However, from a certain perspective, dreams are a way of thinking that people use primitive cognition, but they use visual thinking to understand the world. Just as we use logical thinking and make many predictions about the future, the visual thinking of primitive cognition is t

Next, we will discuss a topic that many people are interested in, namely dreams and prophecies, or prophetic dreams.





Ancient people believed that dreams were prophetic. Some people have such doubts. How can dreams know what will happen in the future? However, from a certain perspective, dreams are a way of thinking that people use primitive cognition, but they use visual thinking to understand the world. Just as we use logical thinking and make many predictions about the future, the visual thinking of primitive cognition is the same. Sometimes we should also think and predict the future.

In real life, many people can use logical thinking to predict the future. For example, many economists have made predictions about the future world economic pattern.

There are also some people who specialize in the future, called futurists. They will predict the impact of some new scientific discoveries on society based on various economic principles and sociological principles, and tell us what the world may look like in decades.

Among these predictions, some are positive, such as predicting that artificial intelligence will become more and more advanced, and there will be accurate machine translation, etc.; some are negative, such as the greenhouse effect may become more and more serious, the ice in the Antarctic and Arctic will melt very violently, the penguins will become fewer and more or even extinct, polar bear may disappear, etc.

These are things that did not happen at the moment of prediction, and are predictions made by these futurists through logical thinking reasoning.


Similarly, at the original cognitive level, there are also the same thinking and speculation about the future, and some conclusions can be drawn. However, in the original cognition, we use figurative thinking, and the final conclusions we draw will be expressed in a visual way. There are many ways to visualize

, some of which are more professional, such as writing science fiction novels and making science fiction movies. The method I use is called image dialogue. Through this psychological method, we can help us think in image and draw some imagination about the future.





Zhu Jianjun new work "Become your own dream interpreter - 30 lectures on Zhu Jianjun's dream interpretation"

Among all the visual way of thinking, the most natural one is dream. We can also say this: many people are also working when dreaming, because when they imagine what the future may be, they are likely to make a lot of imagination and speculation in a visual way, and the inferred results will be presented in the form of a dream, that is, dreaming of a future thing. If the speculation is accurate, for example, if he really sees this happening one day in the future, he will think that dreams can predict the future.

For example, someone said that he dreamed of a woman and clearly saw the woman's appearance in the dream. A few years later, he met a woman, fell in love with her and got married, and both of them felt in love. At this moment, he suddenly remembered that his wife looked exactly the same as the woman he saw in his dream a few years ago. He may find it wonderful and tell others that he had seen his wife in a dream many years ago.




actually, from another perspective, this situation is not surprising at all. It is not necessarily that his Mengzhen foresaw his future wife, but that Meng told him his standards for choosing a spouse in advance. When he meets someone who looks very similar to the woman in his dream in reality, he will be more likely to have feelings for her, become a partner with her, and will be more likely to think that this is a prophetic dream.

In addition, it is what Freud said, "We sometimes have a sense of déjà vu, which is actually an illusion." We may find that one day we have seen someone, a scene, or a certain thing we have seen in dreams before. Freud's explanation is that we may not have seen this phenomenon in dreams, but when we encounter this thing or this person, we may have a feeling that it seems familiar, but remember it as if we dreamed in the past.





Does Freud make sense? Actually there is.Because although something has not happened before, we may have had the emotional experience it brings before, and in this case it is prone to illusions.

For example, when we were young, we went to a place and felt that this place was too beautiful and gave us a stunning feeling. When we grew up, we went to another place one day, and it was also very beautiful, and we would have a stunning feeling that was very similar to when we were young. Although the places are different, the stunning feeling is the same, so you may have the illusion that you have dreamed of this place before. This explanation has been verified in real life.




There is another wonderful situation, that is, sometimes we really dream of people or things we meet later. For example, every September, many college students will come to a place they have never been to to go to school. Some of them will suddenly think of certain scenes on campus, "Oh! I have dreamed of this place before, and the place in my dream is exactly the same as here." Some students even dream about what a new classmate wants to say, but they have never seen it before. If this is the case, we cannot use the above reasons to explain it, and the current scientific level cannot explain it.

When I first studied dreams, I doubted this phenomenon and thought it was a misunderstanding for everyone to remember? So I put in a little hard work to write down everything I dreamed of, although I didn't remember it in detail. As a result, after a year or more, I found that some dreams really appeared in reality. Whenever I encounter this situation, I will look out my past notebook to see if I have remembered this dream before, but I found that some things can really match them, and they are the same as my records.

When I encounter a realistic scene and feel like I have seen it in a dream, I will let myself stop in reality, recall what I will see next in that dream, and then compare it with reality. For example, when I walked into a yard, I felt like I had dreamed of it before. I would think about the scenery there when I left the yard and walked elsewhere in my dream.

I first remembered it, then really walked over to compare it, and checked whether it was consistent with what I saw in my dreams, and most of the time it was consistent.

Although we cannot explain the above situation clearly at the moment, it is not without solutions, it is just more complicated. If we were sitting on a boat and downstream, there was a building called Huanghe Tower downstream of the river. When we boarded this boat, although we hadn't seen the Yellow Crane Tower yet, we would see it after a certain period of time.

So, people who go downstream can describe it as follows: "The Yellow Crane Tower is a building that I will see in a certain time in the future when I look out through the window on this boat." In other words, the Yellow Crane Tower actually exists downstream, but our ship has not arrived yet.





We can understand this way: many events have existed in the next time period, and people live in time, just like people on this boat. So for us, what will happen in the future already exists in the future. If we have a telescope, we can see it in advance, and dreams may be such a telescope.

of course, if you can't understand this passage for the time being, it doesn't matter. There is no need to go into it in depth. As long as you know that this phenomenon does exist. There is a difference between prophetic dreams like



. People who often pay attention to their own dreams will find the difference. Some unrealistic things will appear in non-prophetic dreams, such as dreaming that you fly to the sky without any equipment; dreaming that you jump from a very high building and will not fall to death at all; etc. The prophetic dream has no exaggerated plot, it is very plain, like a clip that happens in real life. Shenzhen psychological counselor





For prophetic dreams, I found an interesting rule, that is, this kind of dream is often related to some important things in my life, but I usually don’t dream directly of this important thing, but I only dream of a small detail related to this matter.

Professor Zhu Jianjun's introduction

For example, for many people, going to college is a very important thing and a major change in life. Most people will be in their hometown when they are in middle school, but they will leave their homes far away when they are in college. This is a very big change and important thing for young people. Prophetic dreams are very likely to occur at this stage.

These students may not dream of going into the university and seeing exciting scenes like "×× University" written on the school gate, but will dream of a detail that seems less important, like being with a new classmate, eating together or something.

Also, marriage is very important. People who are about to enter the marriage may not dream of the exciting scene of the wedding, but will dream of some small details before or after the wedding, similar to buying things with their lover, making breakfast together, etc. Why is this happening to



? I guess that those exciting things will cause too strong emotions and are not suitable for presenting them in dreams. The emotions in dreams are amplified compared to the emotions in reality. For example, if we dream of killing a person in our dream, we may just slap a mosquito to death in reality.

Similarly, if you dream of a terrible vampire coming to suck blood, maybe when we open our eyes, we will find a mosquito biting ourselves. Therefore, most of the things that are extremely excited in reality cannot be expressed in dreams. On the contrary, some small things that are not that big but related to big things are easier to dream of.




In short, there are still many phenomena that cannot be explained clearly about dreams, but we cannot deny their existence and believe that we will find a good explanation in the future.

This article is excerpted from Professor Zhu Jianjun's book "Becoming Your My Dream Interpreter: 30 Lectures on Zhu Jianjun's Dream Interpretation"