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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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When a major airliner crashes, the tragedy is overwhelming. The destruction, sudden, and complete.

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In the spring of 1979, a New York woman has a series of dreams of an airliner disaster in the Midwest.

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Two months later, a Cincinnati man dreams of a large jet in peril. It crashes and explodes.

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The dream repeats ten nights in a row, and no matter what he does, it will not leave him alone.

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Were these dreams just nightmares, or will they prove to be prophecy?

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In the aftermath of a major air disaster, federal and state investigators sort through the debris, looking for answers that might prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

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Recent findings have revealed that a strange phenomenon often precedes these catastrophes.

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Psychic researcher and author Alan Vaughn believes a warning system that could avert these tragedies may be locked within our own minds.

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Some may disbelieve, but Vaughn's own strange experience perhaps indicates the possibility.

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A gifted psychic tested at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York, Vaughn meditated in 1969 about the upcoming Apollo 12 moonshot.

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I got the impression that there was a grave danger for this flight.

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Unless something in the fuel system or electrical system is corrected, there will be an explosion which could kill the astronauts.

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I saw an image of Neil Armstrong's footprint on the moon, but there was a big X crossing it out.

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So I thought, no, they will not reach the moon.

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Apollo 12 did experience problems at takeoff, as the rocket was struck by lightning.

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But for the most part, there were no mishaps. Vaughn's premonition was wrong.

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Four months later, April 1970, Apollo 13 is launched for the moon.

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Just as the capsule leaves Earth's orbit, a muffled explosion rocks the spacecraft.

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The astronauts inspect their disabled craft, and soon the problem is diagnosed.

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A fuel cell has exploded and cut off most of the capsule's electricity.

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The primary mission has been aborted.

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Did Apollo 13 fulfill Vaughn's premonition for Apollo 12?

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Skeptics would say no.

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Believers, however, hold that his Apollo 12 premonitions fit Apollo 13.

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Most of us think of extrasensory perception as an experience happening to others.

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Yet ESP can occur every night.

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In our most common altered state of consciousness, sleep.

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Scientists are studying sleep in the laboratory, hoping to find evidence of ESP in dreams.

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At the Maimonides Medical Center in New York, Dr. Montague Omen and his colleagues conducted a group of experiments that made research history.

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For six years, more than 100 subjects would come in at night to be studied as they slept.

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Their physical state would be recorded so that the scientists could monitor their brain waves and determine when they were dreaming.

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Could dreamers dream about the future demonstrating precognition of an event that was yet to happen?

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In the design of a precognitive experiment, the special waking event that the dreamer is to dream about does not exist.

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It hasn't been created. No one knows about it or what it's going to be.

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Each night, the subject is asked to dream about a series of slides he will be shown the following day.

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These slides will be his target.

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His dreams are charted and he will be awakened after each one.

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I was dreaming of a color blue. It's very prominent and it's birds and like the sky.

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In the morning, he is interviewed to capture any last impressions before the dream reports are sent away to independent analysts.

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Terry, what is your overall impression of this dream?

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I have a feeling that my next target will be concerning birds.

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Later that day, another experimenter who knows nothing about the subject's dreams selects a slideshow at random.

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If the topic of the show corresponds to his dream, the target will be hit.

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Where our hypothesis was that precognitive dreaming could occur, the results of the judges matching of dreams and target events was such that the likelihood of getting that result on a chance basis alone was less than one in a thousand.

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This case plus many others suggests that precognition can occur in our dreams.

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However, precognition isn't limited to the laboratory.

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How many of us are glimpsing the future in our ordinary dreams and nightmares?

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Perhaps these dreams can be used to save hundreds of lives.

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Robert Nelson is searching for someone, maybe that one in a thousand who can foresee the future and help prevent disasters.

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Nelson founded the Central Premonitions Registry.

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He regularly receives letters from people who feel they have had a preview of an important upcoming event.

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His files contain many intriguing correlations between news items and these predictions.

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What would happen if he received several warnings of a major air crash?

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We would certainly draw up a letter to the heads of the airlines and also to the FAA pointing out that we have received careful and detailed predictions relating to what could be a disaster.

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And we would send this to the involved airline, plus we would probably send it to the other airlines too in case it was a miss on the airline, plus to the FAA.

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We would make sure that this information was disseminated.

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Every day, Nelson searches his mail for messages of the future.

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But so far, no individual dream message has provided enough information to prevent a disaster.

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In 1978, Sean Robbins had not heard of the Central Premonitions Registry.

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If she had, she might have reported this dream. Sean recreates what happened that night.

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It was Sunday night and in September I had a dream that was different than my usual dream.

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I saw a plane in the sky. It was going to a destination. The destination was California.

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I had the feeling that the disaster was about to happen. It would be the United States worst in history.

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I also felt that this dream had a meaning to it, meaning it was imminent, the disaster was about to happen.

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I woke up and had a radio show the next morning.

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As a personal counselor who feels she has a heightened sense of ESP, Sean is often interviewed on the subject.

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The morning after her dream, she was featured by Buddy Dean on KOTN in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

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We were on the air and she said, I have had a dream, a worst of that effect, that there is going to be a major air disaster.

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She emphasized major air disaster. Well, I didn't think a lot about it at that time, but about three hours later,

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I was driving in my automobile to car radio and I heard our news director announcing a major air disaster in San Diego.

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Less than 24 hours after Sean's dream, a jet airliner collided with a private plane over San Diego, California.

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All 144 aboard perished. America's worst air disaster to that date.

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Our telephone at the radio station completely went insane because of course everybody's reaction was, did I hear that correctly?

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I heard the interview this morning, did I hear that news too? We had calls all day long. It turned the town upside down.

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There was really an amazing prediction there.

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Although in the past, Sean has told others of premonitions of airline disasters that did occur, this was the first verified case.

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Less than five months after the San Diego crash, Sean began having dreams of another impending air disaster.

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Would she or other dreamers perceive enough information to prevent it? And even if they did, would anyone listen?

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In March 1979, Sean Robbins dreamed of another major plane crash. She sensed this event was still weeks or months away,

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but approaching with a terrible certainty.

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On March 12th, she told her premonition to John Erling, whose morning talk show is broadcast on KRMG in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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I'm 72.

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And halfway through our conversation, as I started talking about previous airline crashes that had been predicted by her,

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she said as a matter of fact, John, she said, I had a dream last night about a major airline crash that would happen in the Midwest.

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At that time, she gave me numbers, which could have been the flight number and tail numbers, as I recall,

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and said, but it was by a major airlines.

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Off the air, she gave me the name of the airlines.

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And I gave a destination. I felt California would be important, as well as the Midwest, but I did not know at the time the interconnecting facts.

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In the following weeks, Sean tried to escape the fear that was becoming a constant part of her life.

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But you can't forget plane crash dreams. They don't let you forget. They come back. They come back without warning.

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It's as if they want the story to be told. They have a mind of their own.

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Sean continued to dream specific details about the disaster she felt was coming.

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On April 26th, she reported these to Ed Hartley on WKBX in Savannah, Georgia.

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Any idea on how many people may be involved?

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Well, the prediction that Sean made was that there was going to be a crash of a jumbo jet in the Midwest.

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Now, she saw the Midwest. She didn't see exactly where the crash would be.

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She did say later on the conversation that California would enter into that, and she suspected that that was the destination of the airplane.

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Sean said she sensed the crash was now less than a month away.

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As the dreams became increasingly terrifying, she dreaded falling asleep for fear of what she'd experience.

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I've become both now a passenger and a spectator aboard that aircraft.

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After the plane has crashed and everyone on board has died, and I walked away as a spectator, the living one,

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I wake up with a start. It's almost as if my heart is in my mouth.

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I said, why did I have the dream? Why didn't everyone else dream the same thing? Why was it me?

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Were Sean becoming obsessed with plane crashes?

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Was she having a flashback to her previous dream prediction? Or was there something more to this new dream?

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One thing is certain, Sean was not alone.

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For David Booth of Cincinnati, a nightmare was just beginning.

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Before May 1979, David had led an average life managing a rent-a-car office and raising a family.

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He never had psychic-type dreams before.

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But one morning, he was jarred awake by the shattering vision of an airliner crash.

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On the morning of May 16th, I had a dream.

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I'm looking out to my right over a field and there's a tree line diagonally down like that.

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And I look up in the air and there's this great big jet and it wasn't making the noise that it should.

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It wasn't a feeling of impending doom or that it was going to crash or anything.

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It just wasn't making the sound that it should.

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It starts to turn with the wing going up in the air and it just goes on its back and then goes straight down into the ground and it explodes.

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As the sound of the explosion would start to die out, that's when I would wake up.

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It was very, very scary.

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Trying to describe some of the emotions that I felt. I mean, how can you describe sorrow?

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David was unable to understand his frightening dream.

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All that day, he tried to forget it by losing himself in his work.

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For the moment, he shared his experience with no one.

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That night, he went to bed exhausted, hoping his sleep would be undisturbed.

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The second night that I had the dream was a very weird experience.

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When I woke up, I had been crying.

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The main feeling that I had was urgency, as if I was being compelled to do something, to act fast.

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As the week progressed and the dream repeated every night, David found it harder to ignore.

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Still, he kept it to himself.

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Tuesday, May 22nd, David had the dream for the seventh night in a row.

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He began to feel he would have no peace until he took action.

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It starts to bank off and just rolls on its back and down it goes.

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And the same explosion.

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David Telephone, the Cincinnati office of the Federal Aviation Administration,

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and spoke to Facilities Manager Paul Williams.

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The first thing David described to me was the type of aircraft he thought it was.

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First of all, he identified it as an American Airlines plane.

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He described it as a big plane with an engine on the tail.

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Now, I asked him if he knew specifically what type of aircraft it was,

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but David didn't know one type aircraft from another.

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Williams asked David to search the dream for more specific information.

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But each night it came back frustratingly the same.

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All that week, they spent hours reviewing every detail.

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My initial reaction to his description of the aircraft was that it was a Boeing 727.

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However, the engine on a Boeing 727 is in the tail and the engine on a DC-10 is on the tail.

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A more accurate description of what he told me would be a DC-10 or a plane similar to that,

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because he described the plane as having an engine on the tail.

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On Friday morning, May 25th, the start of the Memorial Day weekend,

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David had the dream for the tenth time.

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But this time, it left an unexpected impression.

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The feelings had not changed, but David said he somehow knew he would never have the dream again.

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I went to the office and I could not do anything.

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I think I must have just went to that whole day in a day, very much upset.

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Oh, I mean, I was at one point in the afternoon, I thought I was on the verge of a nervous collapse.

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I took off work early. I had to. There was no other choice. I couldn't function there.

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It was four o'clock, three o'clock at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

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Flight 191, cleared for takeoff.

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Flight 191, Roger. Here we go.

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270 people were aboard Flight 191, a DC-10 bound for Los Angeles.

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Was this the flight David and Sean had seen?

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Sean had seen an American Airlines jet bound for California, involved in a Midwest crash.

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David identified the same airline and sought trouble for a large jet with an engine on its tail.

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I look up in the air and there's this great big jet and it just wasn't making the sound that it should.

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It starts to turn with the wing going up in the air and then goes straight down into the ground and it explodes.

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One of the plane's engines had broken away during takeoff.

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At 500 feet, the plane began dropping.

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Eyewitnesses reported the other wing engines shut off. There was silence in the air.

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It was the worst air disaster in U.S. history. All those aboard died.

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When I heard that an aircraft had crashed in Chicago, it was as if I knew what had happened.

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All of the other events that I've learned that happened in Chicago describe after the fact what David Booth described to me before the fact.

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News of the disaster had not yet reached David and his family.

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I came home and we ate dinner and we sat down to watch television and a news break came on.

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I couldn't even find the words to describe how I felt.

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I called Paul Williams and I think emotionally I just fell apart.

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David appeared to me to blame himself for not being able to get enough information to prevent this accident from happening.

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He seemed to feel that if he could have grasped just a little bit more information that he would have been able to prevent that accident.

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It seemed that he felt he was being singled out as the only person in the whole world that message was being given to.

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I tried to tell him that he couldn't blame himself for it, that he had done all that he possibly could.

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We did try to do something. We made an attempt even though we failed.

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If there had just been somebody that we could have talked to that understood these, that maybe in some way it couldn't have been prevented.

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I don't know. I feel that way. I feel that way very much.

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Since his premonition about Apollo 12, Alan Vaughn has started dream workshops.

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With the new Ways of Consciousness Foundation in San Francisco, he helps people learn about the inner world of their minds and suggests techniques for coping with frightening dreams of the future.

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Instead of being frightened by them, learn to talk to them and understand them.

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Then after a while, your dreams will give you images that can really be helpful.

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So you can turn a frightening situation into a situation where the dreams bring gold.

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Find out what it truly means to be British.

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And see how its past shaped its future. On an all new History of Britain, tonight at 9 on the History Channel.

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.