of the C.P.R., he mailed off his description in a letter that Nelson received on May 9, 1969.

At approximately ten P.M. on August 31, 1969, a Cessna 172 carrying a pilot, Rocky Marciano and another passenger crashed in a farm field two and a half miles southwest of Newton Airport, not far from Des Moines. The pilot, Glenn Eugene Belz, wasn't rated for instrument flying, and there was a low cloud ceiling that night, affording no more than two miles' visibility. Belz, unaccustomed to landing solely by instrument, apparently miscalculated the location of the airport in the fog.

The numbers and letters on the side of the plane (N3149X) corresponded with numbers and letters Greywolf had seen, save one (Greywolf saw a two instead of a three). The details of Greywolf's premonition were sufficient to earn him a citation for a hit from the C.P.R., as well as Nelson's deep respect. "Let me put it this way," Nelson says. "Many a professional psychic could predict that something bad would happen to me in the next two weeks and I wouldn't worry. But if Greywolf predicted it, I'd be a little nervous."

Nerves play a big part in the world of premonitions. Take, for instance, the woman who foresaw the assassination attempt on George Wallace. When Nelson called her to request that she fill out a questionnaire he uses to compile data on the personal characteristics of hitters, she confessed that she'd sunk into an awful depression since the event had happened. She said she felt somehow responsible for Wallace's injury. Nelson tried to convince her she wasn't, but she told him that she never again wanted anything to do with psychic phenomena and refused to cooperate with him. "This whole thing has made me a nervous wreck," she said, and hung up. He has not heard from her since.

Even Greywolf, by most people's standards a relatively unshakable soul, confesses that the burden of his vision has sometimes been more than he could carry. "Do you know the frustration of seeing disasters before they happen and trying to get somebody to listen to you, and nobody--nobody--can help you? What makes you crazy is wanting to warn people, knowing that no person in power to do anything will listen. Bob Nelson has saved a lot of folks' sanity. He can't do much, but at least he can give them credit for having experienced something that most people wouldn't believe."

It's true that Nelson can't do much. He finances the registry out of his pocket with lecture fees he earns from various colleges and civic organizations interested in the paranormal. Although he has been a guest on the Merv Griffin show and the registry has been written up in several publications, no one has stepped forward to finance it. So far, he and Nanci have managed to handle the daily flow of predictions, filing each one on its own index card. The cards, in the basement of the Nelsons' eight-room suburban home--all 7500 of them--are stored along with original letters, copies of Nelson's replies, the questionnaires he sends to all who submit predictions to the C.P.R. and 11 years of correspondence. Each day, the Nelsons and an occasional volunteer scrutinize dozens of newspapers, checking each story against their backlog of predictions. It's a tedious job that would be done far better by a computer, but Nelson can't afford to set up such a system. His main hope that this might change comes from a call he recently received from an organization in Seattle that's trying to put together a national computerized premonitions hot-line with a toll-free number. "I don't know how far along they are," he says. Meanwhile, since Nelson is neither subsidized nor computerized, one wonders what he can do to prevent disasters.

"The registry is basically a research project," he says. "Originally, we had no intentions of being a disaster-deferral agency. But if I ever receive two or more premonitions from different parts of the country describing what appears to be the same event, I can get to people who can prevent, for instance, a plane crash easier than the people who had the premonitions could. I heard that a professional psychic in New York also had a premonition about the DC-10 crash that Booth saw. If both of them had written to me, it would have been the first time in the registry's history that I had the same prediction on file from two people. You can bet I would have been on the phone to American Airlines as soon as I received the second prediction."

Shawn Robbins, a 34-year-old ex-model, is the New York psychic to whom Nelson refers. She, like Greywolf, is an aircraft-disaster specialist, having predicted several plane crashes over the radio during the past six years. She first predicted the O'Hare DC-10 crash in January 1979 while being interviewed on a talk show on station KRMG in Tulsa, and she predicted it twice more on talk shows in Savannah and Cincinnati. She didn't dream the sharp details that Booth had dreamed, but she did specify that the crash would involve an American Airlines plane flying out of O'Hare, bound for the West Coast.

Like Booth, Robbins hadn't heard of the Central Premonition Registry at the time of her premonition. Yet she points out that many of her premonitions have occurred within hours or days of the actual event and that it would be nearly impossible for Nelson or anybody else to prevent a calamity under such short notice. For instance, one of her most famous hits--the collision of a PSA jet and a Cessna over San Diego in September 1978--came to her on the day of the crash. She made her prediction on a radio talk show a mere four hours before it occurred.

"In cases like that," says Nelson, "we'd need a computer system, a WATS hotline, direct lines to the FAA and to people at decision-making levels in airline companies." But even with a system such as he describes, Nelson admits that most premonitions lack sufficient detail to enable a computer to isolate when, where and how a disaster will occur. "With the best resources and equipment, our greatest effectiveness would be in averting plane crashes, and that's because people are frequently able to identify the airline, and sometimes the airport involved. Plus, we have control over our airplanes. We can ground them if we think something's wrong. But earthquakes and other natural disasters--who can control nature?"

That's a question that applies not only to natural disasters but to the phenomenon of the premonition itself. Who can control it? For most people who've hit with the C.P.R., their entry into that odd time zone turns out to be a one-shot thing, an incredible experience never to be forgotten, and certainly not under their control. Many of them echo David Booth's lament: They felt like something had taken them over.

But does something take them over? Or are premonitions the evidence of a little-used faculty common to all of us, one that occasionally becomes active in a few of us? Or (and this is the only explanation many people will accept) are premonitions merely startling coincidences and nothing more? Nobody knows for sure, but if anyone has a good idea, it's Dr. Montague Ullman, psychoanalyst, author and founder of America's only dream laboratory devoted exclusively to parapsychological research.

•

Monty Ullman is a tall, slender, gray-haired man with the dignified bearing of a scholar and the impersonal yet warm manner of most good shrinks. Above all, he is a scientist. During the early years of his psychoanalytic practice, he was intrigued and then fascinated by the frequency with which his patients reported dreams about him that contained bits of information about his private life that could have been learned only through means other than direct communication.

He discussed this phenomenon with several analysts, some of whom had also experienced it but had dismissed it as coincidence. Ullman wasn't at all sure that it was coincidence and he was determined to explore the matter further. Out of that determination came the dream lab at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Ullman was director of the Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics from 1962 to 1978, when he retired, leaving the lab in charge of his longtime research associate, Charles Honorton. (The lab, recently renamed Psychophysical Research Laboratories, has been relocated in Princeton, New Jersey.)

Some of the results of Ullman's experiments with Alan Vaughan and other psychics were published in Dream Telepathy, a book Ullman wrote with his colleague Dr. Stanley Krippner and Vaughan in 1972. (Vaughan, by the way, is the one nationally known psychic who regularly sends premonitions to the C.P.R. and has recorded five hits, tying him with Greywolf for the lead on Nelson's hit list.) Ullman's conclusion in the book is clear: There is something about the dream state that certainly makes premonitions possible. "In my opinion," he says, "they do occur."

How they occur is another matter, one upon which Ullman can still only speculate. But he and other parapsychological scientists do have some notions about the psychological make-up of people who have premonitions.

"It seems that the early mother-child relationship is the cradle of all ESP functions in human beings," he says. "There is a nonverbal, nonphysical line of communication open between mother and child that must be open for the infant to survive. Literature is filled with accounts of mothers' 'sensing' their infant was in trouble or hungry, or in pain, even though the child was separated from her. This whole area of the psychic relationship between mothers and children needs to be explored further."

Ullman speculates that the reason many neurotic patients seem to exhibit some sort of psychic connection with their therapists is that early in the therapeutic process, the patient may temporarily regress emotionally into a state of symbiotic dependence and closeness with the therapist. However, Ullman points out that most patients, upon overcoming their neuroses, also lose the psychic link with their doctors.

But the parapsychological--"psi"--capabilities of neurotics in therapy are an exception, Ullman says, for experimental evidence by other parapsychologists indicates that emotionally unstable people display far lower psychic ability than well-integrated and outgoing individuals. "They've found that generally, the less neurotic the personality, the better the test scores in an experimental situation."

Another factor that bears heavily upon a person's psi capabilities, says Ullman, is what is known in the parapsychology field as the "sheep and goat syndrome." What this means is that those who believe that human beings are capable of extrasensory awareness (the sheep) generally score better in psi experiments than those who think it's all a bunch of hooey (goats).

The third factor is the relative ease with which a person can relax and enter what Ullman calls "passive states" such as daydreaming or experience an altered state of consciousness such as hypnosis. Nervous sleepers, people who routinely fail to remember their dreams and people who find it difficult to be calm for more than a few minutes will have a hard time awakening their psychic potential.

Ullman has also observed that, "on occasion, certain precognitive dreams are different from ordinary dreams--they are more insistent and persistent in the dreamer's thoughts afterward.

"The dream is either about the trivial or the terrible," says Ullman. "That is to say, one may have a premonition about finding a quarter on the sidewalk or about the death of a close relative, but rarely about a moderately stressful event such as going to the dentist, for instance."

Dreams of terrible disasters often produce acute guilt feelings in the dreamers themselves, based on their concern that they might have averted the actual event. "There's no evidence that a person who has had a premonition of a disaster is in any way responsible for it," he says. "Sometimes, when the disaster involves someone close to the subject, the sensitivity the subject has to the victim creates this feeling of responsibility. Many people who've written to me and reported having precognitive dreams about painful circumstances become terrified, so terrified that they develop a fear of dreaming itself."

Ullman is quick to point out that only a small percentage of disaster dreams actually come true. "We've seen one in our experiments, where a subject had a dream that warned him of a real future incident. But we've recorded hundreds of dreams of accidents that never happened." Obviously, that is what makes it hard for people like Nelson to sort out the real from the false prophets.

Given that difficulty, plus the catch-22ish fact that a premonition can only be positively certified as a premonition through hindsight, will mankind ever be able to use precognition as an early-warning system to stop impending disasters? We put the question to Charles Honorton in Princeton.

"Well," says Honorton, "even if you had ten of the most talented, reliable psychics sitting in one room, concentrating night and day on picking up future catastrophes, it would still be a very iffy proposition at this stage of our knowledge about precognition. Even the best psychics are wrong as often as they are right. They can be dramatically correct or completely off. So most of our current research is directed toward making psychic ability generally more reliable, so that we know the psychological and physical correlates--signs--that indicate a person has had a true premonition. But, frankly, the limited funds available for this kind of research make it unlikely that we're going to advance very fast in this area. If we had more research going on, then I might say, yes, one day, we might be able to distinguish a real premonition from a false one nearly all the time."

But then Honorton throws a philosophical monkey wrench into the works that, as he says, gets us into some fairly cosmic questions. "The fact is," he says with a reflective sigh, "when you talk about preventing a disaster based on a premonition, you run into a paradox. Let's say you have a psychic who's almost always accurate and he predicts an accident. If you prevent the accident, he didn't have a precognition. It might just be that certain things are unavoidable."

But even if our scientists are eventually able to recognize true premonitions most of the time, and even if there is some way around their paradoxical nature that enables us to use premonitions to prevent disasters, one barrier may never be overcome: human skepticism. The FAA's Williams says that after Booth's premonition of the American Airlines DC-10 crash was made public, "The general reaction around the aviation industry was one of amazement, because the details were so nearly right. And in this one case, I think many people in this business wanted to accept Booth's dreams as premonition. But at the same time, they don't want to believe such phenomena exist, that such a thing can happen." And perhaps that's the biggest paradox of all.

•

It's lunchtime again at The New York Times and Robert Nelson heads over to the Times Square Station P.O. box, just as he does every day at noon. It's a good day for premonitions and the box is stuffed--12 letters. He can't read them all at the moment but opens one just for fun. "Dear sirs," he reads aloud, "There will be a massive earthquake in New York on September 1, 1979." Nelson checks his watch and notes that today is September first. "Well, one way or another," he says, "I won't have to check up on this prediction after midnight tonight."

Back on the street, a truck filled with gravel rumbles by, shaking the pavement a bit with its weight. Nelson pauses, notes the source of the rumbling and keeps walking.

"Odds are, sooner or later, somebody you know is going to see tomorrow before it gets here."

"Greywolf experienced a peculiar rush known only to those who have seen premonitions come true."

" 'What makes you crazy is wanting to warn people, knowing no one in power to do anything will listen.' "

Tomorrow's News Today: Some Predictions

We asked Robert D. Nelson, director of the Central Premonition Registry, to give us a sample of the predictions he has received that pertain to the Eighties. He divided them into two categories: those he's received from his "heavy hitters" and those he's received from first-time contributors to the registry.

Seven Heavy Predictions

1. There will be a new Israeli leader in 1980.

2. Ayatollah Khomeini will be deposed by the end of 1980.

3. Beginning in the summer of 1980, there will be strange weather reversals during the coming decade, bringing heavy rainfall to normally arid parts of the country and producing aridity in normally wet areas.

4. There will be a tragedy at a British air show in the summer of 1980. A British vintage Moth biplane will hit a British Airways Vickers jet.

5. There will be a new agreement reached by Begin, Arafat and Sadat early in 1980. A few months later, Arafat will be assassinated.

6. The Soviet Union will launch the first space station in 1985.

7. Sometime during the Eighties, there will be an atomic explosion near Albuquerque. Nine will be killed and the fallout effects will make the area unsafe to live in for years afterward.

The Best from the Rest

Politics

• Jimmy Carter will be renominated by the Democrats in 1980, with a black Vice-President.

• Jerry Brown will team up with Linda Ronstadt to win the primaries.

• Carter won't run for re-election. Edward M. Kennedy will be nominated but will never become President, due to a fatal accident.

• Richard Nixon will succeed Jerry Brown as California governor.

• The next President will be shot in 1981.

• Jerry Brown will be President in 1988 and his Vice-President will be Robert F. Kennedy's son.

• George Wallace will be elected President in 1980 but will be assassinated before the year is out.

• Edward M. Kennedy will run for President but will lose due to a scandal and family troubles involving a suicide.

Economics

• In 1981/1982, the U. S. economy will turn around and there will be 12 years of prosperity (no recessions).

Prominent Persons (general)

• George Harrison will release a new album in 1980.

• Kate Jackson will have a baby in 1980.

• Richard and Pat Nixon will break up in 1980.

Prominent Persons (death or injury)

• The Emperor of Japan will die in 1980.

• Lucille Ball will die in 1980.

• Shots will be fired at the President in 1980 but will miss him.

• There will be an assassination attempt on President Carter in August or September 1980.

Natural Disasters

• In the Eighties, there will be heavy earthquakes in California, causing severe damage in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There will also be a serious earthquake in New York.

• Volcanic activity during the Eighties will raise the earth's temperature and melt the polar ice caps.

• During the winter of 1980, a department-store roof will collapse, killing many.

Science and Medicine

• In the Eighties, there will be electrotreatments for gums, eyesight and hearing problems.

International Relations

• Warfare in parapsychological (psi) functions between the U.S.S.R. and the U. S. will become public in the spring and summer of 1980.

• There will be a new treaty between the U.S.S.R. and China in 1980.

• Puerto Rico will become the 51st state in 1980.

• There will be a new Soviet leader in 1980.

Civil Unrest

• A new revolutionary movement code named Samizdat will begin in Russia in 1980. It could threaten to overthrow the government.

Miscellaneous

• There will be a new Pope in 1980, a revolution in Catholicism and an end to the rule of celibacy for priests.

• By 1985, no animal, fish or fowl will be eaten in the U. S. The nation will have to become vegetarian.

Special Heavy Prediction for 1990 from Greywolf, Heavy of Heavies

A large, glowing, mysterious object of gigantic proportions will appear moving toward earth through the constellations Pisces, Taurus and Gemini. This object is most likely an asteroid, but when it nears our solar system, it will cause havoc on earth for ten years or more.