How can we tell the difference between a dream of the future or a self-help dream?

Question

Would there be anything I would look for that could indicate a dream meaning something not yet experienced, but yet to come.

Answer 1

The purpose of dreams, as far as we understand them, is to process the vast amount of information that comes in through your senses each day whilst you're awake.

On this basis the "meaning" of your dreams is simply that you are making sense of information which previously didn't have a "meaning", for you, because it hadn't been processed so as to fit into your mental maps of the world (all your existing beliefs, ideas, values, etc.).

Given what seems to be going on, it's not really surprising that lots of things appear in your dreams that have nothing to do with what has been happening in your life just before the dream occurs. Things can appear in your dreams that have been part of your memories as far back as you started forming memories - or anytime in between then and now.

Nor do the things in your dreams have to be obviously related to each other. Like I said, dreaming is a process of finding/making meaning, and the brain can draw from anywhere in its huge store of memories in order to carry out that process.

By the way, there is nothing random about this process, but your subconscious mind can come up with connections that your conscious mind would never dream of (!), which is why dreams often seem pretty weird.

So when, if ever, you happen to notice yourself having what seems like a weird dream in future you can literally rest assured that everything is OK. Your brain is actually doing, with great skill, one of the jobs it was designed to do

Answer 2

Depends. usually when most people have dreams they experience a fantasy or reality of something they are glad, happy, sad, angry anxious, etc. about. If something in the past (a few days/weeks) that happened to u and ur still getting over it that may be a cause of if something ur scared or excited about that's about to happed you might dream of that and sometimes it's just made up fun