When Dreams Speak: Looking Back at the Signs We Missed”

 

Retrospective: “When Night Tells a Story — My Strange Respect for Dreams”

When I was a child I treated dreams like postcards from a future I hadn’t yet visited. Some arrived stamped with the neat handwriting of clarity: a scene I’d later recognize exactly. Others were written in riddles — a stranger who felt like someone I’d meet later, a house I didn’t own, or a road that split into impossible directions. Over time I learned to live in the middle ground between two stubborn truths: dreams are intensely personal, and they are not always literal.

Looking back, I see three things happening at once.

First, there’s the everyday engine of the brain — memory fragments, fears, hopes, people I’ve seen that day or years ago — stitching themselves into a little nightly movie. These fragments like to rearrange themselves into stories. Second, there’s the emotional filter: small things that worried me in the day balloon into dramatic set pieces at night. A missed message becomes a betrayal; a minor embarrassment turns into a farce in front of an audience. Third, there’s my own active sense-making: I wake up and fill in the gaps. My mind prefers meaning over randomness, so it connects the dream to something I care about — a possibility that feels like a future.

Do dreams “predict” the future? Sometimes our brains are incredibly good at spotting patterns and risks that we’re not aware of consciously; when we act on those hunches, the dream looks prophetic. Most scientists say dreams aren’t supernatural telegrams from tomorrow. Still, they do feel prophetic precisely because they package unnoticed feelings, knowledge, and predictions into vivid scenes that we remember. Whether a dream “comes true” is often as much about perception, memory, and the choices we make afterward as it is about anything happening while we slept.

What keeps me respectful of dreams — despite the skepticism — is their power: they map an interior weather system I don’t always notice while awake. They can nudge me toward deeper questions: Who am I afraid of becoming? What do I secretly want? What might I prepare for? Even when they are symbolic or absurd, they are honest in ways waking thought often refuses to be.

So I keep a small ritual: a notebook by the bed, three scribbled lines upon waking, and one slow question: “What part of my life is this dream trying to speak for?” Sometimes the answer is practical (prepare for a job change), sometimes it’s soulful (pay more attention to a relationship), and sometimes it’s simply a reminder that my mind is still working on me when I’m not watching.