Why predictive dreams are not predictive

As a child and also later when I got older, I occasionally had prophetic dreams. One of the prophetic dreams I had made such an impression on me at the time that it has always stayed with me.

I grew up in a cosy porch flat in the centre of Krommenie. One day, our upstairs neighbours - an elderly couple - moved into the old people's home and a slightly older single man moved in above us.

He never got visitors, had no family, always wore the same beige rib velvet suit and never spoke to anyone. When I met him on the stairs he would say 'bye'. That was it. He was probably just a lonely old man, but as a young girl I was a bit scared of him.

A few months after the man moved into the flat, I had a horrible dream about him.

In my dream, I met him in the stairwell. He walked past me, but was already dying. His body was already rotting and as I walked past him I smelled a horrible, pungent corpse smell.

I woke up and cried to my mother, 'Mummy! Neighbour is dying!'

Two weeks later, his flat was emptied and his belongings put in the bulk waste by the housing association. Neighbour had died.

This was clearly a prophetic dream... or was it?

Logical

Actually, it made perfect sense that I had this dream. After all, dreams come about in our own subconscious where the brain makes connections between all the stored information. And yes, there can be a predictive dream among them by chance.

Needless to say, I was already a bit afraid of this gentleman. Every time I saw him, his appearance was a bit messy and he made an unhealthy impression. So as a child, I must have consciously or unconsciously thought on one occasion: that man will probably die soon.

And because everything that you consciously or unconsciously experience during the day, you relive at night in all possible sequences to process these experiences, chances are that you will occasionally have a prophetic dream.

However, the fact remains that more dreams not come out than do, which would make it comparatively more logical to go from coincidence to speak when you have a prophetic dream. There is no paranormal giftedness involved here at all.

Grandma

I was also always taught in the past That deceased people could visit you in your dreams. They could get through to you more easily at night because during sleep, consciousness is at rest and they could thus penetrate the subconscious more easily by whispering their messages (telepathically), which would make you see or hear them in your dreams.

Once, I had a dream about my late grandmother. In my dream, I cried for her. Promptly, she stood in front of me in the supermarket. She spread her arms to give me a hug, upon which I walked up to her and hugged her.

'Do you have to cry over such an ugly old person now?' she laughed.

At that moment, I startled awake, convinced that for a moment she had actually been with me to let me know that she did not want me to be sad.

My grandmother was a vain woman and always kept a neat make-up with powder, blusher, lipstick, eye and eyebrow pencil until the last days of her 94-year-old life.

She hated getting wrinkles and whenever I was with her, she invariably praised me about my 'peachy skin' and regularly told me that I looked so much like her when she was a young girl herself.

Obviously, the things she once said to me were stored in my subconscious. Perfectly understandable, then, that I had such a dream after her death and she said something to me in this dream that she could have said to me in real life too. And probably had once actually said.

Deceased loved ones

So it cannot be said at all that her spirit was actually with me at that moment. More likely, unconscious memories surfaced during my sleep in combination with events I myself had experienced during the day or emotions I had felt during the day.

Even when you speak to a deceased loved one in a dream who gives you an announcement that later turns out to come true, this prediction still comes from your own subconscious.

In this case, the prediction is the product of your own brain that has made connections between all the available information in your personal 'database'.

Since the deceased loved one is also present in your memories, it is quite understandable that your brain involves him or her in the dream and makes him or her say things that are also stored in your subconscious.

Our brain is the best film director there is. From all the images stored in our subconscious mind - combined with our own hopes, fears and other emotions plus everything that concerns us in our daily lives - a unique film is produced every night. That is why dream psychology also so interesting!

It might be a nice idea to keep a dream diary for a while in which you write down in brief what you dreamt immediately after waking up.

TIP: A beautiful and handy dream diary can be found >HERE.

I did this myself for a while as an experiment, and after a while I noticed that all the topics that had passed in my dreams were fragments of thoughts, feelings, emotions, events, TV clips, Google search results and book passages that had all passed by during the day, combined with older information already stored in my subconscious.