Since the beginning of time, the mysterious nature of

dreaming has led people to believe that dreams were

messages from the other world. Dreams have been regarded

as prophetic communications which, when properly decoded,

would enable us to foretell the future. There is, however,

absolutely no scientific evidence for this theory. It is

certainly true that individuals who are concerned about a

traumatic event, such as the threat of the loss of a loved

one who is sick, will dream about that loved one more

than would otherwise be the case. If the dreamer then calls

and finds that the loved one has died, it is understandable

for him or her to assume that the dream was a premonition

of that death. But this is a mistake. It is simply a(n)

correspondence between a situation about

which one has intense concern and the occurrence of the

event that one fears.

To prove the existence of premonitory dreams, scientific

evidence must be obtained. We would need to do studies

in which individuals are sampled in terms of their dream

life and judges are asked to make correspondences between

these dream events and events that occurred in real life. A

problem that arises here is that individuals who believe in

premonitory dreams may give one or two striking examples

of ¡®hits,¡¯ but they never tell you how many of their

premonitory dreams ¡®missed.¡¯ To do a scientific study of

dream prophecy, we would need to establish some base of

how commonly correspondences occur between

dream and waking reality. Until we have that evidence,

it is better to believe that the assumption is false.