Since time immemorial, human beings have had a special and conflicting relationship with existential time and their future. Knowing what tomorrow holds in store for them to escape from traumatic events has awakened a very strong curiosity and intrigue in human beings. Therefore, it is not strange that dreams have become important references for many cultures.
As the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy indicates, “precognition” or “premonition” is a term that defines this alleged attitude to see events before they occur, without there being any reason to deduce them from the present sensory experience. That is to say, in no way is precognition based on a logic of cause and effect.
Premonition
Pre-cognition has regularly been linked with paranormal qualities. Its domains belong to Psi Gamma phenomena. Moreover, many of its followers consider that premonitory experiences do not depend on the subject, as they occur unexpectedly and spontaneously. For the mystic, on the other hand, it is a spiritual capacity.
In psychological science, pre-cognition is understood rather as an idea that appears later in the dream contents. And this idea, which is conscious knowledge, appears in the dream in the form of “déjà vu”. The subject re-elaborates in the dream the knowledge in the form of imminent announcement, but it does not stop being based on past experiences.
What are premonitory dreams
The reservations that people have about premonitory dreams will depend on their personal expectations, including their personal culture. Human beings often want to find answers in dreams, which are elusive in their conscious lives.
There is no doubt that the interest in premonitory dreams has left behind an extensive literature . In the less scientific field, it is suggested that people with extrasensory abilities are capable of dreaming about events in the immediate future in an involuntary way. The leitmotif of these dreams is to prevent what will happen and, after it happens, the subject recovers his emotional state. Reiterative premonitory scenes involve states of distress, which are then overcome.
Whether by chance or causality, there are many times when you have probably had a dream that leaves you thinking, because then it seems to come true. The average person keeps a healthy distance from all his demons, even the most harmful ones. Regularly, when coincidences are obvious, the dream is seen as a causality-causality.
The human mind and premonitory dreams
Be that as it may, the human mind has its own mechanisms to compensate for real conflicts. Most of the time dreams are dissolved upon awakening and we don’t give importance to those dream fragments.
However, the story contains an important anecdote regarding premonitory dreams. It is worth mentioning the historical dream of Julius Caesar’s wife, named Calpurnia. The woman dreamt of a star falling to earth, before the murder of her husband. Then, by the mechanism of symbolic transposition, she turns the fallen star into the murdered king. By symbolic means, the dreams would be manifesting a series of events of difficult determination, although they warn of a very rich field of knowledge.
The symbol has a socio-cultural charge that goes hand in hand with the times. The dictionaries of symbols are only an instrument to reach an approach to the dreams. Rain can infer sadness, but water connotes “birth” or childbirth. The symbolism of rain, like that of any natural phenomenon, should not be taken for all dreams and dreamers in the same way. It depends on the dreamer, his experiences, his circumstances and his culture.
Premonitory dreams and reality
Dreams can also be extremely naturalistic; scenes follow the format of real life. Abraham Lincoln ‘s wife said that he himself predicted his death. Lincoln’s description of a dream to his wife, days before he was killed, is famous. In the episode, he distinguishes a sarcophagus in the White House and a soldier who tells him: “He is our president.
For the Greek philosopher Aristotle, premonitory dreams are an offering from the gods. In his treatise “On Divination by Dreams”, Aristotle gave birth certificates to premonitory dreams, while recognizing the impossibility of understanding them scientifically.
Studies about premonitory dreams
In the stories about dreams linked to the “déjà vu” phenomenon, the psychologist Arthur Funkhouser stands out. He told a 1983 study that as a teenager he saw a friend parking his bicycle on a corner near his house, and immediately had a phantom memory of a past dream image. For Funkhouser, “déjà vu” and premonitory dreams appear because of the development of the nervous and cognitive structures.
Another important collaboration in the study of this topic is due to the researcher Kazuhiko Fukuda. In 2002, he conducted a survey of 122 students at the University of Fukushima in Japan, where he revealed that 40% of them had experienced premonitory dreams at least once. The rest, who had never had such dreams, had not experienced “déjà vu” either. The Japanese researcher warned that the two phenomena tend to be confused.
The evidence indicates that premonitory dreams respond more to the real signs we perceive. That is, we notice situations in our environment that could become real and we are likely to end up shaping them through dreams. The prophetic is inscribed in the possible and if it happens in real life, we would interpret it, according to most researchers, as warning signs.
Some theories about premonitory dreams
Probability theory seems to make sense here and is shown to be a useful tool. The dream contents of earthquakes and hurricanes are very abundant because these phenomena are very common everywhere, especially in geographical areas that are on geological faults. Evidence indicates that prophetic dreams also obey the need of many people to search and study, in an unconscious way, the hidden signs of their environment.
Beyond scientific perspectives, the truth is that dreams are vivid ecosystems, because the person is certain, while not awake, that he or she is going through a life experience. And it becomes an enigma for the dreamer who – at times – goes through waking states and tries to consciously pick up the dream where he left off because he finds it fascinating. It is also there that fragments remain in the memory, which he will later remember.
The themes of premonitory dreams
Premonitory sleep is not – most of the time – the episode of the death of a loved one. Nor is it when you dream about death, an accident, illness, or lottery numbers. Dreams are not carbon copies, they can have important messages, but strangely coded to be read in other keys.
The contents of the unconscious can stimulate you to do something that you have put off for a long time or give you light to solve a problem. The future is full of present actions, not guessing in dreams.
How premonitory dreams are interpreted
The oneiric imaginary is a reservoir of symbols of the conscious emotions and the future of your life. It’s very interesting to determine their types as far as possible. Commonly one dreams about known facts and events of everyday life. The dream cuts across that world and covers it with a regularly cryptic symbolism.
Premonitory dreams are in addition to those already mentioned. There is extensive literature that defends the idea that it is possible to know the future through dreams. They value dreams as an instrument of the most sensitive people to reach extrasensory perceptive phenomena, since the most suitable environment is generated for this purpose.
It is known that Freud or Jung established two types of dreams: premonitory dreams and telepathic dreams in night perspectives. In the field of esotericism and paranormal experiences, for some experts telepathic dreams take place when subjects or things penetrate the consciousness while the tranquility of the dream is produced.
As it is well known, accidents, tragedies, catastrophic events, are the most recurrent facts in premonitory dreams. However, they often manifest themselves in the form of symbols. Intuition must be given a very relevant place in order to interpret this type of vision. The terminology associated with dreams also accepts the term pre-cognitive.
It is possible that in premonitory dreams the dreamer is an external agent. The event occurs like a movie, where there is only one spectator. The episodes have the character of verisimilitude of films. The colors tend to be very vivid and real. On the other hand, premonitory dreams may not be as clear and realistic, showing themselves in disjointed fragments, without linear sequence, closer to a “collage” or to the editing of a video clip.
The world of premonitory dreams
A list of these dreams could run to dozens of pages, but here only a few of the most famous are mentioned: the death of the brother of the writer Mark Twain, who had a dreamlike vision of a sarcophagus, inside which his brother lay adorned with white flowers. Twain’s brother lost his life in a boat fire and his body was arranged in the same way as in the dream.
A historic case is that of the Bishop of the Balkans, who dreamt, in June 1914, of the epistles received, particularly that of the Emperor’s house. This letter describes the assassination of Archduke Francis of Habsburg, which occurred 24 hours later.
It also recalls the premonitory dream of the Welsh girl Eryl Mai, dated October 1966. At the age of 10, this girl, who lives in Aberfan, a mining area, dreamt that something black swallowed her school. A fortnight later, a huge coal spill took place, burying 144 people. There were 128 children left, including the same girl from the dream. But, stories were also reported from many other inhabitants of the place, who claimed to have had dreams with dark avalanches, the days before the event.
Elements that distinguish premonitory dreams
Premonitory dreams are reminiscent of life itself because of their multi-sensory characteristics. That is, it’s as if it were living reality, but sensory overdimensioned. Usually their role is that of an omniscient observer, because the dream seems very real and, at the same time, their point of view is privileged, as if it were from another dimension. He looks, but he also smells, touches, tastes…
Premonitory dream contents tend to become clearer than normal dreams. It is important to know how you feel, what emotions you experience during sleep, in order to know if the dream can be catalogued as premonitory. If on waking up your emotions are still highlighted, your body sweats, your breathing is intermittent, and you have the intuition that you have experienced a privileged vision, you are probably facing a premonitory dream. The dream episodes would then have a futuristic vision.
Life and premonitory dreams
Life, however, is often what you plan and work for. Events happen and will continue to happen, everything also depends on chance. It is not common to wake up and have the consciousness of having experienced a premonitory dream. Try to sleep without thinking, minutes before, in the premonitory dream; the dream supposes the recovery of the lost forces, it is not another battle that it is necessary to assume.
Nightmares are not necessarily premonitory dreams. Conscious life can manifest itself harshly in dreams. If you are tormented by a frustrated affective relationship, it is possible that your unconscious will manifest itself in dreams where you will feel persecuted, where you will surely feel that you are locked up or that you are walking through rooms that never end. Your personality traits, which in conscious life are usually those of a normal person, could find in dreams the brave and adventurous hero.
In any case, the dream dimension does not cease to involve dimensions of a parallel life. A person who has a life rich in dreams is also a person rich in conscious experiences. Artists often have very imaginative dreams, because they have a heightened sensitivity. Their dream worlds compete with their great imagination to find the best solutions to their creative problems.