Is it possible to see your future while sleeping?

Have you ever seen things in your dreams happen before they do in real life? Have you ever remembered a dream in a scarily precise and realistic manner? If your answer is yes, you’ve experienced premonitory dreams.

How does premonition happen?

Premonitory dreams appear in our minds out of the blue to warn us of a future event that may be dangerous, sad, or positive for us. It’s a demonstration of what our psyche is capable of but we can’t really control it.

We get a mental picture of an event that is about to happen in our lives. It may be an act, a situation, or even a transformation of our understanding of the world. It happens more often than you may think: many people claim that they experienced premonitory dreams at least once.

Premonition and presentiment: What’s the difference?

Premonition is a feeling of seeing or knowing what exactly may happen in the future. On the other hand, presentiment is a vague feeling that something is about to happen but you don’t really know what. Many people say they often experience both.

These phenomena, presentiments and premonitions, are part of our intuition or sixth sense. They tend to appear without any warning; they just happen. For example, you may have a sudden urge to change your usual route to work, because you feel something terrible may happen if you don’t.

There are dozens of stories when premonition saved lives during catastrophic events, such as the Titanic disaster or many others. You probably experienced premonition at least once or heard a story about the phenomenon from someone you trust.

How to detect a premonitory dream?

There are no certain ways to tell for sure (you need just wait and see) but these four criteria may point you in the right direction.

Firstly, many people report that their premonitory dreams are exceptionally vivid – they have almost camera-like ‘quality.’

Secondly, it’s recurrence. If a certain dream happens over and over again, it may be knocking on our subconscious doors for us to open them and finally understand the message.

Important dreams also often tell you about the death of someone you know. If you dream about someone’s death, you should take it seriously.

And lastly, having a shared dream with someone who is closed to you.

How to explain it?

We don’t have enough evidence that it is possible to see the future while sleeping, but we can try to explain the phenomenon of premonition rationally. Seeing what is just about to happen in your dreams may be the result of the unconscious logic analyzing our lives.

During our sleep, the brain makes up a scenario that seems plausible. In a sense, it seeks a way to inform us of what will happen soon. Our brain analyzes a lot of data without our (active) knowledge: every day, it records an unimaginable amount of tiny details (smells, images, and so on) we’re not even able to notice consciously, because all these details are lost in the mass of information we receive.

While we’re sleeping, the brain sorts these details and establishes correlations. Due to its hard work, we sometimes know what will happen before it actually happens.