DREAM PROPHESY

Many people believe that dreams contain some message for the dreamer, often foretelling the future. One of the most famous dreams was that of the Pharaoh of Egypt, interpreted by Joseph and recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible (Genesis, chapter 4IX Joseph was sold to an Egyptian courtier as a slave. Because he was very handsome, his master's wife wanted to have an affair with him, but he refused. She became terribly upset and she told the master that Joseph had made love to her. The master put Joseph in prison.
Whilst in prison, he became well known for his ability to predict the future through dream interpretation.
One night the Pharaoh had a dream in which he was standing by the River Nile. He saw seven fat cows feeding on the grass, but then seven thin cows came up and ate the seven fat cows. In his next dream there were seven ears of good healthy corn and seven ears of withered corn blighted by the east wind; the seven thin ears swallowed up the seven good ears.
No one in the palace could interpret the dream. Joseph was called from the prison to interpret the Pharaoh's dream. Joseph explained that Egypt would have seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. The Pharaoh was very pleased with Joseph and made Joseph the Governor of Egypt. Joseph began stockpiling grain, and was able to do this for seven years. But the next seven years were ones of severe world-wide famine. Joseph had lots of grain, and became the most powerful man of his time, for soon the whole world was coming to Egypt to buy grain.
This is one of the many stories of dream prophecy, illustrating the fact that some people can dream what is going to happen in the future. It is believed that such people possess psychic power. But dreams are in fact a reflection of our inner feelings and unconscious thinking. Perhaps dreams represent a sixth sense—the ability of seeing into the future.
The psychiatrist Carl Jung had his own theory of the interpretation of dreams. Jung saw the mind as being divided into two main compartments, the conscious and the unconscious. Deep in the unconscious portion there is a part that is common to all mankind and he called this the 'collective unconscious'. The collective unconscious is the common denominator of our personalities irrespective of culture, race, and time. Jung thought there were two kinds of dream, the personal and the collective.
The collective dream obtains its source from the collective unconscious and is significant both to the individual and to society. Primitive people described the personal dream as the 'little' dream and the collective dream as the 'big' dream. The dream of the Pharaoh of Egypt was a big dream. It was of supreme importance to the people and, at that time, dreams were believed to be sent by God. At the time of the Pharaoh, cows and ears of corn both had tremendous meaning to the Egyptians, conveying symbolic meaning. Food and its accumulation meant power and stability. The Egyptians worshipped a god of corn, and they had sacred bulls. These were the symbols in the collective unconscious of the Egyptian mind.
But how Joseph was able to predict seven years of famine through a dream remains unanswered. Perhaps he was doing what the present day economists are doing all the time—predicting when our next recession will be.
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