Western culture has little understanding of the deep origin of dreams and the invaluable guidance they offer. As a result, few people benefit from nature’s most direct source of growth and healing. Popular opinion, and even many capable scientists, suggest that dreams are trivial side effects of the sleeping mind with nothing to convey.
everyone knows that no one can know what is going to happen before it happens. And they are all wrong. Dead mistaken. Dreams come from the timeless side of our psyche, where the past, present, and future coexist, and regularly herald the future in two ways.
predictive dreams anticipate the trajectory of current events and imagine the likely result; if we continue to drink, we will eventually deteriorate and a dream could represent us in that sad state. Such dreams carry a “probable future” precisely for prevent let it come true.
Less frequent, but much more challenging for our vision of reality, is the Prophetic Dream. While they do not seem to be aimed at prevention or correction, they certainly do they imply an origin in greater knowledge than is available to the human mind. Some offer a surprisingly accurate and detailed account of things to come.
I have written of a prophetic dream that he anticipated, At the minutethe death of Princess Diana and that changed the vision of the world of the young woman who dreamed it (Prophetic Dream of Actual Princess: Dreaming of Princess Diana).
There is a much more famous dream that predicted the shocking death of a national leader more than a century before. President Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his own death shortly before he was assassinated. He reported to a friend that the dream had disturbed him for days and he could not shake the melancholy it induced. It’s like she’s allowed to mourn his tragic death in advance.
The extraordinary details are recorded in “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1885” (Ward Hill Lamon, 1911):
About ten days ago I retired very late. He had been awake waiting for important dispatches from the front. I couldn’t have been in bed long when I fell into a dream, because I was tired. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a dead stillness around me. Then I heard muffled sobs, as if several people were crying. I thought I left my bed and went downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobs, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; there was not a living person in sight, but the same dismal sounds of anguish met me as I passed. There was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts were going to break?
I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of so mysterious and shocking a state of affairs, I pressed on until I came to the East Room, which I entered.
There I was met with a disgusting surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funerary clothing. Around him were posted soldiers who acted as guards; and there were many people, some looking sadly at the corpse, whose face was covered, others crying piteously. Who is dead in the White House? I asked one of the soldiers ‘The President’ was his answer; He was killed by a murderer! Then came a loud outburst of complaints from the crowd, which woke me from my sleep.
After President Lincoln’s assassination, his coffin was, in fact, placed on a platform in the East Room where soldiers were stationed to act as guards. Dreams are far from being a mindless fantasy or random neurological discharge. They are direct communications from the source of being that guide us, make us grow, enrich us and, on sad occasions, warn us of events destined to change the world.