The predictive power of dreams We need all the guidance we can get

No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.

That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.

That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.

Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud’s the most important figure here, though there were influential writers before him who laid the foundations for his work, and plenty of others after him that took his basic insight and ran with it, as often as not in directions that horrified him. Freud’s central claim was that dreams offered privileged access to the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, and thus to the psyche with all its quirks and foibles. Most dreamwork has gone in that direction since: it’s about personality, not prediction.

Let’s change tracks here for a moment. It so happens that one of the other things I’ve been doing with my unwanted supply of spare time brought me face to face with a parallel shift, this time in the field of astrology. While I have a second career as a political astrologer, reading ingress and eclipse charts for entire nations, I’m also interested in natal astrology, the astrology of individual horoscopes. And one of the things I’ve been doing lately is studying the seven hefty volumes of astrological instruction written by Alan Leo, a pen name which referenced the author’s astrological sun sign at a time when astrology was still illegal in Britain. Leo’s series of books, with their focus on personality rather than prediction, can be taken as the starting point for most of modern astrology. The long history of astrology underlines how drastic this shift was. The entire science of astrology, born in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, had prediction at the very heart of its whole enterprise — but it sought to answer political, not individual, questions.

What happened on earth the last time something happened in the skies? That was the empirical question that intrigued those early astrologers. Over several millennia of careful recordkeeping, tentative hypotheses, failures, and successes, astrology as we know it came into being out of that research project. Personal horoscopes were only a side effect of that programme — the discovery that a king’s birth chart might offer some guidance about his behaviour and his impact on his kingdom helped to birth what we call natal astrology, but it was only until Alan Leo that a discernible shift can be observed.

While Leo set the movement in motion, his successors, Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones, went even further, redefining astrology as a study of personality and downplaying the entire tradition of astrological prediction. This attitude spread into other methods of divination. I’m old enough that I can recall the angry denunciations of “fortune telling” flung by tarot readers who focused on personality at the older generation of readers who focused on prediction. I also recall well, and profited from, the first ebbing of that particular tide. Early in my writing career, I used to go to various Neopagan events to make presentations and try to interest readers in my books; I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and so I helped pay my way by doing geomancy readings for other attendees.

Geomancy, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is more or less a Western equivalent of the I Ching, using randomly generated four-digit binary numbers where the I Ching uses six-digits. What sets geomancy apart from most other ways of divination is precisely that it’s a method of prediction. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer, and by and large it’s right.

So I would settle at a table in the divination room and do readings. My rule was that I’d cast and interpret the readings and then the clients would pay me whatever they thought it was worth. I cautioned everyone who sat down for a reading that they shouldn’t ask a question if they didn’t want to know the answer, because geomancy doesn’t provide wiggle room; if you ask it “Will I achieve my fondest dream?” it’s perfectly capable of answering “No”. Of course there were people who didn’t believe me, asked questions like that, tried to get me to take back a negative answer, and ended up flinging a handful of loose change in my face and stalking away in a rage.

While I remember such encounters, they weren’t the ones I found interesting. I was drawn to the people who wanted a straight answer even if it was negative. One woman in particular comes to mind. She sat down at the table, listened to my spiel, and asked about a grandiose and not very marketable business project. I cast the chart and it was a very strongly negative one. The woman burst into tears and thanked me, because she’d had a bad feeling about it all along, but she couldn’t get anyone — not her friends, her advisers, nor the other diviners she’d asked — to give her any response other than some mindless cheerleading. She then opened her purse, got out some bills with noticeably large numbers on them, and handed them to me, before getting up and letting the next person sit down for a reading.

My political astrology these days follows the same principle. I’m in the business of offering the most accurate predictions I can. While I’m certainly not infallible, my predictions are reliably better than, say, those of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. (Admittedly this is shooting fish in a barrel; if an economist tells you the sky is blue, go look.) As a result, I make a decent share of my income from the subscriptions I ask for in return.

My point here, however, is not to preen myself on my far from unmixed success as a prophet. It’s to point out that there’s a market niche for something that most astrologers aren’t providing: predictions, as accurate as possible, instead of personality-obsessed navel-gazing. The flight from prediction that gripped dream interpretation and astrology alike in the late 19th century has deprived a great many people of a resource they want.

That, I’ve come to think, points at the heart of the flight from prediction. The years that Leo was turning away from astrological prediction, and Freud was redefining dreams as a means of psychological introspection rather than advice about the future, were also the years when Jules Verne was inventing science fiction, and technological change was first becoming a steady process rather than a matter of occasional fits and starts. Furthermore, it was also the zenith of Europe’s rise to global empire.

It was during these years that the modern mythology of progress was invented. Victorian futuristic novels such as Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889) took it for granted that Western civilisation would suffer the usual fate. By contrast, Leo was among the early adopters of a very different view: the notion that the world stood poised on the brink of a new golden age in which all the miseries of the past would be laid to rest forever.

While that belief had been in circulation in its original religious form for a very long time, what distinguished the myth of progress was how it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world over the long 20th century was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to the cultural mainstream Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unravelling of the failed progressivist faith.

What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of utter horror. Imagine for a moment that Leo had been interested in prediction rather than personality, and that he’d been able to get a good clear look at the next century or so of world history. He would have had the chance to preview two horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.

As it happens, there were people who foresaw some of the horror in advance. One of the occultists of that era I find most appealing, the colourful Joséphin Péladan, proclaimed to a bemused Paris in 1891 that European civilisation had passed its peak. A leading figure of the Decadent movement which was also home to the now more famous Joris-Karl Huysmans, he predicted that eventually Chinese troops would conquer France and parade down the Champs Elysées —a prediction that seems far more likely right now than it must have done in his day. More generally, the entire point of the Decadent movement was the recognition that the West was in decline.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that this awareness was behind the flight from prediction. Too many people saw or sensed what was coming and so fled into a fantasy of a shining future. It’s understandable that they did so: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot noted in his interwar poem Burnt Norton. Yet there comes a point at which fleeing from the facts becomes too dangerous.

We’re arguably well past that point now. That’s why I could pay most of my travel expenses back in the day by doing geomancy readings that gave people the bad news nobody else would tell them. Outside of the airtight bubbles where our political classes spend their time many people have come to grips with the fact that the future is going to be more difficult than the past — the mirage of Utopia projected by our corporate pseudoculture will never be more than a slickly packaged daydream.

I’m not sure how long it will be before that realisation starts to affect the practice of astrology, or for that matter the interpretation of dreams. Nonetheless I’d encourage people to consider their predictive possibilities of either of these. As the long road down to the deindustrial dark ages stretches out before us, we can use all the guidance we can get.