The pre-cognitive dream is a totally different experience It is relatively rare and also not, typically, necessary to interpret. There are some cases where interpretation is necessary; for instance, there was a man who always dreamed about a cat three days before he got sick. (Very convenient for planning ahead.) But, you see, that symbol was totally personal.

Most precognitive dreams are pretty straight-forward. Some are very clear; for instance, a friend of mine has seen the deaths of five out of six of his close friends some time during the week before they happened, close up and in color. Other precog dreams are not so clear. Hundreds foresaw, in some way, the landslide of coal slag that hit a schoolhouse in a Welsh mining village some years ago. Some dreamed of an enveloping blackness, some of children screaming, others of an avalanche -- but I've never heard of one who had a precise, clear premonition of the disaster in exact form.

Since you are soothsayers, this is the type of dream you will probably want to cultivate. A method for doing this goes back to your pad of paper at the bedside. Exchange it for a notebook, and record your dreams on either the left or right of the page, leaving the other side for prediction. After you jot down your dreams, note on the prediction side what you think they might mean. Then come back once a week or so and circle any that you consider to be "hits". In theory you should get used to your own predictive style this way and eventually start improving. You may also spot personal signals, like the man with the sickness=cat symbol.

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Related to precognitive dreams are telepathic dreams; you know, the mother hears her child cry out in an accident across the country, a man says goodbye to his wife before he dies 500 miles away, etc. Of course, when either death or sleep is involved, it's hard to say definitely whether it's a case of telepathy or out of the body travel. I don't see that it makes much difference, though it's an interesting point to consider. A telepathic dream is indicated when (1) you are asleep -- if you are just drowsing before retiring, it isn't a dream but straight telepathy -- and (2) the sending and receiving seem to take place at the same time. On the other hand, some people communicate by telepathy from the East to the West Coast with both parties in their own 11:15 time slot, ignoring the accepted realities of time zones. Others take the time zones into account, which seems to happen more often in spontaneous communications. In the case of ghosts saying goodbye, quite often the ghost comes when the viewer is open to it, not at the time of death. This can be hours later. or even a little before they die. All this indicates to me that time is a crutch which we discard when we leave this "real" world behind. Have you noticed that in five minutes of sleep you can get in hours of dream experience? (If you haven't you probably will if you try to write down all of your dreams.) At any rate, telepathic dreams almost never need interpretation. And it would be silly to try.

A related type of dream is the Out of Body experience, while the body is asleep. It is typified by extreme clarity of detail and generally travel to another place. I remember once when I was trying to visit a friend in New York City that way I got lost in Central Park. To do dreaming of this type, you suggest to yourself that you will go to some specific place or visit some particular person (record your intention and the results in your notebook) and then relax and see if it happens. As with most types of psychic activity, there is a base level to any "talent" whether OOB travel, precognition, clairvoyance, etc. and then there is developing that talent with practice. As with artistic talents like painting or singing, the more you practice, the better you become, and you'll never be really good without practice . But the potential you have for your final level is very dependent upon what level of talent you start with. But remember, lots of people have talents that are undeveloped because they didn't know they had them in the first place. And you can still get a workmanlike skill in most skills by simply applying yourself.

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Another kind of place you can go without your body is other planes and other worlds/other lives. From my own experience I have found that we do not RE-incarnate, but simultaneously incarnate in different lives. If being aware of your other simultaneous lives won't stunt your growth, you might find that you recall other lives when you wake up. This dream type is not a heck of a lot different than remembering what happened yesterday in this life. It is typified by clarity of detail, and, especially, inner consistency. You won't see your friends and relatives of this life in the other life wearing this life' s form --though you may recognize them even though they differ in age, sex, and relationship to you. Matters of this life will not intrude. This type of dream is very rare. Again, it is not to be interpreted, although you can learn lessons from it. Often the lessons one is learning in one incarnation are applicable to what's going on in this one.

Another memory dream is memory of past lives, usually just fragments and interesting ones at that. These are hard to tell from the fun, fantasy dreams I mentioned first (sometimes the way to tell is that they are more often in the middle of the night, rather than just before waking). Usually the way to identify them is by a strong conviction that that WAS a glimpse of a past life . Generally, they don't have much more lesson in them than fun dreams do, unless it is to point out that you are about to repeat a mistake, or explain where you got an attitude or a belief. Aside from that they are not too useful. After all, you've already learned the lessons of that life; pay attention to what's going on here and now.

The problem solving dream is not a dream that requires interpretation- it usually is obvious to the waking dreamer what the useful part of the dream was. I think it was Singer who dreamed he was in Africa having spears thrown at him by natives, and when he woke he remembered that the spear points had holes in them, which gave him the answer to how to make a sewing machine work- put the thread through the point not the base. Kekule needed no prompting when he had his famous dream in which the atoms showed him how they arranged themselves in the benzene ring. Sadly, I've seen my share of dreams where the answer to a problem came to me, but when I analyzed it while awake, there was a major logic or reality flaw in the dream solution. But sometimes the answer is beautifully clear and real.