The answer to this is that you can't know. You will only know if it was a prophetic dream when the event actually happens.

The only exception to this is if you have been studying your dreams in depth for a very long time and have become acquainted with the different feeling states of your dreams. You may come to recognise when the dream you've had is likely to be prophetic. And even in this case we can only say it is likely - not certain.

The vast majority of dreams we have are not prophetic.

This is another way in which dream dictionaries can be misleading because half of the symbol descriptions are apparently telling us about the future.

For instance if you dream about a coconut this is supposed to mean that money will come to you. You can guess that I don't believe this. A coconut could mean abundance but it would depend on all the details of the dream, what a coconut represented in your culture and what a coconut means TO YOU.

Culturally, there also seems to be a strong belief that the purpose of our dreams are to tell us about the future. While dreams can occasionally give us this information, (which is where this belief comes from), there are many other important functions of dreaming, particularly on the intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels.

I have had a few prophetic dreams, psychic dreams, and spiritual dreams. Read about some of them below.

Frequently, between the ages of 14 - 18 a man I didn't know kept turning up in my dreams. He wouldn't be doing anything in particular in my dream just make an entrance and leave or simply hang around. I can remember telling my friends about how strange it was. When I was 18 I met the man from my dreams, had a relationship with him and a child. Obviously some part of me knew that before I had even met him!

On this occasion I had two or three dreams about what was going to happen before it happened. It didn't mean I could do anything about the outcome though! I was about 8 years old and I kept having this dream where I was in a race at Summer Camp. One part of the race had three low benches that I had to hurdle over. As I hurdled the second bench I caught my foot on it and my face slammed into the third bench. Imagine my surprise when a few days later on our last day at camp we had a relay race with obstacles - one part of which was made of three low benches that we had to hurdle.

You can guess what happened! I fell on the second bench and smashed my face into the third. What hadn't been in my dream though was that I got up with my face grazed and bleeding and continued to win the race!

I have had many, many of these dreams where I dream about an ordinary day before it happens. It's never a day when anything major happens.I'm in the process of developing my theory about this and will publish it as soon as it's ready. Do any of you have these kinds of dreams? Email me with them and your theories about them.

One of my prophetic dreams

Another prophetic dream

General dreams of the future

Read my new article on the science of psychic abilities and ESP