Your dreams can tell the future. If you’re ready to listen.
What 60 years of research, debate, and ridicule has taught us about the predictive power of our dreams.
I dreamed I was running from a violent man. I found my friend, begged her for help. She solemnly opened a heavy Bible on the table. Ignoring my panic, declared that she would read to me from the Gospel of Mark. Switching to lucidity- the awareness I was in fact dreaming- I realised she was a lost cause. I willed myself awake. Smashing through consciousness to escape the danger. And woke screaming and sweaty in my bed.
The line between my nightmare and the waking world was a little too blurry for comfort. The vision hadn’t seemed as firmly caged in my sleep as I would have liked. In the days that followed, I couldn’t shift the sense that it was some kind of warning. I delicately probed my life for clues. Reconsidered new male acquaintances. Questioned the confused female friend who had offered the night-time sermon.
One third of people believe in future-telling dreams.
Many people share my gnawing feeling that their dreams bring messages from the future. Different surveys give different figures. But it’s said that between 17% and 38% have at least one personal experience like this.
This percentage- around one third of the population- has held steady for the last thirty years. The belief that dreams can tell the future stretches back through time. Touching almost all recorded cultures. Its even found in the Old Testament.
In the aftermath of national disasters, people sometimes make claims of premonitions. An American psychologist collected dreams in the months leading up to 9/11. The dreams seemed to hint at the looming tragedy. Nightmares included airplane crashes, exploding buildings, and terrorists.
It wouldn’t have been the first time shocked sleepers awoke to find news headlines echoing their dreams. In 1966, a small mining village in Wales called Aberfan was devastated by a landslide. 144 people, mostly children, died when debris from a nearby coal tip fell on a primary school.
After the catastrophe, many people across the UK spoke out. They insisted they had dreamed the event before it happened. Even parents of the deceased children mentioned worrying visions. At the time, before the landslide, they had brushed them off as nothing.
Back in the 1960’s, the British establishment took the predictive power of dreams seriously. Prompted by the Aberfan disaster, A psychiatrist called John Barker founded The Premonitions Bureau in 1967. Its goal was to collect dream-related intelligence of national interest.
Scientific attempts to prove future-telling dreams have been unsuccessful.
In the 18 months of its existence, the Premonitions Bureau collected around 1000 dreams. But less than 10% predicted future events. No untimely deaths were averted.
Today, looking back, the Premonitions Bureau seems quaint in its optimism and immature in its methods. The modern scientific evidence for dreams’ power to predict the future is weak.
In 2018 academics in California looked at all available research. Their review concluded that there are few well-controlled studies. And of the handful that meet the standards expected of mainstream science, the results are mixed.
There is an old children’s game that used to be played in parts of the UK, during the Celtic festival of Samhain. Children would chase crows. They believed the direction of escape foretold secrets of the coming year.
In 2023, Barker’s Bureau has been exiled to this category. Superstition not science.
Our dreams give us deep insight about the present.
Future-telling dreams have been disregarded as old wives tales. Their failure to hold up under laboratory conditions has pushed them to the periphery. But the tide is turning.
As we learn more about how dreams link to our current waking lives, their power to predict what comes next seems increasingly grounded.
In the daytime, we see and hear millions of things. Most of which we disregard because they’re judged to be unimportant. But unbeknownst to us, this information is captured by our minds. And later weaved into our dreams.
Our dreams are not a place where brand new wisdom is conjured up, or transmitted through time from the future. Instead, they are an opportunity to draw attention to signals missed in our waking lives.
In Oracle of the Night Sidarta Ribeiro calls the brain a “probabilistic neurobiological machine.” He says during dreaming, it uses tiny clues about what we experienced the previous day. Then it builds simulations about what might happen in the future.
The better our ability to collect and process the tiny clues, the more accurate our predictions turn out to be.
This idea is called the Implicit Processing Hypothesis.
Understanding the present helps us predict the future.
This mechanism helps explain some of the anecdotes. Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his murder 10 days before it happened. At that time there was clearly growing tension around him. He wouldn’t have needed psychic powers to have felt it.
British analysts made a similar suggestions about the pre-9/11 flurry of dreams. As shocking as the attacks were, with the benefit of hindsight historians now know there were visible signposts. Ones that a sufficiently-receptive person might have unconsciously picked up on.
This role for dreams- as a deep insight into our present- has been used by therapists for decades.
One psychotherapist noticed something strange about the first dream each new patient told her. The dream painted a picture of how the therapy would progress. Occasionally over many years.
A young man dreamed of a beautiful house. It was filled with wonderful things. But was impossible to enter. During treatment the man focused his efforts on telling interesting stories. It was as if he were performing to a crowd. Like the beautiful house, he was unwilling to let the therapist in.
The dream revealed information about the patient’s current state. From this, the psychotherapist could predict how they might act in the future.
Some people are hypersensitive to the messages in their dreams.
The psychotherapist in this example had trained for many years. Her experience earned her sensitivity to the dreams of her clients. But for others, the gift arrives uninvited.
Childhood abuse leaves scars on the lives of adult survivors. The devastating impact of these early experiences includes damage to mental and physical health. But packaged up with these challenges seems to be a glimmer of grace.
Survivors also are more curious, creative, open-minded, and clever. We still don’t fully understand why this happens. Scientists think the brains of children in abusive households might develop in unusual ways. Ways that help them cope.
These traumatised adults are more likely to believe in the predictive power of dreams. Through the lens of the Implicit Processing Hypothesis, this seems logical.
Horrible circumstances forced these children to develop incredibly strong threat detection. So of course they are extra skilled at spotting hidden cues in their waking lives. This gives their dreams lots of useful input for simulations of the future.
Researchers have historically dismissed the dream-experiences of these survivors.
Putting their claims down to low education, desire for control, or fantasy. This oversight wastes unique contributions to our understanding of predictive dreams.
We might need to get comfortable with the mystery.
On the north bank of the River Thames you will find the Tower of London. Walking distance from financial, scientific, and political districts. Institutions that made the city famous.
Inside the tower there are nine ravens, The descendants of a flock that have lived there since 1685. Tended over centuries by the Raven Master. English children don’t chase crows on Samhain anymore. But somehow, this tradition of the tower ravens has lived on.
They say these ravens know about threats on the horizon. Things that humans can’t yet see. Legend has it that if the birds leave the tower, the kingdom will fall. Even as the world advances, the most logical amongst us cling to not-quite-understood ancient wisdom.
For millennia dreamers have known, in their bones, that there is some value to their visions. Perhaps not the same kind of truth found under the microscopes of scientists. Still, no less precious. In the midst of chaos, complexity, and especially crisis, we look inwards for understanding.
Dreams are not a crystal ball. But they hold a promise of intuition we’re not ready to shatter.
