What do Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler and Yi Seong-gye, the 14th century founder of the Joseon Kingdom, have in common? They all claimed to have seen their future in their dreams ― years and sometimes days before the actual events occurred.

Abraham Lincoln told friends a few weeks before he was killed in April 1865 that he had seen his own body lying in state in the White House.

“Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments,” Lincoln allegedly said about his dream, according to his biographer and friend Ward H. Lamon.

“Who is dead in the White House?” Lincoln had asked in his dream. A soldier standing guard answered that the corpse belonged to the president.
 

A few weeks later on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth, a sympathizer of the Confederate States of America, the losing side in the American Civil War.

In the 14th century, some years before Yi Seong-gye took control of Korea, the young military officer dreamed he was running out of a blazing house. He had carried out three rafters from the burning home. He also witnessed two sheep losing their horns as soon as he stepped out of the fire.
 

To make sense of this strange dream, myth has it that Yi consulted a Buddhist monk in the nearby mountains.

Once Yi described his dream, the monk, ironically known as “the ignorant,” bowed in deference, calling Yi “your majesty.”

“The blazing home foretells a coming military battle, while the three rafters and the sheep foretell your rise to the throne,” the monk answered, explaining that the Chinese character for sheep and the number three resemble that for the word king.

In 1388, Yi was given command of an expeditionary force to attack China. Instead he conducted a coup by redirecting his army to Gaeseong, the capital of Korea at the time, to claim the throne.

Adolf Hitler also claimed that a dream had saved his life, and that this, which occurred about 15 years before he seized power in Germany, was an omen for his rise.

In 1918, on the western front during World War I, Adolf Hitler had been napping in his trench. In his dream, an avalanche smothered the future German dictator.

Hitler asserted that he woke up and wandered off from the trench, in a “trance-like” state, exposing himself to enemy fire.

Once bullets rained past, Hitler awoke from his sleepwalk and crawled back to his bunker, when he realized that a shell had landed near where he had been napping. The sleepwalk had saved his life.

“Hitler interpreted this dream to be an affirmation of his destined role as a great leader to his people,” writes Jeff Belanger in his book, “The Nightmare Encyclopedia: Your Darkest Dreams Interpreted.”

But historians often dismiss these dreams as mere myths, or uncorroborated stories.

“As far as I know, Hitler’s infantry unit never suffered that kind of hit. It was quite possible, of course, that he could have told a story like that later on, at any point, and interpreted it as a prophetic dream. He fantasized all the time. That doesn’t mean that he ever actually had the dream, of course,” said John H. Weiss, a World War II expert at Cornell University.

By Jeong Hunny (hj257@heraldcorp.com)