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The Dream that May Have Saved Churchill’s Life

Winston Churchill was an ardent proponent of early aviation and loved to fly planes himself, doing so repeatedly in his first months as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1913-14. Two of his flight instructors crashed and died within days of flying with him - in the same planes he had flown with them. His wife Clementine pleaded with him again and again to give up flying. She was terribly nervous in June 1914, when she was expecting their third baby - especially when she learned that Churchill's latest flight instructor, Lt Creswell, had crashed and died in the plane Winston had been flying six days before.

Clementine sent Winston this urgent telegram:

I had a miserable night haunted by hideous dreams, so this morning I am sad and worn out.  I dreamed that I had my baby, but the doctor and nurse wouldn't show it to me and hid it away.
  
Finally all my entreaties had been refused and I jumped out of bed and ran all over the house searching for it.  At last I found it in a darkened room.  It looked all right and I feverishly undressed it and counted its fingers and toes.  It seemed quite normal and I ran out of the room with it in my arms.

And then in the daylight I saw it was a gaping idiot.  And then the worst thing of all happened -- I wanted the doctor to kill it -- but he was shocked and took it away from me and I was mad too.  And then I woke up and went to sleep again and the little thing has been fluttering all the morning

Clementine dreamed she had given birth to a baby and was checking it out to make sure it was intact - down to counting toes and fingers. Then the baby disappeared, and she was desperate to find it. When she did discover the baby outside, it was fine - except that it was clearly an "idiot". Distraught, Clementine demanded that the doctor should kill her baby. He refused.

She woke up feeling terrible, went back to sleep and had the same dream again.

She grabbed Winston's latest cable to reassure herself, and saw that it had been sent from Sheerness (where there was a base from which he used to fly planes) and was filled with dread, knowing that he was preparing to fly again.

She rushed to send him a telegram in which she related her dream and told him that she was so fearful she expected every telegram to be a message of his death in a flying incident.

This appeal finally got through to him. He cabled back immediately, promising to quit flying, at least until her "kitten" was delivered - even though he was close to gaining his pilot's certificate.

Given the high casualty rate among fliers in that era, it is quite possible that Clementine's dream-reinforced appeal saved Churchill's life. We are not told - in the extensive and very loving correspondence between the couple - whether Winston (with his baby face) recognized himself as the "idiot".

It's interesting to reflect that the two central antagonists of World War II were both preserved by dreams to play their leading roles on the world stage. It was a warning dream, on a night in the trenches near the Somme in1917, that led Corporal Hitler to clamber out before an incoming shell killed all the other men in his section.

Clementine and Winston Churchill
(photo: Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge)