By James Zheng

I never firmly believed in a future-seer theory. I had an ambivalent view on prophetic dreams, dreams that hint at events to happen in the future. The positive effect of such dreams could enable us to be prepared for the upcoming events, but it instigates a dreadfully scary question about the theory of destiny–Is your destiny already decided? Fate never sounded like a thing to me. Therefore, I had no imagination of how it would be like to accurately predict a future event. The existence of such magic could only immensely terrify me.   

Some confuse prophetic dreams with Déjà vu, which is a term for the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before; it is also scientifically explained as a phenomenon of memory delusion. And according to my experience of prophetic dreaming, it is a different feeling. When a specific conversation, place, and any other presence appears before me, the sense would come to me that such an image has already emerged in my past dreams, so I would possess an instant realization, “This happened in my dreams in the exact same way.” Then the scene of that dream would come to my mind again. As I have gone through this countless times, now I can remember several examples.

Once I dreamed about being in Disneyland located in Japan. That was the time before summer as I was a junior in high school. The dream felt so real since I could hear and see everything clearly. So when I woke up, I basically just thought to myself, “There is no possibility that this could happen during summer, cuz I am going to be busy with college stuff and independent pre-AP classes.” But who would know that after four months my younger cousin came to my city and spent his summertime with me, and my father suddenly suggested I should take him to Japan. As I rejected the suggestion, my cousin seemed really unhappy… and more ridiculously, my father told me it was actually a promise he made to his brother one time when he was inebriated on a feast. Okay, so, we went to Tokyo to visit some tourist attractions;  Disneyland was one of them. And the primary thing is that I had already completely forgotten about that dream until the moment I walked into Disneyland. 

My second prophetic dream is even more whimsical. When I was back in the U.S. again, I dreamed about talking to a guy in our school and he made a joke about a video game I liked. But the thing is that I hardly ever play a game with him. And again, who would know that after three months we bought the game and played together. 

“Risk of Rain, more like Risk of Pain~~”

“Could be true.”

After 10 seconds, “Wait… no… this is not possible.” As I muted my mic and started growling. 

So, I was absolutely terrified. All of the cases my dreams predicted so far were merely trivial, but what if I had some “realistic” nightmare that plausibly predicted a happening? And there are no omens to warn me until it truly happens to make me aware of it?

There could be a thousand explanations given, yet none of them match with my experience. And our almighty guide “science” couldn’t even do anything about it. This prophetic dream is quite astonishing, huh? Remember that human beings used to pursue this ability. People used to study the stars and make assumptions about their future based on the movement of star clusters. Now I have this genuinely unstable power, and maybe someday I should learn how to control it–if possible….

My father shares his opinions that youngbloods like me all should have similar experiences. But I feel the concept that I call “prophetic dream” might just be an outcome of mind overload. After all, who knows exactly how it functions? If you have some ideas to share pertaining to the topic or something more intriguing about this, I would be glad to read your comments.

Dreamer Editor: Doreen Yuan