(This is a compilation of essays I’ve written over the years on the subject of dreams.)
A while back, a friend of mine told me she had been having vivid dreams that she was in a passionate relationship with one of her work colleagues. When I asked if she had ever told him about her dreams, she said no. She wasn’t sure it would be appropriate to do so.
But she insisted that she had never had such vivid dreams before, so they simply could not be false visions. “I’m already with him in my dreams. It’s so real! How could that be if it’s not going to come true?”
It must be a vision of her future, she insisted.
That conversation got me thinking. Most of my dreams seem to be set in the past, often the distant past. I’m often starting college all over again or showing up at a new job. Those dreams are usually anxious ones because I can’t find my classes or where the office is — things like that.
Carl Jung wrote that we process our subconscious in our dreams, so that’s how any underlying anxieties are likely to surface when we sleep.
One of my granddaughter’s dreams are a case in point. She says she often relives her most embarrassing moments in dreams. “If I did or said something embarrassing in front of somebody, it happens again in my dreams. I see them and suddenly I can’t help but do it again.”
That makes all kinds of sense to me. But I keep wondering about that other kind of dream, the one where we maybe, just maybe, we actually do see the future.
So I checked into the topic and according to the Sleep Foundation, some of us (roughly 18-38%) can and do see the future in what are known as precognitive dreams. Also, Healthline reports that Carl Jung himself had some precognitive dreams, though they were of a negative variety — foreseeing his mother’s death and world war in Europe.
But back to my friend who dreamt of a relationship with her colleague. Some months after our conversation, the two of them did become a couple. It turned out he had been having the same kinds of dreams about her.
***
One of my grandmothers claimed she was psychic. She claimed she could see other people’s thoughts. She was very convincing in this regard, so much so that some of my cousins and I wondered whether we were psychic too. We tried to read each other’s minds, with mixed results. Giving each other enough hints, we could indeed read each other’s minds, sometimes, sort of.
My grandmother was asleep the night my grandfather died in the living room. He was surrounded by his children when he peacefully passed away. At the very moment that happened my grandmother let out a scream in her bedroom. When they rushed in to see what was wrong, she was sitting up in bed.
“It was Alec,” she said. “He came to me to say good-bye.”
***
One of the better pieces I’ve read about the phenomenon of precognitive visions, or dreams about future events was in Psychology Today a few years back.
The article cites research that roughly twice as many women as men report prophetic dreams, which is interesting in itself, and provides some possible explanations for what such dreams may mean and why they occur.
To Carl Jung, such dreams may be “an anticipation in the unconscious of future achievements, something like a preliminary exercise or sketch, or a plan roughed out in advance.”
This makes sense to me from conversations I’ve had with friends about their dreams and my own memory of dreams I have had. Such anticipatory dreams often occur when we are just starting a new job, or preparing to give a major presentation, or on the verge of some other significant event.
Our minds seem to be working out a strategy for us to at least survive that future event, which is clearly causing us some anxiety, and maybe even help us thrive. In the dream, we become hyper-aware of our vulnerabilities — of the possibilities of failure in unanticipated ways.
This type of anxiety about the future is productive on several levels, I suspect, for creative work.
Many writers wake up from dreams with ideas for solving writing dilemmas. If they can shake themselves alert enough to do so, they turn on the light and write the idea down for later use.
Later in the light of day, that idea may seem stupid or foolish or naive, but at other times it indeed turns out to be a flash of brilliance. Either way, it helps inform our future work.
Finally, we may anticipate new relationships in our dreams, whether romantic or otherwise. In that regard, free will is in play. To quote the great Bob Dylan, “I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”
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