Many people had vivid dreams about the late Queen Elizabeth, and some believed they had dreamt of her death before it happened. TARAS YOUNG scanned a year’s worth of Twitter posts in search of possibly precognitive tweets…
Until her death aged 96 in September this year, Queen Elizabeth II was a constant figure in public life. Spanning seven decades, her reign corresponded with both a worldwide population boom and the information age, making her undoubtedly one of the most ‘seen’ figures in human history. From coins and stamps, to her annual Christmas speech, to being groped by inept cop Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun and defaced in Jamie Reid’s iconic artwork for the Sex Pistols, the public image of Elizabeth II was hard to avoid and has become firmly lodged in the global psyche.
While there is no substantive way to quantify the extent to which Her Majesty invaded our most intimate thoughts, it’s not a stretch to believe that the Queen must have been one of the most dreamt-about personalities of the last 100 years.
Indeed, a dream about Elizabeth II inspired one of the last songs country star Johnny Cash wrote before his death. In the album notes for American IV, Cash wrote: “I was in Nottingham, England, and had bought a book called Dreaming of the Queen… I dreamed that I walked into Buckingham Palace, and there she sat… As I approached, the Queen looked up at me and said, ‘Johnny Cash! You’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.’” The biblical quality of this statement moved him to revisit the Book of Revelation, leading Cash to pen what he later termed his “apocalypse song”, “The Man Comes Around”. Cash kept the oneiric monarch’s prophetic-sounding phrase as part of its haunting chorus.
The book Cash referred to was, in fact, Dreams About H.M. the Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family by Brian Masters, who would go on to build a successful career writing biographies of serial killers. In 1972, Masters compiled and analysed dozens of dreams sent to him by the public, ranging from the relatively mundane – having a cup of tea with Her Majesty – to the truly bizarre: one correspondent reported dreaming that savage dogs were dropped onto the Queen from a false ceiling as part of a ritual crucial to her survival.
Among these fantasies, Masters identified another type of dream – premonitions of a monarch’s death. “When a king dies,” he wrote, “the number of premonitions in dreams which suddenly come to light runs into hundreds… One only pauses to think if the dream coincides with the event to th
