Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: they were all male, and none of them are still with us. Other than that, there appears to be little that connects the three men. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have dreamt, two weeks prior to his assassination, about being shot dead. Charles Dickens was visited by one Miss Napier, a girl in a red shawl. Shortly before this, Dickens had dreamt about a woman, also dressed in red, who shared the same name. Mark Twain is said to have dreamt of the corpse of his brother in a coffin just a few weeks before he died as a result of an explosion.
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Is predicting the future during our dreams really a possibility? Is there anything else that could explain these particularly peculiar events? Is there a chance that we can harness our sleep to make predictions of the future today, or does it just come down to coincidence and self-prophecy?
Way back during the 50s, over half a century ago, Eugene Aserinsky was a pioneering scientist within the field of dreaming. Aserinsky, a US psychologist, realised that pulling someone out of sleep during the REM phase of sleep often resulted in reports of a dream. REM, or rapid eye movement, refers to the part of sleep during which the eyes can be seen to move and dart around, reflecting the movement of our site in the “dream world”. As a result of Eugene’s work, many exciting pieces of knowledge were found, for example that almost everyone dreams in colour, and that while remembered dreams are often bizarre, other dreams include chores and everyday tasks that could be considered to be boring activities.
It was also discovered that by stimulating a sleeping person, with splashed water, a shining light, or some quiet music, it is possible and indeed probable that the sleeper will include the stimuli within their dream.
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The average person has about four dreams every night. This might sound like a lot, and you might think that you dream way less than average, but in fact we simply don’t remember most of our dreams when we wake up. Often small fragments or pieces of these dreams are stored in our memory, but because we forget about them as we rise in the morning, we find it very difficult to recall some or all of the dreams we had while we were asleep.
Just because we find it difficult to access our dreams on command or at will does not mean that we do not have parts of the dream stored away in our memory. Just like with word association, an event that happens in real life can trigger our memory of these dreams.
As a result of this phenomenon, we are far more likely to remember dreams only when we experience something similar in real life. Our mind then flicks back, and causes us to think “Hey, I dreamt about this happening!”
This unfortunately does not mean you are psychic, or that you are able to predict the future in your dreams. We are all just victims of probability.
