Do dreams ever tell the future? This is a question that I've heard often. Are dreams ever prophetic? Can you know what the future holds by paying attention to your dreams? The short answer is "yes". The longer answer is that there are several categories of prophetic dreams: true precognitive dreams (which are rare), foreshadowing dreams, and dreams with subliminal awareness. 

A true precognitive dream needs: 

• to be recorded in some way, preferably written down and dated, or perhaps told to a second person. 
• to be true to fact, meaning there'is a really close relationship between what was dreamed and what happened
• to come true within a reasonable period of time.

A foreshadowing dream needs: 

• to be recorded. 
• to be relatively close to fact. 
• to come (mostly) true within a reasonable period of time. 

A dream with subliminal awareness needs:

• to be recorded. (You might notice a tendency here.) 
• has usually only one element which comes true in a short period of time. 

So let's say I have a dream about an earthquake that shakes and rumbles and dumps my wine glasses on the floor where they all break. I write the dream down. A few weeks later, we have a 5.7 quake that does indeed rumble and shake and tumbles my wine glasses on the floor and they break. That's a precognitive dream. However, if it's years before a quake breaks my glasses, that's not really precognitive. After all, when I lived California, earthquakes were a fact of life there. 

Now let's say I have the same dream, record it, and in a few weeks, we have an earthquake that knocks over my vases - which don't break. This isn't precognitive either, since it's not true to fact. However, it could be considered a foreshadowing dream. 

And finally, let's say you have a dream of driving up a mountain when your brakes fail, and you start sliding backwards over the precipice. Two days later, you put on the brakes at a traffic light, and they don't catch. You have to pump them to stop in time. That wasn't a precognitive dream, and since there wasn't any mountain nor any sliding over the edge, it's not really foreshadowing either. It's still an attention-getter, isn't it? The part about the brakes may have had a subliminal component. Although your conscious mind didn't catch it, some part of your brain noticed a problem with the brakes and incorporated that symbol into your dream. It never hurts to get your brakes checked after a dream like that, but you might also want to look at your life and see if there's some "back-sliding" going on. 

Here's one more thought about this question. I believe that dreams can also show us a future self that we can choose to become. I'm thinking of one of my dream clients who is a sweet, creative, wonderful woman who didn't have a lot of self-confidence. Her dreams consistently showed her strong, confident women, who were taking charge and making a difference. As we worked on the dreams in group, she became aware of these self-confident women as possibile future aspects of herself. Over the months, we got to watch her "step into" that future self more and more, activating a new reality for herself.  So, do dreams ever tell the future? Yes. And sometimes, we can use them to form a future to bring us closer to our potential. 

If you have questions about dreams or dream symbols, or would like to make comments or suggestions, email me.