Can Dreams Predict The Future? Experts Weigh In On Precognitive Dreaming

Have you ever had a dream that turned out to foreshadow the future? You wouldn't be alone. Call it divination, or call it one of the many mysterious powers of the brain, but many people have experienced precognitive dreams, and déjà rêvé—the feeling of dreaming something before it happened—at one point or another.

Here's what to know about this strange dream phenomenon.

Precognitive dreams are essentially dreams that suggest events of the future. While there isn't established scientific proof that they are real and reliable, there are many anecdotal reports in the literature.

Déjà rêvé—or feeling like you dreamed something that happened in real life—is one type of precognitive dream that seems to be relatively common, especially when we're young. (More on those below!) Other precognitive dreams can relay everything from specific and incidental circumstances of an event to more vague things like feelings or emotions.

Say you dreamed about feeling very unsettled, and the next day, found yourself having that same unsettled feeling; Some might argue that was a precognitive dream, though there isn't any way to back that up. And that's just one example—here are some more famous ones.

One famous example of precognitive dreams was in the case of the Aberfan Landslide tragedy. Back in 1966, a landslide in Wales killed nearly 150 people, and later on, a psychiatrist discovered many children and adults in the area had dreamed about it before it happened.

Or take famed psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was very interested in the predictive ability of dreams; He claimed to have had a dream that predicted his own mother's death.

And of course, we can't forget Abraham Lincoln, who is said to have dreamt of his own death 10 days before his assassination.

According to neuroscientist and author of The Oracle of the Night: The History and Science of Dreams, Sidarta Ribeiro, Ph.D., there could actually be some science behind the experience of precognitive dreams. Based on his research on dreams, Ribeiro thinks there is a very real chance they have a "predictive" function—but not in the way you might think.

"[Your dream is] not a deterministic oracle that can predict what's going to happen, but rather it's a very sophisticated, probabilistic, neurobiological machine" that simulates possible futures based on what happened in the past, he explains to mbg.

In other words, our dreams are constantly putting out potential scenarios for what the future could look like, based on what our brains know of the past.

Think of it like this: We know that dreams (and sleep in general) play a role in consolidating memories. In doing so, they help us learn and prepare for the future and are "a source of new ideas and creativity," Ribeiro says. "On top of the neurological processes at play, you have the dream level that's symbolic and related to your life in a predictive manner," meaning that some of it may eventually prove true to your experience.

Déjà rêvé is a French phrase that translates to "already dreamed." While there can be some variation, it generally describes the sensation of feeling like you dreamed about something before it happened in real life.

As therapist and dream expert Leslie Ellis, Ph.D., previously explained to mbg, "Dreaming is a phenomenon where time does not follow the strict linear rules of the day world. In dreams, we often have a mix of past, present, and possible future. Dreams that predict the future are called precognitive dreams, a close cousin of the déjà rêvé phenomenon."

In Ellis' own clinical practice, she's seen examples of these kinds of dreams, and notes that many cultures throughout history have regarded dreams as "sources of spiritual guidance from a source of far greater knowledge than we normally possess, including information about possible or probable future events."

So, while Rubio considers precognitive dreams to be more of a mechanistic phenomena of the brain, others believe there could be more to it.

The next time you're struck by the realization that your dream foreshadowed something that happened in real life, give it up for neurobiology and the brain's amazing abilities. While our dreams may not "predict" the future, per se, they seem to be pretty good at guessing what's possible.