Prophetic and Recurring Dreams
Prophetic dreams are dreams that show evidence of precognition. “Precognition” means knowledge of something in the future before it occurs. It’s the ability to see future events—in short, what psychics do, using their honed skills of ESP and at times engaging in the use of tools such as tarot cards, runes, astrology, crystal gazing, and others, like their dreams.
Perhaps the most famous person who had the ability to be prophetic in a dream state was Edgar Cayce, who is known as the “sleeping prophet.” For over forty years, Cayce gave thousands of psychic readings by lying down with his eyes closed and going into a meditative state that connected him with his superconscious state of being. He never had any intention of being a psychic originally, though he was a deeply spiritual man.
Over fourteen thousand of Edgar Cayce’s readings were recorded, and they can be read today in the library at the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia. His dream-state predictions cover thousands of topics, with a great majority of them helping people treat their illnesses and medical conditions. Other topics he covered in his dream state include reincarnation, dream interpretations, ancient mysteries (including information about the pyramids in Egypt), and amazing psychic and spiritual phenomena.
Cayce was a master of using the superconscious dream state in order to see the past and the future and to tap into the global consciousness and into the higher spiritual planes to obtain information from current and previous lifetimes as well as history of humanity since its beginning.
A person with precognitive or psychic ability can tune into this information when they are awake. Prophetic dreams, on the other hand, happen while sleeping, and the person may not have any idea or indication that they have any intuitive ability at all. In fact, they may vehemently deny that they have intuitive ability and may have opposing spiritual beliefs that disagree with the thought of possessing psychic ability or prophecy. There are records of prophetic dreams in all cultures throughout history as well as written records of prophecy in the Bible. Many people, though, are uncomfortable with the thought that they could have a prophetic dream.
When a person has a prophetic dream, it can be very disturbing to them, especially if they don’t believe in the ability to see the future. They wake up with their heart pounding from a terrifying dream warning them of danger to come, or they experience a physical pain in the body warning them of a problem. The dream itself is a terrifying experience, only exacerbated further when the event happens in real life.
The most frustrating part of having prophetic dreams is that you typically have no idea when they will occur and can’t seem to order them at will when you desire to know something. There isn’t much you can do to force yourself to have prophetic dreams. They most often come when least expected and often with information that you knew nothing about previously. I write about them here more to explain how they feel and how you can determine if they are prophetic if they do happen to you one day.
Sometimes prophetic dreams come in enough time to give fair warning, to help change someone’s destiny. There are stories of kings, queens, emperors, and others who were spared from death through prophetic dreams that they or their spiritual advisors had. They paid attention to these dreams and changed their plan of action, which saved them.
In other situations, a person can have a prophetic dream, but it lacks the detailed information needed in order to save them from the experience. Abraham Lincoln is a famous example of someone who experienced a prophetic dream: he attended his own funeral. He was being shown that his death was near, but the dream did not give him details of how and when it would occur, so there was little he could do to change or delay the future outcome.
Some of the most traumatic prophetic dreams that I’ve had are ones that involved me personally. These dreams were so haunting that I remember them as clearly today as I did when they occurred many years ago.
Those of you reading this who have experienced a similar type of dream know what I speak of. You wake from the dream with every fiber of your being on alert, knowing that something terrible is going to occur and, try what you will, you can’t shake the dream and go back to sleep, nor can you shake it off throughout the day.
In the introduction of this book, I shared with you my prophetic dream about losing my dog. When your dreams are this intense, they most typically are warning you of something to come. I learned two valuable lessons from these early dreams: one, I could not always control what happened to the people and pets that I cared for in my life; and two, I was being prepared for a lifetime as a psychic and empath, in which many times I could see and sometimes feel the future.
I’ve continued to have many prophetic dreams throughout my lifetime, and not all of them have been this traumatic or life altering. Many of the dreams have warned me of problems to come, including conflicts that I could not stop. These dreams helped me be better prepared for the conflicts when they arrived, including being more emotionally ready for the argument or negative experience another person would bring into my life. I’ve also had prophetic dreams in which I was given enough time to warn the person about what was to come in order to help them avoid a dangerous experience.
Over time, my assumption has been that when I have a prophetic dream in which there is nothing I can do to change the situation, this is divine will. In these cases, I am receiving the message, picking up the waves in motion like a radio. Perhaps this was the case for Abraham Lincoln as well.
In other cases, I dream about something happening to someone, and I have time to tell them and give them the opportunity to do something about it. I assume that I have been given this prophetic dream in order to help this person, as it is not necessarily their time to have this experience.
The challenging thing about prophetic dreams is that if you have one and warn the person and they avoid the experience, many times you both will never know if it would have occurred. Given the opportunity, though, I’m always happy to warn the person so that they can make a change and avoid the experience, even if they don’t believe it would have happened.
I’ve now had enough prophetic dreams that people listen to me and heed the warnings. Some of these dreams include warning people in New Orleans and Mississippi about Hurricane Katrina. When I was younger, I didn’t really share with people that I was psychic and had prophetic dreams, so it was much more difficult to share these types of dreams with others.
I once had a dream about a friend’s mother. I woke up in a panic from this dream, calling my friend early in the morning to tell her that I had a dream about her mother and that she should not drive to work because she would be in a car accident where she would be injured. The friend didn’t believe me about the dream and didn’t warn her mother. Later that morning when the car accident with her mother occurred as I described, she was understandably very upset. She called me to tell me it had happened as I had explained. I thought at first that she was calling to say that she wished she would have warned her mother to stay home that morning. To my surprise, she called to yell at me and say that whatever this ability was that I had, it had caused this problem. I remember being so shocked and hurt by this accusation, as I had been trying to help. I can’t blame her for being upset because I had never shared with her that I had dreams like these, so it was a shock to her system in many ways.
In another scenario, I warned a friend that her family was in danger of having their home flooded from a storm coming to the state where they lived. She disregarded this information, thinking there was no way that I could predict these kinds of events. When the storm came and her family was flooded out of their home, she called me later to discuss what I had told her. She said that she understood it to be true that I must have some kind of ability but that it was one that she did not agree with and that she thought was a bad thing spiritually. Rather than appreciating that she could have moved her family out of the town before the storm flooded their home and area, she asked that I never share this type of information with her again, as she did not want to know anything about it due to her religious beliefs. I’ve respected her wishes and have not spoken about these types of things with her again.
I mention these instances to prepare you for when you have prophetic dreams. They may not always be received in the helpful manner you intend. In both of these situations, it was the early days when I had not begun to talk so openly about my psychic abilities to many people. It was a surprise to both of these friends when I warned them after a prophetic dream. Now that I’ve written many books and taught thousands of people about these abilities, people take it and me more seriously.
Had my friend warned her mother about the car accident and her mother stayed home, the accident would not have occurred, and so there would have been no proof if my dream was prophetic or not. That’s the challenge with prophetic dreams: with many of them, if you heed them, you aren’t sure if the event would have happened.
Some can be tracked; for example, you dream of a plane crash and warn someone not to get on a certain flight, and then that tragedy does indeed happen. My friend and her mother could have checked traffic reports that morning to see if an accident had occurred on the roads that she traveled to work during her commute time, and that might have provided the proof they needed. However, even this is hard to say, because some experiences happen at certain times and need certain people in play for them to happen, so there may have not been an accident that morning because the mother was not there.
This is what is so frustrating about prophetic experiences. There are so many variables that are not fully understood, so they are difficult to track scientifically and typically are not repeatable. Throw in the fact that the variables change through energy of what we think, feel, and do, thus changing the outcome, and we are dealing with quantum physics well beyond what science understands yet at this level.
If you have prophetic dreams, it’s important to be as gentle as possible when explaining your dream to the person you had the dream about.
In the case of my friend’s mother, I called urgently, as I had woken from the dream only minutes before my friend’s mother was about to leave for work, so I didn’t have the time to get into a deep explanation—I was trying to stop her from getting into her car. My friend was very upset and shaken from what happened to her mother, and I felt so bad that I had not shared with her earlier that I had psychic abilities, which occasionally showed up in dreams. Had she known this about me earlier, she would have taken the news much better.
In the second example about the coming storm, my friend had heard me speak about psychic ability and that I could see and predict things, but she never took it seriously and didn’t like discussing the topic with me, so our friendship focused on other things. When I made the call to tell her about the flood near her family, the reality of me being able to see a situation like this was more than she could comfortably bear with her personal religious beliefs. She disengaged with the friendship after this event, as she felt uncomfortable around me going forward.
I’m fortunate to have other friends who are fine with and very understanding of my peculiar abilities. You may find for yourself that as you open up to understanding your dreams, you may experience prophetic dreams as well.
If at all possible, take the time first to explain to the person that you have had a dream that appears to be a warning. State that there is no way that you can be absolutely sure that this dream will come true, but that you felt so strongly about the dream that you wanted to share it with them in case it could be of help. Be careful when doing this, however. If you have never had a prophetic dream, you could scare someone unnecessarily with information that is not really a prediction of things to come.
Positive Prophetic Dreams
I hope I haven’t scared you off too badly about prophetic dreams. My intent is to warn you about how they can be disturbing to both you and others so that you are prepared should you have one. Many of my clients, students, and friends have shared stories with me that they or someone in their family have experienced a prophetic dream in their life at one time or another, so chances are pretty good that you may have had one or will one day.
Not all prophetic dreams are so foreboding. There are times when you’ll have wonderful prophetic dreams about the future. As we discussed in an earlier chapter, many people have dreamt about their future child and seen a first glimpse of their baby in the dreams before they even become pregnant. I’ve had happy dreams in which I’ve seen homes that I will live in and even new relationships to come.
One particular prophetic dream recurred often throughout my life. In the dream, which I first had at the age of sixteen, I was married in a past lifetime around two thousand years ago. I remembered distinct details in this dream and wrote them down in my dream journal. The man was kind and loving, and his name was James. We had a wonderful marriage and life together and pursued our spiritual work as part of our daily lives. Each time at the end of the dream, the man I was married to would say to me, “When we meet again in another lifetime, you’ll recognize me as James. I will find a way to show you that I am James.”
I became convinced over time that the man I would meet and marry would find a way to show me he was James. Either James would literally be his first, middle, or last name, or he would remember this lifetime and describe it to me. When I married for the first time when I was very young, I remember looking hard at the person to see if he was James, but he was not. I decided that perhaps it was just a dream and that we would not be able to connect again in this lifetime. This relationship ended fairly quickly in a divorce and was not meant to be.
Years later when I wasn’t looking to even date anyone, I had a friend who decided to introduce me to someone that she thought would be a good match for me. I declined the offer and thanked her for thinking of me. She was persistent, however, and invited me to a birthday party that she was throwing for someone I knew. I came to the party and discovered that she had invited him as well. She made it very obvious when she introduced us that she had intended for us to meet.
As soon as we met, we both felt a spark and an instant connection. He told me his first name, which was not James, but I could not deny that I felt like I had known this man for a lifetime. We had a long talk that evening about spiritual topics and went on our first date a few days later. On the second date, I asked questions like I often do, such as what his birthdate was, because I wanted to know his astrology sign and information. I also asked him what his full name was, and his middle name was James. This excited and intrigued me, but wasn’t enough to fully go on for me.
A couple of weeks later, he called me on the phone and proceeded to tell me that he had a dream about me the night before and that it was a different type of dream because he saw himself in a past life. He relayed that I was with him in that dream as his partner. I couldn’t believe it—he was describing the recurring dream that I had experienced over the years.
I stopped him at that moment and said, “Don’t tell me anything else about this dream. Stop right now and write down everything you remember about this dream.”
He replied, “I already have. I write down all of my dreams.”
Hello, I remember thinking, is this my dream guy literally or what? He’s into all of the metaphysical things that I’m into and he even journals his dreams.
I said, “I’m coming over to discuss your dream.”
“Great!” he said.
I went digging into a big box where I kept my journals and grabbed two of them in which I had recorded this recurring dream over the years with different details. When I arrived at his place, I handed him my dream journals and asked if I could see his. We exchanged journals and began to read. At several points of reading each other’s descriptions about this past-life dream, we would both be a little surprised and shocked, glance up at each other, and then continue reading.
When we were done, we couldn’t believe it. We had both had the same dream, the same remembering of a lifetime together, that we had both detailed and explained with the same memories and experiences. The details were so similar it was uncanny. His details focused a little more on the man’s perspective of what life was like at that time, and mine had the more feminine observations, but it was the same life and the same dream. What each of us had felt the most in that dream was the strong, loving relationship that we had shared. He remembered that his name was James in the dream, and when he read my dream about how he said he would find me again and would find a way to show me he was James, it was just overwhelming.
From this moment onward, we began our adventures together in this lifetime as we explored other prophetic dreams we had over the years along with remembrances of many previous lifetimes and experiences together, including times we had studied together in ancient Egypt and Greece in the mystery schools and other times when the studies were more informal with teachers and guides.
The more we worked together, the more powerful our experiences grew, and our psychic connection was linked. We once studied with a metaphysical teacher and over time began to feel that this particular teacher was not leading us in a good direction. We decided to link our energy together one evening as we lay together in bed and ask that we be given clear information about this person through our dreams in order to determine if we should continue to study with them.
When we awoke the next morning, we both immediately wrote down our dreams before speaking to each other. Our dreams again were eerily similar. Both of us had dreamed of a past lifetime when we were students together, and this person had been our teacher. In the dream, the teacher had turned to the dark side and was using their energy to take energy from others. The teacher was here again in this lifetime attempting to do the same thing. We knew that our intuition and feelings were right on target and that we shouldn’t continue studying or engaging with this person.
I could list hundreds of dreams like these in which I’ve been able to divine prophetic information about past lives as well as what’s happening in my current life. In some cases, I’ve also been able to dream about what’s coming, beyond this current lifetime and into a future lifetime.
Over time as you continue your work with dreams, you’ll find that you’ll be able to explore the past, present, and future in ways you never imagined before.
Prophetic Dreams Workbook
As you are keeping your dream workbook, make sure to dedicate a special section to prophetic dreams.
Date each dream and write down as much descriptive information that you can, including how emotionally intense you felt about the dream. The details and symbols in these dreams are very important and can help discern what the dream really means and how literal it is.
Some prophetic dreams can be more symbolic than specific. For example, you may dream about a death that is not actually a death, but rather an ending of something, like a relationship that ends in divorce or a friendship that is going to come to a sudden and rocky ending.
This is why the dream workbook is so important, as over time you’ll have a much better understanding about your dreams and how you feel about each one. You’ll be better able to determine if the dreams are warning you about a specific situation or hinting to you about an emotional experience that is heading your direction.
In daily life, we tend to remember the negative experiences more strongly than the positive ones. We can receive ten compliments in one day, but if one person says something negative about us, that is what we will focus on for days or even longer. This is part of human nature, and it runs the same with dreams.
For example, in the dream that my husband and I shared about when he was James, parts of the dream focused on different details that were important to us individually. Our dreams both described our home and the town where we lived in great detail. However, what was most important to us in daily life was a little different. As the wife, I remembered how my home looked and felt, while he remembered more about his work life. Some of the parts that matched the closest in our dreams were things that happened that were surprising and negative, such as when something caught fire in the home and an upsetting incident with livestock.
When we have a very upsetting dream, we tend to remember it in great detail in comparison to the happy prophetic dreams, which don’t feel as real to us in the dream or in life. When many people are asked to describe their happy prophetic dream, a smile will cross their face and they talk about the dream like it is a vague idea that they wish could come true but probably won’t. Yet when asked to describe a scary prophetic dream, they seem almost certain that it’s destined to happen.
It’s difficult to give specific steps on how to have a prophetic dream because 99 percent of the time they come out of the blue with no warning at all. You can try asking your guides to help you dream about something that will happen in the future, but this is so nebulous that it usually works better to ask for help in finding the solution to a current problem. Prophetic dreams are the most mysterious of all and for the most part cannot be tamed, controlled, or timed.
Recurring Dreams
A recurring dreams is a dream that appears repeatedly. You recognize it from previous dreams because it is so strange to have this dream over and over again. If you’re keeping a dream journal, you’ll find that how the dream ends rarely changes. It’s like watching a movie that you’ve already seen and playing it over again. The more you have a recurring dream, though, the more details you’ll notice and be able to record.
Some of the most common recurring dreams are dreams that I’ve mentioned earlier, including dreams of falling, flying, and being chased. When these types of dreams recur, they are typically the subconscious mind trying to help you work through something you are facing in your daily life. These dreams can be very helpful, as they motivate you to take action on something that is disturbing you or making you uncomfortable. For example, a dream about being naked in a classroom before you take a test can cause you to double down on studying in order to make sure that you are as prepared as you can possibly be to take the test. Recurring dreams feel stressful when you experience them, but in reality your subconscious is trying to help your sense of confidence and well-being. These types of dreams fall under the daily life category of dreams.
Recurring dreams can be a result of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People who have suffered trauma may repeatedly dream about the incident over and over. Their subconscious mind is trying to help them come to terms with what occurred so that they can process the grief, pain, and fear through the dream state, as many times it is too difficult for the conscious mind to deal with for a long period of time. These dreams fall into the category of what we also describe as nightmares.
A rarer form of a recurring dream that goes beyond the description of nightmare is the night terror. The biggest difference between a nightmare and a night terror is that a nightmare occurs during the REM state of sleep, in which most dreams occur, while the night terror occurs during a non-REM state. In this case, the person many times does not remember the dream. They may sit up in bed and scream out loud, only to fall right back asleep. When awakened, they often don’t recall the dream or screaming, and they are surprised to hear that this occurred when another person describes it to them. Many people have described an episode of this type with a child or a partner who was talking out loud, screaming, or thrashing around in the bed. Night terrors are pretty rare to experience.
Another type of sleep disorder of this nature is sleep walking, which is experienced more often by children for a brief period of time. Adults who sleep walk are usually under the influence of a medication that they have taken to sleep, only to experience the side effect of sleep walking. In chapter Seven, we’ll further explore nightmares in general.
The REM stage of sleep typically occurs every hour and a half to two hours of sleep throughout the night. Thus, the longer you sleep, the more dreams you can have each evening. The REM stage for each person can differ from ten minutes to thirty minutes or more. Your dreams and dream cycles are unique to you and your sleep patterns. Additionally, your dream cycles and sleeping patterns will change throughout your life, sometimes due to stress and life changes as well as evolving as we age.
The studies of dreams still show that we don’t know much about dreams, including why they occur or why some people dream in greater detail than others.
Prophetic Recurring Dreams
When the recurring dream is about something less ordinary and becomes more specific about an event that you don’t recognize as happening in your life, then the likelihood exists that it is a prophetic dream that is repeating and trying to warn you of something to come.
There are many reports about people who have recurring dreams that warn of an event to come as well as reports of large groups of people who share a recurring prophetic dream. Shamans were more familiar with this and often relied on this information to warn them of things to come to assist with their survival, including dreams about major weather changes like floods and famine, so they could prepare in advance and store food or migrate elsewhere when necessary. They would also dream about coming wars and battles to give them time to prepare.
One very famous case of a disastrous prophetic dream involved a group of children in Wales who didn’t want to go to school because of their dreams. These schoolchildren woke panicked from recurring nightmares in which they were in darkness and feeling crushed and unable to breathe. The children’s dreams were eerily similar. Some of the dreams were documented, as several adults had the same dream, including a local housewife and other people of Welsh descent who were living in other areas of the United Kingdom.
This prophetic recurring dream happened several days before the incident in 1966, when a coal slide disaster buried and destroyed a portion of town, including a local school, where 116 children between the ages of seven and ten lost their lives as they were crushed under the weight of the coal that poured over their school, making it the worst landslide disaster in the United Kingdom. Some of these children had reported their dreams of being buried alive in the school several days before the event occurred. One child reportedly had awoken from her dream two days prior to tell her mother that she was not afraid of dying because she would be with her two friends when it occurred.
Other examples of disastrous recurring prophetic dreams by large groups of people about natural and manmade disasters are September 11 in New York City, the death of Princess Diana, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Many people have shared their dreams leading up to these events while not fully understanding the dreams or what they were trying to communicate to them.
It appears that in the global consciousness, where we have access to all the thoughts and ideas of humanity, time does not exist in the same way that it does here on the earth plane. When an incident of great tragedy is drawing near, it seems that it can be detected days or sometimes weeks before it occurs and that some people can pick up on this emotional energy through their dreams because the grief and pain is so intense and on a large scale.
The majority of recurring dreams, though, are the daily life type of dreams. Prophetic dreams don’t recur as often. They typically get their point across in a very powerful and profound way, and you wake up feeling as if you’ve lived through the experience on a very direct and intense level. There are some prophetic dreams that don’t repeat the exact recurring dream; rather, the dream shifts each time about the same recurring subject. I refer to these dreams as status updates, providing information about what will occur and how it’s currently changing.
This has been a very serious discussion about prophetic and recurring dreams. I wish it could be more lighthearted, but for some reason many prophetic dreams that people remember do seem to concentrate on very terrible and disastrous events. Perhaps it is because the emotions felt with the pain are so much more intense that more people pick up on this energy over happier experiences.
This seems to be the case in the beginning for many people as they remember their dreams. But if you do the work that I’ve described so far in this book and continue to work on remembering your dreams, you’ll be much more open to remembering other prophetic dreams, including dreams of past lives with hints of how they will reappear again in this lifetime.
In future chapters, we’ll explore how you can change your thinking and your attitude about dreams and how you can empower yourself to believe in the power of your good dreams.