Just before his title fight in 1947, Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt he was in the ring with Doyle. ‘I hit him a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me.’ Doyle never moved and the crowd were shouting ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ He was so upset by the dream Robinson asked Adkins, his trainer and promoter, to call off the fight. Adkins told him ‘Dreams don’t come true.
If they did I’d be a millionaire.* In the eighth round Doyle went down from a left hook to the jaw. He never got up, and died the next day.
The problem is that many such dreams felt to be predictive never come true. Often dreamers want to believe they have precognitive dreams, perhaps to feel they will not be surprised by, and thereby anxious about, the future. When the baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, and before it was known he was murdered, 1,300 people sent ‘precognitive’ dreams concerning his fate in response to newspaper headlines. Only seven of these dreams included the three vital factors—that he was dead, naked and in a ditch.
Out of 8,000 dreams in his Registry for Prophetic Dreams,
Robert Nelson, who was sent dreams pnor to what was predicted, has found only 48 which bear detailed and recognisable connection with later events.
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