Yes, We Time Travel in Our Dreams

But Can We Change or Fix the Future?

I have been an active dreamer all my life, with vivid dreams transporting me to other realities since I was a little girl.

As much as we remember our former selves, we also forget; and as such, I forgot that I was a student of dreams even as a teenager. Only while thumbing through my old Psychology notebook from high school in recent years did I remember that I recorded dreams back then, every now and again. (It was sweet and bizarre reading a dream of mine from age 17.)

Before discovering the entry in the notebook I might have told someone I only started recording dreams in 2012 or so, but in the years since I unearthed that old high school notebook, I’ve found other dream journalings in scattered places: old diaries, letters to friends never sent, backed up computer files from the 2000s.

There have been a handful of times I’ve even found dreams from long ago that may have predicted the life I am living now, which even for a precognitive dreamer is a unique delight.

I’ve tracked dreams long enough now to know that we do sometimes dream the future, but in my tracking I have found that it’s most common, at least for me, that I dream futures close to the time I am currently living: a week away, maybe a year, maximum three years. The idea that I may have dreamt of a life at age 17 I wouldn’t live out for another 30 years is pretty astonishing, especially considering the multitude of choices I’ve made along the way.

Contrary to what the headline may imply, I don’t have a definitive theory for time travel in dreams. Nor do I have a strong opinion or advice for what we are meant to do once we know we time travel in our dreams. For now, I have well-informed speculations that excite me. Mainly, those speculations come from direct experience with dreams and visions, as well as from spiritual teachings; mainly in Kabbalah, though also some from Bon Buddhism.

Lately, however, I’ve turned my attention away, in part, from tracking my dreams for the sole purpose of proving or understanding time travel, and instead, I have been more intentional about the feeling experience inside my dreams. (Side note: Certain Kabbalistic teachings say that the feeling experience is actually the whole point of and way to engage with prophetic dreams.)

This change is directly a result of being a student of Natural Dreamwork, an empirical approach to dreams that (among other things) aims to foster healing through differentiating feeling and reactivity in dream content. I can’t say enough about how rich in depth this work is and how much it’s transformed my waking life experience since I’ve been working my dreams this way.

These days, I am still interested in, but less concerned with what to do as a result of a potential precognitive dream, and more interested in how the dream makes me feel when I wake up. Further, when I have an unsettling dream (sometimes referred to as “nightmares”) that I worry may be precognitive, I’ve found that I am less reactive, less tasked with the self-imposed responsibility to change or fix any potential future.

This has been such a welcome relief.

My whole life I’ve tried to drive, control, change, avoid, fix, or guarantee a certain future. In psychology, this would be diagnosed as “generalized anxiety” or “hyper-vigilance.” As such, figuring out I could sometimes dream the future became the proverbial “blessing and curse.”

Figuring out I sometimes dream the future, but didn’t have all the necessary details or context to know what to do only served to make me more anxious. However, working with the spontaneous images and encounters in my dream using Natural Dreamwork has helped me feel more comfortable with not knowing what will be in the future and allowed me to encounter what arises, and feel that feeling, whether it’s a pleasurable or painful feeling.

One time, I had a dream in which my boyfriend was accusing me of a certain type of behavior. Or at least that’s what I believed happened in the dream when I woke up. I could hear my teacher’s voice requesting more details: “What did the dream boyfriend actually say?” he might have asked.

In the dream, my boyfriend said: “I wish you would …” do something this way or that way. The meaning I made of that encounter was that he wasn’t happy or satisfied with what I was doing or who I was.

When I woke up from the dream, I was unsettled, worried we would have an interaction like this in the future, in waking life. I made all sorts of assumptions about what my boyfriend was feeling about me, but not expressing out loud. I also started obsessing over what to do about this still-imagined feeling my boyfriend had about me — or at least what I assumed he was feeling about me as a result of this dream.

A few hours like this passed and then I caught myself; realized what I was doing. Stopped. Made a conscious decision to not obsesses over the dream anymore, not worry whether or not it was predictive. I dropped it, basically. I moved on. I let it go.

Less than a week later, my boyfriend and I were hanging out casually, having a pretty deep and intimate conversation that I felt grateful for even while it was happening. Midway through the conversation, his tone and languaging started to feel familiar. I perked up. Soon after came the words he spoke to me in the dream earlier in the week. The very same words.

I laughed quietly. I didn’t want to interrupt him, as what he was saying was vulnerable and intimate. I waited for him to finish, and then I said, “I’m smiling because I had a dream of you saying this very thing. But in the dream, we hadn’t yet had the whole conversation we just had. I only witnessed a snippet of it. This snippet.”

“Without the context,” I shared with him. “I was mad at you.”

We both laughed then. It was a profound revelation. In dreams, as in waking life, we sometimes make meaning of an interaction or an event before we have any context, or without the full picture, or in the absence of background details. In this case, a few sentences on their own sounded to me like an “accusation,” whereas in the context of the larger conversation we had in real life, the words were beautiful, validating, and loving.

Amazing, don’t you think?

In an audio chat I recorded on my Patreon on this topic, I compared the experience to opening up a novel you’ve never read to page 142. Can you imagine? Opening up a novel you’ve never read to page 142, trying to ascertain the details of the scene, the nature of the characters, and then trying to follow along with their dialogue or interaction without context? We could try, and maybe succeed on some level, using only the cues and behaviors of the scene we landed upon. But we most likely would end up missing so very much of the full story.

It’s here that I return to the question in the subheading of this article: If we time travel in our dreams, can we or should we change the future?

I don’t know if we can. And I’m even less sure we should try.

In fact, I think what I am learning lately is that the more important question is “Do we really even know enough what is going on at any given time to responsibly change, alter, or fix anything?” Also, “why do we think we are the responsible party for this?”

How many of us are asking those questions?

There are the kinds of people in the world who act impulsively and there are the kinds of people in the world who take too long to act. Most of us fit into one of these extremes, I think. Act too soon. Don’t act fast enough. It’s our conditioning. We learned to be this way, along the way, as a result of personality, parenting, family dynamics, schooling, informal education, social interactions, rejection, acceptance, etc.

However, maybe as a result of learning this pattern of reactivity about ourselves, those of us who care about personal growth may try to course correct along the way. So if I am someone who historically has acted impulsively (I am), I might try to act with greater care, to even out my natural tendency to speak up or act too soon. I might try to insert more pauses, as uncomfortable as that might feel in the beginning.

I know people who may be too slow to speak or act, and end up regretting much of their interactions, as a result, wishing they had done or said something when they didn’t. These people may course correct by saying “Yes” more quickly and more often, even if they’re not certain. Or, by voicing their opinions when previously they would remain silent.

All of us, before trying to predict and change the future we may become privy to in our dreams, would do better to consider how well we handle what already is in our waking lives: how good are we at navigating complexities, or treating others with respect and kindness? How successful are we at making healthy decisions for ourselves and our families when given the opportunity? If we can’t answer in the affirmative for how we behave in waking lives, what makes us think we are capable of positively shifting any future outcome we have dreamt?

This may seem a little like a trick. Like I lured you in to reading promising an answer to a question you’ve asked yourself about time travel or dreams. It’s not a trick. It’s simply a conversation I’ve had with myself over the last few years as I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that time travel is possible, and it happens inside dreams.

So what if it is?

As with any advancement in technology or awareness, what follows is the harder question: what do we do with this power now that we have it?

It’s our responsibility, I believe, to pause before we use any newly developed power, skill, or technology; to check in; and to align our hearts with our heads. If we can change or alter the future, the first step may be to pause.