Question: Can dreams foretell the future?

Answer: In one sense, they obviously can: If you dream of arguing with your boss, this could reflect tensions in your relationship, foreshadowing even worse problems ahead.Mathematician John Allen Paulos told of dreaming as a kid that he hit a grand-slam home run, then two days later he hit an actual bases-loaded triple. Coincidence? Paulos figured it was.

More remarkable was a sleep laboratory dream recounted by Dr. Peretz Lavie in "The Enchanted World of Sleep." On most nights, sleeper R. reported long, detailed, logical-sounding dreams, but one night he awoke to report nothing except the word "carbide," which he said "stuck in his mind." Three days later the worst industrial accident in history occurred in Bhopal, India, killing 4,000 and injuring 20,000 more -- at Union Carbide Co.!

Hearing the news, Lavie was stunned. Had it happened to anyone else, he says, he wouldn't have believed it. "I have no convincing explanation, and so it joins the other reports of unusual dreams in the scientific literature, dreams which provide evidence of the multifaceted character of the abundant world created in our brains each night."

Question: What's the origin of political "mud-slinging"?

Answer: It dates back to ancient Rome when candidates for the senate wore white togas, inviting mudballs from detractors, says "Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts." The toga of an unpopular figure soon became "toga maculosa" (defiled by mud), meaning he could no longer be a candidate -- literally, "clothed in white."

Question: What if a black hole wandered into Earth's vicinity and swallowed us up? Would we all have time for farewells? What sorts of agony should we expect?

Answer: Three possible scenarios here, says North Carolina State University physicist John Blondin:

1. Star-sized black hole: Known to exist, with more than a dozen already identified in our galaxy. There could be MANY more wandering through space; hard to say because they're only visible when a normal star is close by dumping gas into the black hole, making it glow. "If one of these wandered by, we could kiss (ourselves) goodbye, and it would not be pleasant. There'd be ample warning, months or even years, because their intense gravity would distort the night sky star patterns, but NOTHING we could do. The end would be gruesome as the tidal pull of the black hole ripped Earth into pieces and sucked them and us into darkness."

2. Supermassive black hole: Has mass of millions or billions of stars, existing at the core of galaxies, including the Milky Way. There's really no chance of being sucked into one of these in the next billion years. Here the tidal pull is weak, so you could fall in completely intact. Then what? A new dimension of space-time?

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3. Mini black hole: Never seen but possible, small as an asteroid, would probably fly straight through Earth, "eating" its way through. Because they're small, we wouldn't see them coming. The worst case would be if one was big enough to swallow enough mass to slow down, then start sucking up the Earth bit by bit from the inside out.

Question: Union Oil Co. had a problem: Its hundreds of miles of gas pipelines were springing leaks across the desert. How to pinpoint these? Hint: think stink.

Answer: The company injected ethyl mercaptan into the lines, an odorous substance that to humans smells like urine after one has eaten asparagus, but to turkey vultures smells like rotting flesh, says Michael Gazzaniga in "The Mind's Past." Now, wherever the olfactory-keen vultures alighted to lick a leak, a fix-it squad followed.

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com

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