How to predict the future with dreams

There are two ways:

Firstly: Make the prediction after the event has happened.

Let's go over the first way, using an imaginary example of a dream from Richard Wiseman's excellent book Paranormality to illustrate the point:

"At two o'clock in the morning you are right in the middle of a rather sinister dream in which you are driving along a dark country lane. Eric Chuggers, your all-time favourite rock star is sitting in the passenger seat, and the two of you are chatting easily. Suddenly a giant purple frog jumps out in front of the car, you swerve to avoid the frog but go off the road and hit a tree. However, tonight your cat feels a bit peckish and decides to pester you for food. As she jumps onto the bed you wake up from the dream with a vague memory of Eric Chuggers, a giant purple frog, a tree and impending death."

In a couple of days time you wake to the news that Eric Chuggers was driving through the city, swerved to avoid a car, and hit a lamp post. You realise that your dream was a prediction of the future!

However, this doesn't stack up on closer inspection. Firstly, in the dream, Eric is not driving, but in the passenger seat; it's a dark country lane, not the city; there is no purple frog; Eric slams into a lamppost and not a tree.

However, the dream gets twisted as a prophecy, given that all of the incidents are broadly similar. Of course, the other dreams that you have had that week are forgotten. And so it is for most dreams - the majority go forgotten, as real life events don't trigger our memory of them.

So it is with "true" tales of prophecy - it's not uncommon to see, after the fact, people coming forward with how they predicted a catastrophic event, because they had this or that dream that if you squint your eyes, kinda matches the real life events.

I am unaware of any cases of a catastrophe being avoided because someone acted on their prophetic dream to stop the disaster occurring.

The second way, which is essentially the same as the first: wait. It's a bit like the first, but in this case you have a dream in which you are convinced that a life altering situation is going to happen.

Let's say you have a vivid dream of some life changing event happening when you are 32 years old. Maybe this will be a good thing - you will meet the partner of your dreams. Maybe it's a bad thing and you will die.

You have this dream as a child, and you really remember it, you're convinced that you have had a prediction of the future. Your life carries on, and you hand to 32 as a special number. You've primed yourself already for spotting things that happen based around this number.

Maybe you marry the partner of your dreams, but you're actually 29. However, you don't think any less of your premonition - it turns out you were spot on, because he lived at number 66 when you first me, which, is 32 x 3. You got married three years before you were 32, and that's a hit for your premonition!

Maybe you marry the partner of your dreams, but you're actually 29. However, you don't think any less of your premonition - it turns out you were spot on, because if you add the day, month and year of when you get married it's 23, which is 32 backwards! Granted it's 3 years earlier than you thought, but 32 is there if you look closely enough.

Of course, maybe the prophecy was your death, and you are convinced that you will meet your end at 32. However, you're in the 32nd week of your pregnancy, it's not been going well, and now, the 32 years has become 32 weeks, and the impending doom has transferred from yourself to your unborn child. Harrowing stuff, and entirely understandable. However, had these issues arisen in the 34th week you may not have thought anything of it.

It's a lot like the "27 club" - whereby famous and talented muscians die too soon, at the age of 27 - Amy Winehouse being a recent example, who joins the likes of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix,  and Jim Morrison. Of course, this club becomes self selecting. Any musician who dies at 27 enters it.

Nobody thought of the 27 club this year when we sadly lost David Bowie, Glenn Frey or the tragic deaths of Viola Beach reported today.

As soon as you become fixated on a particular feature of a dream, it is bound to crop up at some point in your life. Of course, this is not because your dream was prophetic. The details of the dream have long been forgotten, and all that is left is a fixation on a particular feature or two.

Again, from Paranormality Wiseman writes that sleep scientists are finding out that the majority of dreams tend to be unpleasant ones. This means that most "prophetic" dreams will involve something horrid.

None of these dreams, of course, translates to the real world, unless you make them, after the event, and with a little tweaking along the way.

If you're worried about your dreams, that's understandable, they can impact on how you feel.

But dreams are no more prophetic than tea leaves - you'll only see what you want to see. This is why it's best to forget your prophetic dreams- after all, they're more likely to be horrid than not, and who wants to see that?