10 Unbelievable Stories About Dreams That Came True IRL (+ Expert Insights)

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Discover the science and the supernatural behind predictive dreams
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History is chock-full of famous examples of dreams coming true. But is it magic, science, or something else entirely? With the help of intuitive psychic medium Jason Zuk and magic and manifestation expert Leza Labrador, we’re going to find the answer. We’ll look at famous dreams that have come true, cover how these prophetic dreams (called precognitive or predictive dreams) work, and hope to help you uncover any doubts you have regarding your own dreaming.

Do dreams come true?

According to psychic medium Jason Zuk, “Dreams are real to an extent that they allow us to have the ability to potentially communicate.” In other words, some dreams may be your way of accessing the future, past, or people who have gone long ago. Famous examples include:

  • Abraham Lincoln predicting his own assassination.
  • The entire town of Aberfan dreaming of a natural disaster.
  • Carl Jung having visions in his sleep of WWI before the war started.
Section 1 of 5:

10 Famous Dreams That Have Come True

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  1. 1
    Abraham Lincoln predicted his own death. Lincoln’s law partner and bodyguard reported that a few days before his assassination, Lincoln told him about a dream he had where he walked into the East Room of the White House to find a small group of mourners. He asked one of the guards who had died, and the guard said, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.” He was shot three days later. [1]
    • Depending on how you interpret his behavior, Lincoln may have been a fortune teller. He regularly talked about the power of his dreams, and he regularly had recurring dreams that signaled important events. [2]

    Meet the wikiHow Experts

    Jason Zuk is an intuitive psychic medium with over 26 years of experience in helping people overcome obstacles and reach personal clarity.

    Leza Labrador is a magic and manifestation expert (known as The Social Sorceress) who specializes in folk magic, shadow work, and self-exploration.

  2. 2
    A whole town dreamt of its own destruction—then it happened. In the small town of Aberfan, on October 1966, 144 people were crushed in a landslide. A psychologist who was already on the way to the town decided to stick around in the aftermath and noticed something odd. In talking to people, he found 67 examples of people who had dreamed about an “avalanche” of coal and stone the night before the disaster. [3]
    • It’s possible that all 67 reports were just trauma responses, especially since nobody had reported their dreams until after the event. Still, that’s a lot of people reporting the same event!
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  3. 3
    Carl Jung may have predicted World War I in his sleep. In 1913, famous psychologist and writer Carl Jung had a dream that a flood would cover Europe from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. The flood would shift from a yellow tide to a deep red as the water became saturated in blood. In 1914, World War I started. The battlefield ran from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. [4]
    • Jung actually had a second dream like this, except he dreamt the land was a barren, frozen wasteland—not a flooded region. Some suggest this second dream predicted the war lasting through winter, which it did. World War I wouldn’t formally end until 1918.
  4. 4
    Mendeleev dreamt of the periodic table… then he invented it. The chemist Dmitri Mendeleev is famous for describing and developing the periodic table of elements. Funnily enough, this discovery came to Mendeleev in a dream. He had a vision in his sleep of a series of patterns that connected the various elements he was studying. With a little bit of time and meditation on the dream, he created the table! [5]
    • The dream really stuck with Mendeleev. So much so that he dedicated tons of time to describing and praising the dream in his diaries. It really was a life-changing event for him.
  5. 5
    Kathleen Middleton tried to warn people about Robert Kennedy’s death. The same psychologist who studied the Aberfan disaster began working on a study about precognitive dreams when he was contacted by Kathleen Middleton. She had a dream that Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be killed. It made her so anxious that she actually contacted the psychologist’s organization three times to reiterate how serious the threat was. Kennedy was shot and killed three months later. [6]
    • Middleton would later claim that she had even dreamt about the Aberfan disaster before it had happened as well, despite not living in Aberfan (or anywhere near the area). [7]
  6. 6
    Joan of Arc’s entire career was based on dreams. From her initial inspiration to lead the French army to the dreams predicting her death at the hands of the English, much of Joan of Arc’s story was inspired by dreams she had. In fact, her father even had precognitive dreams about her! He dreamt she would lead an army one day before she could even walk. [8]
  7. 7
    A bishop dreamt of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Growing up, the young Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had a tutor—Bishop Joseph Lanyi. Years later, Bisop Lanyi had a dream that a letter from the Duke sat on his desk. The letter said, “I herewith inform you that today, my wife and I will fall victims to an assassination.” He even documented this dream by telling witnesses about it and drawing the assassination site he had seen in his visions. The Duke was murdered later that day. [9]
    • The assassination of Franz Ferdinand is widely considered to be the catalyst for the outbreak of World War I. It’s possible that without this single event the world would have never plunged into war.
  8. 8
    Lucrecia de León predicted the end of the Spanish Armada in a dream. Lucrecia de León may be one of the most infamous predictive dreamers of all time. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition had her arrested and tried for spreading prophecies that went against the Church and Spanish royal families. Her trial took a long time because all of her prophetic dreams kept coming true. The largest of which involved the end of the Spanish Armada. It was, at the time, the most powerful navy in the world. She predicted its downfall, and fall down it did. The English basically destroyed the entire navy in one encounter. [10]
    • The case against Lucrecia de León was so difficult to prove (given the dreams coming true) that she was eventually acquitted. To add to the mystery of the whole ordeal, she immediately disappeared and was never heard from again.
  9. 9
    Niels Bohr discovered the atom based on a vibrant dream. Another example of a famous scientific discovery coming from a dream, we only know about the structure of the atom because of a vision Niels Bohr had in his sleep. After seeing a horse race in his sleep where the horses were spinning around one another on a track, he woke up and immediately ran to the lab to try and find evidence of the atom’s structure. He found it! [11]
    • Bohr actually got a Nobel Prize for Physics based on this discovery.
  10. 10
    Mark Twain’s brother died in his dream and died the next day. Mark Twain and his brother Henry were supposed to embark on a steamboat together, but the night before the trip, Twain dreamt of his brother’s body lying in a casket. The next day, his brother failed to show up for the trip. He had gotten on a different ship and the boiler exploded. [12]
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Section 2 of 5:

Could dreams come true?

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  1. Some dreams have (allegedly) come true, but it’s not that common. For every single dream that does seem to predict the future, that dreamer may have hundreds (or thousands!) of dreams that do not come true. In other words, while it’s certainly possible for the events in a dream to happen in reality, it’s not likely that a single dream you’ve had will predict the future.
    • Zuk actually had a predictive dream about his own life! “I had a premonition dream that I'd call myself Jason Zuk, the social psychic. That was years before I even decided to be an open psychic. And then in 2017, I started doing it professionally.” [13]
Section 3 of 5:

The Science Behind Predictive Dreams

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  1. 1
    Predictive dreams are a common side effect of epilepsy. Déjà vu is well-established as a side effect of seizure activity in the temporal lobe, which is a common location for epileptic seizures. [14] While scientists are still unclear on the source of the mechanism, déjà rêvé seems to be closely related to the same cluster of symptoms. [15]
    • If you regularly experience déjà rêvé and you’ve never been tested for epilepsy, reach out to your doctor to look into it. Epilepsy is very treatable (and common), but it does require management.
  2. 2
    Dreams can “come true” by way of symbolic interpretation. It’s possible that predictive dreams come true because they inspire a new way of thinking about something. For example, say you’ve had a predictive dream that your home was on fire. You wake up with the odd feeling that you’ve had a predictive dream. Later that month, you discover termites in your home and have to hire a terminator. Your home really was in trouble! [16]
    • Was this a predictive dream or not? It depends on how you interpret it! Your home never burned down, but your home was ultimately in danger.
  3. 3
    Some predictive dreams create self-fulfilling prophecies. Say that you have a dream about a test that you’re going to take next week, and in your dream, you ace the exam. You wake up with a renewed sense that the test is very passable, so you study with a little more purpose, focus, and belief in yourself. Later, you nail the test. Did the dream cause you to pass? Or did your dream give you the headspace you needed to be able to pass on your own? [17]
    • You’ll notice these dreams more often if you pay attention to them. Labrador says, “A lot of times we think that the dream should be treated in the abstract only. Like, if you have a dream, it's probably because you're overthinking something…our dreams can actually interconnect with our living lives, though!” [18]
  4. 4
    One theory holds that predictive dreams are an evolutionary adaptation. So, humans need water to survive. Our brains are hardwired to look for water. As a result, we might naturally hold things like plants or beaches in our mind as markers that water is nearby, which means they’re good things. Some scientists suggest that predictive dreams are just the human brain’s way of encoding important predictive information for future threats. [19]
    • The brain generates predictions literally all of the time. You look at a door and assume it opens to another room. You see a black bird that looks like a raven, and you assume it’s a raven. A dream that urges you to make a prediction of some kind makes natural sense for the human mind!
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Section 4 of 5:

What are precognitive dreams?

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  1. 1
    Precognitive dreams refer to dreams that can predict the future. A precognitive dream is a dream where the dreamer wakes up believing that their dream is predicting the future. People will often disqualify precognitive dreams if the events don’t come true, but that makes the very idea of precognitive dreams a little self-selecting. [20]
    • How do I know if I’ve had a precognitive dream? Zuk provides some insight here: “I think things come to us in dreams to help us, reassure us…but if you're able to kind of get through it, you could probably also gain some credible advice from them about the future.” [21]
  2. 2
    Déjà rêvé describes the feeling and experience of a predictive dream. Déjà vu is the feeling that you’ve already experienced something before. On the opposite end of the spectrum, déjà rêvé is the feeling that you will experience something in the future. Predictive/precognitive dreams are simply any dream that triggers the feeling of déjà rêvé. [22]
    • Déjà rêvé translates to “already dreamed” in French.
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Section 5 of 5:

What is the rarest dream?

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  1. Telepathic dreams are considered the least common type of dream. Telepathic dreams occur when a dreamer is able to communicate with someone else in their sleep. [23] Very few people report having dreams like these. While it has been demonstrated that it’s possible to communicate with someone while they sleep, there’s no evidence that telepathic dreams exist. [24]
    • Shared dreams are a kind of telepathic dream that may be even rarer, but there’s even less research on these kinds of dreams than there is on other phenomena.

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      References

      1. ↑ https://www.history.com/articles/did-abraham-lincoln-predict-his-own-death
      2. ↑ https://www.history.com/articles/did-abraham-lincoln-predict-his-own-death
      3. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/23/the-vision-collector-the-man-who-used-dreams-and-premonitions-to-predict-the-future
      4. ↑ https://www.top10.com/psychic-reading/can-dreams-really-predict-the-future-10-most-famous-precognitive-dreams
      5. ↑ https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-periodic-table-dream/
      6. ↑ https://www.top10.com/psychic-reading/can-dreams-really-predict-the-future-10-most-famous-precognitive-dreams
      7. ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deeper-dive/202504/why-do-some-dreams-seem-to-predict-the-future
      8. ↑ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gordon-joan.html?scp=1&sq=joan+of+arc&st=cse
      9. ↑ http://www.worlddreambank.org/F/FERDINAN.HTM
      1. ↑ https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2018/02/the-prophetic-dreamer.html
      2. ↑ https://www.thescienceexplorer.com/5-dreams-that-led-to-scientific-breakthroughs-and-innovations-743
      3. ↑ https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/twain
      4. ↑ Jason Zuk. Intuitive Psychic Medium. Expert Interview
      5. ↑ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3420423/
      6. ↑ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6028740/
      7. ↑ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35066902/
      8. ↑ https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/self-fulfilling-prophecy
      9. ↑ Leza Labrador. Magic and Manifestation Expert. Expert Interview
      10. ↑ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4700581/
      11. ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deeper-dive/202504/why-do-some-dreams-seem-to-predict-the-future
      12. ↑ Jason Zuk. Intuitive Psychic Medium. Expert Interview
      13. ↑ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6028740/
      14. ↑ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33951809/
      15. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/lucid-dreaming-communication/

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