Russell Gruber is a professor of psychology at Eastern Illinois University. In an interview, he gave his answers to a few intriguing questions about the so-called prophetic dreams and nightmares.
So can our dreams predict our future and what do our nightmares hide?
We have evidence that dreams can predict future events
“The fact is that today we have more evidence that dreams can predict the future, but as scientists, we need experimental evidence.
I admit that we have some information and stories from people who have had such kind of experiences, but we should collect what we call “real scientific evidence”.
There are studies that have been performed in 70 dream workshops. The results showed that people have the ability to dream things that had not yet occurred.”
How to find out if your dreams are prophetic
“There is a method developed by J.W. Don many years ago and can be introduced by everyone. What he did was to keep two diaries: in one, he would write down the dreams he had had during a week just after awakening. In another one, he would keep daily notes about the events that had taken place in his life for that period.
Then he compared the two calendars and discovered that there were indeed things which came true the next few days after he had dreamed them. But he dreamed only about the events of the immediate future, i.e. something that would happen a few days later. Each of us could conduct this simple experiment.”
Our nightmares are our repressed fears
“I think very often we dream things that we fear. So most nightmares are just our hidden fears. This puzzles dream researchers very much, and their main query is why we frighten ourselves.
If we indeed create our dreams with our own brains, then together with the nightmares we load our minds with many scary thoughts during sleep and at that moment, we do not know if it is just our imagination or reality.
Thus, nightmares remain a mystery, but most dream researchers agree that in reality, nightmares are hidden fears about events and situations that would scare us and if we were awake. Let’s face them: most of what we dream will never happen in reality.”