A friend dreamed that I had a very special television set delivered to her house. It was stylish and had many features she had never seen before. When she inspected the set more closely, she was astonished to find that it could be adjusted to play scenes from the future. The buttons on the monitor gave her the option of choosing how far into the future she wanted to look – a week, a year, five years, or more. The channel selections weren’t the regular ones. She could select the Family Channel, or the Money Channel, or the Love Channel. She could choose to look beyond her personal and family situation, at the future state of the country or the world. Earth Changes and Mass Disasters were options; so were Wall Street and Future Presidents of the United States.

She realized, inside her dream, that she had been given the power to see into the future, near or far. She could stay on her personal channels, or look at future events affecting the lives of all.

She was excited, and scared by the immensity of the gift. Now fully lucid, inside her dream, she sat in her favorite easy chair with the monitor in her hand. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the options buttons and the blank plasma screen. She tried to will herself to experiment with the set. Maybe she could just see what would happen next weekend, whether her cousin’s baby shower would come off and if so whether everyone would stay sober.

Nope. She couldn’t bring herself to look even at that. Faced with the possibility of visiting any or all of the future channels, she froze. The future, on any channel, might contain things she would rather not know about. Her screen stayed blank.

I often think about this reported dream when people discuss precognition, especially in dreams. I thin it’s like this. every night, it is highly likely that we all see elements of the future in our dreams. I am convinced that part of the survival function of dreaming is to prepare us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. I am also well aware, having journaled my own dreams for many decades and having collected thousands of dream reports from others, that the dream self seems to travel ahead of the waking self, scouting the ways.

Our ability to receive dream information about the future of course depends on whether or not we remember and record dreams, and on whether we are willing to allow those channels to play. Consciously or unconsciously, we make decisions not to see or remember things we would rather not think about. I do this myself. I have made a conscious decision not to spend too much time on the future channels that show terrible things happening that I can’t do anything about. Some of the gifted psychic dreamers I know, out of altruism or out of the unwillingness to screen content, pick up much more in the way of awful events than I do.

Once we wake up to the fact that we can dream future events, maybe all the time, we’ll want to think about using that inner monitor to do some channel selection. And we’ll come to a more important awakening. Any future we can see is a possible (or probable) future. the odds on its manifestation may be high, but it is still not inevitable. The fact that we have seen a possible future event may give us a chance of changing that event for the better – provided we clarify the information and take appropriate action.