Do you think dreams can teach you something about your life, stuff you need to learn? Can they offer clues to the psyche: hidden fears or beliefs, or help you with crucial decisions? Or are they just scattered bits you took in throughout the day: input, stimuli and thoughts you might not even have noticed as they happened?

The confusing part, I think, is that they are both. Sometimes the details are just random. Sometimes they contain deep meaning, clues to our desires, anxieties, choices. I think these clues come more readily because we have to submit to sleep; the controlling part of us is disengaged. Other times, in my opinion, dreams offer proof that we can sometimes see the future.

One night a few years ago, I dreamt I was at a rock concert. Odd that it wasn’t a Prince concert or a Robben Ford concert, as that’s where I would more likely be, but I was at the show of a loud, heavy, aggressive rock band. At some point during the show, just before I woke up, the band brought out this huge, frightening, thirty-foot tall animatronic creature onto the stage. It was a monster: its legs so long I could barely see the torso or head. It had that strange, frightening un-reality, the oversized proportions you only see in movies and in you dream world. It was very tall.

I woke up.

The next day, a highly gifted music student named Bret gave me a CD by a band I had never heard before called Evanescence. This was 2003 or so, and I hadn’t yet heard of them. I put the CD in, and was listening to it at one point during my hour and ten minute long, rural, forested commute back to the Berkshires. About halfway home I turned a corner with the music up loud, and what did I find?

A moose. First time in my life. A giant buck sporting a full rack of antlers, and legs so tall that from my Volvo wagon I could barely see his head.

I was stunned. I love catching a glimpse of wildlife. Even just a porcupine or woodchuck. I often see deer on my daily walk. Last year a brown bear and I surprised each other in the woods. We crossed paths, and the bear took off into the forest. I did not follow.

But I had never seen a moose in my life, and the striking feature, obviously, was its enormous size. To come upon a wild animal that large is an amazing experience. I think that for me it is similar to how some people would feel if they walked into a room, and there was a movie star. It was a sense of, Oh, I know you… I’ve heard of you but never met you. And here you are, in the flesh. There was a sort of unreality to it. But it was happening.

I got very close. He allowed me to gawk at him for a while, and then trotted out right into the middle of the road. I drove past him, turned around, and then blasted the horn, flashed my high beams, and talked out the window till I drove him up into the forest. A car accident with this animal, I’m quite certain, would be catastrophic for all involved.

The next day there was an article in the Berkshire Eagle about the prevalence of moose in our area; apparently they had come down from the north: Vermont and Canada. I felt lucky to have had such a private, close-up experience with one.

So, just to bring us around again to my dream… this was no coincidence. I dreamt the concert because the next day I was to drive home with the CD playing loudly. I dreamt the music the way it was, because it was the closest I could approximate to the band I hadn’t heard yet. I dreamt the giant guy with the unbelievably tall legs because I didn’t know it would be a moose. The experience was such a vivid one it reached back in time, proving all the more that this kind of information can move backwards or forwards on the timeline; it doesn’t make much difference.

So what of precognition and free will? This dream featured ambiguous symbols that I could understand only when I looked back on it, after the actual event the next day. What if the dream had been more specific though, and I got excited and decided not to blast my student’s CD, or to leave work five minutes later, or stay another half hour with the vocalist I was writing a song with? I guess precognition organizes all of these forces and gives us a glimpse of what’s going to happen based on the free will choices that will lead up to it.

Tristan L. Sullivan