Precognitive Dreams

By Rebecca MacBride
 

There is no question that keeping a dream diary helps me to recall my dreams, especially when there are multiple dreams in one evening. I have kept such a diary since I was very young, less successfully in adulthood, but the symbols are well established by now. For me, precognitive dreams are often less symbolic. I have also found that world-event dreams or dreams of well-known people happen more often when I am very sleep deprived and when I awake from such a dream I notice that less than 10 to 15 minutes has passed from the time I last looked at the clock before closing my eyes. When I am sleeping more soundly, for a longer time, those tend to be dreams of people I know or events in my every day life. I am not sure why this happens this way, but it is definitely the dream pattern.

My dad would sometimes be a little spooked by the fact that I would insist that I had been to certain places before when we would go on vacations. On one occasion I was about 10 and I was saying how excited I was to be going back to this vacation spot where we were headed. My parents were adamant that I had never been there before. I was so frustrated because I had vivid memories of being at this place. To prove I knew the place, I described the room, the pattern on the drapes (yellow with monarch butterflies) and where my bed had been. The hotel restaurant had a separate room with two pool tables and there was a wall length diorama of a western town with very detailed models and horses, etc. My parents just laughed and told me I simply had never been there before. When we arrived and went into the hotel restaurant it was exactly as I had described it - especially the separate room with the pool tables and the western town in the wall. When we went into the room we were staying in and the drapes were yellow with butterflies I remember my dad asking me with a very concerned look on his face how I could have possibly known about these details. I told him - I had been there before and he just said, "Okay, I guess we were wrong." I remember being rather confused that they would not remember having been there themselves.

I think this is one reason that they took me very seriously when I told them about the experiences I had later on at my aunt's home, which I think I have told you was haunted and where I had the experience with the poltergeist activity and the kitchen cupboard doors opening and slamming shut on their own.

I went through a dry spell for many years and after my dad died my precognitive dreams started happening again. I often dream of traumatic events as they seem to be happening. I say "as they are happening" because when I awaken from such a dream and write it down, I often find out that day that these events actually happened at the time I would have been having the dream.

One such event happened when I was dreaming of being in a field and a man was standing next to me. He was casually dressed and was wearing a baseball cap with the NY Yankees emblem on it and his shirt had a #15 on the back. There was a small plane flying overhead and it was very, very low and obviously coming down in distress. I was very alarmed and said to him that the plane was way too low and must be having a problem. He was very relaxed with his hands in his pockets and asked me if I could read the call letters on the wing - which I could - and he asked me to remember them. He shook his head in a very disappointed way and said, "Yeah, that's me. I'm in trouble. I'm not gonna make it." He thanked me for standing there with him and when I woke up, I did write down the info on the wing and told my mom about the dream. I was a teen at the time. I found out that day that he died while piloting his own small plane. This happened to be Thurman Munson, the New York Yankees pitcher.

I think I dream about planes because my dad had his pilot's license and loved to fly and would often take my brother, sister and me up with him. My mom was deathly afraid to fly and would beg us not to go with him. My brother and I almost always went though - we loved it.

Recently I dreamt of the small plane that went into the apartment building in New York - and again, it was with very little warning. My husband almost never travels for his work, but he was going to another province that day by plane and I was very anxious about him going. The night before he left, I dreamt of hearing a horrific sound of a crash and running down the hall of an apartment building and looking out a window to see that further down there was a plane that had crashed into the building.

The wreckage was on fire, falling into the street, and people were very afraid it was a terrorist attack. Some people were saying we should not try to go down the stairs and others were thinking of going to the roof. One guy commented that there was another building nearby that had a landing pad on the roof and so it might be a good place to go to be rescued. I decided to run down the stairs to try to get out. I remember counting that I was 50 floors up.

I was so shocked the next day when that, indeed, happened. At first, of course, I put it down to my fears of my husband leaving and I told him the dream and all the details. When it happened, I felt as though I was in a very disoriented state of mind for the next couple of days. I always wonder why these experiences happen to me and regret that there is no way for me to forewarn anyone - how could one report such dreams and be considered serious? While writing this, I just realized that this fellow was also a Yankee baseball player - I had not thought of that before. That is an interesting synchronicity.

Some dreams are world events. On one occasion I dreamt that I was walking through a dense forest and in the middle of it was an extremely ornate portrait of Pope John Paul II. I was very surprised to see it there, of course, and so I stopped and was looking at it very closely and carefully. I heard someone tell me to watch the face and, as I did, it slowly changed and turned into a death mask, like a skeleton. I was very upset and was asking the person who was with me (whom I could not see) if this meant the Pope was going to die and again the voice told me to watch the face. Extremely slowly, it changed again and finally became the normal face of the Pope. The voice said that he would survive a close call with death, but he would never find his way out of the forest. I think it was 2 - 3 days later when the Pope was shot and he came very close to dying, but then recovered. He had a very long recovery though as I seem to remember.

Sometimes my dreams are preparing me for bad news. My mother told me in a dream that she was going to be diagnosed with lung cancer and would die within two years. She was hugging me and telling me how sorry she was to tell me this news. I never told her of the dream. She became ill three months later and had a series of tests that led to that diagnoses. The doctors estimated that she would live about a year, but as she had told me in the dream, she lived for exactly two years from her diagnosis.

To end on a lighter note, I sometimes have conversations with people in dreams and they reveal information they are not ready to share when we are both awake. When I was getting to know my husband, Scott, we spent a couple of years as very close friends. As our relationship slowly changed into something more serious, I had a dream of him asking me to please be very patient with him because he had never had a relationship with someone who knew him as a friend first and he said, "And one more thing - you need to change your perfume because if we are going to be spending our lives together, you need to know that I can't stand that perfume you wear now. I actually hate it."

So, the next time we were together, I asked him if my perfume bothered him and he said, "Oh, no, it's fine." I asked him a few more times and he kept telling me it was fine. So, at the end of the evening I said, "Well, that's not what you said to me in my dream!"

He was quite surprised, as you can guess, and asked me to explain. I told him all about the dream, what he had said and how he said he actually hated the perfume - not just disliked it - but hated it. He had his head in his hands and he was laughing. He looked at me and said, "Well, you've got me because I did not want to hurt your feelings, but I guess the ME you visited with in dreamtime must know that you have no plans to change that perfume and the only way you're going to stop wearing it is for HIM to tell you I hate it. Because, I actually do, to tell you the truth... really hate that perfume!" He was very surprised. I told him that if he hated it so much then maybe he should help me choose one that we both liked and he agreed. That was my Christmas present that year.