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August 14, 2024 15 mins
Today's theme is Dreams. Michelle shares us about the most common nightmares and Edwin tells us about a society called the "Premonition Bureau" designed to help people by predicting the future.   


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Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Alan was working when he complained of severe headaches, and
he wrote a note saying that he thought there had
been a train accident about an hour ago. The train
had the accident at nine sixteen pm, and.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
He had written the note at ten fifteen. Get ready
for a campfire story.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with
playful banter that'll keep you up at night.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
So throw someone on the fire and put a wiener
on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Here we are in the woods and we're talking about dreams,
or specifically nightmares. It's nighttime and Edwin, you're going through
a run through the canyon behind your house. The moon
is out like it's just a surreal environment. Everything is

(00:59):
black and white. You are running, and you're running when
suddenly you are stopped in your tracks by her. Now
everything is dim except for her. She is blowing mysterious, white, beautiful, terrifying.
She smiles and you turn and you run in panic

(01:21):
until you wake up in a cold sweat. It was
just a dream. It's still dark out, but you decide
to roll over and get out of bed. You scream.
She is there, standing above your bed, smiling. You dash
out of your room, down the stairs, out the garage,
feet hummeling the asphalt as you run down the road.

(01:43):
But then she is there in front of you again, smiling.
Scared out of your wits, you stop, and you wake
up in your bed in a cold sweat. It was
just a dream. It is dark out. You decide to
roll over and get out of bed. You scream. She
is there again, standing above your bed, smiling. You dash

(02:08):
out of the room, down the stairs, out the garage,
feet pummeling the asphalt as you run down the road.
But then she's there in front of you again, smiling.
Scared out of your wits, you stop, and she glides
away and begins to smile and talk to a group
of your friends on the side of the road. You

(02:30):
try to scream at them, and you wake up in
a cold sweat. It was just a dream. It's stark out,
but you decide to roll over and get out of bed.
You scream, she's there again, standing above your bed, smiling.
You dash out of the room, down the stairs, out

(02:51):
the garage, feet puddling assphalt as you run down the road.
But then she is there, standing with your friends smiling
and talking. You try to warn them, but she just
turns to smile at you, and you wake up in
a cold sweat.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
See you fool me once? Okay? Why three times?

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Oh we got like ten morethies?

Speaker 2 (03:18):
All right? Six? Okay? Seven? I don't know was that
actually waking up or.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Yeah, you actually woke up this time. So now you're awake,
but you're traumatized.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
So I had that dream within a dream thing once. Yeah,
I woke up thinking that I had missed school.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Ah, that's a classic one. And then you just keep
waking up.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, and then I woke up and then I was like, oh,
now I woke up.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
I mean, nightmares are pretty common, but the most common
nightmare is actually about falling. Have you ever had one
of those?

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, Oh man, with the relief you feel once you
wake up, it's oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
And then the second is being chased, third death dream
where you die, fourth feeling lost, fifth feeling trapped, teeth
falling out. I've had that is also a big one,
and I've had that one. Waking up lake is a
common one.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, I've had that.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Loved one. Passing. I mean there's ones that it like
makes sense, visited by a deceased friend and family, feeling
unprepared for an exam your spouse, leaving you inability to
find your car. I feel like I have that dream
once a week for some reason, technology malfunction, have that one.
Sometimes I can't text in a dream, and it's like

(04:39):
I really need to text for some reason.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Have you had dreams with social media?

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Well, I mean this whole topic started because I was
having a weird dream about Apple podcast comments where I
was like, in my dream I was reading Apple podcast
comments and someone had just written sad.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
I remember having MySpace like no notification dreams back in
the day.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
Oh and uh, going bald is on the bottom of
the list.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
You know what I've had losing my eyesight.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Ooh interesting, Okay, losing a finger also.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yeah, malformation of your body is one of them.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
I've had dreams of not car crashes, but like almost
like near misses.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Oh feel so real?

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Oh yeah, pretty intense.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
I barely have dreams anymore, like I rarely really every
fucking night.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Man, Yes, that was exhausting.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
It's exhausting. A lot of them now are like Robert disappearing.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Okay, that's fair, Okay, Okay, So there was this guy.
He was a psychiatrist. He was educated in Cambridge. He
was also very into clairvoyance aka sensitivity to certain things
that makes them able to tell the future right. His
name was John Barker. He went to the newspaper, The

(06:02):
Evening Standard, and he pitched this idea to them. You see,
he thought that there were people out there that could
sense disasters and things like that, and if he could
get them to write in the premonitions and then it
turned out to be true, they would have an accurate
record of people actually predicting the future. The editors were like, hey, yeah,

(06:23):
it sounds good, let's do it. And then the letters
and phone call started coming in. They ended up getting
seven hundred and thirty two in total, eighteen of them,
though just eighteen seemed to be true. Out of the
ones that were true, the majority of those came from
only two people.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Odds of that happening are pretty low.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Two people just nailing it, because it's like whoa, because
you probably know something right. So these two people were
probably what he thought were clairvoyant. Kathleen Lorna Middleton and
Alan Hencher. Kathleen was a ballet teacher, quite wealthy. Alan
was a switchboard operator and he would get a premonition.

(07:02):
He would also get strong headaches, and they started happening
after he got in a car accident.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Of course, John Barker learned.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Of these people for his project, but these two people
had already had this for a while, like they kind
of knew this of themselves already, that they could predict
the future. In March of nineteen sixty seven, the book
review that I found in The Guardian on this book
that was written about all these cases, they talked about
this thing where Alan called the Evening Standard and told

(07:29):
them about this premonition that there was going to be
a plane crash with one hundred and twenty three debts,
which is pretty accurate, right, And then Swiss airline Globe Air,
the flight from Thailand to Switzerland burst into flames.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
One hundred and.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Twenty six people died, like I think there was one
survivor that was uninjured.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
And then three of them survived but they were injured. Okay,
So back to John Barker, right, the psychiatrist. His idea
for this project was that he wanted it to be
a type of warning system, but there was some weird
time space continue on things. It's like if somebody tells
you that this is gonna happen, doesn't it mean that
it's gonna happen, Like can't really change it? Or like

(08:08):
if you try to change it, that's what causes it,
because how could you even prevent that? Like if you
say a a plane crash is like, oh right, that's
gonna happen. The BBC Radio four the group has a
box set about these premonitions, like in a whole series
in case wanna go into them. But anyway, the most
famous one of these cases was the Abervan disaster. The

(08:30):
disasters what triggered the Premonitions project turns out in October
nineteen sixty six, there was this enormous and I'm saying
huge landslide that just fell over a school and like
a row of houses in this town.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
It killed one.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Hundred and forty four people, mainly children. And in the
book review that I read, they mentioned this this was
triggered it all. But there had been several reports before
this landslide, and.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
They were pretty creepy.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
Like one of them, there was this ten year old girl,
Errol made Jones, who had told her mother the ninth
before that she had this dream and she said, Mummy,
last night I dreamt I went to school and there
was no school there. Something black had come down all
over it. And then there was another one, an eight

(09:23):
year old boy, Paul Davies.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
He had drawn a.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Picture of a group of figures digging the hillside and
above it there were the words the end. Both of them,
Paul and Errol died in the disaster.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
And John Parker was obviously moved by this when he
heard it, so he was like, okay, let's start the
Premonition's bureau. And then April nineteen sixty seven, Kathleen, one
of the premonition like top dogs in the project with Clairvoyant,
the one that knows what's up, sent in a vision
saying that an astronaut who was heading to the moon
this is going to end in tragedy. She saw an
image of a petrified astronaut crouched inside a spherical spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
Oh, that's like really eerie to me.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
It's a terrifying image. I don't like it. I don't
like that at all. It was.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
It was weird because they had a plan, but the
government didn't say what they planned on doing exactly like
people just knew that there was a launch and they
were good trying to get to.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
The Moon, but it was really it wasn't even a
moon mission.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
It turns out that Vladimir Mikhailovich Comorov a cosmonaut. Since
they're Russia, they're not really astronauts or cosmonauts. They were
going around Earth. The orbit was going around Earth that
they're gonna sent in another one to like connect and
then the astronauts were going to go into one spaceship
come back down to Earth if that was a mission.
But there's a lot of things that went wrong as

(10:43):
they were heading up there, like the second launch couldn't
go through, so they're like, hey, you know what, come back,
there's no other spacecraft, just come back.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
He tried two times. Both times he kind.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Of failed, like the thing just kept skipping by the
ways that kind of going into the water. So imagine
like I need to get there at an angle, uh huh,
skipped went back out well, trying to get into Earth.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
The third time he did. Finally Cross was going to
help with the parachute didn't open.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
And it crashed and the article said that they died
from the fire and I'm like, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
The fall well hopefully it was cul.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Hopefully yeah, hopefully he didn't feel anything, and like stand up,
there we go, We're gone. So she was right the
one that, you know, she said this is gonna end
in tragedy. And there was other other premonitions in there,
the assassination of Robert Kennedy. It was Kathleen also couldn't
you know, get the image out of her mind. She
was like, something's going to happen. I feel like history
is going to repeat itself. This guy's going to die.

(11:41):
And then yeah, it happened. And then there was one
where both Kathleen and Alan, both clairvoyants and part of
this project, predicted the same thing and it was the
hither Green rail crash. It all started with Alan right.
It was October eleventh, nineteen sixty seven, and Alan told
John Barker that there would be a main line rail crash.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Three weeks later, on the.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
First of November, Kathleen wrote to John Parker saying that
she was feeling depressed and had visions of a crash
quote maybe a railway, a station, people involved waiting in
the station, and the words chairing cross. About a month
after that, the train between Hastings and Charing Cross jumped
off the rails. Four carriages flipped, two of them had

(12:25):
their signes ripped off, windows were smashed.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
It was a disaster.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
And when it happened, Alan was working when he complained of
severe headaches and he wrote a note saying that he
thought there had been a train accident about an hour ago,
and that was almost exact. The train had the accident
at nine sixteen pm and he had written the note
at ten fifteen.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Geez, do you believe in premonitions?

Speaker 3 (12:50):
I think they're interesting because you know, I've had a few.
But I think I also well, yeah, I told you
about my premonition dream with a cheating Yeah, but I
think you kind of know it with those kind of things.
But random stuff like oh, a plane is gonna crash
or a train is gonna flip. And the example of

(13:11):
that woman the man being frozen out in space or whatever,
that's like the opposite of what happened to him. He
did die, but he didn't get stuck out in space.
He crashed to Earth. So it's interesting the ability to
interpret those images.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
It might be also like an odds thing because if
you're constantly seeing things like you're gonna get a match,
but then there are some like for example, these right,
you get hundreds.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Of premonition scenting.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, and then a few of them happen to be true,
and it's the same two people that are like getting
them right. So I mean that tells me maybe there
is something to it. I don't know, like there's so
much stuff we don't understand the world. So yeah, but
you know the movie Final Destination, that thing creep me out.

(14:01):
And whenever I see any means about the truck.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
With the law that was immediately what I thought of
was just always driving behind the log truck.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
If you know, you know, if you don't let us
keep this inside joke amongst the millennials and.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
The and also you know, you don't need to see it.
You don't really need the trauma if you don't have
it already. So you don't need to see Final Destination,
don't one, two, three, four, five, You don't need.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
To see the roller coasters, electricity ladders.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Death will find you no matter what, there's no escaping it.
We have a fan corner corner, fanfan corner.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
I need to leave us comments, Leave us comments.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
Basically, this comment kind of spurred the whole topic of
today's show because this is from Tara. Oh my god,
I just had a dream that my neighbor was hiding
a dead body in his bed after listening to your
newest bot. And then there's a bunch of emojis of
the girl hitting herself in the face and then going
ah and then crying tilty face emoji. Thanks for the

(15:08):
night mare, Michelle and Edwin Lol, love you guys. I
love that well anyway, right, and let us know what
you think of the show. You know, we're always open
to themes, so let us know if you have any
themes ideas for an episode. And well, we're still working
on our outro.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Guys.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Anyway, we'll put out the fire that Never goes out.
Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
And Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed
by Sarah vorhe'z Wendel a VW sound

Speaker 3 (15:45):
Make sure you follow us wherever you get your pod
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