Our dream selves are forever traveling ahead of us, scouting the roads that lie before us. They can show us challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, of which our waking minds know little or nothing, if we are willing to listen to their travel reports.

My first question, when I wake from a night dream, is to ask of my dream self: where did you go?

I will then study all the details of a dream with an eye to the future. Has my dream self returned from his excursions with a glimpse of a possible future? Do I like it? If he has brought me a preview of a happy future event, then I’ll want to figure out what I need to so to make sure it is manifested. If he has returned with memories of an unpleasant and possible future, I will be mobilized to study what I need to do to avoid that unwanted scenario.

This is beyond important, though most Western approaches to dreams pay little or no attention to it.

It can save your life. To my certain knowledge, I have avoided death on the road in possible fatal car crashes at least three times, by clarifying my dream memories of what happened on one event track, and then taking appropriate evasive action to avoid living it out in my physical body.

Let’s be clear. Dreaming, we are time travelers. We soar beyond linear time. We scout the future, we enter past time and parallel time tracks. Our ability to visit the future  in dreaming is part of our survival kit. Most human societies, across most of our history on the planet, have valued dreams and dreamers for the gift of prescience.

Personally, I don’t want to see everything that lies ahead. That would be deadly dull. In any event, it isn’t possible. Any future we can foresee, in dreams or in other ways, is a possible future. The odds on its manifestation are constantly shifting. Simply to see a possible future is already to change it, to shift the odds towards manifestation (if we tell ourselves this is “meant to be”) or away from it (if we choose to take action that will place us, and perhaps others, on a different course).