QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
Dreams Department

Please remember, this column is designed to help the consumer seeking behavioral-health information, and not intended to be any form of psychotherapy or a replacement for professional, individualized services. Opinions expressed in the column are those of the columnist and do not represent the position of other SelfhelpMagazine.com staff.

Question

I've had dreams that came true. Example: I ride a motorcycle. I dreamt that I saw a sign that said 10 mph curve. Two weeks later I went through that curve I dreamt about. The reason the dream is important to me is because I was riding too fast to make the curve. I remembered the sign before the curve and did a hard braking job and just made the turn. It took me 30 minutes to recover from the experience. I don't always have dreams that are like that one, but I do have dreams that come true. My question is "What does dreaming have to do with what we are doing at any point in time?"

Answer

Trying to determine which dreams are about the future and which ones are not can make you pull your hair out in frustration! Stanley Krippner, who devoted much of his carrier to paranormal dreams wrote a book about it aptly called Song Of The Siren. He feels that there is a great potential in the dream and psychic ability, but also finds the search quite elusive. His teacher and co-researcher for over a decade, Montague Ullman, agrees and his book Dream Telepathy is well worth reading for anyone interested.

Carl Jung was also interested in psi phenomena but came to a different conclusion about dreams that speaks to your question about what dreaming is doing at any point in time. He felt that dreams predict the future in a more general sense -- warning us when an attitude has gotten too far out of hand. Thus the dream will play out variations of what will happen if the attitude is not changed. That a particular occurrence or event happens is more the natural outcome of the attitude at play rather than a seeing into the future in the sense we normally call precognitive.

This seems to fit with newer theories about dreams being a place of rehearsal. In a sense, we are rehearsing the future and some of these plays are going to be accurate.

To test yourself, Linda Magallon suggests we create a dream journal and be very careful about dating each dream. This way when something does occur, we can go back and have an objective record, at least for ourselves.

2/20/98

Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.