Do We Dream of Our Past Lives … Or Future Ones?

And If So, Why?

I have been studying dreams for more than a decade. A large focus of that research has been on the sub-topics of time and dreams, as well as memory and dreams.

As I’ve written before, my interest in these specific topics goes way back, but was amplified when in my thirties I became convinced I was having precognitive dreams, and that repeating dreams seemed to have a cyclical pattern in time.

Since then, I’ve been diligently tracking my own dreams and studying dreams from a phenomenological approach. I read research on memory, consciousness, and the brain (with a specific focus on hemispheric lateralization). I also just think — all the time — about our perception and experience of time.

Here is my brief answer to the question in the title: Yes, we dream of our own past lives. We also dream of potential future lives we have not yet lived into (and may not live into). Perhaps even more startling is that we even dream of other people’s past, current, or potential future lives. The dream space, so to speak, is filled with images upon images upon images representing all experiences across all time — and we have access to them when we fall asleep.

Once you get over the ontological shock of this and arrive at a certainty that the above…