Why Do Some Dreams Seem to Predict the Future?

In a previous post, I mentioned there are five ways to understand the language of dreams, including that dreams are extrasensory, that is, they express dream material that is not derived from sense organs. These include precognitive dreams, which foretell knowledge about the future that cannot be entirely inferred or known from actual available information.

My interest in extrasensory and precognitive dreams grew out of many personal and professional experiences.¹ One example of such a dream occurred decades ago when my patient had a detailed dream that depicted a school shooting. She had this dream prior to the general rise of school shootings and their growing presence in American culture since the early 2000s. Two days after her dream, the shooting unfolded in almost precisely the way she had dreamt it. This patient had no connection to the school, and she lived thousands of miles away. How could she possibly have known?

It’s not only my patient—Canadian citizen and music teacher Kathleen Lorna Middleton frequently had dreams about places she wasn’t connected to. As reported in The New Yorker, at around 4 a.m. on October 21, 1966, she had a powerful feeling of foreboding. She awoke choking, gasping, and with the sense of the walls caving in. She told Alexander Bacciarelli, her lodger, about the ominous feeling when he came home from a night shift. A little more than an hour later, a group of laborers was working on an enormous heap of coal waste in South Wales that collapsed.

The heap stood on a steep hillside and had shifted because of weeks of heavy rain. The coal waste moved, and “tall black waves crawled up the slope before 150,000 tons of slurry rushed into the valley below, overwhelming Pantglas Junior School in the village of Aberfan. Children and staff heard what sounded like a jet plane, and then were buried. A hundred and forty-four people—including 116 children—were killed in Aberfan.”²

For a year, Middleton wrote to, or called, the newspaper The Evening Standard, which opened a premonitions bureau after the Aberfan disaster, to share her premonitions and precognitive dreams. Starting on March 11, 1968, she had a dream about Senator Robert Kennedy and his assassination. Four days later, she wrote to the paper again, saying she couldn’t disconnect the word “assassination” from Robert Kennedy. On June 4th, she became frantic and called the Premonitions Bureau three times; Kennedy was killed shortly after midnight.

Some people might call these dreams a fluke or a mere coincidence, but Jung noted dreams that express news before the news reaches the dreamer “is something that happens fairly frequently.”¹ Furthermore, our evidence-based, highly rational society, by and large, seeks to dismiss extrasensory experiences because they are difficult to understand, replicate, and measure. However, to quote Jung again:

“The statistically significant statement only concerns regularly occurring events, and if considered as axiomatic, it simply abolishes all exceptions to the rule. It produces a merely average picture of natural events, but not a true picture of the world as it is. Yet the exceptions—and my results are exceptions and most improbable ones at that—are just as important as the rules. Statistics would not even make sense without the exceptions. There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.”

Reality is nuanced, complex, and mysterious. If something occurs even once, it thus proves its validity, and additionally, some of the most meaningful dimensions of human experiences elude comprehension from a scientific viewpoint. That’s not to say there aren’t theories as to why precognitive dreams occur—there are many—but there is no one definitive answer.

If we turn to Jung, he suggests that human consciousness is dynamic and multi-layered and consists of the personal, collective, and cultural unconscious, which processes and synthesizes reality in ways that our conscious mind cannot. We each have our own story or personal unconscious, which intersects with our cultural stories or cultural unconscious. Moreover, across all humans are archetypal symbols, patterns, and experiences that transcend yet may include individual and cultural life histories, which Jung called the collective unconscious.

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He believed the unconscious is constantly absorbing information from personal, cultural, and collective sources, which may, in turn, enable a person to pick up on events that are about to occur, even if they have no direct or concrete connection to the event, as in the case of my patient and Middleton. Jung posited, and I agree, that the nature of the psyche is inherently spiritual, and this is also reflected in the nature of consciousness, which can include personal, cultural, collective, transpersonal, and spiritual forms of knowing.

Similarly, Rupert Sheldrake proposed there are “morphic fields” that curve around objects in space-time as “nonmaterial regions of influence extending in space and continuing in time.” These fields contain memory for the object or system they organize and can transmit formative causal influences through both space and time. They inform objects or systems and act as a collective cultural memory. These fields can transmit information instantaneously in accordance with quantum physics across country borders and continents. This means there can be an energetic link between people, and that link is how information, such as a planned school shooting, can be transmitted.

Quantum physics and neuroscience have offered other theories about why precognitive dreams occur. These theories speculate that our perception of time could be more fluid than we experience consciously. For instance, nonlinear time proposes that the past, present, and future might not be as strictly separated as we think, and our brains may be able to access future events under certain circumstances, such as when dreaming.

Religion and spirituality also have an explanation for precognitive dreams. Some traditions believe that precognitive dreams are communications from an angel, spirit, deity, or spiritual source that enable humans to recognize and experience the larger spiritual world and develop a meaningful relationship with it. A spiritual source may communicate the future for various reasons. For example, so that the dreamer can make wiser, spiritually informed, and more conscious decisions in their life.

I don’t ultimately know why people experience precognitive dreams, but as a depth-oriented psychologist and psychoanalyst, I respect these experiences and recognize them as quintessentially human. The mystical and the mysterious are intrinsic to our humanity, whether we choose to embrace them or not. These mystical and mysterious experiences manifest in numerous ways, and precognitive dreams are only one mechanism.