Can dreams predict the future? What we know about prophetic dreams

Why a dream that "came true" is so striking

A prophetic or precognitive dream is one that, looking back, seems to have announced something that later happened: a phone call, a visit, a loss. The experience hits hard because it touches two things we care about deeply: the sense that our mind knows more than we think, and the wish that the future would warn us. That's why these stories get passed down in families for years.

Taking them seriously doesn't require believing that dreams can foretell. You can respect what someone lived through, the chill and the emotion, and still ask how the coincidence came about. So far, research has not shown that dreams predict the future, but it has learned a good deal about why it sometimes looks that way.

We dream far more than we remember

The first piece of the puzzle is sheer volume. On a typical night we cycle through the stages of sleep several times, and REM sleep, when most vivid dreaming happens, first shows up about 90 minutes after we fall asleep and returns several times, getting longer each time. So every night holds several dream episodes, and most are forgotten on waking or within minutes.

Add up the nights in a year and you get hundreds of scenes. Add up the people in a city and you get millions. With that many stories in play, you'd expect some to resemble something that happens the next day, even though none is connected to the future. The strange thing would be if it never happened.

How memory builds the coincidence

The second piece is memory. Dreams that don't come true leave no trace: nobody remembers the night they dreamed of an accident that never came. But when something resembles a dream, the dream comes rushing back and becomes a story. It's a well-known bias: we count the hits and forget the misses.

Memory also isn't a recording. Each time we recall something, we rebuild it, and after an event it's easy for the memory of the dream to shift toward what happened: one detail sharpens, another fades. Dreams tend to be vague and symbolic, which helps them fit many different situations. That's why writing a dream down before you know whether it comes true is so valuable.

What the dream knew without knowing

Sometimes a dream gets it right because it picks up on what you had already noticed without realizing it. During the day we take in countless small signals: a tired voice on the phone, an odd silence in a conversation, a noise from the car we'd rather not hear. A dream can gather those clues and stage them as a scene. When your worry is later confirmed, it feels like prophecy, but it was intuition built on real information.

The reverse happens too: the dream changes what you do. If you dream you're arguing with someone, you might treat them with suspicion the next day, and the argument arrives. Without anyone intending it, the dream can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why we believe our dreams

In 2009, psychologists Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on how people interpret dreams. In one, they asked 182 Boston commuters what would make them change their flight plans. Dreaming about a plane crash weighed more than deliberately imagining one or a government terrorism alert, and nearly as much as a real crash on that route.

The same researchers found that we give more weight to dreams that confirm what we already believe or want. In another study, highly religious participants considered an imagined dream in which God told them to travel the world meaningful, and one in which God told them to work in a leper colony meaningful too; less devout participants saw some value in the first and little in the second. Their reading: because dreams don't feel like something we made up, they seem truer than a conscious thought, and we choose, without noticing, which ones to listen to.

What research has shown

There have been serious attempts to test prophetic dreams. From 1962 to 1978, a laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn studied whether dreams could pick up information from a distance or from the future, and its researchers reported positive results. Later studies done elsewhere found much weaker effects, and the scientific community does not consider the phenomenon demonstrated.

A more recent example shows how tricky this is. In 2014, psychologist Caroline Watt of the University of Edinburgh published an online study in which 50 participants tried to dream about a video they would watch later. The initial result was slightly above chance, but in 2015 Watt and a colleague reexamined the data from people who had dropped out and concluded that the hit rate had been inflated. Another finding is telling: the more confident people were in their dreams, the more similarity they saw between dream and video, yet that impression didn't match the ratings of independent judges.

History has lessons too. After the Aberfan disaster in Wales in October 1966, which killed 144 people, most of them children, psychiatrist John Barker gathered accounts from people who said they had dreamed or sensed it. The following year, with a London newspaper, he opened a Premonitions Bureau to collect warnings before events happened. It received many letters, but it never prevented a disaster.

Traditions that value dreams

Many cultures have treated dreams as a source of knowledge, and that view deserves respect. In the Bible, Joseph reads Pharaoh's dream of seven fat cows and seven lean ones as seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine. In the second century, Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the Oneirocritica, one of the oldest surviving books on dream interpretation. In Islamic tradition, the true dream holds a special place, and in many Indigenous communities of the Americas dreams are shared and talked over within the family or the community.

In these traditions, a dream is rarely taken as a literal forecast. It usually calls for interpretation, reflection or the counsel of someone experienced, and it's often valued more for what it says about the present, a relationship or a decision, than for what it announces. That attitude, listening to a dream without blindly obeying it, is close to the one we offer at Astral. For a fuller picture of how dreams have been read through the ages, see our article on the history of dream interpretation.

What to do if you fear a dream will come true

If you woke up dreading that something bad is about to happen, these steps can help you sort through it.

• Write the dream down with the date and time, exactly as you remember it, before you know anything more. That way you can compare it fairly later.
• Ask yourself which worry from the past few days resembles the dream: a trip, someone's health, a relationship under strain.
• If the dream made you think of someone, call or text them. Not to alarm them, but because the dream reminded you how much they matter.
• Do what's reasonable, not what's extreme: checking your car before a long drive is prudent; putting your life on hold over a dream isn't.
• If the dread returns night after night or keeps you from sleeping, talk with a mental health professional. Constant fear deserves attention, whatever the dream.

Test your dreams with your journal

The most honest way to explore this is your own dream journal. For a few weeks, write down each morning what you dreamed, with the date. When something in your life reminds you of a dream, go back to the page and compare what you wrote, not what you remember now. Count the dreams that matched nothing, too.

Many people find that the hits are few and partial, and that their dreams speak mostly about their feelings and what they're living through. In the dictionary, the entry on prophetic dreams covers the most common cases, like dreaming of a death or an accident, and how to read them.