Prophetic Dreaming

Recently, I have been reading many books concerning dreams, dreaming, the levels of consciousness, and sleeping. These stem from Buddhist, Hindu and Western sources, and are not solely observing the topic from a single viewpoint. Naturally, I have been contemplating dreams and dreaming from my own perspective, in addition to reading the findings of other people.

Many of my dreams do not contain other characters that are representative of myself, as is supposedly the origin of many of the participants within our dreams. The people in my dreams may represent somebody else, but it is generally people that I know or someone symbolizing these friends and family members from within my life, rather than representations of differing aspects of my own being.

I tend to dream lots of dreams that relate to events in my day ahead, or concerning connections I have, or will have in the day ahead, with people that I know. For example, if I know two people with the same surname and dream of one of them, it may be the other one that is being portrayed within the dream. Or perhaps I will dream of somebody I know who shares a character trait, profession, of lifestyle aspect with another friend; in which case, I may dream of somebody else but also be able to tell whom the dream truly represents.

Until recently, I assumed that on my spiritual level, I could travel to the past or future in my sleep, take mental pictures, and then show these to myself in the form of a dream. This explained the “how” of prophecy to me, when I questioned how such could actually occur. I have read a selection of books and contemplated the matter further, and I have now come up with a new idea as to how prophetic dreaming might happen. I have yet to investigate my theory in full, but I am convinced that I now understand how prophetic dreams come about.

A Buddha – as in a totally enlightened being, rather than just THE Buddha – can see the totality of karmic workings in all beings. He does not only see some of his own karmic workings, but all aspects of the karma of everyone. Obviously, we – as in the rest of us – cannot see even our own karmic workings completely, even if we can see sometimes spot glimpses of our karmic workings or deduce a few aspects of karma.