To Sleep, Perchance to Dream THE FUTURE

I have had incredibly vivid dreams for my entire life. When I was a kid, my family used to talk about our dreams over breakfast and we had to stop doing it because mine were so long and detailed that everyone got bored and I was late getting ready. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s entirely possible that this was more of a “I, a self centered nine year old, hold court every morning over cereal and tell my family about my nightly adventures in Imagination Land even though they clearly give not one fuck” rather than actually talking about dreams over breakfast as a group. I distinctly remembering my sister saying “When is this going to be done? It’s BORING”, but it wasn’t! To me.

I’ve had a lot of dreams that involve me breathing underwater, which sounds awesome until you realize that it looks less like this:

Silly little underwater friends!

And more like this:

Yes, a very boring pool

Usually I’m swimming someplace pretty barren like a huge version the gross pool above, but there is some kind of terrifying orca or hell seal that is going to kill me/my dream soulmate/a little orange puppy named Macaroni. I even recounted that dream about Macaroni for a creative writing assignment in fifth grade, that doesn’t count as cheating, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about falling, but I dream about swimming all the time. Dream interpreters, do your thang.

I also used to dream about flying sometimes as a kid, but I sure as shit wasn’t soaring above the clouds effortlessly. No magic carpet involved either. I just started running until I ran into the air like it was a staircase, and I totally thought I was a special little snowflake because my subconscious recognized that it would be actual physical work for a human to fly, just like it is for birds, or Pegasus.

Nope, that shit doesn’t fly here 
(oops, forgot to warn you about my love of puns!)

As it turns out, that is actually not what makes me a special snowflake. That particular distinction stems from the fact that I have had at least TWO prophetic dreams. Maybe I should have caps locked AT LEAST, because I remember having a few days where something happened and I was like “hey, that’s crazy, I dreamed that last night” not to mention countless instances of déjà vu. I’m sticking with only those that can be corroborated by witnesses, meaning I bored someone to tears in the morning with my detailed account of the night before, and then later that EXACT THING HAPPENED and I was like “holy shit, I’m so glad I told you that, aren’t you glad you sat through it so you could bear witness to my PSYCHIC POWERS?!”

It’s like when I know what’s going to happen at the end of a movie that I’ve never seen, and I face a dire struggle. The angel on my shoulder is like “Don’t be a dick and ruin the ending for them!” and the devil on the other side is like “You have to tell them, otherwise they’ll never believe in your impressive powers of observation when it comes to foreshadowing! They’ll think you’re just saying that you guessed that plot twist in the first twenty minutes! Don’t you want to prove that you were right all along?” I try really hard to just settle for the satisfaction that I know I knew...really hard. But I’m not great at settling, so you probably don’t want to watch movies with me.

Have you seen the twins episode of Law and Order SVU?

Totally called it.

So! My first future telling dream was a few years ago. I woke up, showered, went down for breakfast, hooray all is well. I sit down at the table with my granola (every morning, every day, Meijer brand with raisins, don’t judge me), and the conversation goes thusly:

Anya: So, last night I had a dream that there was an outbreak of the whooping cough and it started with like four people and then everyone in [my college town] got it. (By this time I had learned to seriously pare down my dream reporting).

Mom: No way!

Anya: Jesus, you don’t have to be sarcastic, I got it down to one sentence!

Mom: No I just read in the paper that there are a couple kids in [college town] that just came down with the whooping cough.

Anya: Holy shit, I guess I’m a prophet(ess?). In my dream it was like kind of a plague and a bunch of people died, hope that part’s not real.

Mom: Oh, great.

Pretty impressive? I thought so, that’s for sure. I can’t tell you how many times Paul has brushed off a nightmare I had about someone we know, and inevitable he hears “But remember when I predicted the whooping cough outbreak? IT COULD BE REAL!”.

The other one is less fun (I mean I guess the whooping cough wasn’t fun for the people that actually came down with it). I was dating this guy a few years ago, and things ended badly. Like cheated on me, lied to me, pulled some things that are a blog article unto themselves badly. And honest to God, one night I had a dream that he confessed that he had lied to me, was sleeping with someone else, blah blah blah. Lo and behold, the very next day we have that exact same conversation. As hurt as I was at the time, I was still totally like “Aw fuck, prophecy dream number two, moving on up in the psychic world!”

Next stop, TLC

I mean what are the odds? Nate Silver could probably tell me that, meh. The problem is, it’s not really helpful when only like one dream every three years comes true the next day. Or when I wake up from it about two hours before it actually happens. I’ll work on it?

-Anya