Is it really possible to travel while asleep into another dimension – to a point in time where past and future merge?
Most of us are pretty sceptical about such theories and so was Mrs Linda Heuser. To her they were fantasies which had no place in her busy well run life…at least not until February 1985 when she reluctantly entered the realms of psychic investigation with a story which remains a mysterious classic.
For it would seem that Linda Heuser, a 52-year-old widow, had a dream which inexplicably saved a man’s life. She claimed that in a nightmare she saw he was in deadly peril and without her intervention couldn’t possibly have survived.
Mrs Heuser was as bewildered as everyone else by what happened that night. “I have never experienced anything remotely like it,” she told journalists. “I don’t even remember having a nightmare before. I am usually a very peaceful sleeper.”
She had arrived three days earlier at the Gruener Baum hotel in Staffelstein, Bavaria, kept by her son and daughter-in-law, for a short holiday. A guest at the hotel was Erichn Jeschny, a 44-year-old furniture store owner, in the area on a business trip.
On February 10, he warned the hotel owner that he was making a long car trip to a supplier and might not be back until the early hours of the morning. Consequently he was given a key to the front door.
That Night Mrs Heuser went to bed about 10pm and fell asleep about half an hour later. Her room was on the third floor overlooking the main street and as she looked down while drawing her curtains the area was quiet and almost deserted.
At 1 am the staff went off-duty, the front door was locked and a light left on for Erich Jeschny, but when he returned to the hotel about 2.30am he found that the key he had been given didn’t fit. There was no bell and after vainly knocking, Jeschny, shivering in the freezing night air, returned to his car, parked with three others, outside the hotel.
He folded down the front seats, prepared himself for an uncomfortable night and eventually fell into a fitful sleep. Meanwhile, in her cosy third floor room, Mrs Heuser began a dream which turned into a nightmare.
Later she would remember: “In the dream death was knocking at my window. There was the white hand of a skeleton. Then the scene of the dream changed to a large open space and I was aware of some overwhelming force bearing down on a man who was asleep in some sort of yellow box.
“Suddenly there was a terrible noise and the man was sent flying by some sort of violent blow. The violence of it all woke me up. I was shaking with fright and turned on the light. For some reason my first reaction was to go to the window and look out.
“In the street below I could see a man hunched up in his car. I knew he was a guest because I had seen him arrive in his car the evening before.” Mrs Heuser woke her daughter-in-law who let in the shivering guest. Fifteen minutes later when everyone had once again settled down for sleep, there was a violent crash outside the hotel.
A huge truck travelling at speed had missed the bend in the road outside the hotel and ploughed into the cars standing outside the building and Erich Jeschny’s yellow saloon was totally destroyed.
A police spokesman later told reporters that the car was damaged so badly that Jeschny would certainly have been killed had he still been in the vehicle. And he would still have been in his car had it not been for Mrs Heuser’s uncanny dream of death.
Was it coincidence? Or was Mrs Heuser actually woken by the knocking of the locked-out guest and subconsciously adapted her dream to fit the circumstances? But if so why did she automatically look out of the window and spot the man in the car?
Mrs Heuser could offer no explanation other than to point out that had she not woken and gone to the window before the accident, Jeschny would have still been in the car when the crash took place.
And there were several people who confirmed that the time between Jeschny being admitted to the hotel and the truck wrecking his car was only 15 minutes.
To Erich Jeschny the incident remained both a mystery and a miracle. “How could she have known?” he kept repeating, as he left the hotel the next day. “How could she have known..?”
Three decades later no one seems any nearer to an answer.
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