Will Joe Brandt’s Dream One Day Come True?
Product ID: PP44
Report Topics:
- In 1937 a teenage boy had a remarkable dream about being in Los Angeles during a future massive earthquake, and his descriptions of what he saw from seventy years ago match many of the same scenes we are now seeing today
Full Report:
In 1937, a young boy named Joe Brandt suffered a head concussion from a fall he received while horseback riding. For three days afterwards, Joe lay in a Fresno, California hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness and delerium. During his ordeal, he also had a strange and terrifying dream that kept recurring and continuing without stop—something so vivid and clear that upon recovering he immediately wrote down everything he had experienced. Today, over seventy years later, the pages of Joe’s journal are yellowed with age, and the ink is starting to fade, but the import of his deam is still as startling as the day he set down on paper—perhaps more so, because the particulars he envisioned are now being fulfilled.
The firs thing that Joe remembered after being thrown to the ground was suddenly finding himself in Los Angeles. But he recognized that it was not the Los Angeles of 1937, for the city looked much larger in size and more crowded than he knew it. Everywhere he saw people riding about in “odd-shaped cars,” being smaller and faster than those of the 1930’s. He called one a “baby half-sized thing,” and noted tha various vehicles were not mostly black, as in his day—they were all brightly colored.
Next, Joe found himself standing on Hollywood Boulevard. But again the scenery in many respects was very different. To his delight, the girls were all good looking and wore “real short skirts and pants.” Their hair, he described it, was “all frowsy,” or frizzled and pulled up from their heads. To his consernation, however, the young men he saw pass by—most of them Joe’s own age—had beards and wore earrings and other jewelry. He wrote that this seemed utterly ridiculous to him: “Nobody in the future on Hollywood Boulevard is going to be wearing earrings—and those beards. I don’t think anything like that could ever happen.” Joe also noted that all the youth “slouched along” and did a “crazy kind of walk,” like a strange new dance-step. Joe tried to imitate them, but found he could not. He called to them, to show him how it was done, but discovered that no one could hear him, or even see him.
As Joe walked down the street, he observed several other unexplainable things about the strange futuristic place he was in. He noticed that everywhere he smelled sulfur-like fumes that seemed to hang in the air like a faint fog. The theaters he passed by were showing movies mostly preoccupied with sex. One marquee showed a giant picture of a seductive blonde with six-foot long bared legs—something Joe had never seen advertised in 1937. Everywhere were ads for various actors and actresses, none of whom he recognized.
Then Joe found a newstand, and took a look at the front page of the newspaper. He wrote that he could not see the date very well. He thought that the year ended in either a “6” or a “9,” but could not make out the decade. There was a picture of the President in the headlines—only, as Joe described it, “It surely wasn’t Mr. Roosevelt. He was bigger and heavier, with big ears.”
As Joe continued to stroll about in his vision, he slowly became aware of a growing feeling that something momentous was about to happen. The first sign he noticed was that, as he walked through a residential area two blocks north of the Boulevard, there were no birds in the trees. This was very strange, Joe thought, because the day was relatively clear and sunny, and he figured the season was early spring. But no birds sang—anywhere. In fact, he became aware, above the din of traffic, there was a swelling silence, as if all Nature was standing still in anticipation of an imminent event.
As Joe returned to the Boulevard, the climax came as a nearby store clock showed the time as five minutes to four in the afternoon. The ground began to vibrate a little. Up and down the street, people stopped and looked at each other wide-eyed. One of the bearded youth, Joe overheard, told an earringed lad, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s move back East.”
But it was too late. In a matter of seconds, Joe saw sidewalks being pushed up by invisible underground forces, while “those funny little cars” began jumping about and up onto the sidewalk. The middle of the Boulevard split in two, a great crack appeared down the center, and gushing water shot out from broken water mains. Everywhere, people were hanging on for dear life, wailing and screaming in terror. Joe tried to cover his ears, but to no avail. The rising combination of rumblings from below, car horns blowing, sirens blaring, explosions and fires, buildings rattling, and millions of people crying out, created a deafening roar.
Amid this chaos, Joe found himself lifted up into the air, and saw that the disaster was not just happening along Hollywood Boulevard, or even just in Los Angeles. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the whole area from the San Bernardino mountains to the coast was tilting toward the ocean.
At first, Joe witnessed, most of the Los Angeles buildings stood firm in all the shaking, and many people, to escape the cracking streets, crawled into them for safety. But then, almost all at one instant, the buildings collapsed into rubble, killing their occupants. Elswhere, hundreds of “little cars” traveling large highways—thoroughfares wider and busier than Joe had ever seen before—were slipping and sliding into each other, jumbled into heaps, as the concrete roadways began dissolving into large chunks.
Finally, Joe could see the ocean slowly coming in, “moving like a snake across the land.” Looking back down at where he had stood on the Boulevard, he noticed the store clock—the time was now 4:29 PM.
The scene of destruction was so overwhelming that Joe had to divert his gaze away from it. As he did so, however, he was shown other catastrophes to take place in other parts of the world. Joe felt that these would happen not at the same time as the California quake, but some would occur earlier, and others later. He saw:
An upheaval beginning in the Grand Canyon, spreading as far as Reno, Nevada and Baja California, with the Boulder Dam to be severely damaged.
Volcanoes erupting in both Colombia and Venezuela, South America.
Japan disappeared into the ocean in so short a perod that the Japanese people had only enough time to show an expression of surprise on their faces, before going under.
Hawaii will be destroyed by a giant tidal wave.
A flooding of Istanbul will occur as the Black Sea rises.
Sicily will be devastated, as Mount Etna erupts with unrecorded violence.
The Suez Canal will suddenly dry up.
Huge flooding will occur in England, Ireland and Scandinavia, at a time thousands of people are in church, praying and holding candles.
In New York City, people will go crazy as the water level rises dangerously—some in distress will run into restaurants and eat everything in sight, stores will be ransacked, fuel will be scarce, and mobs will run aimlessly through the streets as radios and sirens blast away, and searchlights light up the night sky….
Suddenly, Joe found himself back in California, standing on Big Bear Montain. He could see the clock which still read 4:29, and the California coast was still tilting slowly into an encroaching ocean. The very air was disturbed, tossing about out-of-control airplanes and other strange aircraft Joe could not recognize.
And in the middle of the mounting disaster, Joe heard hundreds of radio operators yelling into their equipment to the very last minute, warnings and messages for those to the east: “This is California. We are going into the sea. This is California. We are going into the sea. Get to the mountains. Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Utah. This is California. We are going into the sea….”
At this point Joe’s vision ended, as he recovered from his concussion and regained consciousness. He wrote that after he left the hospital for many days following all he could hear ringing in his ears were those final words: “This is California. We are going into the sea….”
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
