How to Tell the Future

Developing Your Extrasensory Perceptions

Learn the difference between premonitions, precognitions, and prophecies. Any time you get into future-telling, a lot lingo starts getting tossed around. It can get confusing. Keeping terms straight can untangle a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo and make the techniques and the simple tricks a little more fun for the beginner. Precognition means awareness of the future, through direct knowledge or some other kind of perception, like dreams. Most precognitive experiences occur in dreams, and most occur 24-48 hours before the occurrence. Premonition involves the feeling that something might happen, but not the knowledge of what it is exactly. Premonitions might include feelings of foreboding or "hunches" that something "feels right." These can be just as significant as precognition, and much more reliable. Prophecy refers back to the ancient Greek sense of time, with the future being fixed and immutable. A prophecy is a knowledge of a future that will definitely happen, without question. For something to be prophecies means that it cannot be changed.

Start meditating deeply. Scans show that humans have dormant parts of their minds, sitting in their skulls, seemingly useless. But are those dormant abilities really useless and dormant? Not necessarily. Flexing your unconscious muscles is possible through practicing deep meditation, letting your unconscious mind overwhelm your conscious mind, and take over. This is where future telling happens. Start by making yourself comfortable, in a room with soft natural light. Sitting in a comfortable upright position, preferably on the floor, calm your mind and focus on your breathing. Feel the breath go into your body. Feel the breath go out of your body. Feel the oxygen nourishing your body, and going back out into the world. Just focus on your breath, nothing else. Gradually, start focusing on relaxing your body as you breathe. With every breath, focus on relaxing one arm, first. Feel the breath going into your arm and relax your arm. Then move to your other arm, then down your chest, and throughout the rest of your body. Calm your head and your mind, as well. Focus on relaxation.

Gradually enter and deepen your entranced state. There's no big secret to meditation. Zazen–the type of meditation done by Zen monastics–is loosely translated as "just sitting." The goal is nothingness, letting your subconscious mind take over, with its extrasensory powers of perception. By learning to do this, you'll open yourself up to a wider array of signs and portents, making the future more visible. As your trance deepens, you should gradually start losing your sense of time, quieting your thinking mind and allowing your subconscious to become more perceptive. Some diviners find it effective to visualize climbing or descending a ladder, or walking into a cave to symbolize diving deeper into your subconscious and deepening the trance state.

Add meditation into your daily life. As you begin entering your trances and deepening your meditation, stop trying to force things to happen and begin allowing things to happen. Pay attention to images that arise during your meditations and then seek out these images during the day. Pay attention to faces and people that come up in your meditations and keep an eye out for them. They may be precognitions. Use all your senses. It might sound silly, but you can think of your body as a "psychic eye," or something that's always gathering information. Temperatures, certain smells, even feelings can all be signs of the future. If you notice feelings of anxiety when you see owls, feelings you've never experienced before, take it as significant. If every time you hear Katy Perry sing, you feel coolness, take it as a significant premonition of something.

Pay attention to symbols and signs. Signs and portents are all around us, but it's up to us to find them. If you're lucky enough to have been gifted with some observation skills and extrasensory perceptions, learning to tell the future still takes a lot of work, but you'll be a better future teller if you work out your extrasensory muscles. If you want to open your perceptions and expand your abilities, stop seeing events and images as “random” and start seeing them as part of a plan. Pay attention to "hair on the back of the neck" moments. When something happens that pricks the little hairs on the back of your neck, making you feel just slightly "off," stop what you're doing and focus. What do you notice? What seems to have startled you? What seems significant? Pay attention to deja vu. Ever have the feeling something has happened before, and everything feels weird and reverberating? Start paying attention to what seems off about these moments. What do you notice? Where are you? What sense memories are being evoked? Pay attention to coincidences. Maybe you wake up some morning and see moths on your porch, then the cute barista will be wearing a t-shirt with a furry moth across the back. Mere coincidence? To some, there is no such thing–what matters is that it happened. Take coincidences as symbols, signs, and portents, rather than unexplainable randomness.

Analyze the symbols. So, you meditated and couldn’t get the image of a fleet of crabs drinking gasoline on a beach at nighttime out of your mind. Weird! What does this mean? It might mean different things for different people, so learning to interrogate your symbols and subconscious portents and apply them to your own experience will be up to you. Think of it like dream interpretation or poetry analysis. These images should give you impressions, so start simple. Does it seem positive or negative? Powerful or weak? Daytime or nighttime? Research the individual symbols you find recurring in your life and in your meditations. Crabs, for example, are significant in all kinds of fortune telling, appear on the "Moon" Tarot card, and is part of the Zodiac. A significant vision. The Dream Bible, can be an excellent resource for quick reading about the symbols that appear in your dreams. It's a good place to start.

Read up on Greek mythology. If you don't know your yarrow stick from your elbow, telling the future's going to be a tough climb. If you've got an interest in developing your extrasensory muscles and telling the future, it's a good idea to do some research on your own and learn about the collective unconscious, and the important myths and symbols of your culture. The writings of Carl Jung are deeply influential in the way we understand our minds and the connection we have with our subconscious or "unthinking" mind. Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces is an excellent resource for finding patterns that recur across cultures and mythologies, suggesting that certain symbols, signs, and portents might be ingrained in us as humans, somehow.

Analyzing Dreams

Start keeping a dream journal. It can be difficult to analyze your dreams if you can't remember them. To make it easier on yourself, keep a notebook beside your bed with a pen ready to go, every time you go to sleep. As soon as you wake up, write down everything that you were dreaming. Describe it in as specific an amount of detail as possible. Try to do it as soon as you've awakened, no matter how tired you are. What did you see? Who was there? What did you notice around you in terms of senses like smells, tastes, textures? How did you connect to it emotionally? Was it a scary dream? A sexy dream? A pleasant dream? Write down dialog first. This tends to be the first thing to go and it can be frustrating to think that something important might have been communicated and not be able to remember what it was.

Awaken yourself periodically throughout the night. If you struggle to remember your dreams, wake yourself up in the middle of them. Interrupting your dreams is an effective way of recognizing the symbols in them and keeping the images fresh in your mind. Set an alarm on your phone to go off every three hours, which will allow you to complete two full REM cycles of 90 minutes each. You can write down your dreams in only a minute or two, meaning that you'll still be able to get a full night of sleep and will be able to record your dreams.

Locate and assign meaning to the symbols in your dreams. Just as you might with symbols that come up in your meditation, start interrogating the symbols rise out of your dreams and assigning significance and meaning to them. Pick up on lots of different things in each dream. Go back to your image of crabs drinking gasoline on the beach. The crabs and the gasoline seem significant, but also consider what drinking might symbolize, what sand might symbolize, and other tactile or emotional elements to the images. How did it feel to watch? People are symbols as well. Dreaming that you kissed your best friend doesn't necessarily "mean" that you're in love with your best friend and you should start kissing. When we dream of specific people, it is because our subconscious has attached a symbolic meaning to those people. Dreaming of kissing your friend might mean that you're attracted to a certain element of your friend as a person, something that you want to get closer to, or accomplish in your own life.

Connect your dream symbols to your life and to the future. Common dreams, like dreaming that your teeth are falling out, or that you are flying, or that you're in public with no clothes on have common interpretations–you're stressed out, you're struggling or succeeding with control, you're vulnerable–but you might make more compelling connections to events or coincidences in your own life. Use dreams along with your well-developed extrasensory perceptions of your life to create your own premonitions and precognitive sense of what the future might hold. If you're waiting to hear the news after a job interview and dream that you're flying high and out of control, you might take it as a sign that you're feeling anxiety about the idea of success, of the freedom a new job might bring you. Which might mean you've got the job. Temper your dream analysis with practicality. If you've dreamt that your friend is dead, laid out in a coffin, it doesn't necessarily mean "my friend is going to die." Rather, a chapter in your friend's life might be closing, or your relationship might be changing in some way, in the future. Apply it to what's going on in your life.

Practice lucid dreaming and question the future. Some particularly ambitious and skilled lucid dreamers use waking dreams to attempt to question the future directly. If you've practiced and developed the ability to remain conscious while you're dreaming, Try to visualize a pad of paper, or some other oracle, and ask it direct questions. "Who's going to win the Super Bowl?" or "What chance do I have of getting this job?" See what happens.

Consulting an Oracle

Pick an oracle to consult. An oracle is a practice, object, or method that allows you to "read" the future. No, you don't need to climb a mystical mountain and present a floating trio of goddesses with a laurel wreath and a clear conscious to consult an oracle. Think of oracles like tools for seeing, or like shortcuts to the future. Oracles–from the Latin for "to speak"–are just ways of making it easier on yourself. If you like unusual images and totemic symbols, the Tarot is the classic way to go. To get started, visit an experienced Tarot reader to see what a reading is like. Then you can start learning about the different cards and the history of the Tarot in divinatory culture. If you enjoy meditating on stories and coincidences, learn to consult the iChing and gaze into its mysterious world. If you enjoy deep meditation and open-ended symbols, consider scrying, palm-reading, or other more complex methods of divination that will allow you to put your own spin on the oracle.

Ask open-ended questions of your oracle. If you want to look to an oracle for your future-telling needs, you’ve got to do most of the work by providing a probing and open-ended question. This will help you interpret the oracular symbols that you receive and apply it to your interests. It only works if you lead with a question that's both open-ended and complex. Good questions to prompt the oracle usually start, "What should I notice…" or "How should I approach…" or "How do I think about…" Leave enough open that the oracle can give you something concrete to interpret. Asking "Will I get this job?" won't work when you're throwing bones or reading the iChing, because you won't get a yes or no answer. Instead, focus on asking questions like, "What do I need to know to improve my chances of getting this job?"

Consider reading Tarot cards. Tarot cards are made up of 78 cards, featuring major and minor arcana, and resembling a deck of regular playing cards. There are four suits: cups, staves, swords, and pentacles, with strange art on each card that you can use to read in any number of different ways. It's one of the most famous and versatile methods of telling the future symbolically. Most Tarot readings tell stories, focusing on a specific question the querant is asking. If you want to learn more about Tarot, go in for a reading, get a guidebook, and get started familiarizing yourself with the deck.

Ask questions of the iChing. The iChing is the book of changes. You can consult it using coins, marbles, yarrow stalks, or by other mathematical methods, which result in the drawing of a six-lined "hexagram," made up of two symbols, that corresponds to an entry in the book. Simply put, you'll throw some dice, ask a question, and read a few mysterious passages. If you enjoy poetry, chance, and meditating on stories, it's a great way of getting in touch the with future.

Read shadows. Sciomancy is the art of divining the future by looking at shadows, looking into the dark for images and symbols for interpretation. If you want to get started, all you'll need is a candle and a well-developed sense of your own ESP. Set yourself up in a darkened room with plain walls. You should be illuminated from behind yourself with a single candle. Meditate deeply for a while, opening your eyes to look into the corners of the room, watching the way the light plays with the shadows. Record the images that arise for you out of the shadows, writing them down for later. Imagine that the room is your mind and the shadows are ideas, images, and thoughts that float around in it. What seems significant? What might portend the future?

Gaze into a crystal ball or other reflective surface. Similar to shadow-gazing, scrying is the art of looking into a reflective surface of some kind, most famously a crystal ball, to "find" images and symbols for interpretation. To get started, get yourself a crystal, most preferably made of clear quartz. Other acceptable crystals include amethyst, beryl, selenite, or obsidian. The crystal should be at least four or five inches in diameter. Charge your crystal in the light of the full moon, for the course of a night, and keep it clean and locked in a safe place where it will be free of psychic negativity. To stare into the crystal, hold it gently in your hands, or place it in front of you on a stand or a dark pillow. Enter your deep meditative state and stare gently into the crystal, looking deep, relaxing your eyes to allow images to reveal themselves.

Study the stars. Ever since there have been people, people have looked to the stars for guidance. Astrology has been used for millennia to learn about ourselves and about our futures. If you're interested in moving past your basic newspaper horoscope to learn more about interpreting symbols based on the organization of the stars. Astrology is just as much of a philosophy, or a way of understanding behavior, as it is a mystic tool. There are 12 astrological signs that combine the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, with one of the three qualities–cardinal, fixed, and mutable. Learning about your symbols, depending on the seasons and the changes can clue you into how you should look into the future and what you can do to make your future yourself. EXPERT TIP Tara Divina Tara Divina Vedic Astrologer Tara Divina is a California-based Vedic Astrologer. Vedic Astrology, also known as Jyotish, is an ancient, sacred art of self-understanding and divination. With nearly 10 years of experience, Tara gives personalized readings that answer her clients' biggest questions about relationships, money, purpose, career, and other big life decisions. Tara Divina Tara Divina Vedic Astrologer What signs do you look for when you're predicting someone's future? I look at a variety of factors. Maybe their Vedic chart, from Hindu astrology, points toward a specific thing happening. Then, what's happening in their life lines up with their chart, my intuition, and what I read on their palms. At that point, what I see in their Vedic chart seems probable because multiple factors are pointing in the same direction.