Can a Dream Save a Life?

Most dreams are a jumbled mess that the majority of us fail to even remember a few short moments after we wake up. Then there are those that jolt us out of our sleep, dripping sweat, and shaking uncontrollably. These types of dreams usually involve some sort of nightmarish disaster that seems a little too real for comfort. Once we are back in the real world and realize that we are still tucked up in our cozy little beds, those dreams eventually fade away. What would you do, though, if one of those dreams ended up being something that happened on the evening of the day after you woke up? There are those that claim their dreams are in fact a sign of some real impending disaster, and back in 1979, one of those visions saved the life of a major celebrity.

There are probably many of you reading this that weren’t even born back in 1979, or who may not even be aware of the celebrity in question, but it doesn’t make this story any less cool or weird. During that period of time, one of the biggest shows on television was The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner. The success of the show meant that she had to travel a lot to do promotions and other such celebrity stuff attached with being part of a major TV success. On May 26th, 1979 Miss Wagner arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport to take yet another of those flights, but something ended up being a little different that day.

We’ll get back to her story in a moment, but there was another event that took place the day before that ties in with what happened in Chicago that day. There was a young man named David Booth who was making something of a name for himself back then by predicting airline crashes long before they ever happened. On this particular day in May, a frantic Booth contacted the FAA to speak with someone from American Airlines and told them that he had dreamt of a plane crash that would result in the airliner smashing into buildings and causing major death and destruction. He had no details beyond that, so the FAA really couldn’t do anything about hos call.

As Miss Wagner was preparing to board the plane in Chicago, she started to get a sick feeling that she couldn’t quite place, but was almost certain that she wouldn’t get on the flight. American Airline flight 191 took off without Miss Wagner on board, only to have one of its engines separate and fall off whilst on the runway. The pilots had no way of knowing that the engine had flipped onto the wing, with their instrumentation only showing that the engine had failed. As they tried to return to the airport, several other systems failed and the DC-10 went down, smashing into a nearby trailer park, killing everyone on board, yet only two individuals on the ground. The crash still ranks as one of the top 10 worst in US aviation history.

David Booth was investigated to see if he was somehow involved in tampering with the plane, but the evidence clearly showed he had nothing to do with it. You have to wonder of the dream he had was just some kind of cruel coincidence, or whether he really had a dream of what was to come. What about Lindsay Wagner? Did she just get ill at the right time, or did she too have a premonition that something bad was about to happen? We will probably never know, perhaps because so many of the people who claim to dream about the future end up being revealed as charlatans. Perhaps those folks make it impossible for the real future dreamers to be taken seriously.