Is it possible to meet in dreams before meeting in life? Do our dreams, in some way, foreshadow the future?

This is “déjà rêvé” and is importantly distinct from déjà vu. While with déjà vu, the source of the familiarity remains unknown; with déjà rêvé (already dreamed), the experience is tied directly to a previous dream of a person, place, or thing. The pages of classical literature, the dream visions and romances of the Middle Ages, the legends of the saints and shamans, and the folklore of all lands brim with such fantastical things. The 12th- to early 13th-century tale of Macsen Wledig from the Welsh Mabinogion has Maxen dreaming of a maiden before finding her in life.¹ An old Persian tale has one Ashraf dreaming of a heavenly realm where he finds a “maiden of surpassing beauty.” After a perilous twenty-day journey on horseback, Ashraf finds a mysterious city where he finds the very woman he had dreamed of.²
Such things are common in India, too. There, in an eleventh-century collection of legends, Padmavati dreams of a man with matted hair near a certain temple. Later that morning, she sees with astonishment the very same man bathing at the very same temple.³ Further east, a Japanese tale, among so many others, has Susano falling asleep by a river amid his work and dreaming of a beautiful woman floating along the water. Later that evening, he finds the very same woman, and they later unite.⁴

The Shaman and the Saint

Among shamans, saints, and native tales too, these experiences are found in numbers. In a 1979 study of Korean female shamans, one of them dreamed of a “handsome woman” saying, “Oh, you have come.” Three months later, while attending a ritualistic rite for invoking fortune, the dreamer notes that “the instant I entered, […] I recognized the handsome woman of my dream.”_⁵ Among the Pawnee Indians of the Great Plains, a boy named Handsome Boy dreamed repeatedly of a mysterious figure unknown to him. When he awakens from one of these encounters, he meets “the man concerning whom he had been dreaming.”⁶ At times, these dreams impel the dreamer to seek out the object of the dream. Walking Thunder, the Dine Indian born in New Mexico, noted that “Sometimes I saw a medicine person in my dreams, and then I went to find the person who appeared.”⁷ From the folklore in the Ozarks, a similar capacity is referenced in the passing of a woman who was known for curing warts. She would simply “dream of a man, then seeks this fellow out.”⁸ Anne of Saint Bartholomew (1549–1626) was a Spanish Discalced Carmelite who founded several monasteries in France and beyond. To join, she traveled to Ávila for interview and later noted, “I experienced great content to find myself with them, and I recognized those I had seen in my dream.”⁹

Love at Second Sight

Clearly then, these are relatively common tales. But are they merely tales or literary devices? Errors of memory and perception or related to temporal lobe malfunction? In some cases, most certainly—however, while scholars approaching these facts across various fields rarely engage with it, ordinary people still consistently report and record the very same (even before the dreams fulfillment). In surprisingly large numbers across disparate and unconnected sources, it is claimed over and over again that lovers and others have met first in their dreams—hundreds of which accounts I have documented in Deja Reve & Love at Second Sight. In his own book, A Gift of Barbed Wire, Robert McKelvey—a former marine who served in

Vietnam—briefly recounted the following: “I also dreamt about my wife before I met her. When I later saw her I was stunned! We met in Da Lat. A friend of mine introduced her. After we had gone out together a few times I told her that I already knew her from my dream.”¹⁰ When Miss Mercy, co-founder of the Frank Zappa-produced band the GTOs, was asked during an interview where she met American singer-songwriter and musician Shuggie Otis, she replied simply, “I met him in a dream, I really did. It was in Los Angeles. I met him in a dream and they said you’re gonna marry this person and I did. It was crazy.”¹¹

These dreams, in fact, are often related to or play a pivotal part in important life events. Before medical doctor Lee Lipsenthal began school, he dreamed numerous times of standing next to an altar with an Asian woman who had long, dark hair. He knew no Asian women at the time and “had no context for the image of this woman. The first day of medical school, Lipsenthal noticed a five-foot-tall Asian woman walking through the doors. “I knew,” the author wrote, “at that very moment, this was the woman I had dreamed about.” They would later agree to marry.¹² From a compilation of accounts collected by Today’s Groom Magazine, and worthy of any of the old romances, we read of a woman dreaming of a strange land of ancient walls with children flying kites, one of which drifted over to her. She then was guided on a long journey by a boy who promised they would reunite in the future. Many years later, Elizabeth meets someone online named Jay, noting:

“When he sent me his pictures, I recognized his face from my dream. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. I still had the drawing from before, and I knew it was him.”¹³

Conclusion

Despite the lack of work in these areas, everyday people in everyday settings continue to record these remarkable experiences of déjà rêvé. Whatever their ultimate mechanisms or meanings, experiences of this kind are certainly not relegated solely to the pages of folklore and fancy but continue to invigorate, enlighten, and enliven the lives of so many and deserve attention for this reason.

1. Guest, The Mabinogion, 81–89.
2. Levy, The Three Dervishes, 19–32.
3. Lienhard, “A History of Classical Poetry,” 240.
4. Hearn, Kwaidan, 35–41.
5. Harvey, Six Korean Women, 108–109.
6. Dorsey, Pawnee Mythology (Part I), 414–25.
7. Connor, Shamans, 21.
8. Randolph, Ozark Magic and Folklore, 127–28.
9. Bouix, Autobiography of Blessed Mother, 12.
10. McKelvey, Gift of Barbed Wire, 164–65.
11. “Women of the Underground.”
12. Lipsenthal, Enjoy Every Sandwich, 16–23.
13. Today’s Groom Magazine, “The Groom to Be’s”, 43–46.