Twilight Zones, dreaming the Future

Recently I experienced the twilight zone phenomenon I describe in my book Sixty Nights of Dreams, where I have a dream incorporating elements of the coming day, as if my subconscious tapped into the future and decided to weave those events into a dream narrative in the present. Usually these dreams are the last ones of my sleep, occurring in daylight right before I’m due to wake up.

In this recent dream I was walking along a residential street lined with fully-grown autumnal trees, the footpath thick with a mulch of russet and umber leaves. A high sandstone wall rose to my right. As I walked along the footpath without any particular destination in mind, I saw several naked toddlers in front of me in amongst the leaves. With dream omniscience I knew they had come from behind the wall, that they were lost and that they needed to find their mother.

I picked up a baby. I would find his mother for him. I left the other babies behind and entered an office space with a grey melamine counter. Several people I’d worked with once where here. I put the baby down somewhere and began talking to my former colleagues, promptly forgetting my mission to find the baby’s mother.

I often have dreams where I’m at work before I need to wake up, as if my subconscious is prompting me to acknowledge that I have urgent business ahead, so this part of the dream made sense. The baby part was what puzzled me and I had a feeling it could be predictive, although I had no idea how it could possibly come true.

I found out several hours later when I went to the supermarket. As I passed the self-service checkout, two little boys toddled out in distress, calling out, ‘Mummy, Mummy.’ This was my dream coming true in a twilight zone way, even though the setting was different.

Worried about the boys, I wondered how I could help. No women were in sight in the self-serve checkout area. A man was there, but he paid no attention to the boys' plight. Just as I was wondering if I should take them to a staff member to make an announcement about lost children over the PA, a woman emerged from the self-serve area, pushing a pram. The boys ran over to her. They were safe.

As I grabbed a trolley and headed to the mandarins, which were on special that week, I thought of how the dream babies and the real boys had been different, but the dream babies had seemed just as real. It was possible I’d forgotten to look for the dream baby’s mother because my subconscious had known the real boy would be reunited with his mother.

I still haven’t forgotten the dream babies or the real ones. The twilight zone feeling also still remains.