Western culture has little understanding of the deep origin of dreams and the invaluable guidance they offer. As a result, few people benefit from the more direct source of growth and healing that nature provides. 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 everyone is wrong. Dead wrong. Dreams come from the timeless side of our psyche, where past, present, and future coexist, regularly foreshadowing the future in two ways.
predictive dreams anticipate the trajectory of current events and imagine the probable Leave; 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 make it come true.
Less frequent, but much more challenging for our vision of reality, is the prophetic dream. While they don’t appear to be intended for prevention or correction, they certainly do they imply an origin in knowledge greater 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 foretold 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 sleep had disturbed him for days and he could not shake the melancholy it induced. It is as if she is 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 asleep, because I was tired. Soon I 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 no living person in sight, but the same gloomy sounds of anguish met me as I passed. There was light in all the rooms; each object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts were going to break?
He was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of such a mysterious and shocking state of affairs, I continued onward until I reached 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 funeral clothes. Around him were posted soldiers acting as guards; and there were many people, some looking sadly at the corpse, whose face was covered, others crying pitifully. Who is dead in the White House? I asked one of the soldiers ‘El Presidente’ was his answer; He was killed by an assassin! Then came a loud burst of complaints from the crowd, rousing me from my sleep.
After President Lincoln’s assassination, his casket was, in fact, placed on a platform in the East Room where soldiers were stationed to act as guards. Dreams are far from meaningless 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.