Dreaming about the Future: Precognitive Dreams

Powerful dreams can feel like premonitions or warnings, so how can you tell the difference?

The man had a business trip coming up the next day and dreamed that night about being on a plane as it crashed. So naturally, he wondered if the dream were a warning to stay away from planes the next day. He was fully prepared to cancel the flight. Should he?

No, but not because it’s superstitious to believe that dreams can come true. They do, sometimes. We’ve all heard the stories about someone dreaming about a loved one or friend dying and then it happens. We’ve heard about dreams like the ones David Booth had leading up to the crash of American Airlines flight 191, a case I cite in my book The Science of the Paranormal as one of the best documented. David dreamed ten nights in a row about the same fiery crash happening the same way: the plane, an American Airlines DC-10, banks and flips over soon after takeoff, and that’s what happened on the morning after the tenth night. The flight 191 link above is to a TV interview David did. You can hear his anguish over not being able to do anything to stop the dream from coming true.

Below, I’ll walk you through how I talked with the businessman about his upcoming flight and determined that the dream was not precognitive, not a premonition, meaning not likely to come true. Precognitive dreams have certain qualities that were not present in his dream, and I’ll give you a list of things to look for in case you are here because you had such a dream and are wondering if it’s going to come true.

Most precognitive dreams are not about big events like plane crashes, they’re about small events: the conversations you’re going have, the places you’re going to go, the people you’re going to see, the little things that are going to happen. At r/dreams people ask about why a dream about the future would “waste time” talking about mundane stuff when there are better things to know about ahead of time, such as disasters and preventable accidents and deaths. My answer is that precognitive dreams happen all the time and usually there’s nothing dramatic going on to highlight. How many times do people step onto a passenger plane, step off at their destination and everything is fine, compared to when a flight crashes? I’ll guess that it’s millions-to-one, otherwise no one would take the risk. So we begin with two important facts:

1. Precognitive dreams don’t wait for emergencies or big moments in life.
2. There’s more going on than meets the eye. Like the Butterfly Effect, small actions can produce big changes. That happened to a young man who dreamed about his new iPhone getting burned. The next day while at school, one of his classmates snatched the phone from him and melted the corner of it with a lighter. He said the first thing he thought to himself was “oh crap, I dreamed about this happening!” And it left him stunned, which may have been a good thing because he was pissed off and may have started a fight. What appeared to be a fairly minor incident could have snowballed if he’d overreacted.

[Listen below to a recording of me talking about precognitive dreams.]

Rule out other possibilities

A common mistake is to assume a bad dream is going to come true because it features things that happen in ordinary life, like disasters and wars and mass shootings. These themes are fairly common in dreams and should first be viewed through that lens. You’re looking for conventional meaning or memory residue. You’re looking for ways your desires and wishes are expressed in the imagery. I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that they dreamed about meeting the love of their life and are now hoping it’s really going to come true, and then are disappointed when it doesn’t happen right away.

Physicist Russel Targ studies precognition and advises to look out for a dream simply telling you what you already know, like when someone isn’t prepared for a test, dreams about failing it, then really does fail it. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, not precognition. Russ also noted when I interviewed him that he has a habit of dreaming about the headline news coming up the next day.

While everyone has the innate ability to dream forward and backward (retrocognition) in time, in my experience, only a subset of the population do it regularly and remember. Most people don’t remember their dreams well enough to know that they dream about future (and past) events. That’s the main reason why we get so many posts at r/dreams from people who simply cannot believe it’s real and not a coincidence.

When the psychic Edgar Cayce said, “Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions,” he spoke from the personal knowledge that some dreams come true. He also said, nothing of importance happens in our lives that is not foreshadowed in dreams.

 

Sugar Ray’s dream about killing Jimmy Doyle

Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson’s dream about killing his opponent in the ring is an example to we can use to show how to separate an ordinary dream from a precognitive one, fleshed out in greater detail in my book Dreams 1-2-3: Remember, Interpret, and Live Your Dreams. Prior to his welterweight bout with Jimmy Doyle in 1947, Sugar Ray dreamed that he knocked Doyle out and Doyle subsequently died. It so unnerved Sugar Ray, he tried to back out of the fight. The fight promoter brought in a priest to assure him it was “only a dream.” The rest is history. Sugar Ray and Doyle fought, and Doyle died that night from a fight injury.

If I counseled Robinson about his dream, I’d begin by asking him if and how the dream matches up with his everyday reality. Is the arena the same as the one in which he was scheduled to fight? Did he see people like his trainers and the referee? The more a dream like that matches up with ordinary reality, the more likely it is to be precognitive.

But details such as dreaming about an empty arena instead of the usual crowd would point us in the direction of searching for personal meaning, such as he feels empty inside about boxing, or winning, or maybe about everything. The image is a metaphor, and the use of a metaphor along with discrepancies with reality are a sign a dream is not going to come true, though precognitive dreams do not always match up perfectly with reality. And they can use clever metaphors about what’s going to happen in the future, as you’ll see later.

Next, as an advisor I’d guide Sugar Ray through the possibility that killing Doyle in his dream was an expression of personal hostility. Did bad blood exist between them? Did Robinson feel like he could kill that guy in the figurative sense? If so, odds would be better that the dream expresses those feelings. It’s probably not precognitive.

Then I’d explore if the dream expresses a subconscious fear. Fighters die in the ring; rarely, but it happens. Sugar Ray unloaded with a big knockout punch but was an honorable sportsman and good human being. I’d ask him if he feared unintentionally killing Doyle.

Some digging through historical accounts of the bout uncovered that possibility. Doyle, a tenacious Irish fighter who publicly proclaimed he was fighting Robinson to earn the money to buy his mother a house, was known to have head issues. It’s possible Sugar Ray’s dream expresses fear that Doyle should not be boxing anymore, then the fear came true. The dream might not have been precognitive in the strictest sense. Unfortunately, we can’t ask Robinson the questions needed to make that determination.

However, in his autobiography, Robinson wrote:

“I had knocked out guys before, dozens of them. But in those fights, I always had a good feeling, a conquering feeling when I saw them being counted out, maybe because I could see that they weren’t really hurt. But now, with Doyle stretched out and his eyes blank, I had that empty feeling you get when something in your life is really wrong, and all I could think of was the dream.”

Robinson added, “You warned me, God. You told me. Why did I let everyone talk me out of it?”

It’s always easier to judge after the fact that a dream is literal like that.

 

Dream about plane crash and jitters to take flight

Back to the guy scheduled to fly the next day who got cold feet after dreaming about a plane crash. I asked him if details from the dream matched waking reality. Did he remember anything about the airplane he expected to fly in or the airport where he was booked through that matched up with reality? On the other hand, could something happening or recently happened in his life be described metaphorically as like a plane crashing. Planes take us to personal destinations, so what does it say if the plane doesn’t make it? This dream theme tends to pop up when people are beginning something new and exciting like a romantic relationship or business venture and it fails. Or they have a hope for the future that doesn’t pan out. Their hopes come crashing down, and the image of a plane crash expresses the meaning. The man told me he’d had high hopes for something related to his job that didn’t pan out. In the dream, he knows he’s taking the flight for something related to his work, but it’s not the usual sort of business trip he takes frequently as part of his job. There was some emotional distress during the dream, but not the sort of powerful reaction people usually have when they sense death or disaster coming. Precognitive dreams of that sort hit hard and have an eerie feel of reality to them. In this case, though, the plane crash was a metaphor.

Watching the news for plane crashes the next couple days, I thought about how dicey it is to give out advice like that. Even if there were a crash, I’d never know if the man was on that flight. I thought there was enough evidence to say that his dream wasn’t a premonition and he was safe to fly, but who am I to tell?

That’s how you pull apart a dream to tell whether It’s precognitive. It’s the best I can offer after 15 years of studying precognitive dreams.

 

Precognition in metaphorical dreams

Now let’s look at an extraordinary example of a precognitive dream that uses metaphor and symbolism.

A man dreams he’s at home in a medieval hut, preparing a big pot of meaty stew that he knows will feed his family and friends. He hears a commotion outside and gets a bad feeling, so he runs to block the door but it bursts open and in march three wolves, led by a massive alpha. They have red eyes and make a frightening sight. He can’t win a fight against them, so he decides it’s best to try to befriend them. He reaches out and pets the alpha wolf, and is friendly with it. The alpha turns to the other wolves and says, “We’re going to have to meet to discuss what to do with these humans.”

At the time of the dream, the man, the provider for his household, was preparing to license out a software program he created and loaned to the company he used to work for. A larger company gobbled up that company and his job was eliminated. His software was no use to them, so he updated it and lined up clients. Companies had used the software for years and loved it. He just needed a letter verifying his ownership of the software and the checks could start rolling in.

He pushes for a few months to get that letter and one finally arrives. It’s a legal notice that the new company was contesting his ownership of the software. With enough grey area to tie up the issue in court and even sue him, and a team of three lawyers against him, led by an alpha, it looked bad for him.

Three wolves just marched in and halted his plan for how he would provide for his family. Do you see how the dream foretold it?

The man wanted to fight it out in court but knew how much it would cost and the years it would take to get a final decision. Instead, following the advice of the dream, he reached out to the lead attorney. In a phone conference with the legal team, he spoke on a personal level by explaining that he needed the software to support his family, and in return for settling the matter he could help the company fix a problem he knew they had from the takeover. Friendly, like in his dream, he reaches out. No actual wolves were touched, of course.

The alpha attorney balked at his proposal, and the meeting ended on that note. Then a week later a package arrived from the attorneys, and in it was the paperwork he needed to prove he owned the software.

The entire dream is metaphorical. It can’t be proven as precognition, but the overlapping details between the dream and subsequent events give me confidence to present it as evidence. The person who had the dream has a lifetime of experience with precognitive dreams, and he knows one when he sees it. I trust his instincts. You should hear the dream he had that foretold he’d beat cancer!

 

Evidence of precognition

An investigation of train crashes on the U.S. east coast during the 1950s concludes that trains that crashed or derailed had significantly fewer passengers than the same trains on other days. The four passenger planes hijacked on September 11, 2001 had half their usual number of passengers.

You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who don’t board flights that crash because of a bad feeling. But sometimes, the reason why people miss those flights appears to be dumb luck. Funny man Seth MacFarlane was booked on American Airlines Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001, but arrived ten minutes late because his travel agent gave him the wrong departure time.

Who knows, sometimes what we call luck is otherwise known as synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence.

To really dig into evidence based on research, start with the paper Future Directions in Precognition Research, found at PubMed, and use the extensive citations to do your own research. The evidence to support the existence of precognition is freely available and well-researched, just not widely known.

Or just start a conversation with a group of open-minded friends. Most people will open up about their future-predicting dreams as long as they think they’re safe to express their true thoughts. The stigma against precognition is real, a big reason why it isn’t commonly accepted, but I think we’re smart enough to find out for ourselves through our own dreams. I think it’s highly likely that everyone experiences precognitive dreams because it’s just the nature of the mind. Precognition is not “psychic”; it’s natural and wired into the nervous system of probably all mammals. Sensing what’s about to happen in the future is a heck of a survival advantage!

Trust Your Gut

Which brings us around to the best way to tell a precognitive dream from an ordinary one: intuition. Gut feeling. Precognition is a fact of life; trust it. Precognitive dreams are unusually clear and vivid. A feeling like deja vu can accompany them. When precognitive dreams warn of coming danger or emergency, they spark strong emotions. Additionally, a buzzing sound while dreaming or strong ringing in the ears after waking are occasionally mentioned as accompaniments to precognitive warning dreams.

If you analyze a dream that you suspect is precognitive and it:

a). is not related to residue from the previous day;

b). is not an expression of anxiety;

c). is not wish-fulfillment, and;

d). is not personal symbolism;

Then consider that it’s precognitive. But most of all, trust your gut. That’s your best way to determine whether a dream is precognitive.

Engineer J.W. Dunne kept meticulous notes on his dreams for decades and proposed that as much of half the dreams he chronicalled came true. I can only say that the same isn’t true for me but who knows. Dunne proposed a theory that precognitive dreams happen because the dreaming mind isn’t attached to linear time like the conscious mind. To the dreaming mind, past, present and future are all one. Albert Einstein said it’s the nature of time itself. Space itself is non-local, so everything in it connects as if it’s all part of the same body.

I asked physicist Russel Targ about precognition, a subject Targ studied in great depth, and he thinks Einstein explains it best through non-locality and Dunne’s theory about the dreaming mind’s ability to see anywhere in time it wants to go. Which suggests something deeper directing it, a deeper reason behind a phenomenon that’s widely experienced in the population but not commonly understood.

 

Forecasts Can Change

Precognition is not prophecy. It’s a forecast. Precognition gives us the ability to act ahead of time and if possible change an outcome, or to help it along if it’s something you want to happen. Forecasts can always change, but that doesn’t mean you are responsible for the outcome. Some things you can’t change even if you dream about them ahead of time.

A personally vexing example comes from my appearance on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. During hour-three of the interview, a call-in listener asked me if I thought a dream she had about her mom falling down steps was precognitive. What she saw in the dream actually transpired, and her mom died. Drawing on my limited experience at the time, I said yes, the dream appears precognitive. Then she felt terrible because she thought she could have prevented the accident.

I had too much on my mind at the time to realize what my opinion meant to her, but the next day it hit me and I felt terrible for not making clear to her that even when a dream is precognitive, it doesn’t mean you have the responsibility or ability to change it. How was she supposed to know it would really happen? Precognitive dreaming is such a tricky subject.

 

Practice dream interpretation!

Judging the difference between precognition and ordinary dreams becomes easier with practice. You learn to recognize the methods of your master storyteller the dreaming mind, to tell when something is out of the ordinary or matches your personal patterns. Keeping a dream journal is your best practice, because it preserves the details of your dreams that might otherwise be forgotten and helps you track precognitive ones. They are distinct from the rest.

For example, if you dream frequently about driving on ice and losing control of your car, you know your dreams use that theme to symbolize something going on in your life, probably related to control of yourself or a situation. But if you never dream about that theme, and you drive in a place that could have ice on the ground, you are wise to at least consider the possibility that the dream is precognitive–especially if it’s “real:” in your car or one you recognize, not an imaginary one, and the roads you drive on are “real.”

Dream researcher Ian Wilson had such a dream, took action, and it might have saved the lives of his daughter and himself.

This schoolteacher dreamed she was going to get robbed and it happened. Then she dreamed about Death coming for a friend and told her friend about it. That friend and the friend’s aunt had death-related dreams involving the lungs, so the friend went to the ER and struggled with the doctors to get an MRI of her lungs. Turns out, she had a blood clot that could have killed her.

Research at the National Dream Center suggests that precognitive dreams come to pass within two weeks. Ian Wilson says three to four weeks, but they can come true many years later.

Precognition is normal – everyone does it

Precognition is a normal human ability, widely reported among all population groups that have been studied. Dreams are the most popular way it manifests because the mind is in the right state to process the information. Most of the mind is unconscious, and most of the information it receives is subconscious; only a small percentage gets through to the conscious mind.

Professor Michael Persinger’s research shows that all human brains are connected together by Earth’s magnetic field, like a worldwide internet of the mind. Individuals have to filter most of it out to function normally. Otherwise, brain overload! However, people who cultivate the ability to tap into that information stream can access any information they desire, including possibilities for future events.

This subject really sparks interest and is a popular one during my media appearances. That interest and the importance of offering the best advice I can pushed me deep, and now I am much better equipped to offer my opinion. I hope you are more enlightened now, too.

Further information about precognition:

An Experiment with Time, a seminal work about dream precognition

Russ Targ’s TED Talk Not exactly about precognition but explores PSI ability in general

Precognitive dreams about the 2011 Japan tsunami

Dreams 123.com – to learn dream interpretation