In June 1947, an Oxford student wrote two horse race predictions on a slip of paper, had his friends witness and sign it, and sealed it in a time stamped envelope before the races were run. Then both horses won.

His name was John Godley. In March 1946 he dreamed, in complete detail, that he was reading the racing results in a newspaper, and two of the winners were horses he happened to know: Bindal and Juladin. At breakfast he checked the paper. Both horses were really running, that very afternoon. He bet everything in his pockets on the pair of them, and both came in. A few weeks later, home in Ireland, he woke with a single word in his head: Tubermore. He telephoned the village postmistress, who checked the day's cards and found a Tuberose running. He backed it. It won, at odds of a hundred to six. By now his friends were asking him, only half joking, to please keep dreaming.

So in June 1947, when it happened again, he did the one thing that separates a good story from a record. He had dreamed the jockey Edgar Britt winning one race, and a horse called The Brogue taking another. Before the races, he wrote the names down, gathered witnesses, had them sign the slip, sealed it, and had the envelope time stamped. Only then did the horses run. Both won. The story reached the newspapers, and Fleet Street, reasonably concluding that a man who dreams the future might be useful, gave him a job. In 1950 he published the whole account, witnesses and all. And then the dreams simply stopped.

For eleven years, nothing. Then, in the spring of 1958, one last dream arrived: the Grand National, and a horse called Mr What. Godley backed it. Mr What won at eighteen to one. And that was the end. The gift never came back, and John Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, spent the rest of a long respectable life declining to explain it, because he could not. Chance says a dream should not beat the bookmakers. The sealed envelope, the signatures, and the time stamp say that, at least a few times, it did.

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