In March 1893, weary and vexed in his work classifying ancient finger rings, German archaeologist H.V. Hilprecht went to bed and dreamed that a tall priest led him to a Babylonian treasure chamber. The priest explained that the fragments were not finger rings but earrings for a statue of the god Ninib, cut from a votive cylinder sent by King Kirigalzu to the temple of Bel. “If you will put the two together you will have a confirmation of my words,” he said. “But the third ring you have not yet found in the course of your excavations, and you never will find it.”

“With this the priest disappeared,” Hilprecht wrote. “I awoke at once, and immediately told my wife the dream, that I might not forget it. Next morning — Sunday — I examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands. The original inscription on the votive cylinder read: ‘To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.'”

(Reported in The American Naturalist, October 1896)