There is a reason why some dreams really are forward-looking and can prefigure future events. To explain this, I am drawing on two perspectives: lucid dreaming and what we have learned about archetypes and synchronicity.
Science (neurology and brain-science) is behind the curve in terms of having anything helpful to say about the phenomenology of dreaming because if you take the "I" out of dreaming, you lose the soul-connection. Science wants to eliminate the subject, but you can't do that because dreams are about individuation and transformation of the self.
In a way, we are all experienced dreamers. It's just that we have been dumbed down by rational ideologies! We should trust our experience. Science, in my opinion, will never have the last word about dreaming because dreams pass through the personal filter. Anyone in this (dream) class knows by now that the archetypes are not personal, but the way we experience archetypes is personal and culturally determined. So, for example, snake, mountain, darkness, fire, the sea, all very ancient archetypes, will mean very different things depending on who the dreamer is - Native American, Hindu, Chinese or Inuit. (In Chinese medicine, fire is an element, for Native Americans fire is a spirit or an ancestor. For another example, an island people know the sea as provider but also as devouring and mysterious. When I was in Ireland, I was really surprised when I talked to old men, to learn how many of their friends were lost at sea.)
Jungians say that with archetypes, you have an archetypal field, a powerful psychic field. When that field comes up, in a dream, the whole dream might constellate around the archetype.
In the unconscious, linear time is only an illusion. The dream may appear to unfold in normal linear time, like a play or story but in reality, the whole dream unfolds in a very short time, and events are not always logically sequential. The dream reality appears to occupy normal 3-dimensional space, but space is also an illusion. The lucid dreamer learns to bring a double-awareness into dream-reality which allows the lucid dreamer to increase his or her personal power within the dream-reality, by bending the rules to accomplish some goal or intention. This enables the dreamer to play with the dream, assuming the role of actor and co-director, influencing the action. The lucid dreamer learns their limits, so there is definitely an art to lucid dreaming. The unconscious is still in charge, but it seems to encourage greater consciousness within the dream as long as the dreamer doesn't take over, in which case the dream usually shuts down.
There are older cultures that have mastered dreaming as an art, and they all attach spiritual significance to dreaming.
Jung did not coin the word "psyche" but he embraced the original meaning of psyche, which is Greek and means "soul". So according to Jung, when we dream we are hearing from our souls. The archetypes draw on millenia of human experience, something like programs that can be activated, except it is inaccurate to compare human consciousness to a digital computer. The brain is far more complex than any computer.
In the unconscious, as we live and progress through the decades, certain archetypes naturally come up, because our life experiences seem to constellate these "programs". In indigenous cultures the elders (over time) learned how to take advantage of this to enhance and even evoke this time-sensitive transformational archetypes to become rites of initiation. Even though our culture doesn't do that, the unconscious still attempts to initiate us. So we are often challenged by our dreams when our lives reach certain intersections (which occur at some point in our lives every decade, but potentially much more frequently). These intersections are inevitable in the journey of life.
One small caveat here: Older indigenous cultures were not necessarily individuated cultures. It is Western culture that prizes individuation (or claims to). In the old world, survival depended on everyone knowing what to do and when and on each person carrying their own weight. In the Western post-industrial world, where everything is unravelling, initiation means realigning with our inborn gifts, our original nature, while carrying on in a way that reflects our stage of life. Initiation grounds us in our personal mythos or journey. It reacquaints us with our core self.
In life, as in dreaming, we are acted upon by two types of forces: causal forces and forces of destiny or future-oriented forces. Freud had a lot to say about how we are products of our past and upbringing, but that is only half the story. We are also affected by future causes, or future probabilities.
The past (especially an unhealthy past) sets up a regressive sucking force that wants us to return to the past for answers, but, as we mature, this is countered by a force that pulls or draws us toward the future. James Hillman writes about telos and teleology. When the caterpillar is in its cocoon in the midst of metamorphosing into a moth or butterfly its body is liquified, but its DNA is busy reconfiguring its future form and being.
A caterpillar's metamorphosis is not a metaphor to the caterpillar. But neither is our own transformation metaphorical when we enter into the teleological field of an initiatory archetype.
The future is, by definition, not yet embodied. It is always assuming form within an array of probability fields. There is more than one probable future. Dreams are where the future begins to assume a direction and a form. We actually have an influence on the future we live and, once we begin to develop our gifts, the way we live actually influences and shapes the future of, not just our lives, but our time. I'm not saying that that there aren't other effective ways to affect the outcome of our lives and times, but dreams are where the past and future meet in a dimension that exists outside of time and space, (a psychic dimension), where our soul can get important information to us that helps us become whole and thrive.
Just to repeat, archetypal fields are not personal, nor are they limited to our personal psychic space. They transcend the personal. So, if an archetype has been constellated, we are functioning within the archetypal field whether we are asleep or awake. That accounts for synchronistic events, because archetypes exhibit a psychoid nature. Once constellated, they transcend a purely psychic reality; as patterning agents, they can engage matter. A good example might be crop circles (if you believe they are not all human-made!) or the mind-boggling creation of the Egyptian pyramids. (I am not saying that the pyramids were not hand-built, but that matter "participated" in their construction, so there was an energetic collaboration between intention and matter that was synchronistic.)
When we are in the dream state, our self-consciousness diminishes and the unconscious can draft us to participate in a story that is powered by the archetypes. We may have a hard time identifying the archetypes in a given dream, but they are really the engines of our dreaming. When we wake up, the archetypes are still there, but now our self-awareness and the demands of life are monopolizing our attention. But in the course of our day, events might happen that feel like they have happened before. That is because our dreams and our waking reality are interpenetrating. Once we understand that the archetypes are psychoid (they can engage matter), and that inner and outer are not separate or exclusive as we are conditioned to think, it can make total sense that sometimes we seem to have the ability to anticipate events.
Another way of looking at it is, there is a level at which we don't really stop dreaming. When consciousness dims, it turns out we are still tapped into a psychic reality that underpins our lives.
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