Lore 291: Dream Come True

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In the dream, Arseny was attending a great feast.

The table was laden with dishes and delicacies, breads and meats and bubbling libations, a spread fit for a king.

But most royal of all, well, that would be the main course, a food known only as the king's hand.

Now, the king's hand was no dish known to the waking world.

It existed only in Arseny's dream, and when the 28-year-old awoke, he became haunted by the idea of bringing this subconscious culinary creation to life, which, unfortunately, is exactly what he did.

And I say unfortunately because the king's hand of Arseny's dream feast just so happened to be a hollow, hand-shaped M ⁇ M cookie stuffed with a Greek salad.

Through a series of increasingly deranged viral tweets, Arsini documented his journey to create a real-life king's hand.

Did he have baking experience?

Well, not particularly.

Did his friends and family approve of this venture?

Definitely not.

But that didn't stop him from creating a silicone hand-shaped mold, pressing cookie dough into the crevices, and ultimately filling the entire accursed concoction with lettuce, olives, and feta cheese.

He said, It's hard for me to tell you how King's hand tasted.

I dreamed it up in my dreams, so when I bit into it, it was very rewarding.

I was like, oh my god, I'm eating my dream food.

If another person were to bite into King's hand, they would barf.

I don't know.

And look, the world of dreams is a mysterious one.

Sometimes our visions make sense, sometimes they don't.

But no matter how strange or nightmarish, we can usually reassure ourselves not to worry because dreams aren't real.

At least, they shouldn't be.

But, like the king's hand of the 2020 internet, some slumbering monstrosities manage to claw their way right out of our heads and into the bright, waking world.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

If you're like me, you've probably kept a dream journal at some point in your life.

And while the idea may seem modern, the practice of writing down one's dreams is actually very ancient.

In fact, the oldest surviving dream journal was written in the 2nd century AD by a Roman writer named Aristotes.

Apparently, he got the idea after a god appeared to him in his sleep and told him to start chronicling dreams, most of which ended up being medical tips and tricks from the gods themselves.

Meanwhile, others have been found elsewhere from ancient Rome to medieval Japan.

One Japanese Buddhist monk named Miyowa dutifully recorded his dreams from the 1190s all the way until his death in 1232.

And sure, some of these dreams concerned spiritual matters, as is befitting a monk, but others have a certain randomness that feels strangely relatable.

In the ocean, there was a large fish, he wrote in one entry, and someone said, it is a crocodile.

It had a single horn growing and was about 10 feet long.

In another entry, I pulled down a double-branched peach limb and picked a peach.

It was not an ordinary peach, but a marvelously rare, hitherto unseen peach.

Its white fuzz was about three inches long.

It was shaped like a hand.

And let me be clear that coming off of the king's hand story, I'm not sure if it's comforting or upsetting that we've been dreaming about weird edible hands for nearly a thousand years.

Someone should probably look into that.

And speaking of mysterious imagery, people haven't just been writing down their dreams since ancient times.

We've also been trying to interpret them.

Take this confident advice from a 15th century BC Babylonian tablet, which insists that, and I quote, if he bites his upper lip, joy will not be given him.

If a hunchback seizes him, a curse will smite him.

If he carries beer in the street, his heart will be glad.

Later on, during the 2nd century AD, Greek scholar scholar Artemidorus claimed that playing handball predicts, and I quote, endless quarrels and frequently love for a courtesan, while dreaming that you're covered in a hog's bristles portends a similarly bristly, violent future.

And let's not forget this particularly essential analysis, in which Artemidorus states, and I quote, flat cakes prepared without cheese are good, cakes that have cheese in them signify deceit and trickery.

Dreams of cheese also have the same meaning.

And as a lactose-intolerant individual, I feel you, Artemidorus.

I feel you.

Over the years, dreams have been viewed as everything from divine messages and demonic influence to artistic inspiration and magical prophecy.

Dreams have been used to justify controversial decisions, conjure up medical diagnoses, and even predict the future.

And let's just say, it wasn't long before one group started to become suspicious of this spooky, otherworldly information that citizens received every night while they slept.

That is, the Catholic Church.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, the Church began regarding dream interpretation as dangerous.

Some dreams were sinful or even sacrilegious, for one.

Plus, reading the symbols in dreams was a little too witchy for their liking.

Philosophers weren't stoked about the whole thing either, largely regarding dreams as nothing but nonsense and superstition.

And it might have gone on this way, if not for a certain Austrian neurologist who came onto the scene in the late 1800s.

I'm speaking, of course, about Sigmund Freud.

Freud, you see, had begun his medical career studying psychiatric disorders, specifically what was then called hysteria.

But in 1895, he found himself gravitating toward another field of study.

Dreams.

He himself had a dream about a patient he was treating, which upon waking, he realized was his brain's way of processing his feelings around the case.

Feelings that, until the dream, he didn't even realize he had.

And this made him wonder, what if our dreams are more than random scenes?

What if they are a window into our subconscious minds?

As he delved deeper and deeper into the study of dreams, he concluded that dreams weren't random at all, but blends of a dreamer's memories, experiences, and thoughts.

Often they served as wish fulfillment.

And, well, Freud being Freud, he also tended to insist that dreaming of pretty much anything that was longer than it was wide symbolized something phallic.

Now, today, Freud is basically synonymous with dream analysis, but his landmark 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was kind of a flop in its day.

It only sold a few hundred copies during its first six years in print, but even so, it slowly gained acclaim, and before long, Freud had transformed the study of dreaming into a respected academic pursuit.

And of course, he wasn't the only one driving this dream machine.

Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung, also put stock in dream analysis, but not quite in the way Freud did.

You see, Jung didn't believe dreams represented an individual's subconscious at all.

No, instead, they were gateways into what he called the collective unconscious.

Consider, Jung suggested, how so many people have such similar dreams.

Dreams of flying, of falling, of being chased by animals, or finding ourselves naked in public.

All motifs, by the way, that also tend to appear in folklore and fairy tales.

To Jung, this pointed to a much more groundbreaking idea, that there is a vast reservoir of shared memories, shared symbols, and shared stories that all of humanity is tapped into.

And through our dreams, that collective unconsciousness can be accessed.

Now, don't get me wrong, he didn't think those dreams meant the same thing to every dreamer.

And he wasn't a big fan of those cheesy dictionaries of dream symbols, known as the cipher method.

And neither was Freud, for that matter.

After all, a ring in a wedding dream versus a ring in a dream about the lord of the rings probably have different meanings.

And if the dreamer is a jeweler, well, that could mean something different altogether.

In other words, context matters.

But hey, that sure hasn't stopped dream symbol books from flying off the printing presses.

Heck, in the 19th and 20th centuries, dream books even told you what lottery numbers to play based on what images appeared in your dreams.

Today, countless books, websites, and even apps for your phone claim to be able to tell you what your dreams mean.

And while that would certainly be convenient, the truth is, no single key can unlock the meaning of our dreams.

And yet, what if those dreams can unlock something very real inside of us?

You may have heard the oft-repeated bit of trivia that a dream was responsible for the invention of the sewing machine.

As the story goes, the year was 1844, an American inventor Elias Howe was growing increasingly frustrated at his consistent failure to invent a machine with the capability of stitching textiles together.

So frustrated, in fact, that it manifested in a doozy of a stress dream.

Elias had dreamt that he was in the courts of a cannibal king.

The king told him that he had 24 hours to invent the sewing machine or else.

Elias frantically got to work, but despite his efforts, 24 hours came and went and still no sewing machine.

So the cannibals tied him up and dumped him into a cauldron of water.

He tried to wriggle out of the pot, of course, but whenever he rose up, the cannibals pushed him back in with their spears.

Spears that, oddly, all had holes in their points.

When Elias woke, he was shaken up, but he also couldn't get the thought of those spears out of his head.

And suddenly, he realized the missing element of his sewing machine design.

He should put a hole at the bottom of the needle rather than at the top.

And that was that.

Elias Howe's machine changed the textile industry forever and his needle configuration is still used to this day.

It's a heck of a story and it's pretty widely told too.

But well, it turns out this textile tale is probably fabricated.

No pun intended, I swear.

You see, the first reference that we could find to it comes from a much reprinted 1894 newspaper article in which the story is told by a James M.

Howe.

In the article published 30 years after Elias Howe's death, mind you, James claims to be a descendant of Elias and insists the cannibal dream was passed down as family lore.

Now it might have been easy to accept the article at face value at the time, but we took a deep dive into Elias Howe's genealogical record, and it turns out there is no one even remotely related to Elias Howe with the name James M.

Howe, let alone a direct descendant.

But hey, As satisfying as it is to get to the bottom of a rumor, it is a little disappointing, right?

I mean, that's the kind of story that you really want to be true.

But don't worry, the sewing machine may not have been dreamed up, but there are plenty of famous breakthroughs that really were.

Take, for example, this case from the mid-1950s.

A prominent cartoonist was in a rut, his life was in shambles, his marriage was falling apart, and on top of all of that, his nights had become plagued by horrible dreams.

There was one that he later wrote, where I was in a kind of tower made up of a series of ramps.

Dead leaves were falling and covering everything.

At a particular moment in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton appeared that tried to catch me, and then instantly everything around me became white.

It got so bad that this cartoonist visited a psychologist who advised him to take a step back from his work, that is to stop drawing cartoons.

Instead, the cartoonist did just the opposite.

He began drafting cartoons set in the snowy all-white landscape that he had seen in his dreams and even incorporated dreaming into the plot.

That cartoonist, by the way, was Herge, creator of Tintin, and the work inspired by the nightmare was Tintin in Tibet, often lauded as his finest work.

And then there's the scientist Otto Lowy, who awoke in the night on Easter Sunday in 1920 to jot down an idea he'd had in a dream.

Come morning, he eagerly went to read it, certain that he had dreamed up something important, only to be unable to decipher his messy handwriting.

Luckily, though, the dream returned the following night, and this time he remembered it all.

It was the design of an experiment, he wrote, to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct.

I got up immediately, went to the laboratory and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.

Following the dream's instructions, he stimulated the vagus nerve of a still-beating frog heart, and lo and behold, it behaved just as it had in his dream, with the heartbeat slowing down.

Then he applied some of the salt solutions surrounding that heart to a second, also beating heart, and just like in the dream, that one slowed down as well.

16 years later, after a decade and a half of perfecting his research in collaboration with his lifelong friend and fellow scientist Henry Dale, Otto Lowy and Henry Dale would win the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work on nerve cell communication, which forever changed our understanding of our sympathetic nervous system, all because of a dream.

Now, one might argue that when it comes to experiences like these, there might be nothing paranormal about it.

After all, this could simply be the dreamers' subconscious minds offering up ideas that would have bubbled to the surface eventually.

But what does it mean when someone dreams up a solution to a problem that they never could have solved by themselves?

Today, they are known as the lost children of the Alleghenies, but back in the 1850s, they were simply George and Joseph Cox.

Little Joseph, five years old, and George, seven, lived with their two younger sisters and their parents, Samuel and Susanna, in a cabin nestled among the trees of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains.

And for the Cox family, April 24th of 1856 began as a morning like any other.

First, the household sat down to breakfast together.

Then the kids' father set out hunting while their mother began the household chores.

I imagine that she was relieved when she noticed George and Joseph had left the house to go hunting with their father.

After all, it's not easy to do housework with four children under the age of eight running from room to room.

But come lunchtime when her husband returned from the forest, that relief turned to panic because the boys weren't with him.

In fact, they had never joined him hunting at all that day.

They had simply walked out the door, stepped into into the woods, and disappeared.

It was a frigid April in the mountains, and a light snow had begun to fall.

Miles of woods stretched out in all directions, wild with thickets and gnarled trees, and dusk was mere hours away.

Desperately, Samuel ran to the nearby town of Pavia to rustle up a search party, and soon a group of townsfolk and dogs had set out into the forest, torches and lanterns ablaze.

By nightfall, more than 100 people had joined the search.

Some stayed in the woods all night, lighting signal fires in hopes that the lost boys would see them.

But daylight came and the children were still nowhere to be found.

The following day, more searchers joined, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Hour after terrible hour, the brothers' names were called into the pitiless woods without response, like will buyers from Stranger Things.

Businesses closed and chores were neglected as more and more people banded together in the search.

All told, some 2,000 people participated in the hunt, but to no avail.

George and Joseph Cox seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Now, by this point, folks were beginning to get suspicious.

Gossip gripped the small community, rumors that the boys had been murdered, that their own parents had done the awful deed.

A mob eventually overtook the Cox house, digging up the yard and prying up the floorboards, but nothing was found.

Meanwhile, little did they know, 12 miles away, a farmer named Jacob Dibert was conducting a search party of his own, deep asleep in his own bed.

Dibert dreamt that he was walking through unfamiliar woods looking for the famous missing boys.

Stepping up onto a fallen log he saw a dead deer lying on the ground and following its trail he came upon a single child's shoe and next a fallen beech tree lying over a stream which he used to cross as a bridge.

On the other side, after clambering over a stony ridge into a ravine with a small brook running through it, he finally reached his destination, a massive broken birch tree with ropey, tangled roots, and cradled in those roots as if asleep, lay two tiny corpses.

The next night, the dream returned, and the night after that, each time it was the same, passing the dead deer, crossing the stream to a fallen tree, and finally discovering the bodies of the cock's children.

After having this dream for the third time, Dibert told his brother-in-law, Harrison Wiesong, about it, and with some skepticism, the men set out into the woods.

It was only five minutes before they came upon the body of a deer.

Eight yards farther, they found a child's shoe.

All but running now, Waisong and Dibert crossed a stream via a fallen tree and scrambled over the rocky ridge into the ravine.

And when Dibert saw a massive broken birch tree looming before them, all he could do was point, for curled at the foot of the birch were the bodies.

of Joseph and George Cox.

It appeared the children had died of exposure, lost in the icy woods.

Although the discovery was a tragic one, it ended the finger-pointing that had ravaged the town and granted the boy's bereaved parents much-needed closure.

On May 8th, the children were buried in a joint grave in Mount Union Cemetery, where you can visit them to this day.

And that's the story as it's been told and retold for a century and a half, so commonly accepted as fact that the community even erected a monument to the children in 1906, which is still there and marked with a sign informing the public about Jacob Dibert and his dream.

The Wikipedia page for the lost children also presents the story as fact, just as I've told it to you.

Heck, musician Allison Krause even wrote a song about it.

But hold on, because our trusty researcher Cassandra is about to crush some of those dreams, literally.

Digging deep, and I mean deep into this story, she found that there is only one report from May of 1856 that mentions anything about a dream at all.

And oddly, it isn't Dibert at all, but Wisong, who allegedly dreamt of the children's whereabouts.

But that's all it says.

No details about a deer, a shoe, or even a tree.

A year later, in 1857, a writer named C.

Jeffries published a 50-page book attributing the dream to Dibert, but the supposedly factual document includes numerous conversations that the author couldn't possibly have been privy to.

Oh, and speaking of facts, he does cite a source article from the Altoona Tribune as evidence.

But that article, well, it turns out it's actually an advertisement for the very same C.

Jeffries book.

And the game of telephone continues.

In 1888, another account blatantly plagiarizing Jeffries added the details of the dead deer and the child's shoe.

And so it goes, article after article, book after book, the story warped and reformed until it became impossible to tell how much was real and how much was nothing but a dream.

Tracking history is a little like sleepwalking.

You're stumbling through the dark, assuming the path ahead is clear, but suddenly you found yourself colliding with a wall.

Here is what is true.

George and Joseph Cox vanished in the woods on April 24th, 1856.

Their bodies were found days later by Jason Diiberts and Harrison Weisong.

But whether dreams had anything to do with it, well, that's where the facts grow thin.

Most of our dreams occur during REM sleep, a time when the emotional centers of the brain kick into overdrive, while the parts concerned with rationality, logic, and decision-making take a little rest.

And the result?

The perfect mental environment for some wild, high-emotion visions with no common sense to keep them in check.

But if our dreams are all emotion and no logic, then how are we supposed to explain the phenomenon of precognitive dreams?

Well, according to one theory called Next Up, aka network exploration to understand possibilities, your dreaming brain deliberately creates a rapid-fire collection of scenarios that you might encounter in waking life as a sort of training ground for the future.

Because your dreams are attempting to predict what you might experience down the line, it makes sense that sometimes one of those predictions might actually happen.

On the other hand, predictive dreams might simply come down to statistics.

The average person is believed to have roughly four dreams per night.

And well, multiply that by every night in your life, and that's a pretty good set of odds that one or two of those dream scenes might line up with something in the real world.

And then, of course, there's a case like the lost children of the Alleghenies, in which the dream wasn't manufactured in the sleeping mind at all, but in the rumor mill.

So why then would a story like theirs even develop?

Why claim a dream led the men to find the lost children rather than to tell it plainly?

Well, if I had to venture a guess, I would say it has less to do with the merits of dreams and more to do with the failures of men.

You see, before Dibert and Wisong, not one of the 2,000 searchers thought to cross the stream in their hunt for the boys.

They assumed that the spring waters were too high for the children to possibly have crossed, an assumption that likely cost the children their lives.

Such a simple mistake, with such devastating consequences.

Devastating enough, perhaps, that the searchers grasped for a supernatural reason for their failure rather than bear the guilt of the truth, that they simply hadn't looked hard enough.

I hope you've enjoyed enjoyed this chance to put some of history's sleepiest rumors to bed.

And if you aren't tired yet, I have one last story of a magical dreamer to offer before we give tonight's episode a rest.

And this one is a little closer to home than usual.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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They say that when Kathleen Hines was born, the nurse took one look at her and fainted in horror.

And to be fair, you might have too.

Despite 10 working fingers and 10 working toes, something vital was missing.

The baby, you see, didn't have a face.

At least, that's what the poor nurse thought at first.

In truth, little Kathleen's face was simply obscured by a thin, fleshy membrane called a call, a veil of skin that occurs in roughly one out of 80,000 births.

But while the call was quickly removed, revealing a healthy baby beneath, it was far from forgotten.

You see, Kathleen Hines, maiden name Kathleen Allworth, was born in 1934 in Portchester, New York to a pair of off-the-boat Irish Catholic immigrants.

And as such, the Allworths clung tight to the beliefs and superstitions of their homeland.

Among them, the notion that children born with a call are destined to be cursed with a second sight.

Not wanting to frighten their daughter, Kathleen's parents kept the circumstances of her birth a secret until she reached the age of 13.

And for a while, she seemed like a normal kid.

She spent her days running around Portchester with her six siblings, getting into mischief and helping her parents around the house.

But when she turned 22, Kathleen's life changed forever.

That is, she got married.

Suddenly, she was forced to move five towns away, leaving her tight-knit family for the first time.

And it was there, estranged from her loved ones, that she began having some rather weird dreams.

First, she saw her sister Nora wrapped with sorrow while walking through a church filled with white lilies.

Upon waking, Kathleen tried to shake the dream off as just that, a dream.

But hey, better safe than sorry, she figured, especially given the fact that her sister was nine months pregnant, and so she gave her a ring.

Not wanting to totally freak Nora Nora out, she casually asked how the pregnancy was going, to which Nora responded cheerfully that all was well.

And it was until the very next morning when Nora gave birth to a stillborn child.

It was spooky, but probably just a coincidence, right?

Well, unfortunately for Kathleen, that would be far from the last time her dreams would portend a family member's death.

Take, for example, how before a trip to Niagara Falls, Kathleen dreamt of four men standing around a coffin.

One of them turned to her and recognizing him, she realized that the men were none other than her four brothers, the casket's occupant, her father.

Once again, she tried to brush the dream aside and left for her trip.

But one morning around 7 a.m., she awoke with a start in her hotel bed, only to find her father standing in the corner of the room.

But this wasn't the father she knew.

No, here he looked to be in his mid-30s, youthful with auburn hair.

And then he spoke, I've come, the man said, to say goodbye.

With that, he vanished and the telephone began to ring.

Bleary with sleep, Kathleen answered the phone, only to hear her brother's heartbroken voice informing her that her father had just passed away.

As she progressed through adulthood, the terrible prophetic dreams grew more and more frequent.

In one case, she awoke suddenly in the night with a severe pain in her arm, which she apparently had been holding outstretched in her sleep.

Little did she know, only minutes later, she and her husband would receive a call telling them that her husband's brother had died.

How did he die, you might ask?

Well, by sudden heart attack while complaining of arm pain with his arm outstretched.

But there was one dream that plagued her more often than any of the others.

I like to call it planes, trains, and automobiles ESP edition.

You see, for years, Kathleen Hines had this recurring dream in which she and a living family member would be on a casual stroll when an airplane would zoom down and land beside them.

Out from the cockpit would pop an already deceased member of the family who would generously offer them a ride.

Kathleen, knowing a suspicious situation when she saw one, would always decline, and sure the ghost driver would mix it up now and then pulling up in a car or a train or even sometimes a boat.

But Kathleen wasn't about to be fooled and usually neither were her companions.

Now, I say usually because, well, on at least two different occasions, things went a little differently.

That is, her living companion in the dream accepted the invitation, bid Kathleen goodbye, and zoomed away with the deceased.

And I probably don't need to tell you what happened after that.

That's right, within six months, that person would be dead.

In fact, she foresaw her aforementioned sister Nora's death in this very same way.

By her mid-30s, Kathleen was so frightened by her second sight that she tried to push it from her mind altogether.

If she had an odd feeling or a dream, she would desperately attempt to ignore it, determined to leave leave old Irish folklore behind.

And it's easy to see why, right?

Death in the family is always tragic enough, but to see it ahead of time and be powerless to stop it?

That's a nightmare.

When asked in an interview if she believed these abilities had a purpose, she said, so I can protect my family, warn them.

But that's never how it went, was it?

She'd simply foresee a tragedy and be forced to stand by and watch it play out.

Now, I won't claim to have an explanation for Kathleen's experiences.

Perhaps she genuinely did have some inexplicable ability to see into the future.

Or perhaps it was merely confirmation bias.

After all, she could have had other ominous dreams easily forgotten when they didn't come to fruition.

Add that to the fact that she grew up steeped in Irish folklore and knowledge of a call, and it's easy to see how she might have gotten swept up in the superstition.

But honestly, I don't think finding an explanation matters because to me, this story is about something else entirely.

Let's think back to when all this started.

Kathleen had just gotten married and moved away from home.

She went from spending every moment with her big Irish family bickering and telling wild stories and getting into trouble, yes, but also taking care of one another, making sure the family was safe and loved.

And suddenly she was far away from them for the first time in her life, which was when she began to dream about them.

Maybe second sight is real.

Maybe not.

Undeniably real, though, is the story of a young woman feeling estranged from her loved ones and her heritage and struggling to feel connected to them at any distance, even through death.

Kathleen was 77 years old when an ethnology student at the University of Edinburgh interviewed her at length about her dreams.

And throughout the course of their conversation, she repeatedly slipped into unrelated memories.

The chaos that ensued when offering a box of chocolate to a full room of seven Elworth children, the adventures she went on when she finally visited Ireland, the mischief that she and Nora used to get up with in their youth.

We were real sisters, she said.

We were close as you could get, right up until the bitter end.

The most important thing is family.

Remember that.

Oh, and speaking of family, that ethnology student in Edinburgh, that was our very own Jenna Rose Nethercott, who wrote the words that I've been speaking to you today, archiving the experiences of her great-aunt Kathleen.

and that beloved sister Nora Allworth, while that was Jenna Rose's grandmother.

Even as an old woman, Kathleen Hines still struggled to keep her premonitions at bay.

I don't want this to follow me my whole life, she told Jenna Rose over the phone.

Plus, I'll be meeting the Lord soon enough, and I don't want him to be mad.

Kathleen passed away in June of 2019, and I have a feeling that the Lord wasn't too mad.

From all accounts, she was a pretty lovely lady.

But Jenna Rose and I do have one last lingering question.

Before she died, do you think one last airplane landed in her dreams?

To which Kathleen finally answered, yes, I'm ready.

Let's go for a ride.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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