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Science and the Spook – George Owen and Victor Sims

Nothing ever happens         to me! I have no phychic powers! Only once in my life do I appear to have played any part in a telepathic episode. That involved a dream and is rather amusing.

Some years ago we had a cat who was a night rover, and was usually given his supper in the kitchen before being allowed out on his travels. One very chill January night I put on an electric fire so that he could get warm while eating his repast. Eventually he had had his fill and went happily out into the dark.

I went to bed where my wife was already installed and asleep.

About three in the morning she awoke having had a "nonsense" dream. She had found herself back in the East Anglian farmhouse of her youth, and in the kitchen where a fire blazed in the old-fashioned coal range, universal in those days in the country. Everything was quite normal but for one striking exception. A refrigerator had been fitted into one side of the coal-range. My wife, in her dream, turned to her father who was present and declared "What a silly place to put a fridge! It's too hot, the fridge is too hot!"

Waking with this thought in her mind she went down to the kitchen where she found that the door of our refrigerator was, in verity, too hot. I had forgotten to turn off the electric fire-a portable one-and had left it blazing full blast directly opposite the refrigerator whose door was now noticeably warn to the touch.

One may, if one desires, ascribe this to coincidence. However it is odd that in my recollection that was the only night in a long and cold winter that I had left the fire on, and the only night in which my wife developed an anxiety about the matter.

I like to think that my wife had a telepathic dream inspired by a guilty conscience I had about it, but active only in subconscious layers of my mind.