During my senior year of high school, when my brother was away at Cornell University, I had an extremely vivid dream about him.  He and some of his friends were in a red sports car going down a winding mountain road typical of the ones near his college.  For some reason, I knew they were heading in a roughly southward direction.  The driver had a lot more boldness than skill, and was taking the curves much more aggressively than he knew how to handle.

Eventually he pushed his luck too far, and the car ran off the road and plunged into a steep ravine.  Everyone in it was killed.

I awoke shaken by the dream.  Naturally, it was one of the first things I told my mother about at breakfast.

“That’s quite a thing to dream about your brother,” she observed in a not-entirely-approving tone.

Still, knowing Granny’s history of predictive dreams, she told my brother about it in their next regularly-scheduled phone call, prefacing it with a reminder of our grandmother’s unusual history in this area.

My brother apparently misheard her, and believed that Granny was the one who’d had the dream.  This made an impression on him.

One evening not too long later after their phone call, a group of my brother’s friends decided to hitchhike down the road to a girls’ college.  My brother had an important exam coming up, but he wasn’t normally one to let trivialities like academics get in the way of having a good time. This time, though, he opted uncharacteristically to stay at his desk and study.

Much later that night, his friends stopped by his dorm room, pale and visibly shaken.

“What happened to you guys?” he asked. 

They told him they’d gotten a ride from a guy who turned out to be drunk out of his mind, and clearly not in command of either his senses or the car.  He had driven way too fast, and repeatedly crossed the double yellow line to pass strings of other cars around blind curves. 

“We’re lucky to be alive,” one of them gasped. 

My brother gazed intently at them.  “What kind of car was it?”

“A red Mustang.”


Later, when I heard what had actually happened, I realized a number of things.  One was that they were traveling in a southward direction, just as I had dreamed.  There were also some discrepancies, though.
 
The red sports car I had dreamed of was definitely not a Mustang.  It looked to me more like a British sports car—possibly a big Austin-Healey, with room enough for maybe five people (if there actually was such a car).  I also didn’t hear whether it was a convertible with the top down, like the car in my dream.  And most significantly of all, in my dream it was daylight, and I had a specific sense that it was morning.  My brother’s friends had their harrowing experience at night.

Still, there were enough similarities to my dream that it would have seemed unwise, even obtuse, to just push the experience aside as pure coincidence.