[Free to read] Dreaming Ahead of Time: Are Precognitive Dreams a Thing?

What precognitive dreams can teach us about our lives and our experience of time.

I’ve been working with dreams for a while–sporadically for the first couple of years, but now I have three solid years of dream journals. Like any good student, I’ve inquired into them through the lens of the living past manfesting in the present, shedding light on complexes at work in my or clients’ psyches: a mother complex appearing as a devouring snake that poisons a budding romance, an inner child driving the adult’s car in a work conflict, an unintegrated instinctual bull that rages whenever the client feels slighted by a stranger.

I asked questions like what in your current life feels a bit like the dream? or where in your life are you currently feeling like that?, trying to see what conscious attitude the dream could be compensating for in the present. But I never looked at the future.

In fact, there were few things I found more irritating than when people interpreted their dreams as solely pointing to the future, showing no introspective curiosity whatsoever. They would often deliver their interpretations with absolute certainty, leaving no room for dialogue. This was especially demoralising in therapy, where the dream would usually be very clearly related to the issue we’d been working on, but the client would entirely reject the hypothesis.

Steve: This dream clearly says that something bad’s going to happen to Sheila from work

Therapist: For fuck’s sake, Steve, I think this one is actually about your narcissistic mother.

(We all fantasise that therapists lose their cool like that, but my client Steve is fictional and that only happens in bad movies)

What about the future, though?

You might now be sitting there recalling a dream of yours that did anticipate the future: perhaps you dreamed about a friend you hadn’t seen in eight years and then you bumped into them the next day. Indeed, what does that have to do with your mother?

Anytime before this year, I would’ve probably fought you on that. However, at the start of 2023 I began to notice my own precognitive dreams. Indeed, I dreamed about two people I hadn’t seen in many years and who aren’t part of my life, nor live in this country. The next day I heard them call out my name in a tiny café close to where I work, in a not-so-touristy area of London. I brushed it off as a fun little coinkidink.

However, soon after I had a dream that changed my view. The dream itself was simple and involved an odd question from my therapist involving a breakdown. I took the dream to therapy, where we ended up having the exact conversation from the dream. There were no associations or archetypal amplifications to be made here. We established that I wasn’t heading for that breakdown, which was reassuring, but the dream still felt odd and unresolved. A mere week later, I found out that the breakdown did happen, although not in the way the dream suggested it, and it became one of the most significant things I’ve had to deal with this year in therapy. And I only realised the connection to the dream about two months after it happened.

Since then, I’ve had smaller precognitive dreams that mostly relate to my studies. A dream where I worked in a hospital “in the tradition of Artemidorus” led me to research him and discover that he wrote Oneirocritica, one of the first serious dream analysis texts, and is considered Freud’s precursor in this matter, inspiring his title for The Interpretation of Dreams.

The morning after dreaming about being initiated by a group of magicians “in the tradition of an ancient magician called Gilmesh”, I ran into a colleague from my training who was one of the magicians in the dream. Naturally, I told her about it and she enthusiastically said she’d just watched a documentary about the Epic of Gilgamesh. Now, about a month since that dream, I’m reading a book about precognitive dreams and in the first paragraph of a chapter both Artemidorus and Gilgamesh are mentioned as some of history’s first documented accounts of dreamwork.

What’s happening here?

Precognitive dreams

The book I mention is Gary Lachman’s Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence. The book is a joy to read, largely due to Lachman’s vast knowledge of dreams and the occult and his easy writing style–but also due to knowing the author is Blondie’s former bassist, Gary Valentine.

Lachman claims that precognitive dreams are more frequent than you think. Depending on who you ask, you might hear that all dreams are precognitive or that only a good amount of them seem to anticipate something of the future. The difficulty is that it’s almost impossible to tell that a dream is precognitive–you won’t know it is until waking life confirms it.

This may all sound exciting, but Lachman found that precognitive dreams are mostly simple and about trivial things. Indeed, your dreams are less likely to foretell the next financial crisis, but they may anticipate an awkward encounter with a dreaded ex. In some cases, they may alert you of a potential catastrophe, in which case you might do well to listen to them. They also seem more concerned with your own subjective future, rather than the collective one. And, according to Lachman, they’ll usually have a time lag of a day or two between the dream and the waking life synchronicity.

What’s more, just like regular dreams, precognitive dreams also use symbolic language to “disguise” the material they’re referring to:

“All that is necessary is that we record our dreams as soon as we remember them, and that we pay attention to what happens in our waking lives–good advice at any time. If we are serious about this we will discover, as Dunne did, that impossible or not, we do dream the future. It may not be in the exact form the future will take, although often enough it is, and may appear subject to a kind of ‘symbolic distortion’, which is not surprising as dreams speak a pictorial language made of symbols, images, metaphors and, very often, puns and plays on words. But the symbolism never veers very far from the fact–or future fact.”

Indeed: the couple in my dream were the exact people I ran into the next day, although in different circumstances. The breakdown wasn’t mine, but it was exactly what my dream anticipated and it did have a big impact on my life. And even though I didn’t know much at all about Artemidorus and Gilgamesh, they are now becoming a much more common presence in my life.

The healing potential of precognitive dreams

Some precognitive dreams may also have a curative effect.

The practice of dream incubation, or intentional dreaming, goes back way before the ancient Greeks. However, their belief in the healing power of dreams led to the construction of dream sanctuaries in temples dedicated to the god of medicine, Asclepius. Scattered all over Greece, the sanctuaries would offer rituals of purification and collective sleep practices for dream incubation, not that different from the principles behind psychedelic therapy retreats today. People would go to sleep hoping that the god would present them with a cure for their illness in their dream–and most of them would leave the temple healed.

This may sound like ancient woo-woo, but Jung himself insisted on the healing effect of dreams. In Man and His Symbols, he suggests that dreams have powerful diagnostic value, especially in the beginning of therapy: a client’s unconscious may produce a dream that reveals the dynamic of the client’s neurosis as well as a suggested treatment.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen this happen myself in psychotherapy. Most of my clients have a big or shocking dream right before our first session: perhaps they violently kill a significant person in their life, they see a child hurt in a specific way, or they encounter a particular scary animal. The healing doesn’t come from interpreting the dream, but from beginning to safely open a dialogue with the unconscious. When done well, this facilitates an expansion of consciousness resulting in a correction of the dreamer’s one-sided attitude that caused the issue in the first place.

Image generated with Midjourney

Two brain hemispheres, three dimensions of time

The consideration of precognitive dreams may open up some interesting avenues for healing, but it also raises serious questions about the nature of time.

In his book, Lachman notes that humans have always been concerned with time: more than 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals were performing rituals for the dead, which suggest some belief in an after-life. 35,000 years ago, we begin to see remains of lunar calendars, indicating humanity’s early preoccupation with astrology as a container for our experience of time. And while time had a sacred, infinite dimension for millennia, everything changed with the invention of the clock and its appearance in our collective, public lives. Suddenly, time became measurable and conquerable.

But how could the mere invention of the clock change something as immaterial as time?

Lachman sustains that, despite the invention of the clock, we still experience time in these two ways. He links the infinite experience of time with the right hemisphere, generally associated with our “artistic” self, pattern recognition, images, intuitions, and associative thought. Sitting in meditation, we might feel like we’re slipping into the infinite now, and that the distinction between past, present, and future dissolves.

The left hemisphere, however, is more commonly associated with our so-called “scientist” self: it’s more geared towards logic, language, discrimination, and linear thought. The left-brain is a taskmaster. It can believe that it has conquered time because it can measure and plan it. It separates the past from the present and the future and it’s responsible for our ego consciousness.

Of course, we know now that the brain doesn’t function as two separate hemispheres. The two work together, but operate differently, which can be linked to two ways of observing time.

In examining the possibility of time travel and free will in relation to precognitive dreams (which I will leave out of this essay), Lachman expands on J.W. Dunne’s idea of two observers experiencing two dimensions of time:

“Observer 1 lives in ordinary time, moving from the past to the future. Their job is to gather information, to gain knowledge, and learn about the world. To this end, their awareness is limited to a narrow band of reality, the equable flow of Newtonian time.”

In sleep, however, Observer 1 somewhat dies and we enter the realm of Observer 2. This is akin to Jung’s “another whom we do not know”, who “speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves” (C.G. Jung, CW 10). Observer 2 has access to a reality beyond our usual consciousness and, like the right hemisphere, doesn’t differentiate between past and present.

However, precognitive dreams (and the possibility of time travel) suggest that there may exist, in fact, a third observer with a third dimension of time. And this is quite the realisation:

“Observer 3 is, in a way, not an observer, at least not solely one, but is capable of action. […] Observer 3, then, is the ‘me’ who can change the future, who can not only step back from the press of time and events and, in dreams and other moments, get a glimpse of the future, but who can act. Which means that this ‘me’ possesses free will, something that precognition seems to deny.”

Observer 3 exists in a third dimension of time, different from the left or right brain’s perceptions. In Time 3, time itself becomes subjective. “We are not in time, time is in us”, as Lachman writes. This is the time of synchronicities, the Kairos, where a future revealed to us in a precognitive dream is entirely alterable through our conscious attention and action.

Although this time is rather abstract, I can think of moments that did feel outside of my usual experiences of time. Lachman himself talks about occasionally entering a state where the inner and outer world appear not-so-separate. This is not a psychotic state, as the differentiating consciousness of the ego remains intact, but rather one where dreams and synchronicities abound and life has a sort of otherworldly, magical feeling. In these states, I sometimes feel like I’m tapping into a larger consciousness that helps me see the greater picture or take an action that leaves behind a pattern of conditioning.

The meaning of precognitive dreams

“I would also suggest that the purpose of future dreams is simply to keep us on our toes, to shake us out of our usual drifting approach to life, to make us wonder, rather as synchronicities do.”

So, if they’re not going to give us a heads up about cryptocurrency investments or some catastrophes with enough certainty so we can avoid them, what’s the point of precognitive dreams after all?

Lachman writes that precognitive dreams (although I would extend this to “big” dreams too) snap us out of auto-pilot, or what he calls “the robot”: an unintentional way of living where nothing truly changes and time simply goes by until we die.

The robot, Lachman says, is not the enemy: “an absolutely undetermined life would be chaos and soon prove unliveable”. Not all moments of life can be infused with the intentionality and attention of doing something so fully. It helps us to learn how to automatically perform tasks like driving, tying up our shoe laces, or performing a ten-step skincare routine (although does anyone really need that?), so that we can preserve our energy for moments that do require our full presence.

However, the robot becomes a problem where all life becomes repetitive and uninvolved. This can happen out of mere unconsciousness, an over-identification with a group or family, or as a consequence of significant trauma where one lives in survival. In these situations, life becomes unimaginative, dull, and we repeat the same patterns over and over.

Sometimes, a precognitive dream can remind us that our lives are much more mysterious and magical than we allow them to be. This might lead us to seek out therapy, meditation, psychedelics, or other self-inquiry tools have the same aim of snapping us out of this passive participation in life.

Whichever way we do this, the healing mechanism is similar to that of the ancient Greeks’, who knew that the gods speak to them in dreams.

For most of us, our greatest work is to find a way to reconnect with the imagination–not as the compulsive daydreaming that keeps us stuck in delusional fantasies, but through our active capacity to reflect on our dreams and imagine things differently.

Observer 1 and 2 need to make room for Observer 3, who is more than an observer: the one who is neither seeking to control and interpret the unconscious, nor gets swallowed by it. Observer 3 realises the symbolic nature of life and engages with it. I see it as the ego-Self axis, the long, hard work of individuation, where the ego functions in service to the Self but maintains its sovereignty. Even as a mere metaphor for an attitude, is the fruit of inner work, depth psychology, and a spiritual practice.

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Have you experienced precognitive dreams? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below. And if you enjoyed this essay, please like it and share it with others.

If you’re interested in exploring your dreams and cultivating your Observer 3, you can join my community platform, Dreamwork Circle. You’ll find over 13 hours of recorded lessons, written dreamwork guides, and weekly dream circles with a wonderful community.

If you’re in Bucharest, I’m leading two in-person workshops this December: a dreamwork workshop and a creative imagination workshop for discovering your guide for 2024 using tarot and art therapy. I’d love to see you there.