Dreaming Winners Tell Me the Next One. By John Godley.
(Gollancz. 6s.) THERE are dreams that are pleasant and dreams that are potentially profitable. Any man of sense prefers the former ; they can be enjoyed for the pleasure they give. But if the latter came, a man (I suppose) may be excused when he wants to tell us about them. He should, however, remember that it is easier to be boring about dreams than about anything else—even family photographs. This is an account of the circumstances in which Mr. Godley had revealed to him, in a series of dreams which came to him at intervals during a period of three years, the winners of eight horse-races, to which is added a tentative " explanation " of the experience. The dreams did not all take the same form ; on three occasions Mr. Godley saw in his dream a page in the newspaper giving the results of the races, on one occasion he dreamed he saw the race itself and recognised the winner by the jockey's colours, once he dreamed he heard the result of the race broadcast, and once he dreamed that he was told the name of the winner by his bookmaker on the tele- phone. On three occasions his dream revealed, not the name of the winner, but a name near enough to one of the horses engaged (Tubermore for Tuberose) to make him feel fairly cOadent. But twice his dreams let him down, once giving him an unplaced horse and once a horse that ran third. His bets gave him a net profit of £126 14s. 7d.
Mr. Godley, unfortunately, is a dull man and a not very skilled writer • he is rather portentous abotit it all. The drama is-inflated, and the style is that of a feature article in a Sunday newspaper. His elaborate calculation of the odds against his experiences is tedious, he never put his shirt on any of his visions (he seems to have been more interested in selling his story to a newspaper and in get- ting it investigated by the S.P.R.), there is no preface dated either from the best hotel in Ragusa or from the workhouse, too large a part of the book is taken up with demonstrating that his story is so well authenticated that he should not be suspected of perpetrating a hoax, and his " explanation " in terms of determinism is jejune. However, to those who may be interested (not, I think, racing men) he gives a pretty complete account of his experiences, disposing satisfactorily, of the hypothesis of telepathy as an explanation. There is one point on which the reader would like further information: Were there in the races in which Mr. Godley's dreams led him astray horses whose names were near enough to those he dreamed to have
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