The Stuff of Dreams

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Oct 4, 1999

Dreaming is a universal experience. No matter what part of the world we live in and regardless of our age or belief system, we all dream. Many psychologists claim that dreams are tools by which we can discover hidden desires and unfulfilled wishes that plague us in our waking lives. Others maintain that dreams are just random pieces of nonsense-that our brains, like computers, go through a "defragmenting" process when we sleep, and that our dreams are merely pieces of information being sorted and stored by our brains during our physical body's "downtime". While we may certainly tend to dismiss our dreams as senseless flights of fancy, products of an overtired mind or a late evening meal perhaps, many yet firmly believe that dreams are windows in time through which the future might be glimpsed. And indeed, there are many well-documented cases of precognitive dreaming that reinforce such a belief.

On the very day of his assassination, U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, for example, is said to have recounted over breakfast a dream in which he had foreseen his own death. While dreaming that he was in attendance at a wake, Lincoln was told by the mourners that the body in the coffin was none other than that of the president himself. As an infantryman during the Second World War, Adolph Hitler dreamed that he was being buried alive under rock and molten iron. Upon awakening, he left the trench only moments before an exploding mortar shell buried his comrades under tons of earth and hot shrapnel. On the day prior to the sinking of the Titanic, one passenger experienced a dream detailing the tragedy about to occur. Armed with this foreknowledge, the woman kept vigil, and she and her children survived that fateful night. Her husband, however, who scoffed at her fears, died in the tragedy.

History, too, provides us with many examples of man's inherent belief in the power of dreams to foretell future events. The ancient Egyptians were perhaps the first people to practice oneiromancy-the art of dream divination. One Egyptian text, dated around 2070 BC, states that dreams are messages from the gods sent to enlighten the dreamer as to future happenings. Firm in this belief, the Egyptians went so far as to build dream temples, in which an individual seeking guidance from the gods could sleep and, upon waking, consult the temple priest as to the meaning of his or her dreams.

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