Introduction

No one is you, and that is your superpower.

~Elyse Santilli

What are dreams? Are they a way of processing the day’s activities and sorting out your thoughts? Are they a product of your subconscious telling you things you’re too distracted to focus on during your waking hours? Are they sometimes a pathway to communications outside the constraints of your own capabilities?

Whatever you believe, this new collection of stories about dreams and premonitions will inspire you to remember and analyze your own. You may feel your dreams are generated by your own mind, or you may think that some of your dreams come to you via more divine routes. Either way, these tales of dreams remembered and advice followed reveal how incredibly powerful dreams can be — as a tool for redirecting your life, changing your relationships, and making you a happier person.

I’m a practical, fact-oriented person so I fall into the camp that believes that we generate our dreams ourselves, and that they are the products of our subconscious saying, Hey you! Focus, please. Here’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all day while you’ve been looking at your phone and doing projects and talking to people!

Rebecca Radicchi, for example, shares one such tale in Chapter 1, “Personal Transformation.” She had a recurrent dream in which a tidal wave would be roaring straight at her, and she’d stand there frozen, watching it approach. Finally, after years of this nightmare, Rebecca decided to analyze it. She realized something very important: “Those colossal waves had never actually overtaken me. Not once.” Rebecca understood that no matter what kind of awfulness came at her, she would prevail. She says, “From then on, I viewed those walls of water as a gift. They reminded me to balance out my feelings with facts. They encouraged me to deal with challenges by facing them. And they reassured me that no matter what comes, I’ll never be overcome.”

Many of our writers found similar hope, courage, and confidence through their dreams. Others found new pathways for their lives. You’ll read about people changing careers, homes, even spouses because of the direction they’ve received from their subconscious pointing out to them what they already knew. You’ll read about people figuring out what the stressors in their lives are through their dreams, and deciding to do something about them. And you’ll read about people sorting out their feelings for friends or family members — alive or dead — through their dreams.

In many cases, it’s hard to imagine someone’s subconscious was the source of their inspiration, when the advice they’ve received seems to come out of left field. That’s what happened to Jody Sharpe after she lost her daughter Kate in a car accident. Her story in our chapter called “Listen to That Little Voice” is about a dream in which a voice told her to read Charlotte’s Web. Jody had never read the book, and she had no reason to know its contents. But she went out and bought the book immediately, and in the last chapter she found the guidance she needed to move forward in her life, finding joy in her remaining children and her grandchildren despite her sorrow for Kate.

Have you ever had a premonition that something bad was about to happen? Perhaps you changed your day to avoid that bad event, or you warned someone else. You’ll read plenty of tales of premonitions well heeded in these pages. One of our writers, Marya Morin, had so many dreams and premonitions come true that her parents warned her not to tell anyone. Her story in our chapter called “Prophetic Premonitions” concerns her discovery of her gift as a young child, and her later reluctance to tell the man she was dating about it, until they were about to have a tire blow out on a mountain road. She screamed at her date to stop moments before their front tire exploded. As they sat in the car on the shoulder of that treacherous road, trembling, she confessed that she had dreamed the night before about the tire and the ravine they would plunge into. Marya says that unlike her parents, “He expressed no fear or distaste — only relief for saving our lives and sympathy for the many omens I’d never disclosed to anyone.” They’ve been married for decades now.

I learned a lot about the power of dreams and premonitions while I was making our two previous books on this topic — Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions (2015) and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and the Unexplainable (2017). If you’re interested in reading more stories like these after you finish this book, I recommend those two volumes, which I put together with dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden and her cadre of dream experts.

One of Kelly’s recommendations in those books is to write down your dreams the moment you wake up. Even if you can scribble down a couple of keywords you’ll have a better shot of remembering. How many times have you woken up, said “I had the most vivid dream,” and then promptly forgotten it? That happens to me all the time. I did have two vivid dreams this spring, though, which I have managed to remember.

In the first dream, I was at the grocery store in a long line to check out. My shopping cart was completely empty — not one item in it — and yet I was forced to stand in the line. And everyone was crammed together, too, a no-no during this time of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my second dream, I was pushing a totally empty shopping cart again, but through the streets of the small city that is next door to my town. Apparently I had walked about ten miles from home pushing this empty cart, and now I was on a big city boulevard with lots of other people who were also pushing empty shopping carts. The road was divided and we had to walk in one direction on each side of the road. Everyone was obeying the one-way rule and trying to stay the proper six feet apart but it was difficult.

No one was wearing a mask in either of my dreams.

It wasn’t hard to analyze those dreams. I started stocking up our usually empty kitchen back in February as soon as I saw the grocery-store lines in Italy. So by early March I was done, and I haven’t set foot in any store of any kind since then. We’re in a particularly hard hit area in the suburbs of New York City, so we are being extra-careful around here. After a few weeks of the shutdown, the grocery stores got more organized for delivery and parking-lot pickups, but during those early days it was almost impossible to get groceries if you weren’t willing to walk inside a store. We ran out of some basics during that time. So those were anxiety dreams, plain and simple. No mystery there.

We have a dozen stories about dreams related to the COVID-19 pandemic in these pages. Most of them involve the stress of the pandemic causing epiphanies for our contributors, way more exciting than my very obvious dreams. Sergio del Bianco, for example, found that during the shutdown he was dreaming of people he hadn’t seen in years. In his story in our chapter called “Miraculous Bonds” he describes what happened after he had repeated dreams about a woman named Gwen who had been kind to him at a part-time job he held in college many decades ago. He became fixated on finding her, figuring she must be in her nineties by now. After a prolonged Google and Facebook search, he found Gwen’s daughter, who arranged a phone call for him. Sergio found himself crying tears of joy as he talked to Gwen and told her how much she had meant to him. A few days after that phone call, Gwen’s daughter called to say that her mother had quietly passed away in her sleep, and that it seemed like she had hung on just long enough to hear from Sergio.

So, are dreams generated by your subconscious? Are they your connection to an unseen world? Whatever you decide after you finish this collection of 101 miraculous, thought-provoking stories, I know one thing: You’ll want to listen to your dreams.

— Amy Newmark —

Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, Chicken Soup for the Soul

June 1, 2020