Brain Food #867: What we discover in dreams

A few days before his assassination on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had an uncannily prophetic dream, which he recounted to his friend Ward Hill Lamon. The dream was of his own death. He found himself inside the White House, in a ‘death-like stillness,’ and as he moved from room to room, he came across a funeral scene:

“Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Although the accuracy of this account has been questioned, which is often the case when there are only two witnesses and both have long been deceased, this is not the only example in history that illustrates the precognitive nature of dreams.

One of The Beatles’ most popular songs, Yesterday, came to Paul McCartney in a dream. As soon as he woke up, he turned to his piano and worked out the rest, though he was convinced the song already existed: “It’s gotta be something. And I couldn’t have written it ‘cause I just dreamed it.”

Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had been trying, like many before him, to find a way to classify the chemical elements, until the final arrangement came to him in a dream, in the form of the periodic table:

“I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.”

These are not necessarily supernatural occurrences. There are signs that we absorb in our waking lives that continue to be interpreted in a dream state. Researchers suggest that dreams manifest not only to help us process what happens during our days, but also to help us prepare our future responses to what we are dreaming about, a form of catharsis that ancient Greek tragedy first introduced. This doesn’t only happen with humans, but with other animals, too, like dogs, who scientists suspect dream of their owners, interactions with other dogs, and their daily experiences.

There are cases where the line between dreams and reality begins to blur. Frida Kahlo said, ...