This Isn't a Prophetic Dream
Some people report having the same dream for years, while others say their dreams later come true. Is it really as described, or might there be other explanations?
1. Psychological Suggestion
Freud once had a female patient who “dreamed she met a close acquaintance at the entrance of a certain shop—someone who turned out to be her former family doctor. The next morning, while out shopping, she unexpectedly ran into him, as if the dream were replaying.” This appears to be a classic case of a “precognitive dream.”
However, when Freud probed further, he found that the patient “had no recollection of having dreamed this” until she actually saw the doctor. At that point, she thought, “I must have dreamed this.” Freud commented, “Whether she truly had that dream is irrelevant. What matters is why she thought of it then.” The analysis revealed that years earlier she had come to know a certain gentleman at the doctor’s home, and the two had fallen in love. They had continued to meet over the years, but the night before the supposed dream, she had waited for him in vain. Freud explained, “For reasons that cannot be detailed here, it quickly became clear that seeing the old doctor triggered the so‑called prophetic dream, which really meant: ‘Ah, Doctor, you remind me of those good old days when I never waited for our meetings in vain.’”
Her familiarity with that happy past surfaced suddenly upon meeting the old doctor, and the wish to “relive old dreams” was “shifted” into the belief that she had met him in a dream. Similarly, some people feel a sense of déjà vu the first time they arrive somewhere new—as if every tree and blade of grass were familiar, as if they had “been there in a dream.” This “familiarity” may be another way repressed thoughts get “shifted” or transferred. Freud described another female patient who could not forget a strange experience from age 12. Visiting a classmate in the countryside, she felt as if she had been there before upon entering the yard, and the feeling intensified in the living room—even though she had never been to that house. Freud’s analysis suggested this “familiarity” actually came from a different source. The classmate’s brother was gravely ill (the patient knew this), and a few months earlier the patient’s own brother had suffered from malignant diphtheria and had been sent to a distant relative’s home for isolation. Forced to be apart, she may have harbored repressed death wishes toward her brother. Learning that her classmate also had a dying brother (whom she later saw) may have vaguely stirred memories from months earlier; because her conscious mind could not acknowledge them, the sense of familiarity was “shifted” onto the garden and the house.
Dreams are “thoughts,” and under subtle psychological pressures, people may “imagine” they had a particular dream.
2. Prospective Thinking and Subconscious Insight
In 1952, science‑fiction writer Isaac Asimov accurately described “spacewalking”—13 years before it actually happened. No one claimed Asimov had “precognitive powers”; it was taken as “reasonable speculation,” because humans are capable of “prospective thinking.” For example, dreaming of a loved one’s death—as with the Spanish psychiatrist who thought of his father back home and his excessive weight, then worried, “He could die of a stroke”—reflects a “reasonable concern,” and that concern can enter a dream. This is easy to understand.
Beyond “prospective thinking,” we should also consider “subconscious insight” in dreams, both physiological and psychological. In Dreams and Nightmares, Dr. Hafford mentioned a possible case of a “precognitive dream” that might involve both:
A patient repeatedly dreamed that his arm and mouth became paralyzed and spasmed. Months later, the dream came true: while repairing a radio, he suddenly experienced localized paralysis. It was later discovered to be a complication of syphilis. How could he have dreamed months in advance about warning signs of syphilis complications? Physiologically, syphilis often progresses quietly; although nothing was obvious outwardly, his arteries may already have been damaged, with slight attacks occurring during sleep that fed into the dream. Psychologically, he may have harbored repressed worries about having contracted syphilis, which surfaced in the dream and foreshadowed his illness.
As noted earlier, physiological stimuli can provide material for dreams. While dreaming, our sensitivity to external stimuli diminishes, but we become more sensitive to signals from our internal organs. Jung believed dreams could “alert us to the earliest unhealthy changes in the body,” which fits this situation.
Fromm also cited a “precognitive dream” that involved psychological insight:
A once met B to discuss a possible business partnership. A had a very positive first impression and decided to bring B on as a partner. That night, A dreamed: “I saw B sitting in our shared office, paging through the ledger and altering figures to cover up the fact that he had embezzled a large sum of money.”
On waking, A assumed the dream reflected his own hostility and suspicion toward B, so he dismissed it and went ahead with the partnership. A year later, A discovered that B had indeed embezzled a large sum and falsified records to hide it. Fromm suggested the dream’s prophetic quality may have expressed A’s initial insight into B’s character. Our impressions of others are rarely as simple as we think. A intuitively sensed B’s dishonesty, but B’s polished manner left a strong positive impression, leading A to suppress the negative thought “B is dishonest” (after all, it seems uncharitable to be suspicious at first meeting). That repressed judgment might not appear in waking thought but could surface in dreams, resulting in a “prophetic” dream.
3. Dreams as Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
When someone puts too much stock in the “third kind of knowledge” supposedly offered by dreams, they may inadvertently turn a dream into a “self‑fulfilling prophecy.” In Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, there’s a story called “The Flying Cow”: “A villager bought a sturdy cow. One night he dreamed the cow sprouted wings and flew away. When he awoke, he took this as an ominous sign and feared he would suffer a loss, so he took the cow to market and sold it at a discount. He wrapped the silver in a cloth and tied it to his arm. On the way home, he saw an eagle eating a dead rabbit by the roadside. When he approached, the eagle was tame and did not fly off, so he tied its legs with the cloth and continued home. Along the way, the bound eagle kept flapping. Not paying attention, the villager suddenly realized the eagle had flown off—taking the cloth and the silver with it.”
On the surface, the dream of “a cow growing wings and flying away” came true symbolically, but if the villager hadn’t believed the dream was ominous and sold the cow, how could the cow have “flown away”? In effect, he acted under the dream’s suggestion and fulfilled the prophecy himself.
Another example appears in the Qing‑dynasty collection Autumn Lanterns, in a tale about the great Confucian scholar Zhu Zhutuo (editor of the History of the Ming). Zhu loved duck meat and once dreamed that, while walking in the countryside, he saw a large pond filled with thousands of ducks. A boy guarding them said, “This will be your food for life.” Years later, at age 81 and bedridden with a minor illness, he dreamed he returned to that same pond from his youth and found only two ducks left. On waking, he felt it was ominous and warned his family not to kill any more ducks. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter—knowing his fondness for duck—came home to visit and brought two ducks she had had slaughtered. Seeing the cooked ducks, Zhu sighed, “So this is where my ration ends.” That night, he passed away.
This, too, is a “self‑fulfilling prophecy.” Zhu deeply believed in the dream’s prediction and cautioned his family accordingly, but “man proposes; Heaven disposes.” Confronted with the two ducks, his psychological defenses may have collapsed, worsening his condition and hastening his death.
4. Psychological Factors in “Coincidence”
“Coincidence” may look like a matter of probability, but once psychological factors enter the picture, it becomes a psychological issue as well. People often say, “What are the odds?” Yet we usually ignore a basic statistical point: at the individual level, a person dreams five or six times a night—over 100,000 dreams in a lifetime. If one or two align with external events, circumstances, or others’ thoughts, the probability is not “infinitesimal.” At the collective level, billions of people dream every night. Among those “hundreds of billions” of dreams, it’s hardly surprising if a few coincide with events that “happen the next day.” When you add “personal interpretation,” the effect is amplified.
The Ming scholar Zhang Han recorded in Dream Talks by the Pine Window two instances of “precognitive dreams.” As a student, he dreamed of a green‑faced ghost giving him a pair of red shoes with “36 names” written inside. Later he took the provincial exam and ranked “49th.” On another occasion, after the provincial exam he went to the capital for the palace exam and dreamed someone gave him ten copper coins, telling him to throw them on the ground; whichever side showed more backs would determine whether he passed. In the dream, he threw twice, getting six backs once and seven the next. The person said, “That’s enough.” He did pass the palace exam—with a ranking of “42nd.”
Zhang Han wrote: “One is four and nine; one is six and seven—the numbers line up.” But his “alignment” required turning the actual “49” into “four times nine” to match the dream’s “36,” and multiplying the dream’s “six” by “seven” to get the actual “42.” The methods are completely different; what they share is the psychological principle of “making the numbers fit.” In truth, had Zhang ranked 9, 3, 18, or 2, he could still have used the dream’s six and three with addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division to claim a match. Once you “believe,” you can always find some way to make dreams and reality align.
Over a lifetime, some dreams will involve real people (including ourselves) and real‑world events—say one in a thousand. Most people fixate on the one or two striking hits and easily forget the other 1,000 misses. This “selective perception” reflects one’s personality and basic outlook on life.