In writing Persona Non Grata, I do not claim to have experienced a vision or spiritual premonition regarding the Russian invasion of Crimea.  But the phenomenon of genuine prophecy does have its precedents.  Outside of the Scriptures and modern revelation, the following true story is one of my favorites.  I condensed it from an article entitled, “A DREAM THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.”

It was Sunday night, August 25^th, 1893, and Byron Somes was sleeping off a binge in his office at the Boston Globe.  It was not a tranquil sleep.  A horrific nightmare had tormented his slumber. Watching from mid-air in his dream, Somes had witnessed a catastrophe of monumental proportions.  The earth shook, mountains tumbled into the ocean, waves heaped themselves beyond their bounds, and then an immense explosion erupted from the depths of hell as thousands of screaming voices were silenced forever.  Somes burst awake from his troubled sleep and sat, breathlessly pondering the vision he had just experienced.  In his mind he could still hear the cries of those doomed mortals on that little tropical island as they sought vainly to escape from the fiery fate that engulfed them.  But it was just a dream.

Somes has the presence of mind to jot down the details of the dream while they were fresh in his mind.  Who knows?  Maybe he could use them in the future as feature material on some dull news day.  He marked the notes as “important” – put them on his desk and went home.

Somes did not report for work the next day but someone found the notes on his desk and misinterpreted them as the details of a story.  The notes did coincide with recent seismological disturbances that were puzzling experts.  Fragmentary reports were filtering in with regard to a large earthquake on the island of Krakatoa, located between Java and Sumatra.  In a day of slow communications there was no more information that.  But it was enough.  The next day the Boston Globe ran an excellent story based on the notes Somes had jotted down.  Other papers picked up on the scoop that had been printed by the Globe and in a short time, one man’s dream had been translated into a widespread news story.

When his employers found Somes, demanding more details and more copy, he broke down and admitted that his ‘report’ was nothing more than notes of a nightmare.  The hapless reporter was summarily fired while the editors of the metropolitan daily prepared a humiliating public apology for printing a dream as though it were factual news.

But before the Globe could make its confession, huge waves began to pound the California coastline and the telegraphed reports of a few eyewitness survivors began to trickle over the telegraph wires.  On August 25^th, the volcano on island of Krakatoa had begun to rumble, showering the island with boulders.  Bridges fell, roads became impassable, and ships scurried out to sea to avoid the cannonading. Undersea explosions churned the waters, and volcano after volcano – fifteen in all — joined the violence in a thunderous chorus. Then suddenly there was an explosion so vast that it defied description.  The island of Krakatoa had disintegrated in one cataclysmic blast that sent earthshocks and air waves around the globe. The sound of the eruption was heard 3,000 miles away.  Tidal waves killed tens of thousands of persons.  And more than 11 cubic miles of debris was spewed into the atmosphere. There had been nothing like it in the annals of modern history.

As the newswires brought in the real story, hour by hour, the amazing accuracy of Byron Somes account became evident.  He suddenly found himself in the good graces of his employer again.  The Globe, not surprisingly, declined at the time to reveal the fascinating story behind the story.  But the truth would eventually be known – that in a remarkable dream, reporter Byron Somes witnessed the volcanic destruction of Krakatoa, an island halfway around the world, as it was about to happen.  A dream which accidentally became the news story of the decade.

–from Stranger than Science, by Frank Edwards,                                                                                            p.32-33

Just a reminder that world events have been foretold before – in the strangest of ways.  Persona Non Grata is one of those literary anomalies.  The historic prediction of an occurrence which took the world by surprise – amidst a world of happenings which continue to surprise us.

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