There are many dreams that I can remember. The most remarkable might be the one about a space shuttle crashing right before the Columbia disaster in 2003. I hadn't dreamt of any shuttles prior to that, and haven't since. Imagine my shock when watching the news and seeing pictures taken that looked exactly like the shuttle on fire in my dream. It left me speechless, and I never told anyone about it for fear of them being spooked about what precognition in dreams might mean. Besides, it could have just been a coincidence, though the odds of having that particular dream in conjunction with something as rare as a shuttle crashing are, ahem, astronomical.
Pretend for a moment that precognition in dreams is possible. Death would seem to be a common theme in a lot of people who have them. My fiancé recently revealed to me that she dreamt about a friend's brother's death the morning before it happened. She had no knowledge of his illness either. Another friend said her husband had dreamt about drowning upside down in their house. Come next morning, they found a dead mouse in a pipe that had ruptured, causing their house to flood.
I don't find these extra-sensory dreams particularly scary (and to be frank we are only scratching the surface here), just really interesting. Anyone who's had déjà vu doesn't cower in fear, they appear more fascinated or confused more than anything. Incidentally I do think déjà vu comes as a result of dreaming something before it happens. That sense of otherworldly familiarity is a feeling that is often felt in the dream state, when all kinds of strange things are happening. People try so hard to remember where they saw their source of déjà vu, but they never can because dreams are so hard to remember.
It's thought that one of the purposes of dreaming is to sort out future events and predict what will happen, in order for the mind to alter the lines of probability that would lead to them. Think of it as a safeguard against conflict, one of the many survival mechanisms we have. Our subconscious might also be preparing us for emotional states caused by an inevitable event. Dreaming about a snake that scares the living daylights of you, for example, would seem to prepare you for such an awful event.
I listen to my dreams for this very reason, and I'm always trying to figure them out. Usually, I'm able to figure out what my subconscious is trying to tell me about a particular situation. Then there are the dreams that are so convoluted that I can't help dismissing them as a heap of rubbish. And sometimes, and it is very rare for this to happen, my mind gets the pattern exactly right and my dream appears to come true, as with the case of the shuttle crashing.
What this could all mean is that our brains are so evolved that we are able to dissect time as a dimension and make it dimensionless while we are dreaming. It's not that far-fetched to presume we have an extra sense that would explain this. Animals have many senses we have no explanations for, such as birds knowing the magnetic field lines of the Earth, and pets being able to sense an earthquake before it happens. If we open our minds to the possibility that we have more than the traditional five senses, things as simple as dream precognition and past-life regression aren't so surprising. But beyond that, we might find many others lurking in the bushes of our subconscious. Maybe dreams are a way of trying to release them.
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