From The Gateway (“A magazine devoted to literature, economics, and social service”) Vol. XIX, No. 2 (September 1912):

Two friends, at a distance of some miles from each other, had the same bizarre dream. The first account comes to us from Dr. Adele A. Gleason, of the Gleason Sanitarium, Elmira, N. Y. It was written in February, 1892:

The night of Tuesday, January 26, 1892, I dreamed between two and three o’clock that I stood in a lonesome place in dark woods; that great fear came on me; that a presence as of a man well known to me came and shook a tree by me, and that its leaves began to turn to flame.

The dream was so vivid that I said to the man of whom I dreamed when I saw him four days later, “I had a very strange dream Tuesday night.” He said, “Do not tell it to me; let me describe it, for I know I dreamed the same thing.”

He then without suggestion from me duplicated the dream, which he knew, from time of waking from it, took place at the same hour of the same night.

Adele A. Gleason

The account of the second dreamer, written at about the same time, is as follows:

208 East Water street, Elmira, N. Y.

On Tuesday, January 26, 1892, I dreamed that in a lonely wood where sometimes I hunted game, and was walking along after dark, I found a friend standing some ten feet in the bushes away from the road, apparently paralysed with fear of something invisible to me, and almost completely stupefied by the sense of danger. I went to the side of my friend and shook the bush, when the falling leaves turned into flame.

I was awakened soon after, and noted the time from a certain night train on a railroad near by, and so am certain that the dreams took place at the same hour of same night.

J. R. Joslyn

An obituary of Dr. Adele Gleason appears in the Michigan Alumnus of November 15, 1930, and  reports that she was a respected and accomplished physician who was awarded scholastic honors by Vassar College, L’Ecole de Medicine in Paris, and the University of Michigan. After teaching physiology and gynecology in Buffalo, NY, she practiced at a medical school in India before returning to the US to work at sanitariums in California and her home town of Elmira, New York. She served bravely with the American Ambulance service in France During WWI and was the author of three books and many poems.

John R. Joslyn was editor of the Elmira Advertiser. He served on the school board and was president of the Elmira Microscopical Society, which met on the second Tuesday in every month from October to June at the Elmira Observatory.

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