Can Dreams Tell our Future?

Do you watch American Idol? I do. Wednesday night’s episode in Portland, Oregon was filled with great stories, but one in particular stood out for me. It had to do with a young female contestant named Brittany Zika, 21, who had a dream in which she was singing Gravity onstage with Sara Bareilles. In a synchronistic turn of fate, her mother presented her with two tickets for a sold-out Sara B. concert. While at the concert, Brittany held up a hastily scribbled cardboard sign asking Sara if she could sing that song with her. Wish granted. Before she knew it, she was on stage singing Gravity with her idol Sara Bareilles—just like in her dream.

So, the question is: Was it a prophetic dream—did Brittany see her future? Or was it a wish dream that Brittany manifested because she believed it was her destiny? We’ll never know for sure, but whichever the case, the energy was propelling her toward that event and she ran with it, ensuring her destiny.

Most people accept that dreams play a significant role in our mental and emotional health. But they can also provide a window to the future, a doorway to The Other Side, and a vehicle to travel to other places on dream-time jaunts. In today’s post, we’ll focus mostly on the Prophetic Dream, sometimes referred to as pre-cognitive dream. If you’ve had one, you know how powerful they can be!

I have adopted Sylvia Brown’s categorization of dreams, outlined in her Book of Dreams. I like it because it’s the simplest, clearest, and most comprehensive categorization I’ve found. She uses five basic categories to discuss dreams:

• Prophetic –witnessing the future during sleep
• Release—the subconscious working through fears, guilt, regrets, and confusion, often manifesting in recurring nightmares or disturbing dreams
• Wish—the subconscious delivering in dreams what you most want; the trick to this analysis is to recognize what the objects or people in your dream represent to you in a figurative sense, not necessarily in a literal sense.
• Information & Problem-Solving—Oftentimes, when faced with a big decision, we decide to “sleep on it” and inevitably we have a much clearer sense of the right path upon waking. What we generally don’t remember are the dreams in which we test each of the various possible paths before us, so we can make the decision in our waking lives with conviction.
• Astral Visits—these include visits to The Other Side, to other planets or dimensions in our Universe, and even to parallel lives or past lives.

So, what is a Prophetic Dream? It’s a view into your most probable future via a dream. By that I mean that the cause and event continuum in your life and in those you touch is lining up in a way that will deliver a particular future. I don’t know why some people have or remember them more easily than others, but only a handful of people I have met recall them.

Why do we have these dreams? I believe two related but different phenomena lead to prophetic dreams:

• Our Spirit Guides use our dreams to prepare us for a future event—to warn us, to prepare us emotionally, to stimulate us into action, or to help us relax about whether something will or will not happen.  I believe we only see what we are meant to see; that which is helpful to us in some way.
• The higher self, or soul, allows selected information in one’s subconscious regarding the Life Plan (replete with images), to seep into dreams, for the very same reasons noted above.

I believe I’ve had numerous prophetic dreams in my life, but I can only prove three dreams were precognizant because of journal entries made about the dream prior to the event.  The first recorded dream revealed a work scenario that would occur over two years later in Japan, although

the dream provided no clue as to where in the world it was. The second dream put me in a graduate school classroom, that would come true a year later at MIT. The third one happened in real-time. It signaled a painful personal event occurring thousands of miles away, but also introduced me to my Spirit Guide, Brown Bear.  After this dream and the challenging reality that followed, I needed to know how and why these prophetic dreams were happening, and who was this mysterious man who appeared in my dream? A friend told me about the Spiritualist church nearby in Swampscott. “There are a lot of Mediums there. Perhaps someone can help you,” he said. He was right. That dream put me on the path to my own psychic and spiritual unfoldment, and directly on the path to becoming a Medium. A path, I might add, that has surprised no one more than me!

How can you tell if a dream is Prophetic? There is a special characteristic to these dreams. They are very clear and lucid, like watching a movie of one’s life. There is nothing surreal or strange happening in the dream. Everything and everyone in the dream seems quite normal. There’s a reason for that—they are!

So, is there a single destiny for each of us? It’s logical to think that if we can dream the future, then it’s already set, and we can’t change it. Not true. We always have free will, remember? So consider this:  each of us is undoubtedly having prophetic dreams about a variety of high-probability futures, but of course we only recall those that come true. The others become irrelevant. So, keep this fact in mind when reviewing your dreams. Is the energy there to take two equal but different paths? Or will others’ decisions and actions determine your final destiny? What do you think?

How is Déjà vu different from a Prophetic Dream? My understanding of the difference is that déjà vu is not a dream recall, but rather a soul memory.  On The Other Side, before we are born into a lifetime on Earth, we are given the opportunity to review scenes from our upcoming life, as we’ve planned it, on some type of video display. Now, these scenes represent life events that have a high probability of happening—and when they do, we have the feeling that “we’ve been there before.”  A prophetic dream, on the other hand, happens during our lives on Earth, but again, represent events that have a high probability of happening, i.e. the causal events are lining up in such a way as to ensure it. Now, could the déjà vu be a dream recall, but you just don’t remember that you dreamed it? Yes, it could be that, too.

So what can we take from these phenomena that’s useful? It’s simply this: if you have a series of déjà vu experiences, perhaps coupled with prophetic dreams (however trivial the contents), it’s a good sign that you’re “on track” according to your life plan. Now, not everyone is as psychically open, or remembers their dreams, so if you have neither, don’t worry, you can take some actions to improve your dream recall (see below).  And by the way, a better indication of not being on Plan is the feeling that you are not doing what you should be, or living where you should be, or working where you should be, and everything is difficult. But that’s a discussion for another day…

Here are some strategies to better remember your dreams:

1. Buy a blank book and keep a dream journal. Keep it separate from any other journal you may have, and use only for dreams.
2. Keep the journal and pen next to your bed.
3. Set the intention to remember your dreams. Ask Spirit to help you.
4. Record your dreams immediately when you wake up, so you don’t forget. Date them.
5. Categorize your dreams as best you can. Try to do this each time you record your dreams; it will come more naturally over time. I recommend Sylvia Brown’s Book of Dreams for this.
6. Analysis:  If the dream isn’t obviously meaningful to you, talk with someone who knows you well about your dream. They may provide insights that you miss.
7. Get yourself a few dream symbol books, and use these to help you analyze your dreams. When you find a book you like, invite Spirit to use these same symbols while communicating with you. We use the same strategy in mediumship, and it works.
8. Record your analysis as soon as possible after the dream, when you can still “feel” the dream.

Some dream analysis books I like:

1. I had the Strangest Dream—The Dream’s Dictionary for the 21^st Century by Kelly Sullivan Walden
2. Dream Dictionary by Tony Crisp
3. The Dream Book–Symbols for Self Understanding by Betty Bethards.

In a future post, we’ll talk about Astral Traveling while dreaming. It’s probably the most fascinating of the dream types, and I find them particularly illuminating when it comes to understanding Life Plans and the Soul’s Journey.

I’d love to hear about your prophetic dreams, and how they have impacted your life. How long is the gap between dream and event? Has it changed over time? Is there anything consistent in the theme, or style of the dream? Thanks for sharing!

~With love and light—Renee Buck