Maybe she had been harboring an unconscious need for punishment awareness of which was only available to her in the form of a vague and dreadful destiny until finding realization in financial destruction. Her unconscious, by this reasoning, knew Madoff was up to no good.

I strongly believe that we have control of our future to a certain extent. There are other factors involved when it comes down to what may or may not occur in your future, such as, religious beliefs or popular theories that have been going around for awhile. An example of this would be "The Secret" or "The Law of Attraction". If we focus on what we don't want to happen based on personal fears then you are causing them to manifest as opposed to focusing on what you do want and doing what you can to get it. Personally, I don't believe there is a link between your dreams and the future, on the other hand there is a link between your dreams and your subconscious mind which is like a sponge that absorbs what goes on in our daily lives and this includes thoughts, reactions to certain situations, hopes, fears, and what we learn throughout the day because our minds can't process everything at once so our subconscious stores everything. In life you have to be cautious of what you do because I'm sure you're not going to proceed in crossing the road without looking in the middle of coming traffic. I don't think that there is a correlation between the skiing accident and the dream itself and if so why wasn't there a dream that could have helped the patient prevent the accident from happening other then not going on the trip period?

Nominative determinism comes to mind. But yes, I think we do to an extent, though perhaps not consciously. Proponents of the "Gateway Experience" describe a place where souls plan their next lives for their own betterment; though once born we don't remember what we planned for ourselves.

Personally, I believe that we experience every possible permutation of our life, (a version of the "many worlds" hypothesis) and that we have to keep reliving our lives until we "get it right". Thus at any point we have experienced our current situation a nigh-infinite number of times, as well as a future that is very nearly infintesimally similar to what we will eventually experience. So we have some subconscious developed familiarity with our future by experiencing it so many times before. While we can (and do!) change our path every time we walk it, we do so in a new way each time, so the majority of the path we have already tread, each time we walk it again.

woah, tons of crazy-cool ideas in the comments already (and there are only 3!).

I believe that prophecy is sort of a moral statement about the present, and it's bound to come true unless fundamental changes occur. For instance, ski death dude was probably commenting (perhaps unconsciously) about his own proclivity to give in to peer pressure and to take on slopes above the "flower" ski level (ie he took on the black diamond slopes) even though he was barely mastering the "pizza" method of slowing down. When faced with the prospect of actually skiing, it's no wonder he found himself in a dangerous situation. The danger was merely a natural consequence of his already-existing weaknesses.

It's interesting you bring up this topic. Orci, the star trek writer, talked about quantum mechanics and how matter likes to arrange in it's pre-set pattern no matter what we do to it, and he used this as an excuse to reboot the star trek franchise, saying that it's natural the enterprise crew reassembled even though there is a time-traveling romulan changing the timeline in the new movie due out next summer.

In a way, the future is a natural and foreseeable result of current moral truths. However, this should not be used as a cop-out, so peeps can avoid responsibility for giving in in case of peer pressure or temptation--one must still accept responsibility for their failings, and thus must make every effort to strive toward moral excellence, even if their crash-and-burn failure is, to some extent, foreseeable.

Cool article, I am glad to add to the diverse and crazy opinions already shared in the 3 comments above. Yay for philosophical PT articles!!

I don't know whether it is coincidental or actually we have the power to foresee our future. But yes, many times I have these strong intuitions about things that are gonna happen in near future and most of them turn out true. I have seen most of my negative intuitions turning true. May be we can associate it with the concept of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’

Although not a very logical explanation, we can even associate this foreseeing of events with the Indian philosophy which suggests that God listens to us one moment a day and if we keep thinking one particular thing, all the time it will surely come true.

Interesting comments! One of them made me wonder whether Jung's patient was unconsciously suicidal and the analyst picked up on that element of his dream....But I still can't put that together with my friend and Bernie Madoff. There is no way that she could have known she was making the decision to impoverish herself!

May be we are looking at a unkown territory that our modern scientists are too busy to take a look at.
I rememeber someone who said that the intuitions you have for your future may be more accurate than the words of the fortunetellers.Humans differ from each other,someone may be sensitive,someone may not,the 6th sense is the title that we call to this phenomenen.

I am not sure if one can generalize this. We think of many things maybe repeatedly throughout our life. Some come true others dont.
Thinking on other lines....if we know our fate beforehand wouldnt it be great to change it as per our liking if we have some way of doing it :).