Dreams That Foretell the Future

A science professor at a southern university woke from a nightmare, shaking with fear.

In her dream she had been standing on a tarmac watching an airplane, its fuselage torn open, lying on the runway.

In the dream, she knew that moments earlier she had been on that plane.

She watched in horror as the aircraft burst into flames. This dream came to her many times over the next few weeks.

"I can really say this was a very, very different dream. I was traumatized by it. I believed I would die in such a crash. I tried everything to forget it," the professor told me.

Less than a year after the dream, she took a flight from Bali to Los Angeles. The flight stopped to refuel in Taiwan during a typhoon. When the flight was about to resume, powerful winds were still rocking the aircraft. Several seconds after take-off, there was a bump, then a heart-stopping collision, and the lights went off. When the plane came to a stop, she smelled fumes.

The 46-year-old scientist thought, "This is it. I'm going to die." She began to meditate in her seat, accepting death as best she could. "Then a little voice inside me said to go forward," so she struggled toward the front of the plane. She tried the emergency door, and it wouldn't open, so she fought her way through the dark chaos of broken seats and fallen luggage until she found a hole in the fuselage and crawled out. She scrambled a hundred yards away from the wounded aircraft before she turned around. Watching from the tarmac, she saw the plane burst into flames.

Trembling in the glow of the blaze, she realized that this horrifying crash, in which eighty-three people died, was exactly the same as the one she had seen in her dream.

In my study of dreams, I've observed that there usually is help hidden in the worst of nightmares. If the professor had consulted me before the crash, I would have pointed out that the dream did not predict her death, for in the dream she saw herself standing alive on the tarmac watching the plane burn. That image meant she would survive a disaster whole and unharmed, whether that meant an actual crash or serious break-up, as of marriage or career. She would be horrified but she would carry on. The "little voice" that told her to go forward didn't come from nowhere.

A satisfying pattern I have observed is this: The dreamer dreams something negative, makes a positive response to the image, and thus escapes danger. For example, a young woman named Nicole recently told me she was riding down a four-lane highway with her father driving. "I remembered having a dream about driving down the same highway in the very same lane. This time we were four streets ahead of our position in the dream. In the dream, a car pulled out of a side street into our lane and caused a head-on collision. So I told Dad that he should switch lanes right away and he did. Everything happened exactly as in my dream. A car turned into the lane we'd been in, except this time we were in a different lane so the car hit no one." Skeptics will say that no crash actually happened and there's no way to know that it would have happened if Nicole had not spoken up. True enough, but if I am ever riding with Nicole and she tells me to change lanes, I'm changing lanes.

Other dreams are more complex and their solutions are less clear. Monica, for example, wrote me from Mexico, saying she had experienced a dream in which she was pregnant and very poor but her boyfriend would not help. Monica wondered why she dreamed this dream over and over. She herself was not poor, she was not pregnant, and she was engaged to be married to her long-term boyfriend. About a year after she was married, she found out that, during a few months when she and her fiancé had been apart, he had gotten a young woman pregnant and had left her and the baby in poverty. The young woman's distress was playing out in Monica's vicarious dream.

If Monica had told her fiancé the dream, how haunted she was by it, and how bad she felt for the poor abandoned mother, at the very least she would have been sharing her values with him before their marriage. He might have confessed he had fathered a child and been shamed into taking financial responsibility. In fact, Monica did not tell her dream. Later, when she learned the truth, she divorced her husband, declaring that his behavior was unacceptable. He started sending money to the mother of his baby. And Monica's recurring dream never came again.

When the dreamer heeds a dream warning, talks about it, explores its possibilities, or takes positive action, he diminishes the negative impact of the predicted event. When a dreamer accepts a happy dream and acts with confidence, she optimizes its encouraging power.

The professor who survived the plane crash has been in therapy for post-traumatic stress. Her therapist says that the original dream was a common fear-of-flying dream, unrelated to the plane crash. Still the research scientist can't dismiss it as a random happening. She gives herself permission to trust the part of herself that believes in the dream; accepting both her science and her dream experience as manifestations of the truth. However, she doesn't talk to her scientist colleagues about the dream for fear they will think less of her for putting stock in its predictive power.

I don't argue with skeptics. I only say the experience of a dream come true has meaning and validates a positive action or optimistic view.

If you have had a psychic or life-changing dream, please contact me at tishsweitzer@mindspring.com.

By Letitia Sweitzer