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Miss Ogilvie came down to breakfast with the taste of a bad night still behind her eyes. The morning room at Drumquaigh was bright enough, but she had slept in scraps, and she entered quietly, hoping to manage a cup of tea before anyone required her to be sensible. Her brother was already at the table, the laird of Drumquaigh with a newspaper folded beside his plate and a piece of toast halfway to his mouth. Fanti sat beside his chair, a small white poodle, his front paws together and his whole attention fixed on the toast as though it were a point of law.

“You look,” her brother said, “as though you’ve been arguing with the furniture.”

“I slept badly.” She sat down and reached for the teapot. “I had a ridiculous dream.”

“Tell me,” he said. “I could do with a ridiculous dream.”

She poured her tea and kept her eyes on the cup. “Fanti went mad and began biting people.”

Her brother lowered the toast. Fanti’s head followed it down, then came up again, waiting.

“That is ridiculous,” her brother said after a moment. “Who did he bite?”

“I don’t remember clearly. Someone in the village, I think. It was unpleasant and quite absurd.”

“It may be less absurd than you suppose,” he said. “I dreamed the same thing.”

Miss Ogilvie looked up. “You dreamed that Fanti went mad?”

“I dreamed that Fanti went mad and bit the boy who brings the coal. Or someone very like him. I woke up feeling foolish and annoyed with the dog, which was unfair.” He glanced down at Fanti. “Madness has not affected his appetite, at any rate.”

Fanti’s small black nose quivered at the edge of the table. The toast was still in the laird’s hand, and the poodle had begun to tremble with the effort of not climbing into his lap.

“We must have heard something,” Miss Ogilvie said. “A dog in the village, a story at dinner.”

They tried to recall the previous evening. There had been a cold supper, a discussion of fences, nothing about dogs. Fanti had slept in his basket in the kitchen and had committed no act more alarming than stealing a heel of bread. They found no explanation.

“We won’t tell Mother,” her brother said. “She would worry for a week, and Fanti would be spoiled beyond repair.”

Miss Ogilvie agreed. She was not usually superstitious, but she did not want her mother lying in bed imagining the little dog turning savage.

Then, because they were both sensible people, they inspected the dog. Her brother held the toast just out of reach while Miss Ogilvie looked into Fanti’s eyes. They were brown and ordinary. She examined his nose, which was cool and correctly damp. His temper seemed unchanged; he ignored her entirely and watched the toast with the devotion of a pilgrim. When she tried to draw him away from the table, he dug in his small claws and coughed a polite complaint.

After breakfast, Miss Ogilvie carried her mother’s tray upstairs. Mrs. Ogilvie was sitting against her pillows, a shawl around her shoulders. Fanti had followed and was already settled on the foot of the bed, where he was not strictly permitted to be. The room smelled of tea and lavender.

“Good morning, my dear,” Mrs. Ogilvie said. “Will you put Fanti out of the room before you set that down? I should like my breakfast in peace.”

Miss Ogilvie had opened her mouth to say something ordinary, but she stopped with the tray in her hands. “Why? Has he done something?”

“No, the poor thing has done nothing. I dreamed he went mad and bit someone. I know it is absurd, but I cannot quite shake the look of him in the dream.” Her mother smoothed the blanket. “He was quite unlike himself.”

Miss Ogilvie set the tray down carefully. “You dreamed he went mad?”

“Yes. It was foolish of me, but I would rather he wait outside for a little while.”

Miss Ogilvie picked up the poodle. Fanti allowed this with an offended sigh, his front legs going stiff. She put him outside the bedroom door and closed it. When she turned back, her mother was already opening a letter from the tray. The dog, after a short pause, lay down against the door with his nose pressed to the gap and began to breathe loudly.

Downstairs, Miss Ogilvie found her brother in the hall and told him. “Mother dreamed it too.”

He had been turning over a glove, and he stopped. “Mother dreamed that Fanti went mad?”

“She asked me to put him out of her room. She remembers almost nothing except that he was dangerous. She did not want him near her breakfast.”

Her brother laughed once, but the laugh had no joy in it. “Three of us, then. In the same house, on the same night.”

“It must be an accident,” Miss Ogilvie said. “A very strange accident.”

They spent the next half-hour finding things to check. They examined Fanti’s eyes again, his nose, the way he walked across the hall to the kitchen. The poodle tolerated them until her brother attempted to remove a biscuit from between his paws. Fanti’s lip lifted. He gave a low, rattling growl, and both brother and sister stepped back. Then they looked at each other and almost smiled. It was the same growl he had offered over stolen biscuits since he was a puppy.

“We are being fools,” Miss Ogilvie said.

“I know,” her brother said. “But I propose we continue being fools until evening.”

They agreed to watch Fanti discreetly and to say nothing to anyone. Fanti, having defended his biscuit, ate it in two bites and then looked up at them with an air of great patience, waiting to see whether more food might appear.

The younger Miss Ogilvies returned in the middle of the afternoon, bringing cold air and several parcels into the hall. They had been visiting a neighbouring country house, and they came into the drawing room talking before they had taken off their gloves. Miss Ogilvie was mending a hem near the window; her brother sat by the fire with a newspaper he was not reading.

“You cannot imagine,” one sister said, dropping into a chair, “how little I slept. The bed was comfortable enough, but I had the strangest dream.”

“You think your dream was strange,” the other said. “I had the same one, and I had to wake you in the middle of the night to tell you. You were most unsympathetic.”

“You shook me awake to tell me that Fanti had gone mad and turned into a cat and been thrown into the fire. I was not unsympathetic. I was asleep.”

Miss Ogilvie’s needle stopped. Her brother did not look up from his newspaper, but she saw his hands go still.

“Wait,” the first sister said, laughing. “You dreamed about Fanti?”

“I dreamed he went mad,” the other said. “Only in my version he went further and became a cat. It was very serious at the time. I could not decide whether a cat could also go mad, or whether the madness had carried over into the new arrangement.” She laughed again, and the other sister joined her.

Then the laughter ran out. The room had gone too quiet.

Miss Ogilvie looked at her brother. He met her eyes and gave the smallest shake of his head, but it was not a warning. It was an admission.

“You dreamed Fanti went mad?” Miss Ogilvie asked.

“Yes,” the first sister said. “He was biting people. I woke up quite angry with him, which was silly.”

“So did I,” the other said. “Except for the cat. And the fire.”

Miss Ogilvie set her sewing in her lap. “We did too. Your brother and I. And Mother.”

The sisters stared. Then one said, “What do you mean?”

Miss Ogilvie explained as simply as she could. The breakfast dream, the inspection, their mother’s request to have Fanti put out of her room. By the time she finished, the two younger sisters were both leaning forward, talking over one another.

“But we did not mention Fanti last night,” one said.

“Not once,” the other said. “We talked about the weather and the cold supper and the silly game of cards.”

“Did anyone bark at the house? A dog in the road?”

“No, there was no dog. We would have remembered a dog.”

The five of them had slept in two different houses, the three at Drumquaigh and the two at the neighbouring country house, and all five had dreamed on the same night that Fanti had gone mad. They sat with this fact, turning it over. No one could find a common cause. There had been no story of a dangerous dog, no strange sickness in the village, no remark about Fanti at dinner. The coincidence stood by itself, plain and useless.

Then the door swung open a little, and Fanti came into the room carrying one of the younger sisters’ gloves. He held it high, stepping neatly, as though he had been sent to announce a guest. Everyone stopped talking.

Fanti crossed to the hearth, turned twice, and lay down with the glove between his front paws. He began to chew it, not with any particular menace, but with the contented industry of a dog who had found something that was not his. The family watched him in silence. He paused once, looked up at their faces, and then returned to the glove with the air of a creature who had decided that the whole matter was no concern of his.

They passed the rest of the afternoon in the drawing room and the evening at dinner, and they watched him. Fanti ate his supper with his usual speed. He objected when one of the younger sisters tried to open his mouth to look at his teeth. He slept in his usual place before the kitchen fire, one ear twitching. If the dreams had been a warning, Fanti gave no sign of it.

And they were not a warning. Fanti never went mad. He bit no one, and he harmed nothing but a few gloves, the corner of a rug, and a small pudding that was left too close to the edge of the table. He lived peacefully for the rest of his natural life, which was long. The five matching dreams predicted nothing at all. For years afterward, when he was old and white and slower to climb the stairs, he still stationed himself beside the breakfast table each morning, watching every movement of the toast, entirely sane and entirely sure that someone would surrender a piece.

This story is based on a true account included in Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. You can read the original account in the free Project Gutenberg edition. And if you are interested in fresh and modern content about dreams that came true, you can find them in my book “Dreams That Wake You Up”, a collection of real dreams and real outcomes, directly from my clients, printed with their consent.

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