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?