Dreams

Most human societies have attached importance to dreams and looked for meanings in them. The explorations of Freud, Jung, and their disciples are modern instances of a very ancient activity. Psychologists, however, seldom pay much attention to one long-standing belief, that dreams can reveal the future. This has always been widespread but not in the sense that events are foreseen literally. Precognitive dreams, it is supposed, take symbolic forms and have to be interpreted.


Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar introduces a Roman instance. On March 15, 44 b.c., Caesar was about to leave for the Capitol to preside over a meeting of the Senate. His wife, Calpurnia, urged him to stay at home. She had dreamed about a statue of him with blood spurting from it. If this dream happened as described (there are different versions), it was certainly prophetic, since Brutus, Cassius, and confederates of theirs were waiting to assassinate Caesar by stabbing him with daggers. However, there had been leaks about the plot, and it was known to others besides the conspirators. The date was already rumored, the “Ides of March” (that is, March 15), and the soothsayer Spurinna had warned Caesar to beware.
One popular notion is that dreams may go by opposites. Rome supplies an instance of that belief also. The poet Lucan imagines Caesar’s rival Pompey dreaming about his own triumphal reception in the city after a victory some years earlier. Lucan offers more than one explanation but mentions the idea that dreams can be deceptive and “bode contraries”; this, in the present case, being the right answer, since Pompey’s army was about to be defeated by Caesar.
The Bible gives an older and more interesting story (Genesis, chapters 40 and 41). Joseph, a great-grandson of the patriarch Abraham, is a prisoner in Egypt. Pharaoh’s chief butler, the court official in charge of wine, is in the same prison, and so is the chief baker. The butler tells Joseph of a dream in which he saw a vine with three branches. Clusters of grapes grew on all three, and he squeezed the juice into a royal cup and handed it to Pharaoh. Joseph assures him that in three days, Pharaoh will restore him to his position at court, and he will again be handing his master the cup. The baker also reports a dream. He had three baskets on his head, one on top of another. The top one was full of bread and cakes; birds flew down and ate its contents. Joseph speaks again of three days but says Pharaoh will hang the baker, and birds will peck at his corpse. Both readings turn out to be correct. What is most significant in this tale is that Joseph does not pretend to have any technique. Interpretations “belong to God.” The author represents him as divinely inspired, for a purpose that emerges in the next chapter.
Pharaoh himself has two dreams. In the first, seven thin cows eat seven fat ones. In the second, seven meager ears of grain swallow up seven good ones. He summons his magicians and wise men, but they cannot make sense of the dreams. The butler remembers Joseph, and Pharaoh sends for him. Joseph again disclaims any expertise of his own: the message and the interpretation are from God. Seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine. Joseph advises Pharaoh to store up grain during the good years as a reserve to feed Egypt during the bad years. Pharaoh is so deeply impressed that he appoints Joseph himself to oversee the program.
The biblical author is showing the superiority of God-given insight over Gentile wisdom. Aside from that consideration, his point about the magicians’ failure is an important one. Dream symbolism may convey information about the future, but there is no unambiguous technique for deciphering it. Shakespeare brings this out in Julius Caesar, where Calpurnia’s dream is given a more cheerful meaning by one of the conspirators, so that Caesar will not be dissuaded from going to the Capitol.
Napoleon, in one of his few recorded dreams, was devoured by a bear. He often speculated about this without reaching a conclusion. The animal image was well established and surely clear in its implication. Four years later, his disastrous campaign in Russia was the beginning of his downfall: the bear did devour him. In retrospect, the dream’s essential meaning seems obvious, whether as an actual foreshadowing or as a subconscious warning. Yet in advance, apparently, it was not.
J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, developed another view, not opposed but complementary. He claimed that if dreams are written down promptly on waking, the record may show after an interval—perhaps quite a short interval—that some feature of a real-life experience was anticipated by a dream image, more or less literally. He said that such precognitive images do not foreshadow a complete scene or event, but the image and the waking “fulfillment,” however modified this may be and however different in context, are alike enough for the correspondence to be plain. With a few individuals, Dunne-type phenomena may occur fairly often. Chris Robinson, whose case was publicized on British television in 1994, had dreams that were fulfilled in a manner that enabled him to recognize precognitive ones when they happened, or at least, to recognize that they could be. He gave warnings of danger that were respected by the police and other authorities.