How to Decode Your Dreams and Predict Your Future

In 1993, my best friend Stephanie’s parents bought a sprawling old Moroccan-style house in Los Angeles, sentencing Stephanie to spend the summer after eighth grade sorting through five bedrooms’ worth of junk the previous owners had left behind. While her parents primed and painted, we wandered through the dusty rooms, poking into cabinets and closets that hadn’t been opened in our lifetimes, looking for anything romantic or mysterious to save our squandered summer. We picked out Zolar’s Encyclopedia & Dictionary of Dreams, with its vaguely celestial cover, from a stack of books and magazines Stephanie was supposed to be boxing up for donation. To two bookish fourteen-year-olds, finding this strange occult object as if by chance, abandoned in an old mansion, was the very height of drama.

We soon learned the book’s contents weren’t quite as dramatic as we’d hoped. Zolar’s Encyclopedia contains almost five hundred pages of dream symbols and their meanings, organized by subject and arranged alphabetically. Under p is an entry for “Power of Attorney.” Dreaming of “receiving the power of attorney” means you “Will place trust in someone under you.” Dreaming that you are “giving power of attorney to a lawyer,” however, means you “Will have illness but recover soon.” The letter t contains entries for Trigger, Trinket, Tripe, and Triplets. Under z you can find an entry for Zombie but not the ghoul, only the cocktail. There are more than 20,000 entries in the book, each one presented without explanation or elaboration, just page after page of closely-spaced text, like the white pages for your unconscious mind.

The Encyclopedia is meant to function as a one-stop dream decoder, producing exactly one definitive answer to what every dream symbol means. If you dream about “juniper shrubs or trees,” it means “someone will speak evil about you.” Unlike Freudian-style dream analysis, there’s no room for interpretation by the dreamer or his analyst and no context to bias the interpretation. A juniper tree means the same thing for you as it does for me, even if your beloved childhood home was surrounded by juniper trees and I have a deadly juniper allergy. Moreover, Zolar’s interpretations are rarely intuitive. Dreaming about bad things (“being an inmate of a prison”) often means something good will happen in your future (in this case, “Happiness within the family”). Dreaming about good things often means the reverse. The universe doesn’t want you to get too comfortable—or perhaps Zolar simply realized that, if dream interpretation were too easy, no one would need to buy a book.

That same year, in 1993, I dreamed about a wedding. In the dream, I was standing in a wide grassy meadow ringed with tall trees. It was late afternoon at the end of the summer. The sun was bright and low in the sky, with that held-breath quality of late summer afternoons. I was wearing a long, loose white dress, and my hair was down—I could feel it resting on my back and see the tips set blazing by the sun. Very near me stood the groom. He was wearing all white and had a ruddy golden beard, its curling edges blazing like my hair. I stood squinting up at him but I couldn’t see the upper part of his face, just a solar flare. And that was it. Those were all the clues the universe saw fit to give me.

Stephanie and I looked up the dream immediately. The Encyclopedia contains entries for Bride, Bridegroom, Wedding, and Marriage, as well as every other element of the dream, from “simple dresses” to “a beautiful afternoon.” The symbols were a contradictory jumble, impossible to decode. Dreaming of the sun suggested “Success in love matters,” while dreaming of “the sun shining where you are” suggested “Will soon have a sickness.” None of the entries told me what I wanted to hear, which was that I was dreaming about my future husband. I gave up on Zolar and decided to decode the dream myself instead. I turned it over and over, looking for clues to the identity of my future husband. There weren’t many to seize on, in a dream so short and so spare: a white jacket, part of a beard. Instead, I focused on the way the dream made me feel. Would I ever feel so in love, so enraptured, in my waking life? I imagined that when I had the dream again, as I felt sure I would, it would reveal the groom’s whole face. Then I would know for sure what the universe was planning for me.

None of the entries told me what I wanted to hear, which was that I was dreaming about my future husband.

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Zolar’s Encyclopedia & Dictionary of Dreams has been in print continuously since 1962. The only available information about the author is a short biographical sketch that appeared in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town section,” written by none other than John Updike and published on Halloween 1959 under the title “Dean of Astrologers.” His real name was Bruce King, he was born in 1897, and his professional name was a combination of Zodiac and Solar. As he explained to Updike, King took care to conceal his identity in order to cultivate a sense of mystery; when visitors showed up to his “tiny office in the West Sixties,” he would pretend to be his own manager and explain that Zolar was away on far-flung mystical business.

A former actor, model, and traveling salesman, Zolar wrote books on astrology, numerology, fortune-telling, homeopathy, palmistry, handwriting analysis, hypnosis, “the magick of colour,” and reincarnation. In addition to his books, Zolar popularized horoscope vending machines in the 1930s, selling millions of predictions on little paper slips out of movie theaters and stores like Woolworths. To read the destinies of that many people, he explains, you must be a generalist. “If you want a specialist, you go somewhere else. Over the years, I have evolved a method of astrological analysis that will cover the greatest common denominator,” adding, “That’s the only way you can handle a mass business.”

The Encyclopedia begins with an explanation of Zolar’s method, which is based on numerology and “mystic mathematics.” “The universe operates with exact mathematical precision, calculated to a fraction of a second,” Zolar explains. “Every day of life brings good or bad reaction to the magnetic influence of the numerical equations that surround you. They are in everything you see, feel, or hear. It is impossible to escape them.” The preface also includes diverse anecdotes of dreams that came true, an obligatory hat-tip to Jung, a reference to the second-century mystic Artemedorus Dalidarius, a quote from Freud taken quite out of context, and Benjamin Franklin’s “Astral Rule” for converting dream symbols into numbers that can then be used for the purposes of gambling. The effect is dizzying, like listening to a huckster’s patter. Even as teenagers we recognized every part of Zolar’s explanation was absurd, but the sheer weight of the text, its inexhaustible confidence, conveys a certain authority.

My friends and I were always on the lookout for clues to our futures, especially our romantic futures. We played slumber party games like MASH and SHAMPOO, folded paper fortune tellers, and scanned the suburban sidewalks for signs like ancient augurers watching the skies. Any object might hold predictive power, from a flipped coin to a scrap of paper left turned up— suggestively—on top of the trash can almost as if someone or something had left it there for us to see. At fourteen, it’s easy to imagine that everything is, in some sense, about you. Our relationships with boys were passing infatuations; our real romance was with the world itself, which we lavished with the attention of a new lover.

Our relationships with boys were passing infatuations; our real romance was with the world itself.

Conventional psychoanalysis conceives of dreams as a form of talking to yourself, your unconscious mind communicating its hopes and fears to your conscious mind via a system of idiosyncratic signs and symbols. To decode a dream, you must look inward and backward, to your earliest memories and your most private thoughts. Zolar asks you to look outward instead, to find in the highest heavens not broken shards of the past but a shining celestial pathway to your future. For a romantic teenager, nothing felt more natural than the idea that the whole vibrating universe was sending me personal messages. Like my mysterious dream bridegroom, the magnetic influences of the universe were just out of sight but right there beside me, waiting to be revealed.

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Over the years, I stopped believing—in Zolar, in the mystery man with the beard, in the possibility that the future would reveal itself in secret signs. All the questions we had once asked the universe were answered by her handmaidens, Choice, Luck, and Circumstance. Stephanie and I stayed best friends, though separated by thousands of miles and all the busy details of our separate lives. The details of my dream faded away until I hardly remembered it at all. My real wedding when it came was unlike my dream in every way. Whatever the vibrating numbers had been trying to tell me, I had missed it.

When I recalled the dream again, twenty-four years later, it came not from outside, but from within, burbling up like the psychic sludge of a prehistoric past. I was almost forty years old. My dreams were as ordinary as my waking life. Looking for some direction, I went to another rambling old house in Los Angeles, this time to meet with a witch in a lemon-yellow Craftsman with a wide wooden porch and an overgrown front yard thriving in its benign neglect.

The witch drew seven tarot cards and arranged them into a V-shape. The center card represented me; forking to the left and the right were two paths of three cards each. As she overturned the cards, I glimpsed something, a little shard of a memory. I couldn’t recall every detail of the dream I had once had, but I remembered how I had felt at fourteen, and I could see all the pathways still spread out before me. As a teenager I had tried to decode every symbol for its hidden meaning, but I missed the message. My dream had not been a prediction about the identity of my future husband, but a demonstration of how it feels to love the life you have. Over the next few years I would overturn every part of my life trying to regain that feeling. When I married again it was at the end of the summer, to a man with a ruddy beard, on a beautiful afternoon. Not every detail was the same, but it felt just like the dream had told me it would. I don’t think the universe was talking to me the day of my tarot reading. I was talking to myself, to an interior world equally mysterious, and a long-gone version of myself that believed in dreams.

Just now I went back to the Encyclopedia to try again to wrest some meaning from my old dream that pointed to what was to come. The closest I could get was “a girl dreaming of a man with a beard,” and its interpretation, “Will soon marry the one she loves.” I don’t know if twenty-six years counts as “soon.” I can’t vouch for Zolar or his method, can’t recommend counting up the letters in words to find their magnetic frequencies, but I think he was right about one thing—that you can have that kind of lover’s engagement with the world and find vibrating within your ordinary dreams the mystic intentions of the universe.

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