We dream the future, maybe all the time.  I think it’s like this. Every night the dream self goes scouting ahead of the regular self, checking what lies ahead on the roads of life.  Our dreams can be read as trail markers or road signs, advising us how to handle future travel conditions, and when to make a detour.

Here’s how we can work with dreams of the future to make better choices:

First off, we watch to catch as much dream material as we can, record it, and scan all of it for possible information about the future. Future messages may be literal or symbolic. They may be for us or for others, even for the world. So ask yourself, of any dream: is it remotely possible that some part of this could play out in the future, literally or symbolically?

We need to learn to recognize that while some of our future dreams are precognitive, showing us events that will happen, many offer glimpses of a possible future – sometime scary, sometimes wonderful. We can learn to use information from early warning (or early opportunity) dreams to change the future for the better. I think it’s like this: if you don’t know where you are going, you are likely to end up where you are headed!

Say you dream of a plane crash, or a car accident. You want to try to stick your head back inside the dream and see whether the dream feels more literal or symbolic – is the airplane dream about “flying too high” or “being on another plane” or does it feel like you are on a literal aircraft? If the dream feels literal, you want to look for time markers. See if you can figure out when this might be happening. Get more information. In this way, you may be able to escape an unwanted future event, or help others avoid an unhappy future.

Dreaming the future is also about claiming a brighter and better future that is sometimes revealed in dreams. My book The Three “Only” Things contains a beautiful story from a schoolteacher named Marybeth, who dreamed of  “Mr. Right”. She saw him in a doorway. In the dream, her heart was opened, and a beam of loving energy streamed from her to the heart of her dream guy. She painted that scene to hold its energy in her life, and imagined herself hauling herself along that cord to her dream lover, For fourteen months, she checked the energy of guys she met against what she had felt in the dream, and rejected all of them because they fell short – until she met the man she was sure was the one in the dream. They are now very happily married. This is a lovely example of how we can follow the energy of a dream of the possible future all the way to happy manifestation.