The miniseries Pereval Dyatlova did the same, portraying him as a young man having nightmare premonitions that evil forest spirits were out to get them all.
But, in that series, Yudin did also have a nightmare of the group's tent getting caught in an avalanche--a mundane scenario that doesn't involve any extraordinary elements like evil forest spirits.
Just curious: what did you make of that axe murderer and that ring?
SPOILER ALERT to anyone who has not yet seen the miniseries...do not scroll down
That was all very freaky, the Nazi ring bestowing survival, immortality, on whoever wore it. The Nazi horrors were used as a painful memory of the investigator's previous experience of mass casualties, the battlefields of WW2, and as a link to the present, and directly to his love interest?
The scene I found the most disturbing, linked to that, was when the young investigator's best friend sacrificed himself by throwing his body across a grenade which had been lobbed up onto the mezzanine of a Berlin house they were searching.
He then, fuelled by rage and with flames behind him, fired a machinegun over the bannisters but then he sees it was 2 cowering kids in Nazi youth uniform, so he spares them and fires at the wall above their heads.
And of course this leads to the very emotional scene much later in the series, out in the car park where he outs himself to the (female) DPI pathologist who he has sought out, who happens to be his friend's widow, they have fallen in love and he has become a father figure to her son, having lost his own wife and child.
It was an excellent series overall, though an unsatisfying conclusion, too slavish to the inquiries, but I thought the way Yudin was portrayed as a weak man given to superstition (like one of his relatives was said to be)was completely distasteful.
I saw the lead actor recently in a pretty good Russian alien sci-fi flick called Sputnik.