Dreams, can predict the future?
Michael > February 7th, 2017, 04:22 PM
So here's the thing about proving that dreams can or cannot predict the future.
Given enough random dreams that people remember and share, over time you'll get some that seem to predict the future. That is just the way random chance works. I have had a few dreams in my time that were rather vivid and which I remember well enough and that seemed to predict future events.
In reality I cannot say they predicted anything. After all, when I lived through the events that matched those dreams well it was easy for me to recognize that there were substantial differences between what happened in life and what happened in my dreams.
I'll give you an example.
Many years ago I had the same dream 2 or 3 times. I was driving along a road in Florida (I did not live in Florida at the time) during a storm and tornadoes were coming down out of the dark skies around me. The skies were a dark grey but I could still see the landscape. The tornadoes were very dark funnel clouds.
As dreams go this one was rather scary for me. I don't usually have nightmares and this was not what I would have characterized as a nightmare. I'm not sure I remember what nightmares are like (I had a few when I was very young and I remember being comforted by my mother over them).
In 2004 I moved from Texas to Florida and experienced Hurricane "Crazy" Ivan up close. The reason why they called it "Crazy Ivan" is that all the tornadoes went in the wrong direction so it was impossible to predict where they would go.
One of my nieces asked me to take her down to the beach hours before the storm was supposed to hit the shore. She wanted to see the waves in the high winds. Now, the beach was quite large and by the time we got there we could still see plenty of sand but the waves were huge, larger than any storm waves I had ever seen before (or since). An SUV drove up and parked next to us as I sat there telling my niece I was NOT getting out of the car. A woman got out of the SUV and immediately fell to the ground. The wind just knocked her off her feet. She had a video camera in her hand and it was obvious she wanted to film the waves. She struggled to get back into that vehicle. My niece got mad at me for not trying to jump out and help her, but the guy who drove her there had enough sense to realize we'd all be floundering on the ground if we got out. She eventually got back into the vehicle.
As we left we drove past a naval facility. My niece, now quite frightened, looked at me and was talking about something, probably saying how scared she was. I looked at her and saw over her shoulder the first tornado drop down into the bay. This was hours before we were supposed to have any tornadoes based on my past experience with hurricanes.
The wind whipped up the water into a huge black wall extending for hundreds of feet in either direction. It was literally like the entire bay was being sucked up into the storm, just like in the movies. All I could think of at the time was to keep driving and keep my niece talking so she didn't look behind her. There was no way I could have outdriven that funnel cloud. No amount of amusing fantasy can argue for any chance of survival.
Fortunately for us the tornado went in the wrong direction, jumped out of the water, and came down on a warehouse somewhere behind us. Unfortunately it killed someone who was sheltering in that building.
As I drove home my brother called demanding to know where we were. We had the radio on and were listening to the meteorologists talk about several tornadoes coming down, all hours earlier than anyone expected.
So we drove home through high winds and watched the skies for signs of tornadoes. We made it safely and took shelter.
How close was that experience to my repeated dream? Nothing like it. The only similarities were the state I was in and the fact that I was driving through a storm with tornadoes coming down around me. But in my dream the funnel clouds were dancing along both sides of the road. In the real experience there was only one funnel cloud that came close enough for me to see it, and that dark wall of water and debris was far larger than anything I had seen in a dream.
I do think that, having been through many hurricanes and tornadoes before, I had the "mindset" to dream about bad weather. But I also had the experience to not panic.
Either way, I have not had that dream since, although I did have one other dream about tornadoes a few years ago. It was nothing like anything I have experienced, although in that dream I was driving through a neighborhood and seeing tornadoes come down from the sky and hit buildings.
In 2012 my wife and I moved from California to Georgia. In 2013 we were out driving around when the sky suddenly turned white in a scary way that often precedes tornado weather. I turned on the radio to listen for a weather report but all they said was there would be strong wind.
As it happened, a small tornado touched down right next to us as I drove down the road. I was yelling at my wife to watch the sky for signs of tornadoes and she was yelling back that she didn't know what to watch for. As the rain became intense I lost visibility so I thought about stopping under a highway overpass. While aiming for the overpass a large tree fell down beside the road. The tip of the tree, the very tip, hit the roof of our car and slid down the truck. At the time we thought it was a small tree. When we drove through that area the next day we saw that it had been the largest tree standing near the road and only its distance from the road kept it from killing us.
But, again, this experience looked nothing like my dream. I never saw a tornado. We heard later that a tornado had indeed passed through that area but we may only have caught the edge of the high winds that accompany a tornado. The rain did not, as I recall, include any hail, which often accompanies a tornado in this area (but not always).
I just happen to dream about tornadoes every now and then and I just happen to live through some rough weather. I don't think these dreams are really predicting the future but if they are, they are reassuring me that I'll live through the next bad weather. I guess.
I don't really think about proving or disproving such things. Like I said above, random coincidence ensures that every now and then people will dream something that seems to come true. You cannot prove it's a prediction of the future.