Mark Twain’s Dream of His Brother Henry

Long before he was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens was a young Mississippi River cub pilot from Hannibal, Missouri, and one of the best-documented ‘crisis’ experiences of his life belongs to St. Louis. In the spring of 1858 he and his younger brother Henry, then about nineteen, were working on the side-wheel steamboat Pennsylvania. According to the Wikipedia history of the boat, Sam served on it as a cub pilot from September 1857 until early June 1858, when a quarrel with the pilot William Brown ended his time aboard. Before he left, he had helped arrange a place for Henry as a clerk.

The dream is dated by the scholarly reference Mark Twain’s Geography to the night of 29 May 1858. Sam and Henry were staying with their sister Pamela Moffett and her family in St. Louis during a layover. Sam dreamed that he saw Henry lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting room, resting on two chairs. In the account the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia gives, Henry was dressed in one of Sam’s own suits and had a bouquet of flowers on his chest with a single red rose at its centre. Sam told the dream to Pamela and her family the next morning, and they later recalled that he took it seriously.

On 13 June 1858 the Pennsylvania’s boilers exploded near Ship Island on the Mississippi, a short way below Memphis. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas puts the death toll at about 160 of roughly 400 aboard, many of them immigrants; other accounts of the time gave higher estimates. Henry was badly scalded and had breathed in steam. Sam, who had gone on to New Orleans on another boat, reached Memphis in time to nurse him. Henry died on 21 June 1858. In the Psi Encyclopedia’s retelling, the coffin that was provided matched the metal case from the dream, and the suit and the roses matched too.

Twain took a lifelong interest in what he called mental telegraphy, and the Psi Encyclopedia records several other experiences he reported, including a cold current of air he felt after his daughter’s death. One modern commentator regards the 1858 dream as a genuine case of precognition. It is worth being clear that the dream is known from family memory and from Twain’s later recollections rather than from a document written that night, and that several details come to us from retellings made years afterward.

A single vivid dream, reportedly told to family before the event, of a dead relative in a metal coffin; reported matches with the later funeral.

The dream is placed in St. Louis, Missouri, at the home of Clemens’s sister; the disaster itself took place on the Mississippi River below Memphis, Tennessee.

Twain’s dream appears in discussions of psychical research, where he is one of the best-known named witnesses, alongside his own writing about mental telegraphy.