Since most people dream for a couple hours each night, some will be able to remember their dreams. There are people in this group that have experienced precognitive dreams or dreams that tell the future. If you have a precognitive dream, in order to identify it, you have to do the following:
- Tell someone about the dream before it comes true.
- The dream has to have different details that aren’t by chance.
- The dreams that are self-fulfilling might come from pre knowledge that you have and aren’t considered precognitive.
- Telepathy or communication dreams cannot make the precognitive dream happen.
Using Dreams to Predict the Future
There is not much evidence scientifically that dreams can predict the future. Some believe that there are precognitive dreams that happen when someone is getting ill, or someone is declining in their mental health. This can be someone that is getting a disease such as Parkinson or other mental health issues.
There are different stages of life where someone might have more dreams such as if they have had trauma if they are pregnant or if they have some kind of illness. This can lead to nightmares and bad dreams.
Lucid dreaming doesn’t predict the future, it just allows people to be aware that they are dreaming and to be in control of their dreams.
Precognitive Dreams
Some dreams have been reported to be predicting the future. Here are some of the recorded precognitive dreams:
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln reported of dreaming of his own death. He dreamed of being at his own funeral and saw people crying. When he went to the corpse it was him in the casket. He told the dream to Lamon that he had this dream, and he was frightened. He had dreamed that he was assassinated, and the dream happened a few nights before he actually was.
Landslide of Aberfan
Another dream that was a precognitive dream was the landside of 1966. This was when a landslide killed 144 students and teachers. John Barker, a psychiatrist, researched what happened and then found out that there were 76 reports of premonition dreams. He followed up on some of the dreams and even found that the parents of one 10-year-old girl had reported that her child reported a dream to her that the school was covered by something black and was no longer there.
Robert Kennedy
Robert Kennedy’s assassination was also dreamed about by two people. One was reported in 1968 by Kathleen Middleton where she called the Premonition Bureau three times on June 4th, 1968, to report the dream and the next day he was killed.
Why Do Precognitive Dreams Happen?
There are some different explanations for why precognitive dreams happen including:
- Selective recall: This is people that dream more than other people. The dream can predict the future and if it does then you will remember that dream more than other dreams.
- Tolerance for Ambiguity: This is when ambiguous dreams are interpreted as positive, and these are people that are more likely to experience these kinds of dreams.
- Paranormal beliefs: There is a relationship between believing in the paranormal and then having precognitive dreams and premonitions.
- Coincidences: Some dreams can happen by coincidence, and it can be things that you may have experienced in your life.
- Subconsciousness: Experts believe that the emotions and memories that people have can go into your subconsciousness and it can cause you to have dreams.
Final Thoughts
Precognitive dreams cannot really be proven or disproved but they have been studied for years and years. It is hard to really know what causes these dreams to happen.