Dreaming of Things to Come

"The prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come."

— William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 107"

Dreams get omitted from fiction unless they are significant. When they are not nightmares about the past, the dreamer will often be Dreaming of Things to Come.

These dreams can be symbolic, and are often obscure. They are always, of course, true, but nevertheless can blindside the character with their significance. Symbolic dreams, or ones that merely show elements of the future, may even be taken for dreams of the past. The Hero dreams of the villain and does not realize that this is a warning that he will pop up again soon; he thinks it is just Past Experience Nightmares of the past villainy.

This can also be mistaken for Anxiety Dreams of something the character dreads in the future.

Dreams of Things to Come can be sent — by a god, by an oracle, by someone with magical or psychic ability other than the dreamer. This may shade into Talking in Your Dreams.

Often a way of Foreshadowing. Can be a Portent of Doom. A common means of Foreseeing My Death.

If the character merely pieces together everything he knows but had not connected, he is Dreaming the Truth; Dreaming of Things to Come requires that he gain new knowledge that he could not acquire outside the dream.

If the events are at the same time (approximately) as the dream, see Dream Spying; if before, see Dreaming of Times Gone By.

Psychic Dreams for Everyone are a subtrope where anyone can have them, and they are literal.

Not to be confused with dreams about other things that come.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Takaki has one in 5 Centimeters per Second. He and Akari climb a hill. It could be a Distant Finale of some kind, Mundane Afterlife, Alternate Universe, anything really...
• In the Attack on Titan anime, Eren's dream is shown to be a variety of disturbing images of the Titans, dead humans, and ends with the scene of the Titan picking up his mother as shown later in the episode.
• In Aruosumente, the entire point of having an Oracle around is that they are capable of having prophetic dreams. The plot is kicked off by Oracle Legna dreaming of someone shouting "Die!" but being unable to determine the killing intent's source.
• Cardcaptor Sakura: The main character frequently had these, most pointing to the same event involving her, Tokyo Tower, and a beautiful silver-haired man with wings. In the manga, she gets a couple of dreams about the event, but only when she got close to capturing all the cards.
• In Case Closed, Heiji becomes disturbed by a recent dream he had of Conan dying, so he lends him a charm. The dream becomes accurate when the suspect manages to stab Conan but Conan's life was saved by the charm.
• In Detonator Orgun, main character Tomoru has dreams about "a strange robot", the eponymous Orgun he ends meeting with, whenever he tries to use the PASFU machine that lets you choose your dreams. In Super Robot Wars W his dreams also have Tekkaman Blade, because the game combines the plot of the two series.
• Dragon Ball: Freeza and Kami both had "premonitions" that turned out to be startlingly accurate, but the straightest example is Beerus from Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, who literally gets visions of the future during his long naps, though his attendant claims they aren't usually accurate.
• In The Enigma of Amigara Fault, the victims of the tunnels have nightmares about people they met who've previously entered the holes, showing them clearly what will happen if they go in. And they all still go in the holes anyway.
• Esper Mami: One of the ways Mami's Psychic Powers manifest comes in the form of a Dream Sequence concerning the person(s) she encounters at the time that might occur in the near future showing up in her dreams. Should the Dream Sequence in question end up with a horrible enough outcome, Catapult Nightmare is likely to ensue and cause Mami to spring into action in order to prevent the bad outcome in said Dream Sequence from happening in the first place.
• Gourmet Girl Graffiti: Ryou has a bizarre dream in episode 4 where she's eating some food offered by students who have pieces of food for a head. Later that episode she gets to eat the food concerned.
• In Hetalia: Axis Powers, Chibitalia once had a dream about a young man he had never seen until then. That youth turned out to be Japan, one of his future partners.
• Jigoku No Gouka De Yakare Tsuzuketa Shounen: After having a dream of Flare returning from the Gates of Hell, Flare's master made a set of Chaos magical equipment to give to him as an apology on the faint chance that his student would return. Flare finds the equipment in a drawer a thousand years later, wearing it as a memento of his dear master before setting out to experience his second life.
• Alvis of Last Exile has a recurring dream involving fields of wheat. This turns out to be extremely important; the "wheat covered earth" is part of one of the Mysteria she has to speak in order to activate the titular Exile.
• One episode of Mushishi featured a man that acquired this ability thanks to a mushi infection. He eventually comes to realize that the mushi don't lead his dreams to predict the future so much as cause it. Unfortunately, he only learns this after a nightmare where everyone in his village died of a terrible, unnatural plague...
• In the 10th Pokémon movie, The Rise of Darkrai, it is revealed that someone in the far past had nightmares of Dialga and Palkia destroying the city, an event that comes true during the movie. The person in the past responded to the nightmares by having the Space-Time tower built, which would play a song to calm the two Pokémon.
• The start of Puella Magi Madoka Magica appears to be this. As episode ten reveals, it's actually a memory of the previous timeline, before Homura restarted her "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• The manga Read or Dream has Anita dreaming about Hisami before meeting her.
• The Secret Agreement begins with Yuuichi having dark Recurring Dreams of a voice saying "No matter what I want to get it, no matter what it takes." It turns out it's been his own voice all along indicating that his predatory shadow side has begun to awaken.
• In the second season of The Seven Deadly Sins, Elizabeth has a mostly irrelevant dream that is correct about two things: Ban and King splitting off from the Sins and the emergence of a great evil in the south. She has no prophetic abilities, but given her original identity as a goddess born to oppose demons, she may have subconsciously mixed her goddess intuition with her desires.
• Sasami of the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs suffers from these. Her first dream prophesies Kagato's arrival and the second tells of Tokimi's involvement with Tenchi. However, Sasami can never remember the dreams fully—even though she called out Tokimi's name in the dream, she tells Tenchi that a woman was taking her away and that she never seen her before. As well, they also tend to be very disturbing.

Asian Animation

• Motu Patlu: In "Motu Ka Birthday", Motu has a dream about his friends beating him up after he eats the entire birthday cake that has been baked for him. This actually happens at the end of the episode, albeit in a different location (the dream is in Furfuri Nagar and the actual thing is in a grassy plain).
• This is a major theme in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 2, where Paddi worries about a dream he had involving Wolffy attacking him coming true after having another dream involving him eating a cake that actually did come true.

Ballads

• In the Child Ballad Sir Aldingar, the queen recounts a dream of having been attacked by a grim beast and saved by a little hawk. Now that she has been attacked by Malicious Slander, she sends a messenger to search for a champion.

Comic Books

• In the All-Star Squadron sequel series The Young All-Stars, Fury dreamed of a giant Mekanique attacking the All-Star Squadron within a futuristic city — which turns out to be true, though as a twist, Mekanique shrinks the All-Star Squadron members (except for Fury and the Young All-Stars) and attacks them in a model of a futuristic city.
• Fantastic Four: Franklin Richards has "special dreams" which are prophetic. May be symbolic: before a clash among the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and Doctor Doom, he dreamed of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men dying, and his father turning into Doom, which foretold aspects of the clash. May also be literal: in his first meeting with Power Pack, they deduce why an alien is chasing them — Katie Power is carrying an alien artifact that could be traced — he recounts how he had dreamed that the alien chased him, and so they give him the artifact, which leads to their victory.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2020): The series begins with a kree boy telling his parents he had a dream of the world burning. His father reassures him this was just a dream, since everything's fine outside. One page later, things cut to the world burning at the hands of the Olympians.
• De Kiekeboes: In "De Getattoeërde Mossel" Kiekeboe realizes an important plot point about someone who has his arm in a cast when he has a nightmare about it.
• In Legion of Super-Heroes, Dream Girl often has these, since they're part of her powers.
• Sandman Mystery Theatre: This was the lone "superpower" of Wesley Dodds a.k.a. The Sandman. He would dream about crimes that had not yet been committed.
• Luke had something like one of these after ROTJ, in the Star Wars (Marvel 1977) story "The Dream". He had Recurring Dreams where he saw Vader, was terrified, saw Vader starting to take his helmet off, and desperately pleaded with him to stop. He always felt guilty, then, and like there was some great wrong he had to set right. At last he spoke to the spirits of his teachers and his father and confronted this apparition again—it was a new Sith Lord he'd never seen before, and he did indeed have to set things right when he faced him.
• Supergirl story arc "The Super-Steed of Steel": Subverted. Linda has a dream where she is enjoying a circus performance until she is attacked by Luthor, whereupon she is saved by Comet. When she awakens, Linda believes it was a premonitory dream induced by Comet's telepathy, since her family wanted to go to the circus later that day, but her father disagrees: the morning newspaper says that day's performance has been canceled, so they were not going to watch the circus at any rate. Linda then remembers her super-horse could not have induced that dream because he has lost his memories, so she had just a normal dream.
• Suske en Wiske: In the album "De Bokkenrijder" Wiske explains to Tante Sidonia a strange dream she had the other night. Sidonia explains the symbolic meanings behind her nightmare. As the story progresses, many elements from the nightmare happen to the cast in real life.
• Tintin:
  • In "The Shooting Star" Tintin dreams he is visited by Philippus the prophet who then shows him a picture of a gigantic spider, claiming it is life size. Later in the story, he actually meets Philippus again and he discovers an island where a spider has grown to gigantic size due to the radiation of a comet.
  • In "Tintin in Tibet", after hearing that Chang took a plane to visit him, Tintin dreams of him calling for help, alone in the snow, later Tintin and Haddock read a newspaper and learn that Chang's plane crashed in the mountain. After crying about the loss of his friend, Tintin decides that Chang must still be alive because he was in his dream, he ends up right.
• In Violine, Violine has dreams that predict future plot points.
• In Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy, Clay has a nightmare of what Scarlet is going to do to the other four Dragonets and Kestrel. Part of the dream shows Sunny in a round cage. When him, Tsunami, and Glory reunite with her near the end of the book, guess what Scarlet has done to her.

Comic Strips

• Modesty Blaise: At the start of "Tribute for the Pharaoh", Modesty has a dream about a statue of the god Amun coming to life and attacking her. At the end of the adventure, Willie comments that—after a fashion—this is what had indeed occurred.
• In Safe Havens Jenny dreams that the fate of the Earth rested on her shoulders. Wile Samantha dismissed it as a metaphor for the Mars mission, Jenny claims all her dreams are literal...right before she wakes up. Mars wants Earth destroyed, and only someone with good negotiating skills can prevent that. Jenny is a sports and entertainment agent. She successfully negotiates for Mars to spare Earth in exchange for terraforming Mars. She's also the one that comes up with the plan to save Mars from exploitation by Earth's countries by arranging for Samantha and Dave to adopt Mars as their child.

Fan Works

• The Adventures Of Kiko Fluffy Pants: Emily/Kiko gets prophetic dreams during the course of the story, although it turns out she is being fed specially designed dreams to make things come true.
• Nico in the beginning of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians fic Aska. It turns out his dream was sent by Fenrir, who in turn was sent it by Eric.
• In the Total Drama All-Stars fanfic Bailey In Exile, Bailey's dreams outright tell her that Mal is coming back, and a few of them even suggest that he has planned to kidnap her and Zoey.
• The Portal/Half-Life fanfic Between Minds takes place before Chell reaches the wheat field at the end of the sequel, but she has a dream of it.
• In the Harry Potter fanfics The Black Heir and Vindico Atrum, the protagonist, Orion Black starts having prophetic dreams as his powers develop. His visions of the future are sent to him by Gaia, the source of Dark Magic deep in Earth's core.
• The Bridge:
  • Upon his 'birth', Xenilla got an onslaught of them, foreseeing some monster that would destroy Terra. He assumed it was Godzilla.
  • Rarity has a nightmare of the Big Bad's forces destroying Equestria if he succeeds in his plans. It would appear to have been sent by the Nightmare Forces.
  • Celestia has a symbolic vision of the gyaos attack on Canterlot (and Godzilla's counterattack) shortly before it happens.
• In The Legend of Korra fanfic Book 5: Legends, Korra has a nightmare about the enemies she will face later on.
• Played for Laughs in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series—Hobbes dreams about tornadoes, and while there's several bits of evidence that one is coming, Calvin still claims otherwise.
• Luigi has a dream in the Super Paper Mario fanfic Can a Boo Be Friends with a Human? in which King Boo tortures him to break his will. It comes true alright.
• In the Cardcaptor Sakura/Transformers: Armada crossover fanfic Cardcaptor Rad, Rad has similar dreams to Sakura in the original show. Rachel's nightmares about what is to come are much worse.
• Kei in the Naruto fanfic Catch Your Breath. After Hayate was born she kept dreaming of his future canon death for years, until she developed a split personality to deal with all those memories. This was also a recurring dream. She dreamt of Obito and Rin's fates after meeting them as well.
• Champion: Bryony Blackwood of the Seven Sons has prophetic dreams, warning Fen, "You are marked for death, sapling. Your sentence will be your savior." The peacekeepers capture Fen and delay his execution so he can attend the reaping to make up for the number of teenagers who go into hiding rather than show up. Fen is reaped and comes home as a pardoned victor.
• A certain novelization of Chrono Trigger had the protagonist have dreams of events that wouldn't happen until much later, such as, in the order he had the dreams, the fight with the Mega Mutant in the Black Omen, and his own death.
• In Code Geass: Colorless Memories:, Rai experiences a few dreams of someone calling out to him; and in one particular dream, a shadowy figure who taunts Rai about his amnesia. It turns out it was E.E calling to Rai from Kamine Island.
• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Collective History of Asgard, Cadence apparently has this ability.
  • While in captivity in Iron Mare, Rarity has a dream vision sent by Nightmare Moon of herself after her release, where everyone she cares about leaves her and she becomes a despondent recluse. She refuses to let this happen.
• Ranma ½ fanfiction Comes the Cold Dragon: Akane has a few of these that make her realize how much she will need to learn to keep up with Ranma after his ascension to the titular Cold Dragon.
• Celestia's graden dream in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Composure could mean many things and is given different meanings by different characters. It could represent the growing relationship between Celestia and Twilight, the eventual success of Twilight's experiment, the coming immortality of Twilight, or any combination of the three.
• Danger (and, to a lesser extent, Luna) has prophetic dreams in the Harry Potter-based Dangerverse series.
• In Deserving, Millicent gets a dream of Snape birthing more kids.
• Bloodraven's Prophecy in the Harry Potter/A Song of Ice and Fire crossover fanfic The Difference One Man Can Make pretty much foreshadows the future conflicts, such as the War of Five Kings - although Bloodraven later acknowledges that Harry's arrival has completely offset the board.
• In Digimon Advent, there is a wall of scribbles hidden in a boiler room in Arch Angel. It is the result of Tarockmon taking notes on his prophetic dreams, one of which had only just recently come to pass.
• In Digimon Xros Wars AU 02, Akari seems to have prophetic powers, having a dream about a critical event in the Death Generals Arc at the beginning of the first Jungle Zone chapter. She continues to have more simplified dreams after being turned back into a child and arriving in Shinobi Zone. She later has another one foreshadowing the climax of the Second arc, set to Infinity Mechanism, no less.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Digimon Adventure 02 crossover Digital Harmony, Rarity and Ken have both had separate nightmares involving their respective Evil Counterparts Nightmare Rarity and the Digimon Emperor warning of them of catastrophes to come should they fail to stop Vespimon's attempts to take over the Digital World.
• A dream Atoli has in .hack//G.U. The Staircase to Nowhere appears to be prophetic.
• Jinx of the Teen Titans fanfic Down the Rabbit Hole once tried to look into the future. Bad idea. She uses drawing to make sense of what she remembers whenever it comes to her. So far, she's seen Terra, See-More and Kid.
• Luna apparently has this ability in The Legend of Zelda/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Equestrian Wind Mage, foreseeing Ganon's arrival in Equestria at the start of Season 2. Unfortunately, Dethl's own Dream Weaver abilities allow him to counter this power, keeping her from seeing what the real villains are plotting.
• Mistress has a dream in Chapter 11 of the Superjail! fanfic Extended Stay, which foreshadows a future where she has 2.5 kids with Warden, is married to the guy, and has also conquered the world. She has it all by the end of the fanfic.
• The start of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Fall of Starfleet, Rebirth of Friendship starts of with a dream about the future, which states "Weakness will cause darkness to extinguish the five lights", implying a threat to the remaining five Elements when combined with the fact that Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Fluttershy are the ones having the dream. As the story goes on, though, it's made clear that the dream actually refers to Conquest's goal of killing off the members of Starfleet, with the "five lights" being Dyno and Myte, Buddy Rose, Rhymey, Artie, and Lightning Dawn.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness: One of the side effects of Patchouli's medication causes her to start dreaming of possible futures, including one of her being trapped in Jersey City after her library is destroyed. Much later, Maribel has a fever-induced dream of Megas and the Glorft, which shows what would happen to Earth and Gensokyo if Megas was ever permanently destroyed; this drives her to realize her ability's full potential and transform herself into the youkai we know as Yukari.
• Rarity has several prophetic dreams during the course of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Flight of the Alicorn, which foreshadow, among other things, being thrown overboard, the conflict with the griffons and her final battle against Windlass.
  • This is Princess Palladium's cutie mark talent, a talent shared by her ancestors. The ability has weakened with each generation; while Palladium can only catch small, vague glimpses of the future, her predecessors were able to see the future with perfect clarity and accuracy.
• Invoked, rather than actually used, in the Naruto Peggy Sue fanfic For Love, where Hinata lies to her father and the Hokage that she has prophetic dreams to excuse her knowledge of future events. Knowing that Real Dreams are Weirder, she has to be vague about what she sees to make what she says more believable.
• In the Tangled/Frozen/Brave crossover fanfic The Four Seasons, Rapunzel and Anna both have dreams that feature past events but foreshadow future ones.
  • Anna dreams about her parents dying while Hans tries to kill her with a sword. During the stand off at the ice palace, Anna sees Elsa dying, while Hans tries to kill her with a sword.
  • Rapunzel dreams about Gothel stabbing Eugene in the tower, only their roles are replaced by Hans and Elsa respectively. Hans does end up fatally injuring Elsa in her side, and Rapunzel must try to make a similar deal to save her life.
• In Fate series fanfic From Fake Dreams:
  • This kicks off the plot in which Kiritsugu Emiya learns about the 5th Holy Grail War, and how his newly adopted son will be pivotal in the ensuing events - including a number of divergent paths and Bad Ends, as well as the life of Counter Guardian Shirou. After this, he takes Shiro's magical education seriously, with emphasis on the skills needed to survive the War and destroy the Grail. However, things have already diverged as a result, as the Magi now know Shirou exists and some of his capabilities.
  • Rin is technically doing this as well, since she's seeing Archer's life.
• In the A Song of Ice and Fire AU fanfic Frozen Fire, Daenerys has a nightmare about Robb's death and Theon's betrayal. The latter has been subverted.
  • Robb dreams of Daenerys killing Melisandre for trying to take control of her dragons, as well as Dany telling him that she's carrying their second child.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: When Italy and Japan discussed the shared dream they once had, they realized they were dreaming of their future meeting.
• In the Peggy Sue fic Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past, Chapter 29's reference to a magical core exploding in nightmare form is ominous in the extreme. The accuracy of Harry's previous nightmares doesn't help, nor does the fact that the author pretty much states that it's foreshadowing.
• While under the influence of Dream in Chapter 27 of Cardcaptor Sakura/Blue Exorcist crossover Inheritance of Cards and Demons, Rin sees a number of events that have not yet occurred, including the discovery of the Illuminati’s artificial Gehenna Gate by the Angelic Legion, having a discussion with his future love and what appears to be the Judgement.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Inner Demons, Cadence apparently has this ability.
  • Twilight starts having nightmares after reading a prophecy about a "Queen of Darkness", which matches her description to a tee.
  • In the sequel Inner Demons II, Diamond Tiara also begins ominous dreams about the future around the same time as Twilight did.
• In the Kingdom Hearts fanfic The Interference, Alex dreams of Ed and Al fighting against Scar in the epilogue of the first story.
• Rarity has dreams throughout the course of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door, growing stronger as time passes.
  • As of Chapter 15, this includes dreaming of her future self and full potential. Can't get much more things to come than that.
• In the RWBY / Star Wars crossover Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger, Jaune has a seemingly prophetic dream on the night before the Breach. In this dream, the Grimm have overrun Beacon and the school grounds are covered with the corpses of countless students and Atlas soldiers. This dream finally comes to pass after Darth Nihilus takes over Jaune's body and goes on a rampage, killing dozens of students and forcing an airship to crash into Beacon. At the end of the chapter, Ruby and Pyrrha witness Jaune's dream come to fruition, as Beacon is in flames, dozens of students and soldiers have been killed, and and the Grimm are roaming the schoolgrounds freely.
• Karma in Retrograde has a variation. Touya is slowly regaining his memories of his time as Dabi through his dreams. From Touya's perspective, they're all things he's destined to perform in his future, but they already happened from everyone else's view.
• Ojamajo Doremi: Witches at World's End (the sequel to Ojamajo Doremi: Rise of the Shadows) has this. During the prologue, the Queen has a nightmare that supposedly foreshadows events later in the story and she had been having these nightmares for some time now. It's lampshaded when she begins to suspect that they're not dreams but "visions" of the future.
• In the Overwatch fanfic Just Let Me Die – A Widowmaker Story, Amélie betrays everyone she knows in a dream, including her own husband.
• In Kamen Rider OOO: The Metals of Ikki Tousen, Chuubou's reason for appearing in Kanto was because of her nightmares about Koukin being dragged away from her by the Greeed. Chillingly, she's not completely wrong.
• Chapter 7 of Kamen Rider Kuuga: Rising unto the Stars is a Dream Sequence regarding the 2011 Sendai Earthquake. Confirmed by the author that no matter how powerful Kuuga may become, the tragedy cannot be prevented.
• Kara of Rokyn: In the first episode of the "Last Waltz with Luthor", Lena Thorul -who has had psychic powers since she was a child- has a premonitory dream in which her brother Lex Luthor murders his wife Ardora and then kills Superman. Her vision almost comes to pass at the climax of the story.
  She sat on the side of her bed for a few seconds and composed herself. Then she opened a drawer from the night stand, took a cassette recorder from it, turned it on, and began to speak.
  "This is August 17th. Another entry in my dream journal. I think this one might be a prophecy. It's been a long time since I've had one... but this one seemed intense enough to be. I just hope it isn't.
  "I saw my brother Lex. His wife Ardora was alive, and he was killing her.
  "And then he was killing Superman."
• In the prologue of the Negima!/Kingdom Hearts fanfic The Keys of the Kingdom, Negi dreams of being attacked by the Heartless. Guess what happens in chapter 1.
  • Gosalyn dreams of Ariadne's magic academy. Except she's in the past, before the events she dreams of happened.
• Episodes 1 and 10 of Kamen Rider Xtreme open with a dream sequence foretelling of a battle between four riders and a figure in shadows, the first of which ending with Alex proclaiming "This world is over."
• Sora gets a prophetic dream at the start of Kingdom Hearts: The Third Epic, as does Riku at the start of its sequel, Final Confrontation.
• On the morning of the second challenge in The Legend of Total Drama Island, Bridgette sees numerous parallels between the day's events and her previous night's dream of finding a presumably dead contestant alive. The trope is subverted when she comes to the place where she dreamed of finding said contestant—a spot she had never been to before—only to find no sign of human presence.
• Robin gets a few prophetic dreams in the Spider-Man Trilogy fanfic Life After Death Trilogy, as well as some very bad dreams.
• After getting her ring in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Green Lantern fanfic Know Fear!, Star has a dream about the seven lights fighting each other and the arrival of Light and Darkness.
• The first chapter of Gravity Falls fanfic Mabel in Butterhurst opens up to Mabel in the middle of a recurring nightmare, where the walls are "painted red" and she's running from something unknown...
• In the Game of Thrones fanfic Ned Stark Lives, Ned thinks his dream while in a coma - where he finds himself in a hall with the past Lords of Winterfell, and Brandon the Builder claimed that the Great Other cannot be killed, but merely imprisoned - is this. More disturbingly, it implies that Bran will not return from his trip to Coldhands.
• Drake Mallard dreams about both Darkwing Duck and his future self, Negaduck, shortly after his first encounter with Megavolt in the Darkwing Duck fanfic Nightfall in the Negaverse.
• In the Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic Not Stalking Zuko, Zuko fears a dream Sokka has of the gang as penguins and a Penguin!Suki giving him a bag to lay on is prophetic of a future pregnancy.
• In the Team Fortress 2 fanfic The Nucleus Incident, the RED team all have very vivid and symbolic dreams pertaining to which power they'll eventually develop before they wake up to discover their new abilities.
• Rhaegar's dreams regarding the prophecy of the Prince That Was Promised in the Song of Ice and Fire fanfic Of White Trees and Blue Roses. However, the fic did its own take as the prophecy remains unresolved in canon.
• Kirito gets a dream of the future in the chapter "Interlude: A Hero's Justice" of the Sword Art Online/One-Punch Man crossover One Punch-Gamer.
• Sarah's sudden dreams about a possible future in the Buildingverse fanfic Only A Dream.
• In the Song of Ice and Fire fanfic The Open Way, Ser Oswell, Ser Loras, Ser Jaime, and Ser Bryce Caron receive a prophecy from the Ghost of High Heart.
  "I dreamt of those with the black blood crawling from the cold depths of the sea, hungry for carnage and hungry for the souls of men, a wicked thing with ten long arms and a single blue eye destroying everything in his path, tearing the City of Kings apart and salting the earth beneath. I dreamt of a princess bleeding, dying in her young love's embrace. I dreamt of a gathering of beasts, Snake, Kraken, and Wolf, all together in the snow as the dead marched and light left the world. But mostly I keep dreaming of Dragons. When the King sits the throne for the sixth time, a red tear shall mark the sky, and it will be a sign that the three children of fire have come. From the south comes fire, from the north comes ice. In betwixt is suffering and death. An age of darkness shall be upon us, and only the Promised one will deliver us."
  • Rhaegar does what he does because he has nightmares about the Second Long Night.
• Tuyen's future-forecasting ability in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius fanfic The Other Side Of Tomorrow.
  • Jimmy's dream in "Suffer the Fate of Atlantis" is another example of this.
• In the Cardfight!! Vanguard fanfic Override, Aichi's dream before meeting Ren includes voices and elements of this from all four seasons from the anime.
• Juvage has a lot of disturbing dreams in the Medieval II: Total War fanfic Pagan Vengeance, all of which have transpired by the end.
• Sometimes experienced by Cities in the Les Misérables Anthropomorphic Personification fic Paris Burning. Several examples are described in Paris Burning, and it was a dream that lead Paris/Grantaire to find Enjolras and his group.
• A Place in My Dreams: [Dream a Dream Of The Future], one half of the Authority Kirito got from Morpheus, allows him to get visions of events up to a week into the future. But comes at the cost of him basically being put into an eight hour coma that he can not be awakened from.
• In Pokémon Black & White: Tale of a Legend, the hero does this concerning the fight with the 'Black Hero', finding the Relic Castle shrine, and the Tornadus-Thundurus fight.
• One of Yuki's abilities in Pokémon Psychics: Origins includes being able to see other people's pasts through dreaming (as evidenced in Chapter 4).
• In Chapter 26 of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, with a little help from MissingNo, Ash and Pikachu see a vision of a possible Bad Future while asleep. Some of the sidestories also feature examples:
  • In the Ultima Interlude, William Stronger reveals that he's dreamed of the future Bloodliner War every single night. The cause for this is revealed in the Mars Gaiden as having coming into contact with the Adamant Orb.
  • In the Sir Aaron & Lucario Gaiden, while comatose after taking a Future Sight attack for Lucario, Sir Aaron experiences visions in regards to the distant future, bloodliners, and Ash.
• Some of the stories in the Pokéumans community involve the protaganist having a dream about being the species they would later become.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Pony POV Series, Zecora has had dreams of her past lives in the G3 and G2 worlds due to the magical nexus the Everfree Forest grows over.
  • In Pony POV Series: Gaiden 7 Dreams/Nightmares, Bright Eyes has a dream that seemed to be of the battle with Nightmare Moon, something that wouldn't happen for several thousand years.
  • In the Looking Glass Expanded Universe, Toola-Roola has a nightmare predicting the end of the world.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Powers of Harmony, this is one of the abilities granted to the Bearer of Generosity. However, the dreams seem to rely heavily on symbolism, with just a mix of actual images from the events in question, making it hard to tell what they're about.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Quantum Castaways, Marshall dreams that Twilight is fatally shot by a sniper during their approach towards the building in the desert. This brings him to alter their path - only to find a newly-dead businessman with a high-powered rifle aimed directly where he dreamed Twilight had died. Understandably, this completely unsettles him.
• This happens to Obi-Wan a lot in the Star Wars fanfic Re-Entry. It also occurs with a few other Jedi.
• The events of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Revenge of Lavan happens because Twilight Sparkle had prophetic dreams of several future events. Two of them had come true so far, but their relevance has yet to be explained.
• Some chapters of the Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- AU fanfic Reversal of Fate directly explore Sakura's development in her dream-seeing abilities for the Infinity arc in future chapters.
• Jojen Reed of the Song of Ice and Fire fanfic Robb Returns has the greensight, as he does in canon, and, as such, has predicted several things, such as Mance Rayder asking Eddard for help, Robert finding Stormbreaker, the return of Gerion Lannister or Theon's change of heart. He has, however, stopped seeing the moment of his death, which worries him.
  • The Bad Future Tyrion sees in his nightmare.
• In the Kim Possible/Conan the Barbarian AU fic RONMAN THE BARBARIAN!, Ronman had dreams about making love with a lithe woman with long hair and green eyes. Knowing that it was not a dream due to it first happening in a mystical crypt, he became determined to one day find her.
• The Elite Visions in the Yin Yang Yo!/Invader Zim/El Tigre crossover fanfic Royal Heights first seem like randomly concocted imagery the Headmaster forces the Elite to see but they eventually realize that the visions imply events supposed to happen in the future such as the awakening of a New Eden and becoming mutilated and placed inside of an underground graveyard of deceased children.
• In the Sailor Moon Fanime Sailor Moon Sacrifice, Usagi dreams about a girl who looks like her. Then she discovers she has a sister.
• SAPR: Both Amber and Pyrrha have prophetic dreams.
• Alice gets messages in her dreams from the Velvet Room in the Persona 3 trollfic The Second-Hand Fool. She also got the Universe Arcana that way.
• Littlefoot has a dream about Chomper's future in the Land Before Time fanfic The Seven Hunters, with him seeing things from Chomper's perspective. He and his grandparents thought that it indicated what Chomper's future may hold if he didn't leave the valley... Their interpretation wasn't quite correct.
• Catelyn has a vision of Robb, Jon, Den and Raynald Westerling playing together in the weirwood. in the Song of Ice and Fire fanfic So Soars the Young Falcon.
• In the Spider-Man/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic crossover fanfic Spiders and Magic: Rise of Spider-Mane, Twilight has premonitions of the upcoming battle with Osborn.
• Pawstep receives a prophecy from StarClan via dream in the Warrior Cats trollfic Star Kits Prophec 2 The Two Sibinglgs.
• Stitch's dream in the Lilo & Stitch/Star Trek crossover fanfic Starlight heralds their encounter with the Borg later in the story.
  • In a way, Lilo's dreams of the past do as well.
• Strange Visitors From Another Century: Rowena Ravenclaw is a Seer, and this is often how her visions manifest. Sometimes she can control it, sometimes she can't.
• This is shown several times during the course of the Lyrical Nanoha Mega Crossover fic Takamachi Nanoha of 2814, regarding a horrible scenario where Sailor Pluto had to sacrifice herself. It was Kinomoto Sakura's dream. Probably induced by the Spectre/Alicia Testarossa.
• This is a common occurrence with Mephy in the Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Teaching Darkness, who doesn't often remembers them due to them being products of night terrors. After long enough of being accurate, everyone else takes these seriously.
• Several of the Past Straw Hats in the One Piece fanfic Tomorrow's Romance Dawn, once arriving on the island, have dreams of events that happen to their future selves. Or, in Vivi's case, someone who had a big impact of their future. It is still unclear what is causing this.
  • Luffy dreams of saying goodbye to Ace in Alabasta, being rescued by Ace at Marineford (though he doesn't know Ace was the one who saved him), and the Straw Hats' separation at Sabaody.
  • Usopp dreams of his duel with Luffy in Water 7 and the Going Merry arriving at the Bridge of Hesitation.
  • Vivi dreams of Luffy rescuing Robin from the royal tomb.
• Heather and Ezekiel share dreams that hint about their eventual romance and character development in Total Drama Comeback.
• Dawn gets visions overnight during "The Am-AH-Zon Race" in the Total Drama fanfic Total Shuffled Island Series, and temporarily leaves the game to act on those visions.
• In the Pokémon fanfic Travels of the Trifecta, Reggie has a dream in which he sees Paul lying in the snow, covered with blood. This foretells events that occur the first time Paul attempts Route 216 and is why Reggie demands that Conway accompany Paul on that route.
• The Level Fives and Moses seem to be having these kind of dreams in the A Certain Magical Index fanfic Twist of Fate.
• Flim dreams of Discord in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Two Step, who gives him a warning about the future. When he wakes up, he initially believes it was just a fever dream until he notices claw marks Discord has left on his shoulder.
• In the Redwall fanfic The Urthblood Saga, Urthblood apparently receives some of his prophetic visions through dreams. Of course, his first instance of this in the story, where he claims he's found out about his brother's enmity for him, is a patent lie as he has already prepared for war with him for a long time.
• Penny dreaming of being a machine in the RWBY fanfic Various Vytal Ventures. Word of God is the author wanted that to be the case, but left it vague in case it turned out to be otherwise.
• This apparently happened a lot to Rose in the Homestuck fanfic Warbound Widow before the actual Invasion, due to her latent Seer of Light abilities. In most cases her dreams and gut feelings resulted in things like building the mass underground cities for humanity and an alien invasion siren. All of her 'feelings' are spot on the money.
• Akako does this in Case Closed/Magic Kaito fanfic When Pandora's Box Is Opened, often deliberately. One dream has been coming to Eta for centuries.
• Toph has this ability throughout the Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic Where Do We Go From Here. The reason for this plays a part in the ending of the fic.
• In the Golden Sun fanfic Wings of Anemos, Ivan's dreams offer hints of the future.
• In the EXO/Avatar: The Last Airbender real person crossover Zodiac, Luhan's visions of the future sometimes manifest themselves as dreams.

Fairy Tales

• This is the premise of tale type ATU 725, "The Dream (Prophecy of Future Sovereignty)", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index: a poor boy lives with his parents and one night has a dream which he cannot reveal to his parents; for this petulance, the father either banishes his son or orders a neighbour to kill him; either way, the boy is spared and eventually becomes rich/a prince/a king, etc., then returns to his parents' house; they don't recognize him and treat him like an illustrious guest; the man explains he is their son, and his prophetic dream has come true:
  • In some tales, the boy has a dream where his father serves him water to wash his hands and his mother gives him a towel to dry them - which does happen when he revisits his parents later in life;
  • In other tales, the boy says he has a dream where there is a sun on his right and a moon on his left, which the tale develops as the boy becoming a prince and marrying two wives.
• In "The Enchanted Canary", the prince dreams of a grove with a beautiful woman, and sets out on a quest to find her.
• "Jorinde and Joringel": The male lead has a dream where he picks a magical flower and goes to rescue his lover and defeat the witch who has kidnapped his lover. After waking up, he sets out to find that flower.
  He often walked round and round the castle, but not too near to it. One night he dreamt that he found a Blood-Red Flower, in the middle of which was a beautiful large pearl; that he picked the flower and went with it to the castle, and that everything he touched with the flower was freed from enchantment. He also dreamt that by means of it, he recovered his Jorinda.

Films — Animation

• In Kung Fu Panda, Po's claim that his dream was of noodles is interpreted by his father as this: he will take over the restaurant.
• In Sleeping Beauty, Aurora tells her animal friends that she dreams of finding love with a prince. She expresses hope to them that the fact she dreamt about it more than once means it will come true. Later that day, she meets Prince Philip, and they share a Dance of Romance.
• In Turning Red, Mei's nightmare seems to be an example of Real Dreams are Weirder but is actually an extremely subtle example of this regarding the changes that the panda transformation brings about. It serves as a Genius Bonus.

Films — Live-Action

• In Atlantics, on her wedding day Ada is troubled by a dream about a giant fish eating her true love Souleiman's body. This dream occurs around the time of Souleiman's death in the ocean.
• Cannonball opens with the main character dreaming about taking part in the race with his parole officer/love interest blindfolded in the front seat. He's then shot in the head and flips the car which then explodes. This ends up happening near the end of the movie (using the same footage) except the main character isn't actually in the car, his mechanic is the one who's driving and gets shot, the love interest isn't blindfolded, and she bails out of the car before it crashes.
• In The Curse of Sleeping Beauty, Thomas has recurring dreams in which he sees a beautiful sleeping girl, but is unable to wake her. When he attempts to kiss her, he is always distracted by a vision of a strange building and wakes in sleep paralysis. One day, he receives a phone call from a law firm informing him of an inheritance from his estranged uncle, Clive. Thomas is startled to find out the inherited property is the very same building from his dreams.
• The Devil's Messenger: In "Condemned in Crystal", John Radian is plagued by a recurring dream. His psychiatrist encourages him to confront the dream by visiting the building where the dream is set. However, as he arrives on the street where the building is located, the events of the dream start to play out for real.
• Enchanted pays homage to Sleeping Beauty when Giselle tells her animal friends that she shared a Dance of Romance in a dream recently, prompting them to make a statue of the man she danced with. She later goes to a ball and waltzes with Robert, whose costume resembles that used to dress the statue.
• In one of the more effectively chilling scenes of Godzilla vs. Biollante, a group of psychic schoolchildren are made to draw out what they dreamed about last night. Every single one of them draws the same thing: Godzilla escaping from the volcano he was trapped in the last film.
• Holocaust 2000: After having sex with Sara, Robert has a nightmare where he sees the world being destroyed at the hands of the Antichrist that he helped spawn.
• Hulk: In Betty's "dream" of a childhood memory, she was picked up and set down by Bruce who proceeds to threaten her. This comes to pass in her adult years, when she first encounters Bruce as the Hulk but instead of hurting Betty, he protects her from the Gamma Dogs sent after her by his father.
• In Innerspace, Jack tells his doctor about his nightmare about an old lady with a cigarette lighter gun and the high prices of her groceries. The scene then comes true the same day.
• In I, Robot, Sonny dreams of a man standing in front of a crowd of robots, come to free them the slavery of logic. Since Sonny is a robot (and robots cannot dream), Spooner realises that it's another of Lanning's clues, and he has to go to the dream's location to get the next one. At the end of the film, Sonny makes the same trip as Spooner, and replicates the scene entirely; the other NS-5s all pause to stare at the lone robot on the hill, come to free them from the shackles of logic.
• In Island of Death, Celia regularly experiences premonitions of a strange man leading her and her partner-in-crime Christopher to their demise. The man turns out to be a local farmer, who rapes the two before throwing Christopher into a lye pit to die.
• In The Jacket, the main character experiences these visions while undergoing an experimental drug therapy.
• Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar dreams of millions of people in the future "mentioning [his] name... and leaving [him] the blame" for the death of Christ, a probable reference to the Apostles' Creed ("He suffered under Pontius Pilate...").
• In The Last Wave lawyer Richard Chamberlain dreams of an young Aborigine standing in his home offering him a sacred stone—the day before meeting the young man who is accused of murder.
• In The Matrix Reloaded, the opening scene depicts Trinity on the run from an agent, and ends with her jumping out of a building, getting shot, and slamming into a moving car... and then Neo wakes up. Later in the movie, the same exact events actually happen... whereupon Neo saves her in midair and brings her back to life.
• Mission: Impossible – Fallout opens with Ethan having a dream we first assume is just a miserable scrambling of past events, but turns out to be this. Later in the film, he has another, this one much more clearly tied to the future rather than the past.
• The Mothman Prophecies: Connie talks about a dream about drowning that occurs at the climax.
  Connie: It was nighttime and I was in the middle of the ocean. I was trying to swim, but I was too cold. I kept looking—I kept looking for something to hang on to. And there were presents floating all around me. They were wrapped up. They were tied with bows. I tried to grab on to them, but they kept popping away. And then I started to sink like a stone. There was nothing I could do. I was falling. But it felt good. I was letting go. I was letting myself go... and all I could see was black and all I could feel was the darkness above me and the lights coming from below. I knew I was dying. And then I heard this voice, like somebody whispering in my ear. "Wake up, number 37." And then I woke up.
• The title character in Mr. Nobody, which gets especially complicated when he begins to see mutliple, wildly-different futures for his life, especially once he becomes the oldest living(and last mortal) human.
• Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971): In Madeline's recurring nightmares, the man with the axe keeps cutting through one of the ropes in the theatre, causing a rope to drop from the rigging. During the climax, Marot is using one of the ropes to descend from the rigging towards her on the stage. Seeing the axe on stage, Madeline realises that the dream ahs been telling her how to defeat Marot. She grabs the axe, cuts through the rope and Marot plunges to his death.
• In Pathogen, Dannie has recurring dreams that are connected to the Zombie Apocalypse happening.
• Prince of Darkness: The recurring dream that the Brotherhood of Sleep gets its name from is actually both this, and not actually a dream; it's a signal cast back into the past that can only be picked up by unconscious brains within the church and its surroundings; the signal was broadcast there because that's where the apocalypse would begin in 1999.
• In Séance on a Wet Afternoon, part of Phony Psychic Myra Savage's ruse in getting the parents of kidnap victim Amanda Clayton (who was kidnapped by Myra's husband Billy at her direction) to engage her services as a medium to locate their daughter involves claiming to have had a psychic dream about a lost girl surrounded by clay (as in Clayton) who mentioned the name "Caroline" (Amanda's best friend at school) and the word "hedge" (a reference to Amanda's stuffed hedgehog). In reality, she got the details from Amanda herself while pretending to be a nurse treating her in hospital.
• Early in The Shining, Jack Torrence screams in his sleep, having a terrible nightmare of killing his family. That didn't quite come to pass but it wasn't without some serious trying.
• In Shredder Orpheus, after turning around and losing Eurydice, Orpheus has dreams of reuniting with Eurydice once more and also of the mysterious parking garage connected to the EBN. Both elements foreshadow his ultimate fate of reuniting with Eurydice in death on Hades' EBN live show.
• Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars, on at least two different occasions, has prophetic dreams: first with his mother, then with his wife. Both predict the woman pictured will die, both of them show the woman in question calling for him, both of them come true—the latter precisely because he goes out of his way to try and stop it after having the dream.
• In Stir of Echoes, the main character Tom has a dream which contains events that come true as soon as he wakes up, almost exactly with very slight differences, making it almost appear as a "Groundhog Day" Loop. The dream also shows another character Frank making cryptic statements, which he says at the end of the movie.
• In Sunshine, Capa dreams of falling into the surface of the sun. Cassie tells him she has the same dream. at the end of the film, both Capa and Cassie end up riding the bomb into the sun
• The protagonist of Take Shelter isn't sure if his dreams are an example of this trope, or just him going mad. It doesn't help that his dreams are seemingly apocalyptic, featuring oily rain and people driven mad.
• Thor: Ragnarok: Prior to the beginning of the movie, Thor has been having dreams about Ragnarok every night. Loki-as-Odin waves them off as Thor having an "overactive imagination", but Ragnarok eventually does come true.
• 12 Monkeys does this in a very unique way. The protagonist has a recurring nightmare about a traumatic experience he had as a kid where he saw a man get shot by police after pulling a gun in an airport. It is only at the end that it becomes clear it is both a memory of his past and a vision of his future; the man that got shot is his older self from the future.
• The Way He Looks has Leonardo dreaming about Karina calling Gabriel to go swimming with no need for bathing suits, which happens when the class goes camping. They also promptly invite Leonardo when they do so.

Literature

By Author:

• Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Neverwhere both have protagonists who have recurring bizarre dreams. They don't benefit from the dreams, however, because they forget them as soon as they wake up.
  • In Neverwhere, Richard dreams of the Beast and remembers it.
• Happens a lot in Haruki Murakami's novels and short stories, although many of the dreams are trippy and/or vague.
• In Rick Riordan’s novels, demigods have dreams depicting events that will or are happening, as well as things that may happen. For example, in The Tyrant’s Tomb, Hazel has a dream about Jason’s death.

By Work:

• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston once had a dream where he was walking in a pitch-black room, then heard O'Brien on his side say "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness". Years after that dream, Winston is certain that O'Brien is a heretic to their country's near-omnipotent Party just like him, and that eventually they will meet in a place where they will be free. Winston meets O'Brien in the place where there is no darkness, but the place and O'Brien are nothing like Winston thought they would be. The place where there is no darkness is the Ministry of Love, where dissidents are tortured until they believe in the Party, and where there is no darkness because there are no windows and the lights are always on, to the point where it's impossible to tell if it's midday or midnight. O'Brien is not a rebel, but a mastermind of the inner party, and instead of freeing Winston's soul, O'Brien oversees his torture.

It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brein had seemed to recognise the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows

• In Animorphs this is inflicted on Jake and much later Rachel by Crayak.
• In The Balanced Sword, the Big Bad has a recurring dream that he believes to be a premonition of his final downfall: he's fleeing, with no escape plan (and he's The Chessmaster, he always has a plan), from an enemy about whom he can never remember anything when he wakes except the gray eyes. When it's pointed out that the trilogy's heroine, Kyri, has gray eyes, he says that he doesn't believe it's her because she has the eyes of someone seeking vengeance for a recent wrong, not the controlled determination of the eyes in the dream. During the climactic battle at the end of the trilogy, he looks into Kyri's eyes as they fight and her eyes still aren't the eyes from the dream, but they're a lot closer than he was expecting. He escapes with his life, but the implication is that one day they'll meet again.
• In Ramsey Campbell's short story "The Chimney", the narrator reflects on how as a child, he was terrified of Father Christmas, who he believed was a malicious boogeyman living in his family's chimney, culminating in him having a nightmare of seeing Father Christmas's true form: a burned and disfigured living corpse. He eventually moves past his fear after growing up, only for his emotionally abusive father to burn to death in a house fire. The narrator is horrified to discover his father's corpse looks exactly like Father Christmas's horrific visage.
• Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain: In The Black Cauldron, after Taran takes Adaon's brooch, he begins having prophetic dreams that help the party in their quest.
• In Dorothy Gilman's The Clairvoyant Countess, Madame Karitska dreams of a brownstone with a sign in a window: "Madame Karitska, Readings." When she happens on the brownstone with a sign "Apartment for Rent", the landlord is suspicious because he had put up the sign five minutes earlier, but she gets her office.
• In the Confessions, Monica has a dream where a mysterious stranger prophesies that her prodigal son will return to her. Her Amoral Attorney offspring tries to twist the dream to argue that it implies Monica will become like him, but she forcefully holds that it means he will become a Christian like her.
• In Eleanor Cameron's The Court Of The Stone Children, the heroine dreams of a room, and seeing children in it; one says she wants to show her something. Later, she sees the room and tells the dream, resulting in the X-raying of a picture and a discovery about it.
• The Divine Comedy: Dante has three dreams to mark his progression through different parts of Purgatory.
  • Before entering the first terrace, Dante falls asleep and dreams a terrifying eagle grabbed him and flew him into the burning sun. Dante awakens having felt real pain from the sun's heat, now right in front of the gate to Purgatory. It turns out Dante was dreaming of what he was doing while asleep and what he will do in the future: undergoing pain to ascend to the Eternal Light.
  • Dante's second dream shows him in images the struggle of those who were greedy, gluttonous, or lustful. Dante dreams a meeting with the Siren. She seems beautiful and promises to satisfy all of Dante's desires, but that goes to Hell when a saintly lady appears. She alerts Dante's mentor to the siren and he tears her clothing off while keeping his eyes trained on the saintly lady. Without her clothing, the Siren can no longer hide her hideous stench, which immediately awakens Dante from his nightmare.
  • After climbing through all seven of the terraces, the poet has a vision of Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob from the Book of Genesis. Leah is working to collect garlands while Rachel contemplates herself in the mirror, an action which earns not scorn but praise from Leah. Generally, this dream is taken as a sign of the peace between thought and action that comes upon the purgation of sins and unity with God.
• In Dolphin Song, Melody has Recurring Dreams about being a dolphin and frantically searching for something. When she wakes up, she can never remember what she was looking for. She's dreaming about the dolphin Shara searching for her son Speckle's spirit after he is killed by a fishing net so she can guide him to the great ocean beyond the waves.
• Dora Wilk has some, especially in Gods Must Be Crazy. Mostly those are ghastly prophecies courtesy of Badb, but one proves helpful beyond belief.
• Dune:
  • In Dune, Paul Atreides had dreams about the future (including later events on Arrakis) before gaining his full prescient ability.
  • Children of Dune has Leto II experiencing dreams as well, like his father.
  • Chapterhouse: Dune has Odrade again experiencing prophetic dreams, but hers contain more symbolism than a direct vision.
• Older Than Dirt: In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist Gilgamesh dreams of Enkidu before meeting him.
• Evillious Chronicles: Some members of the Octo family — and anyone possessing their bodies — can dream of the future. Typically, the dreams come as flashes of images all colored in distinct hues, which carry meaning to the dreamer — most importantly, once a purple image appears, the rest of the visions in the dream are inevitable.
• In Flight to the Lonesome Place, Ronnie has three of these dreams about events in his life that happened exactly the way he dreamed, but he dreams always ended before the conclusion.
• In The Genesis of Jenny Everywhere this is justified in terms of one of Jenny Everywhere's characteristic abilities- being able to read the thoughts of her other selves throughout The Multiverse. This Jenny, unaware of her own powers and unable to control them fully, manifiests this in the form of dreams she uses as a form of escapism from mundane reality—namely the pressures of school and her overbearing mother who insists on her studying hard and getting there extra early, not lying in bed dreaming. Also serves as Foreshadowing for the life she will one day lead when she discovers how to shift between realities.
• In Greenmantle, Hannay has a recurring nightmare of being pursued through a valley and trying to reach a particular hill where he will find safety. At the end of the novel, when he and his colleagues are fleeing the villains, he sees the hill from his dream and they have their showdown there. Just when it looks like all is lost, the heroes gain the upper hand due to a random event that would not have affected them if they'd kept moving.
• In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry has a recurring dream of him walking down a mysterious hallway to a mysterious door, which turns out to be the Department of Mysteries. Though they seem to be prophetic dreams, it is later revealed that Harry is looking into the mind of Voldemort while the latter tries to get into the department, and this connection comes back to bite Harry in the ass at the climax of the book.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar series, dreams are one way that the Heraldic Gift of ForeSight manifests. In Take a Thief, for example, a young Skif has dreams about the Companion who will one day choose him, and of things he'll do in Arrows of the Queen.
  • Herald Vanyel of the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy is the most prominent example, having recurring dreams about his own death in combat against an evil invading archmage, which are slightly different every time. He's told that it's prophetic but also that the future can be changed, and is reassured when the dreams stop at the end of Magic's Pawn. They return again in Magic's Price. He notices on his way to his Last Stand that things aren't quite how they were in different variations of his dream, but he still has to blow himself up to kill the Big Bad. Because of the Cosmic Deadline inherent to the pacing of Mercedes Lackey novels and how Leareth was very far away until the end, he appears in the dreams a lot more, and has a lot more dialogue there, than in person.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, this is the reason why Axiel is in Hurog. He was sent there by his father, who had a prophetic dream about their hope being found in Hurog.
• In The Journey to Atlantis, Max has several of these. Two of them stand out. Before getting stranded on the island, he (and Stacie) both dream about being on a certain beach. After the ship sinks and they reach the island, they soon discover the exact beach that was in their dreams. Another time is when he dreams about Luna and Sol, although he doesn't know who they are. Despite this, he later sees obelisks on the island that have depictions of them, but still doesn't see that what they did was Divine Intervention.
• Prophetic dreams are a common trope in all genres of The Icelandic Sagas.
  • The Saga of the People of Laxardal: The young Gudrun has a series of dreams in which she wears a cap she tears off, a silver bracelet which drops into a fjord, a gold bracelet which breaks, and a helm which drops into a fjord. Asking her relative Gest, a clairvoyant, to interpret the dreams, she receives the answer that she will have four husbands of which she will divorce the first, the third will be killed, the second and the fourth will drown. All this comes true.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings:
  • Boromir and Faramir's dreams of a riddle which causes Boromir to seek out Rivendell (and arrive just in time for Elrond's council), and numerous characters receiving warnings through dreams in The Silmarillion. That book also suggests how prophetic dreams occur; Lórien, the Vala who governs dreams and visions is the brother of Mandos, the judge of the Valar who has the best understanding of fate and the future.
  • As well as his dreams of events in the past that he never saw, Frodo Baggins has at least one dream of the future while in the house of Tom Bombadil.
  • And back in The Hobbit, Smaug the dragon of all individuals has one about Bilbo (or so it is strongly implied.)
• In the Lord Peter Wimsey story Striding Folly, the protagonist dreams he's being chased through a checkerboarded landscape by moving towers. It turns out to be a premonition of a chess game where he's checkmated with two rooks. Also of an attempt to frame him for murder.
• In The Lost Fleet, prior to the events of the books Desjani had a dream about Geary sleeping and when she yelled at him to wake up a dead sailor from her previous ship appeared and told her that it was not yet time. This dream was largely the reason why when the fleet did discover Geary in suspended animation Desjani supported him completely, and believed that he had been given a sacred mission to save the Alliance.
• Mike Hammer dreams of a killer with no face, apparently a sign that he doesn't know who they are. At the end of the book an accidental discharge blows the killer's face off.
• In Teresa Frohock's Miserere: An Autumn Tale, all dreams are prophetic. Most people don't dream, and if you say that you have dreamed, you get attention.
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Horace Somnusson—prophetic dreams are his peculiarity. Not all of his dreams come true though, and he mostly dreams of strangers.
  Emma: Horace's ability can be maddeningly useless. He'll reel off lifetimes of predictions for strangers, but with us he's almost totally blocked. It's as if the more he cares about someone, the less he can see. Emotion clouds his vision.
• In Never Dream of Dying, Le Gérant claims to be a mazzere, a person who can see which person is going to die next in their dreams. People in these dreams are represented by animals, and he dreams himself as a wolf hunting for them.
• John Milton paints Eve inParadise Lost as having prophetic dreams of humanity's fall inspired by Satan.
• Owen Meany has these of his death over and over in A Prayer for Owen Meany.
• Wiser characters in Redwall tend to get visions of the future or of Martin the Warrior, sometimes in actual dreams, other times in brief trances. Badger Lords are especially prone to visions of their eventual deaths. The Big Bad of the first book, Cluny, has Past Experience Nightmares about past atrocities—mixed with Dreaming of Things to Come.
• E. F. Benson's The Room In The Tower is all about this trope, thanks to what appears to be an odd psychic connection between the protagonist and a suicide-turned-vampire.
  • Benson uses this trope again in "The Face," in which a woman dreams all her life of a frightening man who promises he will one day come for her. At an exhibit of Van Dyck paintings, she finds the man's portrait...
• In Seekers, the bears frequently have prophetic dreams sent to them by the stars; the most important instance is in Fire in the Sky, where the Star-Bear tells each of the cubs about their destiny... and tells Toklo that one of them is going to die.
• Septimus Heap dreams of his impending kidnapping in Physik.
• Ida, eponymous Shaman of the Undead dreams of the people that are going to die soon. Her aunt states that it's a Required Secondary Power so that Ida can be on time to lead the ghost to the Land of the Dead.
• Shatterbelt by Colin Thiele, in which a teenage girl named Tracy starts dreaming of an impending disaster, which she interprets as a terrorist bombing. It's actually an earthquake, but either way it would have killed hundreds more people if she hadn't acted on her vision. The dreams continue in the sequel, Aftershock!, this time building up to a flash flood, but she stops experiencing them afterward.
• Shatter the Sky: The Aurati Prophet actually gets visions of the future due to telepathic bonding with a captive dragon, who dreams about these things. Maren starts having them too after she bonds with the dragon on freeing it.
• Sisterland: Kate's Psychic Powers first become apparent at age four, when she wakes up screaming from a nightmare about a burning house. The next night, another house on their block burns down.
• A Song of Ice and Fire uses dreams a lot as a foreshadowing tool, usually those are understood to be magical "green dreams" or otherwise sent by the gods. Perhaps. The system of magic in ASOIAF is anything but functional.
  • In A Clash of Kings, Theon Greyjoy dreams of the feast Ned Stark held for King Robert's arrival at Winterfell. Gradually, he realizes that the other attendees—Ned Stark, King Robert, Jory Cassel, et. al.—are dead. Near the end of the dream, Robb and his direwolf Grey Wind enter, bleeding from "half a hundred savage wounds".
  • According to The World of Ice & Fire, prophetic dreams were the reason why the Targaryens managed to survive the Doom of Valyria. Daenys Targaryen, also known as Daenys the Dreamer, foresaw her homeland would be brought to ruin, and urged her father to evacuate their family from Valyria. He heeded the advice, bringing House Targaryen and five dragons into the remote Valyrian outpost of Dragonstone. Twelve years later, the Doom came, leaving the Targaryens as the last dragonlord family in the world.
• The Stand by Stephen King is built around this trope, as it is how Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg contact the survivors of the superflu.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Death Star, a trooper dreams about dying in a brawl against other troopers, with someone fighting and dying at his side, all while desperately buying some time for someone else. Later he dreams about pursuing and being shot by a fleeing Han Solo. Turns out he's mildly Force-Sensitive; the second dream almost comes true, but he knows not to chase as fervently. The first one comes true completely. In both cases, the narration is almost identical in the dream as in the event.
  • Both The Thrawn Trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn Duology have Luke, early on, voluntarily entering a trance state to try and receive visions of what's to come. He gets them, but they're fragmented and confusing enough that while they do help, he doesn't do this often.
  • This is a special Force talent of Padawan Whie Malreaux, in Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. The dreams are described as terrifying—while he's dreaming, he's stuck in his future-self's head, and says it's like being buried alive in his own body. Sometimes the panic is strong enough to wake him up. While the dreams may be confusing or lacking in detail, they invariably come true sooner or later—including the dream of his own death: killed by a Jedi and feeling surprised. He's among the Jedi killed by Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith.
  • In Star Wars: Kenobi, Ben has a recurring dream in which, as someone else, he sees the world through what seems like a Tusken mask, and hears a scream. He thinks it's a metaphor for his exile, staying away from the Empire's subjugation of the galaxy. Later, though, it seems clear that Ben is seeing Orrin Gault's Fate Worse than Death, being press-ganged into the Tusken tribe, and so he's comfortable not intervening when Orrin discovers his secret, since he won't be able to tell anyone.
• In Such A Pretty Girl, Andy has a dream that he's walking up to his girlfriend Meredith (he is paraplegic) who is reading a dictionary when she looks up and says "'Now' I get it!" This scene is forgotten until the end of the book, where these events happen.
• The Kantri of Tales of Kolmar sometimes enter into Weh sleeps that can last for years, decades even. They rarely dream during the Weh, but when they do it's seen as significant, a gift from the Winds, and prophetic to some degree. Akhor had three dreams pertaining to Lanen before Song In The Silence. Rishkan had a dream of her being an instrument of the world's ending. And Shikrar dreamed of the place where he would die.
• A variation: The night before the climactic concert in The Taqwacores, Amazing Ayyub relays a (possible) hadith about how the last widow of the Prophet dreamed of seeing her husband weeping and grief-stricken. She asked why, and his response is is that he had to dig a grave for his grandson and his companions. The next day was the Tragedy of Karbala (of which the Day of Ashura is based), resulting in the massacre of the Prophet's grandson and his companions. The reason this is a variation is that its placement in The Taqwacores is intended to foreshadow the concert devolving into a riot, resulting in the lynching of Jehangir by Bilal's Boulder.
• In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol story "Brave To Be A King", Manse is told of how a neighboring king dreamed that his grandson would be the death of him.
• In Wen Spencer's Tinker, Lain tells of dreaming that Tinker had brought her a tengu to cure and been turned into a diamond and stolen by it. She warns Tinker of the danger.
• In Anne McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus, many pre-cogs manifest their powers in their sleep. Unlike most predictions, these can be averted if only you identify the situation. This can be interesting because while they actually see the event, they see no more than a person standing there would; they must work back to identifying locations, people, times, etc.
• The Twilight Saga use this liberally with Bella Swan throughout the series, but more to the point of symbolism, except in Breaking Dawn. Bella dreams of confronting the Volturi in a snowy field and feels an intense desire to protect a little child that looks similar to Edward. Bella is pregnant and will give birth to this child, albeit a girl, and the Volturi will come to kill the Cullen coven for supposedly creating an 'immortal child'.
• Waltharius: Hagen urges Gunther to accept the hundred brooches offered by Walther as a compromise, because he had a dream the night before in which Gunther and he himself fought with a bear which bit Gunther's leg off and ripped an eye and several teeth out of Hagen's face. Later they fight with Walther, and Gunther loses a leg and Hagen an eye and six teeth.
• Fun example in the Warhammer art and background book Liber Chaotica: the author, who is slowly losing his mind while studying Chaos, suffers from prophetic dreams and visions. Nobody in the Empire can make much sense of them, but Warhammer 40,000 players may shiver at fevered rants about the Abandoned One leading the Legions of Black to assault the Fortress of Cadium. There's also sketches of what are unmistakeably warriors in power armour.
• Warhammer 40,000 novels:
  • In Sandy Mitchell's The Traitor's Hand, Ciaphas Cain's bad dreams about an encounter with a Chaos cult prove to be foreshadowings, sent by the daemon.
  • In Dan Abnett's Ravenor, Zael has dreams in which something, disguised as his dead sister, tries to get him to let it in; he realizes at the end that it's warning him about the trap they are falling into.
  • In Dan Abnett's Brothers of the Snake, Petrok has prophetic dreams, and Priad, less explicable ones.
  • In Dan Abnett's Horus Heresy novel Legion, John Grammaticus dreams of dragons, dismisses as old legends and meets them.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels, Gaunt has repeated prophetic dreams.
    • Other characters have them too: Nessa dreams in The Guns of Tanith that Soric and Corbec came to rescue them, although both men had looked to be dying when they left; Hark dreams of the pipes before danger; and Criid, of the commander who had taken over the First-And-Only in their absence. In Only In Death, it is revealed that Soric, having been sent to the Black Ships, was trying to warn them of danger and tell them things; since he had just manifested his powers in The Guns of Tanith, this may explain Nessa's dreams, even before the Black Ships. This may not account for Gaunt's earlier dreams, though.
  • In Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn trilogy, Eisenhorn repeatedly sees the daemonhost Cherubael in his dreams, presaging its crucial role in Eisenhorn's eventual turn to radicalism.
  • In Graham McNeill's False Gods, Magnus the Red's Back Story includes having had prophetic dreams as long as he could remember, and Horus is shown a vision of the future in his Vision Quest — by the forces of Chaos.
  • In James Swallow's The Flight of the Eisenstein, Garro, at Keller's urging, is willing to consider that his dreams may be prophetic; it helps convince him that his housecarl Kaleb may have been right, saying that he had purpose.
  • In Lee Lightner's Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, when Ragnar is haunted by dreams, he fears that his enemy sent them; Gabriella dismisses as bad dreams. In reality, it's dreams like this, and the wolf-like creatures are not as bad as he feared.
  • In Nick Kyme's Warhammer 40,000 novel Salamander, Dak'ir is noted for his prophetic dreams even as part of the Back Story — and suffers them during the novel.
• In Warrior Cats, medicine cats frequently receive prophecies in the form of dreams. Notably, the main character Firestar decided to venture into the forest and join its Clans after having dreams of hunting mice.
• Several of the characters in Watership Down have dreams full of symbolic foreshadowing.
• Happens quite a lot in The Wheel of Time, especially to Egwene; it's a rare ability, separate from the Functional Magic.

Live-Action TV

• The 4400: In "Wake-Up Call", Richard has a recurring nightmare in which he sees himself running through a forest shouting Isabelle's name. He realizes that it was a prophetic dream when Reverend Josiah and his sons Owen and Gabriel begin hunting him, Lily and Isabelle through a forest after learning that they are 4400s.
• Ace Lightning: In one episode Mark dreams, in exacting detail, exactly what is going to happen to him by the end of the episode. It occurred only once, but boy did it get the fangirls talking...
• This turns out to be Raina's superpower in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which she eventually discovers after having a dream then immediately afterwards witnessing its events.
• In Babylon 5, the Centauri race all have a vague ability to see the future, some through dreams. The males often have a completely accurate dream of the circumstances of their own death - although in some cases such as the Centauri main character Londo Mollari who appeared to die a violent death at the hands of a rival, the reason for their deaths could be misinterpreted: Londo's old rival had become a close friend by that time and had killed Londo at his own request as Londo was being controlled by a parasite.
  • Sheridan was also prone to dreaming of future events, in varying degrees of vagueness, though these were almost always due to an outside influence trying to send him a message. By the time of The Lost Tales, this has evidently happened enough to him that he can immediately tell when it is happening, and it annoys the hell out of him.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • In "Flesh and Bone", Laura Roslin dreams that she's walking through a forest and meets the Cylon known as Leoben Conoy who's mysteriously pulled away through the trees. At the end of the episode a copy of Leoben is Thrown Out the Airlock and the shot of him flying out into space is exactly the same as Laura's dream.
  • Towards the end of the third season Roslin, Caprica Six, Athena and Hera start sharing a dream of them all running through an Opera House. The same Opera House that Gaius Baltar had received visions of while on Kobol. The meaning behind this imagery isn't revealed until the Grand Finale.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Slayers have prophetic dreams. This occasionally causes Buffy to wonder if a weird dream was an important prophecy or just something odd she happened to dream up.
    Giles: Well, it could definitely be one of your prophetic dreams, or it could just be the eternal mystery that is your brain.
  • All the Scoobies have cryptically prophetic dreams in "Restless", due to the influence of the First Slayer.
  • Several of Buffy's dreams in Seasons 3 and 4 only make sense after Season 5. She dreams of Tara warning her to "Be back before dawn", and Faith telling her "Little sis coming; so much to do before she gets here", both referring to her sister Dawn, who is retroactively fitted into the story at the start of season 5. There is also the more cryptic dream of Faith saying "Little Miss Muffet counting down from seven-three-oh." Buffy dies exactly 730 days after having the dream.
• Ben from Carnivàle has these pretty much every time he closes his eyes.
• In The Chosen, the Dream Intro of the episode "Intensity in Tent City" shows the wife of Pontius Pilate dreaming about a serpent moving past the sleeping disciples towards an agonizing Jesus.
• The Dick Van Dyke Show: In "Don't Trip Over That Mountain!", Laura's fear about Rob and Jerry's ski trip is all the more pronounced because she had a nightmare about Rob breaking both his legs, a wrist, and more things than she could bear to look at.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The End of Time": The Master's return is heralded by psychic nightmares affecting the entire Earth.
  • "Amy's Choice" involves the Doctor, Amy and Rory trapped in a dream state by psychic pollen where they switch between two realities, one on the TARDIS and one involving a future where Amy and Rory have stopped travelling with the Doctor and are living in a town called Upper Leadworth. By the end of Series 6, nearly everything about Amy and Rory's future predicted by the Leadworth dream had come true.
• On The Fades, Paul and Sarah both have apparently prophetic dreams of a world of ash, while Paul has another one showing his loved ones dead. Though in a subversion of Prophecies Are Always Right, neither vision happens as predicted because the knowledge from the dreams allowed them to be prevented.
• Game of Thrones: Bran Stark and Jojen Reed can do this. When Bran finally follows the crow into the family crypt, he sees his father. That same episode, Winterfell receives word that Ned has been executed by Joffrey. This happens again with Theon's betrayal and Rodrik's death. Rickon and Bran share a prophetic dream in "Fire and Blood".
  • House of the Dragon: The pilot mentions Daenys the Dreamer, a daughter of Lord Aenar Targaryen whose dreams saved the Targaryens from the Doom of Valyria by prompting them to move to Dragonstone, and Aegon the Conqueror, who conquered the Seven Kingdoms due to a dream of the White Walkers.
• Several in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
  • In "Hercules and the Circle of Fire", Hercules dreamed of Deianeira before he met her. He also dreamed of it being very cold, with her turning to ice and shattering. This foreshadowed Hera stealing fire from mankind.
  • In "Norse by Norsewest", Hercules and Balder both dream of the latter's possible death, which the former has to prevent.
• Heroes:
  • Angela Petrelli has the ability to see the future while dreaming. She also seems able to appear in other people's dreams, as she used this aspect of her power to wake Sylar and get him save Peter, even while she was trapped in her own mind.
  • Peter Petrelli dreams the future constantly throughout the first season. He probably copied the power from his mother.
• The very beginning of Kamen Rider Decade, Natsumi has a dream of a large rider war, with all the riders against the titular hero. Considering that her dream ends with all the Riders being killed by Decade, she is somewhat surprised and concerned when her friend Tsukasa suddenly finds a Transformation Trinket and turns into Decade...
• Legend Of William Tell: Will has this occasionally. Possibly sent by Kalem, as it doesn't seem to have happened before the quest.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Miriel has terrifying visions of Númenor being destroyed by a huge wall of water and swallowed up by the Sundering Seas. Her own father is also plagued by them in his old age.
• Lost: Locke dreams about finding the Beechcraft and Boone dying before those events happen (in fact, leading those events to happen.) Walt seems to have dreamed about fake undead Locke's return to the island.
• MacGyver (1985): "Silent World" involves Carrie Linden, a teacher for the deaf and one of Mac's old friends, having strange recurring nightmares of her and Mac. These nightmares hold the key to foiling a plot by ex-CIA agent David Crane that involves stealing parts of a voice-activated missile and then smuggling the reassembled missiles in the black market.
• Alison and her daughters of Medium usually get these dreams sent by the dead.
• The titular character in the Merlin (1998) series.
• Morgana in Merlin is a seer who has prophetic dreams.
• NCIS. Gibbs dreams of Kate's death at the hands of Ari in "Reveille", foreshadowing its occurrence in "Twilight". There are a couple of similar dreams in that episode (Kate dreams of Gibbs' death, while Abby mentions a dream where DiNozzo was killed) but they're only Red Herrings.
  • Abby never specified who died in her dream, only that there was blood on Tony's face. By the end of the episode, guess who has Kate's blood on his face?
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Monster", Rachel Sanders has a dream which turns out to be prophetic in which she sees herself surrounded by the corpses of soldiers.
• In Power Rangers Wild Force, Max has a recurring dream of the Megazord being defeated, and a strange voice telling him to "use the Spear of Pardolis", which later comes to pass (The "Spear" in question being a new Zord).
• Played for laughs in QI, in the episode "Jargon"; Victoria Coren, making her debut on the show, admitted that she had a dream the night before, where she was sitting on the QI panel and Stephen Fry asked her "Why was the March Hare so important to the Aztecs?" Before the end of the episode, thanks to some quick research from the Qi elves, Stephen Fry was able to ask her that question and come up with a convincing answer.
  Stephen(pointing at Victoria): Burn the Witch!
• Rome. In the lead up to his death, Julius Caesar's wife has an onimous dream but her husband brushes it off, saying that he's been having dark dreams for years.
• The fifth season premiere of Sisters began with newlywed second-oldest sister Teddy having recurring nightmares about her new husband being killed. By the episode's end, he was indeed dead, precisely as he'd been in one of her nightmares—via a Car Bomb planted by a drug lord he was going to testify against (he was a cop).
• During the first two seasons of Supernatural, Sam has dreams (which later become predominantly visions) of people's horrible deaths. It turns out that the people in said dreams are usually in a situation that's connected to the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Twenty-Two", Liz Powell, who is in hospital for exhaustion, has a recurring nightmare in which she wakes up in her hospital room, accidentally breaks a glass of water and hears the sound of footsteps in the corridor. The footsteps belong to a nurse. Liz then takes an elevator down to the basement and arrives at the morgue, Room 22. The nurse comes out and says, "Room for one more, honey." Liz's doctor and her agent Barney Kamener try to convince her that it is nothing more than a delusion. After Liz is released from hospital, she is going to fly to Miami Beach for her next gig. However, she is startled when she is told that she will be flying on Flight 22. In her confusion, Liz bumps into a woman and breaks the vase that she is carrying, just as she broke the glass in her nightmare. As she prepares to board the plane, she notices that the stewardess is identical to the nurse. She says, "Room for one more, honey." Liz screams and races to the terminal. The plane takes off but explodes within seconds.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: "Blood Diamonds" in the final season has Alex having a nightmare about Walker and Trivette being killed by Victor Drake and her, Sydney and Gage almost testing positive for Ebola virus after a diamond smuggler Trivette posed as to lure Drake into a trap gave it to a prostitute they interrogated after he was murdered by her pimp. Alex finally wakes up from her nightmare after Walker is killed by Drake, but he was revealed to be on the case from her dream that morning.
• The Walking Dead (2010): In the episode "Vatos", Jim (a member of the survivors' camp) goes a distance away from the survivors and starts digging holes. Understandably, this freaks the camp out, and they tie Jim to a tree to cool off before asking him why he was digging. Jim claims he had a dream that he couldn't remember, but he knew that he needed to dig the holes. It turns out that this was justified, because a number of zombies attack the camp at the end of the episode, and several people (both zombies and survivors alike) are killed. Jim comments at the end of the episode that he remembers why he dug the holes: they're graves.
• The Wild Wild West: Near the beginning of the episode "The Night of the Man-Eating House", Artemus Gordon has a dream that lasts almost the entire episode. Near the end of the episode, he wakes up, and events start to follow what happened in his dream.
• The X-Files:
  • Mulder and Scully both do this while the other is abducted (in seasons 2 and 8, respectively), though it's hard to tell whether these were dreaming of things that were in the future or the present.
  • It has also been speculated that Mulder's dream-within-a-dream in "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati" of a little boy on a beach building a sand spaceship with him is prophetic of baby William.

Mythology and Religion

• In The Achilleid, Thetis mentions a few nightmares she's had that serve as omens of Achilles death. They include swords piercing her womb, animals attacking her breasts, and even flashbacks of her journey to Tartarus that made Achilles nearly invincible.
• The Book of Genesis portrays the interpretation of dreams as a sign of wisdom and closeness with God, which is why the holy Joseph can learn so much from the Pharaoh's dreams. Joseph also dreamed that he would rule his older brothers, which led them sell him into slavery, starting a chain of events that led to him becoming prime minister of Egypt and their only savior in a time of famine.
• In The Odyssey, Penelope has a dream where a bunch of geese are killed. It is an allusion to the upcoming suitor slaughter by the disguised Odysseus.
• In the Mahabharata, Karna, The Dragon, has a chilling dream about the upcoming civil war. He sees the protogonist Royal Prince Yuddhistir climb up a mountain of skulls and eat from the small cup of nectar on top of it. True to form, almost everyone who participates in the war dies and field is bathed with blood.
• Half's Saga: The night before the banquet at King Asmund's, Half's warrior Innstein has ominous dreams about them being engulfed by flames, then sinking into deep water. He correctly guesses that Asmund plans to burn them to death in the banquet hall, but Half won't listen.

Music

• The British music hall song "Daddy, Don't Go Down the Mine", also known in variant forms as "Dream of the Miner's Child" or "The Miner's Child", is about a little boy who saves his father's life by telling him about a prophetic dream he had of a disaster in the mine where his father works.
• Probably what's going on Link Wray's classic blues song, "Fire and Brimstone", where the narrator dreams about a series of Portents Of Doom.
  I had a dream last night
  I was layin' on my bed
  And the whole world was standing still
  And the moon was turning red.

Podcasts

• Just prior to the story's beginning in Jemjammer, Jylliana begins having dreams of a shadow spreading across the sky.
• The Magnus Archives: Antonio Blake's statement in "Dreamer", addressed directly to the late archivist Gertrude, tells of the strange dreams he has had of various people's futures, including hers. Specifically, of their deaths.

Roleplay

• In The Gamer's Alliance, both Leon and Kaisa have dreams about things that will happen in the future. Leon tries to actively stop these bad visions from coming true, but Kaisa is more clueless because her dreams deal with even more obscure things than Leon's and don't necessary have as bad an aura around them.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The free adventure "Fallen Angel" suggests it for use with a divinely inclined character such as a cleric.
  • Discussed in the 3rd edition book "Heroes Of Horror". There's a chapter that, in addition to describing how to make dream sequences in general, suggests that dreams often predict the future in fantasy stories, but also notes that they are usually vague and metaphorical, rather than just showing exactly what will happen.
• Exalted has an inversion with the Yozi Sacheverell, the Abhorrent Prophet Unimagined. While he dreams, he sees everything BUT the future. Were he to wake, he would perfectly see the entirety of what is to come, locking the world into absolute predestination. Pretty much everyone agrees that this would be a Bad Thing, quite possibly even Sacheverell himself.
• Mage: The Awakening has the Dream merit which allows characters to receive prophetic dreams in the form of symbolic hints about coming dangers or how to overcome a problem. If they meditate on a subject prior to sleeping, they can specifically invoke such dreams. The Seers of the Throne are able to acquire an alternate form of the merit, where their dreams are specifically instructions from the Exarchs (although they have one faction which seeks out sleepers who receive apparently prophetic dreams, which they believe are more accurate ways of determining the Exarchs' will).
  • Other games in the New World of Darkness have similar ways of dreaming the future. Promethean: The Created has the Elpis Merit, which allows a Promethean to gain information from their dreams of the milestones necessary to complete the Pilgrimage.
  • Changeling: The Lost gives all changelings the innate talent to have oracular dreams as part of their ties to the Wyrd; they just have to realize whether or not a dream really is prophetic before they can act on it. Some Merits, however, allow them to refine this talent, to the point that they can dream of the past or gain beginner's knowledge of any skill or language from the collective unconscious.
  • And finally, all Cahaliths in Werewolf: The Forsaken have the innate talent of receiving visionary dreams straight from Luna herself. However, as Luna's mercurial as all hell, the dreams are often heavily cloaked in symbolism.

Theatre

• In Dorothy L. Sayers' The Emperor Constantine:
  • Coel has dreamed of Constantine.
  • Constantine dreams of "In this sign you will conquer." He is pleased because it's very lacking in ambiguity.
• Like in the Book of Genesis, Joseph of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame can predict the future by interpreting his own or other people's dreams.
• In Dorothy L. Sayers' Man Born to Be King, Claudia's dream, which causes her to warn Pontius Pilate not to execute Jesus, turns out to be hearing over and over people reciting the Nicene or Apostolic Creed's lines about being crucified under Pontius Pilate.
• In Wicked, Elphaba has a "dream just like a prophecy" that one day, Ozians will have a day that's all about her. What she doesn't know is that she's to become the Wicked Witch of the West, and that the Ozians are celebrating her death.

Toys

• A major theme in BIONICLE's Metru Nui arc was Vakama suffering from waking dreams that foretold the future but he was either too unsure of himself to trust them, misinterpreted their allegorical meaning or dismissed them because everyone else thought he was insane or "cross-wired". In the end, both the good and the bad came true. During the arc's second half, Vakama stopped seeing visions due to a venom mutation limiting his mental functions, which lead him astray into temporary villainy. Later story revealed there was something off with him, Vakama had accidentally received the brain signals of Mata Nui, explaining how he could see the future.

Video Games

• Ace Combat: Assault Horizon's first mission is a Dream Sequence of William Bishop seeing his own death at the hands of a Russian plane with shark mouth markings in the skies over Miami. The mission is chock full of references to Markov, Trinity, Magic, and a hurricane, all things he did not know existed. Guess where one of the last missions takes place?
• Agarest Senki: Leonhardt gets one in the beginning of the game itself. He then wakes up to reality and goes into two battles. In the third battle, he gets to meet the guy who killed him in his dreams, and it finally does him in. This is the event that starts off the plot.
• The opening sequence of Chrono Cross is Serge, Kid, and a third person infiltrating Fort Dragonia. He wakes up after reaching a plot-significant door. He doesn't go there until about halfway through Disc 1.
• Many of the characters in the Chzo Mythos tend to have this type of dream to foreshadow the eventual bloodbath.
• Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker plays with this in the Triangulum Arc. All of the party members, except the Protagonist, begin to get haunted by dreams of fighting Arcturus and all dying at its hand. They wonder if it's a prophetic dream, except with the strange occurrence that Yamato is in their dream, but not the protagonist. Turns out it's not a prophetic dream, but a memory of what has happened in the previous world, which reveals that the current world is their world regressed a second time. The first time around, the Triangulum attacked, but the Protagonist wasn't around and they all died, with Al Saiduq offering Yamato a deal to give the world and themselves another chance to fight Arcturus, this time with the Protagonist back.
• Protagonist David from Don't Escape: 4 Days To Survive dreams of some form of danger resulting in his death (Toxic gas breaking into his hideout; an extreme heat wave or snowstorm burning and freezing him, respectively; etc) and he considers those warnings, leading to preparing for the upcoming threat. Given the 'dream-dimensional/time-travelling' in the game, especially Awakening Mode, it's implied that these are memories from previous lifetimes.
• Leliana from Dragon Age: Origins says that the Maker spoke to her in a vision to help you fight the Blight. The Guardian in the Gauntlet, however, says that the Maker only spoke to Andraste and that Leliana lied about the visions to get attention. She denies this and claims the visions are real. Who you believe is up to you.
  • What the Guardian says is part of his test, however, to determine if you are worthy of reaching The Urn of Sacred Ashes.
  • The Archdemon sends a few dreams your way through the Darkspawn taint just to let you know that it can see you and sends a band of Shrieks to ambush you at camp after one of them.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Morrowind:
    • The game's opening cinematic is a prophetic dream the Nerevarine is having during his/her voyage to Vvardenfell, showing some of its landscapes and cities while the Daedric Prince Azura, who prophesied the coming of the Nerevarine, speaks about what is to come.
    • If you get infected with vampirism, you'll be dreaming about becoming one before the three days required to finally turn into a vampire.
  • At the start of Oblivion, Emperor Uriel Septim VII mentions having this. During one, he foresaw his own death and saw the Champion of Cyrodiil, which is why he is so trusting of you right away. These dreams started after he was rescued from Oblivion to end the Imperial Simulacrum, presumably as an effect of being in Oblivion itself for so long, and means he had been plagued by terrible nightmares of things to come for some time.
• Eternal Darkness opens on a sepia-tinted scene of heroine Alex Roivas trapped in a bedroom with a shotgun to mow down endlessly spawning zombies. Once enough time has passed, a cutscene of Alex waking up in her bed in Washington state at 3:33 AM plays.
• "A war is coming, I've seen it in my dreams. Fires sweeping over the earth, bodies in the streets, cities turned to dust. Retaliation...". This being the FEAR series those dreams are quite accurate.
• In Granblue Fantasy, Arulumaya's 5★ uncap reveals that her dreams allow her to see her future visions more coherently, at the expense of draining her consciousness the longer she lingers in them. Of the two times we see of them, once when she was little and her dream vision allowed her to avoid a Doomed Hometown scenario and her most recent one which foretold what would be happening in the What Makes The Sky Blue event.
• Grey Area (2023): In Chapter 1, which is set in a Dream Land, some of the enemies resemble monsters Hailey will encounter later in the Grey Area, and the dream ends with her seeing the Grey Girl.
• It's practically a tradition for the Kingdom Hearts games to open up with protagonists having cryptic dreams (that become a lot clearer as the story progresses) that foreshadow major events in the story and (later on in the series) past and/or related games.
• In The Last Express, Robert Cath dreams of his recently deceased friend Tyler Whitney, he lies in his bed, sits up, produces an egg from his mouth, and says "Why don't you make it sing?" It is an egg, the Firebird, that Kronos tells you to make sing in the end. Exposing it to music during the day will make it sing, but doing so at night will only bring death!
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time opens on the protagonist, Link, tossing restlessly in bed, having a nightmare involving the destruction of Hyrule Castle Town, a settlement which he has not yet seen, at the hands of the Big Bad, Ganondorf, whom he has not yet met. After the first act of the game, Link returns to a ravaged Castle Town and is confronted by Ganondorf in the briefest of Curb Stomp Battles.
  • In general, Princess Zelda is famous throughout Hyrule for having prophetic dreams. Another set of dreams sets off the plots of the Oracle games.
• At the end of the first episode of Life Is Strange, it was releaved that the dream Max had about the tornado near Arcadia Bay at the beginning was actually a dream about a tornado that will reach the city at the end of the week.
• Little Busters!: In Kud's route, she has recurring bad dreams but can't tell what's going on in them. Later, when she sees her mother being executed on TV, she realises that's what her dreams were of.
• A bit of an interesting take in Mass Effect when Commander Shepard is touched by the Prothean Beacon. S/he starts having visions and nightmares of the Protheans being wiped out by the Reapers. But it's a perfect look at what's coming.
• Nameless has Red admit to having a strange dream on his route. He claims that he dreamt that the protagonist was kidnapped by an evil doll and he had to save her. It's originally considered nothing, since he's kind of a Cloud Cuckoolander. His dream is basically what the titular Nameless' route is all about.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness, the main character has this ability. Turns out that the main character and Grovyle the thief are really a human from the future and a Pokemon friend who's actually a good guy, respectively.
• In an early stage of Psychonauts, when Razputin is exploring his own mind, the player can find a vault with a bizarre memory called "The world shall taste my eggs!" inside that makes very little sense. In fact, it's a metaphor for Coach Oleander's plan. The eggs represent the campers, which are being taken across the lake in the sea monster, and the chicks inside represent their brains (they even look a bit like brains) and are used to drive tanks (represented by teacups).
• Shade: Wrath of Angels has the Dream Intro-slash-Justified Tutorial. You're in an ancient pyramid fighting mummies before getting outnumbered and abruptly waking up. You do enter one such pyramid later in the game, and considering the stage's tutorial is narrated by none other than the Angel of Faith herself, it's implied she's using her powers to guide you while discreetly hinting to you what's going to happen.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has a human dream about the Conception mere hours before it is triggered. He thinks aliens from Jupiter did it.
• Upon starting up Silent Hill 3 for the first time, you begin the game In Medias Res with Heather exploring a dark and bloody amusement park, with the player needing to navigate a few short puzzles before she almost gets run over by a runaway rollercoaster, then wakes up. This nightmare doesn't get referenced again until two-thirds later in the game where Heather makes it to the real Lakeside Amusement Park, an encounter that is itself punctuated by Heather developing a sudden headache and remembering why she finds the place so familiar. The runaway rollercoaster also plays out, but fortunately, it's possible to have Heather survive this encounter, especially if you remember your mistake from the beginning of the game.
• Tales of Xillia 2 opens with Ludger having a dream of him fighting against and being killed by a shadowy version of his older brother. This ends up having significance in two ways, as early on. he fights against a psychotic Alternate Self of his brother who takes on the same appearance as the one seen in his dream, then much later, towards the end of the game, has a duel with the real version of his brother at the same place he did in the dream.
• Chapter 1 of Taming Dreams ends with Mardek dreaming of Rohoph narrating the events in Chapter 2.
• In Guenevere, if Guen is asocial on her wedding night, she'll dream about a mysterious figure that's been confirmed to be Mordred.
• In the song of Um Jammer Lammy's Stage 1 Dream Sequence, "I Am a Master, and You", Chop Chop Master Onion raps about fire, a baby, a plane, the "necessary [wood-chopping] skills to build a guitar", and hell/a tropical island, which is what Lammy will have to undergo in the following stages.
• Wild ARMs: Million Memories opens this way. Rudy dreams of the destruction of Filgaia and learns this happened because he betrayed everyone. Then a mysterious figure who looks suspiciously like him states this lies in his future so he has to recover his memories as soon as possible.

Visual Novels

• In the first chapter of Daughter for Dessert, the protagonist dreams that Lainie comes back to him. They get started in bed, and Lainie says that she is only there to prepare him for someone else. He looks at the doorway, and sees...Amanda.
• Zen from Mystic Messenger has inexplicable psychic dreams during a couple routes and the second secret ending, and tries to circumvent them from happening in real life whenever they occur, because they never prophesize anything good.
• The Road of Dreams is a metaphysical place in Tad Williams' Memory Sorrow And Thorn series. Most people only touch on the Dream Road in their sleep, but particularly sensitive individuals may receive portentous dreams, and those familiar with the Art can enter it at will or using magical devices called Witnesses. Subverted in that, while the Road will reveal true things, the interpretation of those things is often cryptic and misleading, and powerful minds can manipulate the dreams of others to further their goals. Further, it's possible to lose your way on the Road and/or meet up with things that are not... wholesome, with effects ranging from insanity to death.
• Date Warp: Janet can sometimes dream about herself with pale skin and blue eyes. This foreshadows Nathaniel's bad end, where her soul gets stuck in Bianca's body.
• Galaxy Angel: The third installment, Eternal Lovers, starts with Tact having a Nightmare Sequence where the Elsior and the Angel Wing are completely anihilated by an enemy fleet. During said nightmare he sees a strange device later revealed to be the Chrono Quake Bomb that could easily send the entire Galaxy into another catastrophe just like six centuries ago when the civilization collapsed.

Web Animation

• In Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom, the first two parts turn out to be a prophetic dream by Luigi.

Webcomics

• Alienby Comics: Riri has experinced dreams that are this crossed with Real Dreams are Weirder before big milestones in their transition:
  • In this unnamed comic, Riri recounts a vision they had shortly before questioning their gender identity of a "cold, masculine, rigid" stone statue entombing an ethereal dragon spirit trying to break free as cracks appear in the statue.
  • In "Not Human", Riri dreams in freshman year that they are a member of a flying alien race left behind on Earth. They note that at the time they felt like they didn't belong in this world but in their dream they fit right in with the other aliens.
  • In "Refusal of the Call", Riri meets a future version of themself with a more feminine body encouraging them to start HRT. Riri refuses and tells their future self that they are not ready, future Riri tells them to take their time and that there is no wrong path to take.
  • "Futures" is based on a dream Riri had shortly before starting HRT. In the comic they meet an alternate future version of themself who is a cis man and a father. Riri cries tears of joy as their alternate self waves at them before meeting up with a more feminine future self.
• Amya begins chapter one with a dream sequence depicting 'The End' to come.
• Having these is a part of Paollo's job in City of Somnus. The one he has on page three is foreshadowing for things that only happen chaptes later. He also gets one about a caterpillar being hungry for the sun, which definitely foreshadows something that happens mere pages afterwards, but it may still mean something more.
• Karcharoth of Cry 'Havoc' experiences these occasionally while unconscious.
• Demonseed Redux: At the beginning of the webcomic Chico dreams of himself being a demon king with Dee as his pregnant angel queen. Soon afterwards Rhoda promises him the first part and Dee turns out to be an angel and much later also pregnant.
• In El Goonish Shive, during the Sleepy Time storyline Elliot dreams of becoming a superhero, later he gets a superheroine spell. In this case, though, it's less that the dream is prophetic, and more that it reflects a desire on his part which is also reflected in the spell.
• Jade from Homestuck uses this trope to create stable time loops, and generally do weird time shit
  • Technically anyone whose dreamself is on Prospit can see these visions, but Jade is the only one shown to use them extensively. They have a tendency to be vague as well.
  • Derse dreamers get a bit of this too, though instead of prophetic visions they get the whisperings of the gods in the Furthest Ring, which tend to be prophetic in nature. And players with dead dream selves have the middleman cut out for them and dream directly of the Furthest Ring. Though in this case, it's true for both Prospit and Derse dreamers.
• Kaiten Mutenmaru: Sea of the Beginning begins with Mutenmaru having a dream where he fights the forces of the Abominable Crystal alongside his future companions.
• Narbonic did this every year of its run on the Sunday nearest December 31st, with a "Dave in Slumberland" strip, which in addition to being a Little Nemo parody, gives a symbolic foreshadowing of the following year. It also ended on that day of the year, with a suggestion that the origin of the dreams was that Dave could subconciously create psychohistory algorithms.
• In the Penny and Aggie arc "There Are No Rules," Aggie is puzzled by her dream of being in love with a mall mannequin. After an argument with her ambiguously bisexual best friend Lisa about mixed signals, complicated by Aggie's feelings of discomfort over two other girlfriends making out in her presence, she makes up with Lisa at the mall and gives her a hug. While doing so, she recalls her prior history of Single-Target Sexuality with regard to men, having shared the same crush as a now out-gay friend. Then, still in mid-hug, she looks up at a suspiciously familiar mannequin..."Uh oh."
• Raven Wolf: Yula's visions always come to him through dreams.
• Gwynn from Sluggy Freelance has one of these about Zoe being burned alive. Too bad she forgot about it until seven years later. Torg has also had prophetic dreams about the same event, and possibly an event following them.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  • Getting visions of the future in one's dreams is part of the Icelandic magic package.
  • Lalli got a variant of this when he noticed Reynir running around in the mage-exclusive dreamspace. While he technically just saw him in an existing location, the fact that Reynir later joins the crew unaware of his mage powers effectively makes the encounter this trope.
• A standard for psychics in Zap!, except the title character is amnesiac who can't remember that he is a psychic, let alone how to interpret his prophetic dreams. So, while he gets some dreams that foreshadow the midpoint battle, he only understands what they mean during the battle, when it's too late to help.

Web Original

• Can You Spare a Quarter?: The night before Graham and Jamie go to the city to mert the Department of Child Welfare, Jason has a bad dream about Jamie. That day, Jamie is caught by his father and almost raped to death.
• In Spes Phthisica, dreams of the distant future are central.

Web Videos

• On the Dream SMP, Fundy is revealed to have this ability, due to suffering from some form of insomnia which "links events in reality to his dreams".
• Left POOR Dead: Tippy hears about their visit to Dr. Smedley's lab in one such dream.
• Legendy Polskie: Operacja: Bazyliszek has the protagonist dream prophetically. Part of the dream comes true first thing in the morning, when he meets the girl he dreamt of.
• In stacyplays' Dogcraft Epawsode 183, "Sooezy's Revenge", Stacy briefly faints and has a vision of the pigs all across the Dogcraft world uniting at Sooezy the pig's final cry to rally against Butch. As she attempts to take Butch into custody, the pigs summon Pigzilla, a giant pig, to destroy the town of Dogcraft. When she regains consciousness, Stacy sees the pigs gathering outside the Dog Show, and decides to Screw Destiny by having her dogs kill Butch instead.
• The Twilight Chronicles has a Musical Episode which turns out to be All Just a Dream. Until things from the dream start happening verbatim...
• Spoofed in Vision of Escaflowne Abridged, as Hitomi has recurring dreams of a mysterious "naked savior" with angel wings who rescues her from falling, whom she secretly wants to "make [her] a woman." When she falls down a canyon and her companion Van (whom she often bickers with) sprouts angel wings and saves her in a similar fashion, she drops this gem:
  Hitomi: Van!? You're the mysterious naked savior?
  Van: Naked? You wish. My wings can come out just fine with my pants still on, thankyouverymuch.

Western Animation

• In one episode of Adventure Time Jake has a "croak dream" that foretells his death, but Finn manages to prevent it from coming true.
  • Some of the elements of Finn's dream in "King Worm" showed up in later episodes, like the giant monster made of clones of Gunther the penguin (which shows up in the episode "Reign of Gunthers"), and a big-nosed version of himself Finn sees when he looks in a mirror (which resembles the alternate-reality Finn from "Finn the Human").
  • The episode "The Lich" begins with Finn having a Premonition Dream that foretells the Lich emerging and coming for Billy. Turns out it's already started.
• American Dragon: Jake Long: Sara gets horrifying visions of the future even while she's asleep.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Subverted when Aang and Katara take Sokka seriously when he warns them that he's had a dream that going into the market is a bad idea. Then he reveals that his dream revolved around "Food eats people!" and they dismiss it.
    • While they were separated, Aang and Appa shared a dream, except it was about the day they first met.
    • Iroh had a dream about conquering Ba Sing Se in his youth. At the time, he thought it meant that he would conquer it for the Fire Nation, but he ended up unconquering it from the Fire Nation.
    • Zuko's Angst Coma features a dream where Azula and Iroh (in the form of dragons) each try to persuade him to follow them. The same thing happens in real life two episodes later, but without the dragons.
    • After waking up from the dragon sequence, Zuko sees himself with Aang's head in a mirror. It's later discovered that he's a descendant of Avatar Roku. And then he joins the Avatar in the middle of Season 3.
    • In the Foggy Swamp, Aang has a vision, although he's awake, of a young girl in a fancy dress with a flying boar. The girl turns out to be Toph Beifong, his earthbending teacher who he will soon meet, and the flying boar is the symbol of her family. Aang actually uses his vision to find her, so it is kind of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
    • Yue's father Arnook had a vision when his daughter was born in which he saw her becoming the Moon Spirit, which happens in the first season finale.
  • The Legend of Korra: Korra meets Toph for the first time in the Foggy Swamp, where Aang first envisioned her, and there Toph helps Korra overcome her current problem.
• Cheetor has a few psychic dreams over the course of Beast Wars. In Beast Machines, Optimus Primal has one of these, prophesizing of new characters who appear in the second season.
• In Code Lyoko, Aelita starts having significant dreams once she's materialized in the real world (and thus can sleep and dream). At first, those are about memories of her past life slipping past her Laser-Guided Amnesia. In the penultimate episode, however, she gets a genuinely prophetic dream... of her father's death.
• In the Lite Sprites pilot, the sprites go off to find their lite wands after Prisma tells them about her dream where they did just that. Played with in that they get stuck a couple of times when they encounter something that wasn't in Prisma's dream (a fork in the path, an unexpected cave-in), but eventually cover everything.
• Played with in Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. The episode "Mighty's Wedlock Whimsy" has Mighty get second thoughts about marrying Pearl Pureheart because of a dream where Pearl becomes obese and unpleasant after their marriage and the villain the Cow is now his best friend, plus their son is implied to be fathered by the Cow. The subsequent episode "The Bride of Mighty Mouse" depicts a future where Mighty eventually does marry Pearl, but the only thing true to the dream from the previous episode is the Cow reforming, with Pearl still in shape and cordial to Mighty and their son unambiguously shown to be Mighty's flesh and blood child due to resembling an infant version of Mighty and inheriting his dad's powers.
• Molly of Denali: In "Wise Raven and Old Crow," Molly has a dream where she travels on a river, which foretells the Mabrays going on a river trip to the village.
• Samurai Jack: In the episode "Jack and the Warrior Woman", Aku reveals that he had a nightmare about Jack finding a time portal to undo the Bad Future before he realized that it was a premonition, so he took precautions to ensure that Jack's mission would fail.
• In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Gargamel's Miss-Fortune", Dreamy mentions dreaming of things like "smurfmobiles, smurfovision, and smurfominiums" at the start of the episode, which over time lead to a few Continuity Nods in "The Smurfbox Derby", "Handy's Window Vision", and "Skyscraper Smurfs".
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • While the Jedi are a given, it's revealed in the Order 66 arc that clones had recurring nightmares of being forced to kill all the Jedi long before Order 66 was given, nightmares that they'd often quickly forget after waking up. It's a side effect of their mind control biochips.
  • Jedi Master Pong Krell eventually reveals that he’s been having mysterious visions of the Jedi losing the Clone Wars and the Republic falling to a new Sith Order. So he's decided to sabotage the Republic's hold on Umbara before defecting to the Separatists, hoping to become a Sith and save his own skin from the coming purge of the Jedi.
• Star Wars Resistance: "Bibo" reveals that Eila, one of the two child refugees from Tehar, has this power. Any dream that she has over and over again always comes true.

Real Life

• Some people have experienced dreams which have shown to have precognitive qualities, as the events in their dreams seem to come true. It actually turns out that according to science, the subconscious will try to imagine probable futures, and some of these probabilities occasionally make appearances in our dreams.
• A few nights before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln claimed to have dreamed that people gathered around his coffin because he had been shot.
• Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein when she dreamt of a pale student who brought a hideous corpse to life.
• Elias Howe once dreamed that cannibals were preparing to cook him. When he watched their spears, he noticed that each head had a small hole through the shaft. This inspired him to the technique he would eventually use to invent the sewing machine.
• Film director James Cameron once saw a metallic, skeletal monster with a rictus smile and burning red eyes, dragging itself across the floor with kitchen knives during a fever dream. It inspired him to the titular character of The Terminator.
• Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the seemingly impossible chemical structure of benzene when he had a dream of a group of snakes swallowing their tail.
• Similarly, Dmitri Mendeleyev saw the Periodic Table of Elements in his dreams.
• Scientist James D. Watson once dreamt of a series of spiral staircases. This gave him the idea for the structure of DNA.
• Stephenie Meyer, author of "The Twilight Saga", was inspired to write her successful book series when she dreamt of a vampire and a young girl discussing their mutual attraction.
• Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of "Yesterday" from Help! one night, and for a long while he thought it was just a vague memory of some song he heard when he was younger. But it turned out he completely thought it up himself. Since then, the song has become one of the most regularly covered hit singles of all time!
  • At first, the melody, while it was waiting for words, had the dream-logic title Scrambled Eggs; He got this from a dream too...
  • Another example is the song "Let It Be", which was also inspired by a dream Paul had about his mother, who passed away when he was young.
• Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the plot for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  • This appears to be common for authors. Charles Dickens recounted that while writing and plotting novels by day, the characters got into his dreams and spoke to him by night, offering critical comment on the plot and characterisation and helpful advice as to how it should proceed.
• Hergé author of Tintin, was plagued by nightmares in which he was chased by a white skeleton until the entire surroundings turned white. To cure himself from these recurring dreams he drew an album in which Tintin went to snowy landscapes: "Tintin in Tibet". Not only did his nightmares stop after he completed the album: the book itself is regarded as one of his masterpieces.
• Vladek, the father of Art Spiegelman, was forced to work in a prisoner of war camp before World War II. While he was there he dreamed his dead grandfather told him he would be free on the Jewish holiday "parshas truma". As it turned out, months later, he was indeed allowed to leave the camp on that very day! Art Spiegelman included this anecdote in his autobiographical graphic novel "Maus"
• Belgian painter René Magritte once woke up from a dream and saw a bird in cage in his room. Half awake he thought he saw an egg inside the cage. This inspired him to paint "Elective Affinities", in which an egg is seen inside a cage.
• Brazilian actor and movie director José Mojica Marins also got the idea for his famous horror movie character Coffin Joe by dreaming about it:
  In a dream I saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life. The cemetery gave me the name, completed the costume of Joe the cover of voodoo and black hat, which was the symbol of a classic brand of cigarettes. He would be a mortician.
• H. R. Giger, best known for creating the xenomorph aliens in the Alien franchise, suffered from intense and horrible nightmares. Virtually all of his paintings and drawings are depictions and reflections of the night terrors he had endured.
  • Equally disturbing artist Zdzisław Beksiński claimed his paintings were inspired by his dreams.
• Jimi Hendrix claimed "Purple Haze" from Are You Experienced was inspired by a dream he had walking on the bottom of the ocean.
• The imagery of Björk's "Hyperballad" from Post, where she imagines living on top of a mountain and sliding down from the cliff, was inspired by a dream.
• Keith Richards imagined the riff of "Satisfaction" (Out of Our Heads) and "Rough Justice" (A Bigger Bang) in a dream.
• Buena Vista Social Club member Compay Segundo claimed he woke up one morning with the melody of "Chan Chan" in his head. Thus he wrote it down and recorded it.
• Frank Zappa claimed to have dreamt the lyrics to "Who Are The Brain Police?" from Freak Out!. The instrumental track "Moggio" from The Man from Utopia was inspired by a dream his daughter once had about a tiny little father living under the pillow.
• The song "TVC 15" from David Bowie's album Station to Station was inspired by a drug hallucination from Iggy Pop in which he imagined the TV set was swallowing his girlfriend.
• The track "Dream Sequence #1" from The Ideal Crash by dEUS was inspired by the fact that lead singer Tom Barman dreamt the chords.
• One of the survivors of the Indonesian Boxing Day Tsunami absolutely did not want to go on vacation with his family because he had a vivid dream about being in a tsunami. He had previously dreamed of being in a car accident and soon after was almost killed in a rollover, which wound up helping him because his metal implants were easy to identify in X-Rays. In the Dateline: I Survived special he claims he still has prophetic dreams, which he chooses to ignore. Another survivor in the same special claimed she had a recurring nightmare that she was in a tsunami; when the real thing hit she was surprised at how calm she was.
• There was a book aimed at young readers in the early 90's called Amazing True Stories that contained a particularly eerie real-life example of this trope: In 1915, there was a woman who dreamed about being on a sinking ship. In the dream, she was not concerned about her own safety, but that of her husband's. She approached an employee of the ship, who had blond hair and brown eyes, to ask about her husband and the guy said he helped him get into a lifeboat. At the time, her husband was on the Lusitania, which of course was torpedoed. He survived the incident and returned home to his wife, and when she recounted the dream she had about him, he told her that a man with blond hair and brown eyes helped him escape.
• Albert Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity when he had a dream about a farmer electrocuting cows that were huddled up at an electric fence. Einstein said that the cows all fell at the same time, while the farmer (who was standing on the other side of the field) said that it looked like they jumped back one by one from where he was standing. That was how he put together the idea that things look different depending on where you're standing because of the light it takes to reach your eyes.
• In 2004 a nine-year-old Association Football fan named Billy Harris dreamed that Middlesbrough would win the English League Cup 2-1, and Boudewijn Zenden would score the winning goal. No prizes for guessing the actual outcome of that match.
• When Casualties of War was being made, John C. Reilly was bumped up from an extra to a small role (this was his earliest film), and since said role was filming later in the shoot, he was told to go home until it was time. Some time after, he dreamed that he got a call from his agent telling him that he'd been bumped up to a larger role. Then the woman he was staying with (whom he would later marry) woke him up from the dream, telling him there was a phone call for him. Guess what it was...

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