I became fascinated by this subject because I have been dreaming about future events, large and small, before they happened since my early childhood in Australia. I have been keeping dream journals for more than three decades, and I have bookmarked many hundreds of precognitive dreams.
Here are a few examples:

Dream 1: I check into a hotel where they tell me the credit card I use to pay my bill will be my room key.
Follow-up: Three months later, I make last-minute arrangements to stay at a New York hotel. They explain they have a new system; the credit card I will use to pay my bill will be my room key.

Dream 2: 68 people have signed up for one of my workshops.
Follow-up: Thirteen months later, I arrive at a rural retreat to lead a workshop (not even conceived at the time of the dream) and find 68 people are signed up. The rest of my quite complex dream report gave me very helpful guidance in handling things over the weekend.

Dream 3: President Clinton is looking on avidly as a young woman performs oral sex on a man ­ under covers - in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Follow-up: Ten months later, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and eventually found its way to the U.S. Capitol, with the indictment hearings.

How common is the experience of dreaming the future? I think it goes on all the time. We see round the corner; we see events that may lie years or even decades in the future.

If you have ever had the sense of déjà vu, you are already deep inside this territory. That feeling of déjà vu ("already seen") generally comes when you enter a scene in waking life that you have already dreamed. You may have lost the dream, but you recognize a place or a person you encountered inside it.

In modern Western societies ­ unlike traditional dreaming cultures, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or ancient Celts ­ few of us are given much encouragement or coaching to grow the skills of dreaming true. Many of us are quite unaware that we dream the future (maybe all the time) until a specific dream jolts us awake.

The first time many of us notice that we dream the future is when we are shocked by a dream of death or disaster that subsequently takes place in physical reality. A young woman was horrified by a dream of slaughter in a school library a short time before the mass murders in a school library in Littleton, Colorado. An American radio show host told me he was terrified, as a teenager, by a dream in which he looked down on his mother, apparently dead inside a coffin. A week later, he saw the scene tragically enacted in waking life when the family was out tobogganing in the Rocky Mountains. His mother¹s sled shot off over a precipice and ­ when he got to the foot of the slope ­ the dreamer found himself looking down at her as she lay, with her back broken, inside the coffin-like box .

Dreams of this kind can seem like a curse, when we feel unable to do anything to change an unhappy outcome we have dreamed. But if we pay attention to our dreams, we'll soon notice that our dreams of the future don't only involve death and disaster. Our dream radar scans events large and small, happy and sad, that are coming into our field of experience.

Once we wake up to the fact that we dream the future (maybe all the time) we are ready to play a more creative game: the game of using dream insights into the possible future to change our lives for the better.

To do this, we need to start by catching our dreams, recording them in a dream journal as a daily practice, and learning some simple techniques to clarify our dream messages and take appropriate action to bring the insight and energy of dreams into waking life.

> Step One: Make a date with your dreams. Write down your intention to remember your dreams ­ or better still, to seek healing or guidance or simply have fun in your dreams, and remember. Put some juice into this. Follow the energy of your deepest desires. You can say: "I want to meet my dream lover" or "I want to go to Hawaii" or "I open myself to my creative source". Be sure you are ready to write something down when ever you wake up. If you don't have a dream, write down whatever thoughts and feelings are passing through you. When you do this, you say to the source of your dreams: "I¹m here. I¹m ready to receive."

> Step Two: Keep a dream journal. This is the most important book on dreams you will ever read (including my own books Conscious Dreaming and Dreaming True). Title and date your dreams, and write personal one-liners summarizing the dream content. Log correspondences with waking events that follow the dream. You¹ll find you are creating a marvelous navigational guide as well as a personal dictionary of symbols, while releasing your gift of story.

> Step Three: Run a reality check on your dreams. However bizarre (or humdrum) your dream may seem to be, ask yourself: Is it remotely possible this dream could be played out in waking life?

> Step Four: Go back inside your dreams to get more information. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream experience (as opposed to the often broken or garbled memory of the dream with which we wake up). By learning to re-enter our dreams, we can get the dream message clear and decide whether a dream needs to be taken literally or symbolically. In my workshops, we use monotonous shamanic drumming to accelerate and deepen the experience of traveling inside a dream, which frequently also provides the opportunity to communicate with spiritual guides or departed loved ones (who often introduce themselves through dreams) and to journey into deeper orders of reality.

> Step Five: Take action to honor your dreams ! Dreams require action ­ for example, to avoid an unhappy event, previewed in a dream, or to bring a pleasant scenario into manifestation. Sharing dreams on a regular basis with a trusted friend is a good beginning. Sharing dreams with family members, workmates and others is a wonderful way to deepen and heal relationships.

Copyright Robert Moss 2001

Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream explorer, a best-selling novelist and a former foreign correspondent and professor of ancient history. His many books include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates and Dreaming True: How to Dream Your Future and Change Your Life for the Better. He is also the author of the popular Sounds True audio series Dream Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming. Visit Robert's website, www.mossdreams.com