Precognitive Dreams: When Your Dreams Come True

Dreamwork is a multifaceted process requiring a basic understanding of symbols and a healthy dose of humility. There are some things we can decipher and some that will remain mysterious. However, what can help you traverse the often enigmatic terrain of dreams is knowing five ways to understand the language of dreams:

• Subjective/symbolic attitude toward dreams, which illuminates symbolic meanings and includes the dreamer’s inner state and inner world.
• Objective/concrete attitude toward dreams, which depicts the dreamer’s objective and literal external reality or cultural and collective reality or both.
• Reductive perspective on dreams, which replays past experiences, including traumatic events, and expresses our awareness of how the past remains alive in the present.
• Prospective perspective on dreams, which depicts future possibilities and development, anticipates needed changes, and expresses our awareness of how the future is contained in the present.
• Extrasensory dreams express dream material that is not derived from sense organs. Notably, it includes precognitive dreams that foretell knowledge about the future that cannot be entirely inferred or known from actual available information. More specifically, this category also refers to dreams that may be considered “telepathic” (the capacity to communicate material directly by mind-to-mind communication) and “clairvoyant” (the ability to perceive visual material without the use of normal senses).

As a depth-oriented psychoanalyst and someone who specializes in dreamwork, I find all dream categories fascinating, but extrasensory, precognitive dreams most often enthrall the general public. Some people dismiss these dreams out of hand, saying it’s not possible to predict the future. This is a common response, and we can all easily fall into the unconscious practice of holding strong opinions toward that which we have neither experienced nor understood. Jung spoke to this when he said, “Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.”

If we dig a little deeper, however, we often learn the limitations of solely relying on sources of knowledge that privilege evidence, certitude, precision, and quantifiable phenomena because some things defy logic. For instance, in one of my courses on dreamwork at Notre Dame de Namur University, a graduate student, who was skeptical about these ideas, revealed a dream he had about me. He said in the dream he was looking for me and two women, Barbara and Mimi, described as my close friend and next-door neighbor, who were guiding him to me. My close friend really is Barbara, and my next-door neighbor really is Mimi. My student didn’t have any knowledge of these relationships, nor the names of these two women.

He also revealed additional details in his dream that paralleled an atypical experience with Barbara I had that week. He conveyed Barbara’s and Mimi’s physical appearance, our lives, and relationships. Some people might call his dream a coincidence and brush it aside, but that does a disservice to the psyche. Moreover, brushing it aside forecloses what we can learn from this dream. The unexplained lives side by side with the rational, known, predictable, and proven. Furthermore, the validity of precognitive dreams has been demonstrated.

As referenced in a Good Housekeeping article, Suzanne Degregorio had a recurring dream where she heard over and over again, “It's your time to get cancer.” Her most recent mammogram showed no signs of breast cancer, and she didn’t have a family history of the disease. Her radiologist mentioned she had dense breasts, which makes breast cancer harder to detect, so she pushed for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in tandem with a mammogram at her next screening.

Sure enough, the MRI revealed a suspicious lesion and a biopsy confirmed Degregorio had breast cancer. Her experience isn’t so out of the ordinary—a 2015 study in the scientific journal Explore demonstrated more than half of the study participants reported they had warning dreams about breast cancer.¹ Again, they had no family or personal history of the disease, and, in 94 percent of cases, the dreams were the first clue the women had cancer.

There aren’t many recent statistics on precognitive dreams, but a study from 2009 found that as many as 60 percent of people have experienced precognitive dreams.² Why, or how, are people capable of precognitive dreams? No one knows for sure, but the mind is capable of deep revelations during REM. As I mentioned, dreams have their own language; they communicate in symbols and are insulated from the external influences of the waking world. That means the rational mind is less capable of interjecting and saying, “No, that can’t happen,” and, thus, “irrational” information is more easily communicated and accepted.

This is possible because the unconscious and subconscious mind are constantly taking in information that the conscious mind does not perceive, and these ideas, experiences, and research findings further confirm that this is true. The information the mind takes in includes subtle clues or patterns we’ve noticed but not registered. In dreamland, these clues and patterns rise to the surface so that the hidden knowledge is no longer hidden. That can explain why people are able to predict their own medical diagnoses before a doctor does, but it doesn’t explain other precognitive dreams, ones that don’t involve the person at all, and instead predict future events. We’ll discuss those sorts of precognitive dreams in my next post.