Predictions
Translated from Russian
Posted: 2026-03-26

In 2019, I was working the night shift as a front desk clerk at a small hotel on the outskirts of Kazan. The job was quiet—check-ins after midnight were rare, so most of the time I just sat at reception reading or watching something on my laptop. It was during one of those nights that this started. I had a dream. Not the usual blurry kind you forget five minutes after waking up. This one was incredibly vivid—like watching a high-definition documentary. I saw a street I didn’t recognize: a wide avenue lined with tall apartment blocks on both sides, the kind of standard panel buildings you see in residential areas all over Russia. On the ground floor of a corner building, there was a grocery store with a “Magnit” sign. Next to it, a bus stop with an ad for some fitness club. I even remembered the color of the lettering—orange on a black background. Then I saw people carrying a body out of the building entrance on a stretcher. There were police, an ambulance. A woman in an unzipped puffer jacket stood by the entrance screaming—not crying, but screaming, wordless, just sound. I saw the building number: 14. There was also a street sign, but I didn’t have time to read it—I woke up. I wrote everything down in the notes app on my phone. I have a habit of recording vivid dreams—kind of like keeping a dream journal. I added the date: March 12, 2019. Three days later, on March 15, I was scrolling through the news and saw a headline: in a residential building in Naberezhnye Chelny, a man had gotten into a domestic dispute that resulted in a neighbor’s death. The address was on Mira Avenue. I opened the photos from the scene, and my vision literally went dark. The same panel buildings. The same corner “Magnit.” The article didn’t mention the building number, but I found the address elsewhere—Mira Avenue, building 14. I had never been to Naberezhnye Chelny. I don’t know anyone who lives there. I hadn’t watched any news or films about the city before that dream. I told a coworker about it during my next shift. I showed her the note on my phone with the date. She looked at me strangely and said, “Just a coincidence.” I showed her the photos from the news and my запись. She shrugged. It seemed to me like it unsettled her, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I probably would’ve written it off as coincidence too, if it hadn’t been for the second case. June 2019. I dreamt of an airport. Not one I’d ever been to—huge, with high glass ceilings. All the signs were in two languages, one of which I didn’t understand, but it looked like Arabic. I was standing by a panoramic window looking out at the runway. I saw a plane—white, with a blue stripe along the fuselage and an emblem I couldn’t make out. The plane started its takeoff roll, and I knew—right there in the dream, with absolute certainty—that it wouldn’t get airborne. I felt it as a fact, like knowing water is wet. The plane accelerated, but something was wrong. It felt heavier than it should have been. The nose didn’t lift. Then there was a flash, black smoke—and I woke up. I wrote: “Airport, Arabic-like writing, white plane with blue stripe, didn’t take off, fire.” June 17, 2019. Nothing like that happened in June or July. I figured I must’ve just watched too many plane crash videos on YouTube before bed. Then on August 7, 2019, a Ural Airlines Airbus A321 made an emergency landing in a cornfield after taking off from Zhukovsky. That wasn’t an airport with Arabic signage, and the plane didn’t catch fire. Everyone survived. Not the same case. I almost forgot about the dream. Then, two months later, I came across a news story I had missed. In May 2019—before my dream—a Sukhoi Superjet caught fire while landing at Sheremetyevo. Forty-one people died. Still not a full match—the fire happened on landing, not takeoff. I let it go. But in January 2020, a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 crashed in Tehran. The plane was shot down shortly after takeoff. An Iranian airport—signs in Persian, which visually resembles Arabic. A white plane with a blue stripe—that’s exactly the UIA livery. An explosion right after acceleration. When I saw photos of the plane’s livery, my legs nearly gave out. White fuselage, blue stripe along the side. Exactly what I had seen in my dream seven months earlier. I understand that there’s a huge gap between “a blue stripe on a white plane” and a specific flight. Half the airlines in the world use that color scheme. But the combination of details—the Arabic-like writing, the burst of fire during takeoff, that sense of unnatural heaviness—it felt too precise. After that, I started documenting all my dreams in detail, every night. I made a spreadsheet with columns for date, content, vividness (1–10), and a separate column for “matches,” which I filled in later if anything in the dream resembled real events. Over two years—from 2020 to 2022—I recorded more than 600 dreams. Of those, I rated 47 as “vivid.” Out of those 47, I found possible real-world parallels in 11 cases. But honestly, most of them were vague: “dreamt of a car accident”—accidents happen every day. “dreamt of a fire in a building”—not exactly unique. Still, three cases were specific enough that I stopped dismissing everything as statistics. In November 2021, I dreamt of a shopping mall—large, with a central atrium and a glass elevator. People got stuck in the elevator, and then it started to fall. I saw their faces—a woman with a stroller, a teenager wearing headphones, an elderly man carrying shopping bags. Two weeks later, there was an incident with an elevator at the Evropeysky mall in Moscow—it got stuck between floors with people inside. No one was hurt, and it didn’t fall. But the central atrium with the glass elevator matched. I told my husband about my notes. He’s in IT, very rational. He asked to see the spreadsheet. He studied it for two evenings and then said, “Confirmation bias. You remember the hits and forget the misses. You’ve got 600 entries and 11 vague matches—that’s less than two percent. Random coincidence.” I would’ve agreed with him. But he didn’t feel what I felt inside those dreams. It’s not just “I had a dream.” It’s a state of total presence, like you’re standing in a real place at a real moment—just one that hasn’t happened yet. I can’t prove it. I can’t reproduce it on command. But I’ve experienced it. The last case was in September 2022. I dreamt of a bridge—long, cable-stayed, over a wide river. I was standing on it, feeling it vibrate. The whole structure was trembling. People were running. One of the cables snapped, and I heard a sound—a low metallic groan that made everything inside me tighten. I wrote down the date: September 18, 2022. On October 1, 2022, a suspension bridge collapsed over the Machchhu River in Morbi, India. 135 people died. It was a suspension bridge, not cable-stayed. But—a bridge over a wide river, snapped cables, the vibration of the structure. Thirteen days between my dream and the disaster. I don’t tell my husband about this anymore. He’s a good man and he loves me, but every time I start talking about it, I see that mix of concern and discomfort in his eyes, like he’s not sure whether to worry about my mental health or just change the subject. I’m not psychic. I don’t sell intuition courses. I’m an ordinary person, now working at a logistics company, earning an average salary. I have no explanation for what’s happening. I can’t control these dreams. They come without warning—sometimes once a month, sometimes once every six months. I don’t know why I see disasters specifically. Maybe because they’re big enough to make the news, so I can verify them. Maybe I “predict” small things just as accurately—someone’s broken mirror or a lost wallet—but I never find out. I’m 32 years old. I still keep my spreadsheet. If any scientists ever want to study this, I’m willing to show them everything. It’s all there—dates, tags, descriptions. It’s the only evidence I have.