If you are someone who regularly remembers your dreams, then there is a good chance you have had the eye-opening experience of precognitive dreaming.
My own fascination with dreaming began when I was a teenager. I was an avid dreamer and relished the process of waking up each day and ruminating over the rich landscapes I had visited during my sleep. When I was seventeen, I had a dream that was innocuous enough. I was at my high school, not in a way that was readily recognizable, but in a dream-like sense. In the dream, I was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, in a circle with others who were sitting in the same way. That was it.
About a week later, I walked into my dance rehearsal at school. We had a very comprehensive program for dance led by a gym teacher who had been a dancer in her younger years. This dance company was one of the many creative endeavors that carried me through a difficult adolescence. There had been some recent drama in our ranks, so Miss Hicks wanted us to sit down for a group discussion. She invited us to sit on the floor, and we did so, spreading out into a large circle of students sitting cross legged. Just like in my dream. As I sensed a powerful intuitive connection being established, I realized I was living the very dream I had had a week ago. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but now I understand that I was having my first precognitive, intuitive dream. A career as a psychologist and an expertise in dreams and dream interpretation would follow.
Everyone is intuitive. This begs the question, what is intuition? Webster’s defines intuition as “the power or faculty of attuning to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” In other words, intuition is an inner knowing that something is true or so because we can sense it, rather than having confirmed it from outside evidence. Intuition is a form of perception, but one that sits apart from the rational, thinking mind that governs how we perceive the world around us. That thinking mind is the voice that you identify as your Self, the part of you that knows who you are, where you are, and when you are. But what about other forms of perception?
We often think of our intuition as being a still, small voice inside of us. That still, small voice is difficult to hear and even more challenging to respond to and honor when it whispers bits of intuitive guidance in your ear, because the voice that is our narrator is almost impossible to turn off or dial down enough to let it be heard. While everyone has a different inner monologue, it is safe to assume that we all relate to ourselves in the same rational, and perhaps even literal way. We talk to ourselves in our mind, and that inner conversation generally eclipses all other forms of perception.
Something different occurs, however, when we go to sleep. Our rational perception goes to sleep with our conscious awareness. For somewhere between six and nine hours a night on average, we drift into another realm entirely, where sleep is like a little visit to death. We are reborn each morning as our brain wires back up and our thinking mind turns on. Almost instantaneously, we are back to the orientation we are familiar with: I think, therefore I am. Not so during sleep. As we move through the various stages of sleep, we drop lower and lower into a place deep inside our psyche where we are deeply connected to existence itself. Reality falls away, and we enter the realm of dreams, where anything can happen and probably will. The rational mind is sleeping, so that still small voice opens up and sings loudly in the form of dreams, exponentially increasing our ability to connect to intuition. Many people report dreaming of things that will occur in the future but have not yet happened, or precognitive dreams.
When I asked people who follow me for examples of precognitive dreaming for my upcoming book, the response was almost overwhelming. Clearly, intuitive perception while dreaming is a universal experience, though not so much in waking life. The mind perceives most everything in our waking life, but the mind cannot always be trusted. Most people either ignore their intuition or get so confused by all of the sensations in their mind and the body, they often don’t know how to trust what their intuition is telling them. You’ve heard this before and have probably said it: “I had the instinct, but ignored it.” Instincts are our intuition in action, coming from the part of us that is fourth-dimensional where time is irrelevant. In waking life, most people are shut off from the ability to perceive such a subtle energetic piece of information, partly because the rational mind rejects it. When we are asleep and dreaming, the rational mind is also asleep, and we are much freer to have experiences out of time, which include the intuitive phenomenon we call precognitive dreams.
But how do we develop our intuition during our waking life? Sleeping and dreaming provide the best blueprint. The rational mind is literally asleep, so our perceptions can expand into other energetic dimensions. We can do this while we are awake, but clearing out the detritus in order to hear the still, small voice beneath the clamor will require some effort. Most forms of meditation are designed to quiet the mind, and this waking life discipline is very similar to what happens when we sleep. The best way to develop your ability to tap into your still, small voice is through meditation. Any waking life discipline that can quiet the chatter in your head can help you distill your listening to hear your intuition in its still small voice.
From Psychic Dreamer: Exploring the Connection between Dreams and Intuition © 2024 by Dr. Michael Lennox. Used by permission from Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., www.Llewellyn.com.
Dr. Michael Lennox is a psychologist, astrologer, and expert in dreams and dream interpretation. He teaches classes in self-investigation to a worldwide audience and is the host of the weekly podcast, Conscious Embodiment: Astrology and Dreams. He is also the author of Psychic Dreamer, Llewellyn’s Complete Dictionary of Dreams, Llewellyn’s Little Book of Dreams, and Dream Sight. Visit him online at www.michaellennox.com.
