Diana’s Dream (Rant 106)

‘I will die in a car crash, made to look like an accident’, Princess Diana foresaw. Thanks to the man who used to wash the Princess’ knickers, the relative accuracy of that lethal prediction is now vindicated. Whatever else you may opine about poor, dear Diana, one thing is certain: she was right – dead right – about the manner of her death.



Relax. This is not going to be about that corniest of all subjects, conspiracies – everything is known about those. What interests me is something else.



How did Diana know?



Grant me, it’s a fair question. The most maladroit of conspirators plotting my death is unlikely to inform me in detail how he is going to do it. Not even Peter Sellers’ hilarious inspector Clouzot would do that. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean, should the villain hint at poisoning, say, I’d immediately hire a food taster – well, something like that. Were a tube accident be intimated, I’d start travelling by bus. And so on.



So, again, how could the Princess have known?



In spite of what you think, this is going to be easy. I know the answer. She had had a dream about it.



And how do you happen to know that, Father Frank?



My lips are sealed. You’ll just have to trust me. Of course, Diana was ‘spiritual’. Dabbled in astrology, faith-healing and the like. She also thought herself a bit of a psychic. Perhaps, just perhaps, she was, like many of us, you and I, also a little bit paranoid. Of her imminent death, though, she had had confirmation from a dream.



Dream, eh? Pretty flimsy stuff, surely…



I disagree. The Bible takes them seriously, for one thing. From Jacob’s dream of the heavenly ladder at Bethel in Genesis, to St Joseph – Mary’s husband – in St Matthew’s Gospel, the message is clear – God sometimes uses dreams to speak to mortals, either directly or through angels. But don’t get me wrong. Some dreams are demonic or deceptive. Homer (or is it Virgil?) puts it poetically: false dreams issue from a gate of ivory, whilst true ones proceed out of a gate of horn. By the way, the Greeks - fountainheads of knowledge and wisdom - regarded dreams as children of night and brothers of sleep and death – fittingly, the deity who had authority over dreams was Hermes, the guide of departed souls in the underworld. Moreover, I ought to mention that degraded Scarlet Pimpernel of the shadows, Osama Bin Laden. A remarkable videotape found in Afghanistan shows him discussing his followers’ dreams prior to 9/11. Apparently, one guy had dreamt of a soccer game played against Americans – with the Al-Qaida team dressed as pilots. Another dream had been by man in Kandahar. He saw himself carrying a fallen plane over his shoulders through the desert. Bin Laden naturally gloated over all this but, prophetic confirmation of dreams notwithstanding, worried about security. What if everybody started blabbing about his aeronautical dreams? Osama ordered his chaps to keep their mouth shut.



Wow, Fr Frank, this is really amazing. Still, one doesn’t like to be gullible. Religious people’s evidence is tricky. The supernatural - some would call it superstition… Disreputable stuff. It goes against the grain…I mean, honestly, a rational person would laugh it off. Hard to swallow, isn’t it?



Let me take the bull by the horns. (The horn’s gate, presumably.) Either God can do that – speak to men in and through dreams – or He cannot. I believe He can. I could leave it at that. But, even if unbelieving (horribile dictu!), you might glance at J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time. Out of his own dream experience, he argued we, all the time, have precognition of future events. (The future already exists, he assured us.) It’s simply that either we don’t notice it, or forget it, or dismiss it as mere coincidences. Suppose I dreamt tonight of Saddam Hussein’s capture by US special forces in a certain yellow house in Iraq’s Falluja. Suppose also in a few days’ time the Yanks located the dethroned tyrant in the very place. Coincidence? Come off it! It wouldn’t wash. But, of course, the real challenge is about the mechanism, or the how of this precognition business. Scientists, respectable ones, want to know about how something happens. How to repeat it in controlled lab experiments – and all that. Otherwise, whatever it is, it ain’t science. Dunne knew that and so he proffered an explanation. Alas, it involves a bizarre metaphysical theory of infinite regress, serial time, mathematical symbolism and so unhelpfully on. I’d be a bloody liar if I told you I fully understand it. With J.L. Borges, however, I am inclined to say that the fact of self-consciousness does not imply, pace Dunne, the existence of innumerable observers (one who knows that he knows another who knows that he knows…and so on) fitting into no less numerous dimension of time.



Aargh, Fr Frank, unfair! How can you believe this stodge would convince anyone?



Look, the instances of premonitory dreaming he cites are most interesting. I only regret he seems not to have read Artemidorus of Daldi’s Oneirocritica. Had he done so, he might incidentally have realised a dream’s premonitory meaning hangs a great deal on the dreamer’s personality. And on contextual culture. So, dreaming of one’s own death need not be bad news. In Tarot symbolism, for example, death can be a symbol of transformation, rebirth, new life. Still, Dunne’s theory would at least account for the puzzling phenomena of déjà vu. And personal immortality is another perk. Nonetheless, Dunne’s greatest influence has been not scientific but literary. On writers such as J.B. Priestley. Plays like An Inspector calls and Time and the Conways utilise Dunnian ideas. Stimulating artistic imagination is perhaps his best legacy.



Ahem, Fr Frank, what about Princess Diana?



OK. Hold tight. Hear the priest’s confession. Thanks to the time-hallowed method of incubation, the Princess visited me in a dream the other night.



Wow! What was she like?



As ravishingly beautiful as ever. Eternity obviously becomes her. She wore tight-fitting, smart grey trousers and a pale-blue, heavy silk shirt open at the neck. I noticed the long sleeves, gathered at the wrists – her fine white hands brushed mine. And I remember her row of big pearls. But her China-blue eyes were full of sadness.



Did she say anything?



‘Pray for my children, Fr Julian (my second name). And for my mother. And brother. And Charles and Camilla.’



Is that all? Nothing else? Did she say who it was who…?



Here I must heed what a Rant reader advised some time ago: ‘It is not wise to recount one’s dreams on the Internet.’