Have you ever had a dream and within the next day or so experience events or elements from that dream in real life? This is something that almost everyone experiences from time to time. It is quite possible that it happens to everyone. The thing is that we simply don't remember many of the dreams that we have each night. In fact, people usually only recall the dreams that they are having just before they wake up. Are these dreams truly precognitive in nature? That is to say, are we actually capable of seeing events from the future in our dreams? It certainly seems like it is a possibility given the number of people who claim to experience this phenomenon.

If seeing the future in our dreams is a real ability, then how do we distinguish prophetic dreams from normal ones? Having had some experience with this phenomenon myself I will give you some ideas as to how you might be able to tell.

I began having precognitive dreams back at the age of fourteen just after my father passed away. At first they were just ordinary daily events that happened the very next day. When I say ordinary events, what I mean is that to anyone else it might seem that there is nothing too extraordinary about the dreams, but on a personal level the dreams and the actual events held significance to me. The very first time that I can recall having a precognitive dream, it was about helping my sister cook breakfast. I had never been asked to do this before. It was a first for me. After I awoke from the dream, I went into the kitchen and events played out exactly as they had mere minutes before within my dream. I felt like the dream had prepared me for this event by allowing me to experience it before hand. The dream itself was very vivid in fact it was so vivid it felt like I was remembering something that I had already experience. The primary sensation that is consistent within all of the precognitive dreams that I have ever experienced is this feeling that I am remembering the events. When dreaming about events that later came to pass the feeling was indistinguishable from dreaming about actual memories from my past. The only difference was that, upon waking up, I immediately realized that what I was "remembering" had never actually happened.

As time passed, and I grew older I continued having these short precognitive dreams. The more I had them, the longer the amount of time between the "pre-memory" dream and the actual event became. It was as if the ability grew from short term memory of the immediate future to long-term memory of the future. I had no control over when or how often I had these dreams and afterwards they would remain in my memory just as solid and clear as any of my other memories. They didn't fade as normal dreams tend to do over time. I think this is because they felt like real memories to me and in a way they were. Sometimes I could sense, upon going to bed, if I were going to have a precognitive dream. As I grew older I had them less and eventually they stopped after I began to meditate and develop my psychic faculties on a more conscious level.

I feel like it was a part of my mind that was developing but not being utilized consciously and that because this part of my mind was active, it functioned when I was sleeping. It makes sense to me that a part of the brain that is active but not used when a person is awake would function subconsciously when a person is asleep. This is all hypothesis of course and I suppose that there is no real way of knowing the how or why of it until we have a much better understanding of the untapped potential of the mind.