Precognitive dreams: why we believe we dreamed the future

A dream that seems to have foreseen what followed is a common, unsettling experience that no study has linked to real sight of the future.

Coincidence
Memory
Lived experience

The essentials

Precognitive dreams at a glance

For you, this experience deserves to be taken seriously as a reflection of your worries, without making it a rule for reading the nights to come.

Free tool: Interpret my dream
Also read: Freud and dreams

Interpret my dream

An experience many people describe

You dream of someone you lost touch with, and they write to you the next day. You dream of a departure, and a departure comes. These accounts cross every era, and the sensation is real: a shiver, the impression of having known. There is nothing ridiculous about it. It often shows how much a dream can condense a worry or a hope that was already there, which reality then happens to touch.

What the studies found

The engineer J. W. Dunne noted his dreams for years; in An Experiment with Time (1927), he believed that about one in ten contained a fragment of the future. The experiment organized afterward with the Society for Psychical Research did not confirm it. In 1932, after the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the psychologists Murray and Wheeler received 1,300 dreams from the public: only 4 described the child buried under trees, as was later found. After the Aberfan disaster in 1966, the premonitions collected were all gathered after the fact; the office opened to collect them in advance did not help avert a single tragedy.

Why we think we dreamed the future

Every night, millions of people have several dreams: by sheer force of large numbers, some are bound to resemble what happens next. Memory keeps these striking matches and forgets the hundreds of dreams that led nowhere. Finally, a dream is reread after the event: blurry details then take the shape of what occurred. On top of that, our dreams pick up our fears: dreaming of a fragile loved one before bad news first expresses a worry you were already carrying.

What to do with a dream that troubled you

Write it down, with the date, before knowing what follows: it is the only honest way to compare. Then ask what it said about you at that moment, which fear or which desire it was staging. If the idea that your dreams see the future makes you anxious, confiding in someone close often helps you regain calm.

Facts and sources

The engineer J. W. Dunne recorded his dreams and compared them with the following days; in An Experiment with Time (1927), he claimed that about one in ten contained an element to come. The experiment organized in 1932 with the Society for Psychical Research did not confirm it. J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, London, A. & C. Black, 1927; Wikipedia (en), “Precognition” (disagreement with T. Besterman, 1932)
After the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby (1932), the psychologists Murray and Wheeler collected 1,300 dreams sent in by the public; only 4 placed the child in a grave under trees, as was later discovered. H. A. Murray and D. R. Wheeler, “A Note on the Possible Clairvoyance of Dreams,” Journal of Psychology, 3, 1937, pp. 309–313; Wikipedia (en), “Precognition”
After the Aberfan disaster (Wales, 1966), the psychiatrist John Barker collected 76 accounts of premonitions, all reported after the fact; the “Premonitions Bureau” he then opened received nearly 1,000 messages in 18 months, without any of them preventing a tragedy. Sam Knight, The Premonitions Bureau, Faber, 2022; Wikipedia (en), “British Premonitions Bureau”
No accepted scientific evidence shows that precognition exists; research points to the law of truly large numbers, memory that keeps the “hits” and forgets the rest, and rereading a dream after the event. Wikipedia (en), “Precognition” (R. Wiseman, Paranormality, 2011; S. Sutherland, Irrationality, 1994; J. Alcock, 1981)

A dream is read as a mirror of what you are living, never as an omen: no reading here predicts anything at all.

Precognitive dreams: your questions

Do precognitive dreams really exist?

No accepted scientific evidence shows it. Serious experiments have not managed to distinguish these dreams from chance, selective memory, and rereading after the fact. Your impression does not become false for all that: the coincidence did occur; it simply does not suffice to prove a vision of the future.

I dreamed of a misfortune and it happened: is it my fault?

No. A dream causes nothing and decides nothing. If you were dreaming of that person or that situation, it is often because it was already on your mind. The guilt that follows is common; if it weighs on you, confide in those around you or in a professional.

How do you recognize a precognitive dream?

No reliable sign allows it, and Versana offers no method for this. What remains useful: writing down your dreams with their date, rereading them later, and observing what they said about your concerns of the moment.