A Cautionary Tale

You'd really need to hear my brother deliver this one, but here goes.

Our great-aunt was living in Vienna (this would have been in the 1930's). Her sister lived across town in an apartment building. It didn't have elevators, so people had to take the stairs. Her sister had recently had a baby, whom she wheeled in a pram.

One night, our great-aunt had a dream that the baby was in the pram, which was falling down the stairs of the apartment building, a la Battleship Potemkin. She woke up from the dream, horrified, and set off across town on foot in the middle of the night to warn her sister (she described the distance as equal to that between wildest east Nassau and Brooklyn). When she got to her sister's apartment, she told them about her dream.

After that, they were always very, very careful.