In 1771 a young man was riding along a path toward Drusenhelm, Germany, when he was overtaken by a strange foreboding. Then something bizarre happened. Riding toward him on the same road was an identical replica of himself, except that the figure was wearing gray with a touch of gold –clothes the young man had never seen before. Then the vision suddenly disappeared. The rider shrugged off the incident.

But eight years later it was to have strange repercussions: the young man found himself on the same road, wearing exactly the same clothes he had seen in his vision.

...The man in question was the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Many years later Goethe was still intrigued by the apparent encounter with his own double. When it happened he had found it comforting, for he had just said a sad farewell to the woman he loved, Fredericka…“However it may be with matters of this kind generally,” he wrote in his autobiography, “this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting”.