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Octavian was ill and exhausted in his tent. He was roused by a friend who told him he had dreamed that Octavian would be killed in a surprise attack unless he left his tent at once. Octavian heeded the dream warning, fled from his tent — and so escaped being stabbed to death soon after when Brutus's soldiers burst in and plunged their swords into his camp bed, shredding it to ribbons, under the impression that the boy general was still in it. Octavian and Mark Antony were victorious in the second battle of Phlippi, and Octavian became Augustus, the first Roman emperor.
    Early-Opportunity Dreams
    Early-opportunity dreams may also require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy. You dream you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soul mate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. These dreams may be inspiring and encouraging, and you don't want to let them float away like helium balloons. You'll want to figure out what practical action you can take to move decisively in the direction of these happy dreams.
    Any future we can see (in dreams or through wakeful intuition) is a possible future, and we can influence the odds on the manifestation of a specific future event. While it may seem impossible for an individual to change certain future events perceived in dreams — like a natural disaster or death at an advanced age — it may still be possible to work with the dream information in a useful way: for example, to alert friends not to go on vacation in the place where the dreamed hurricane will hit, or to help someone whose death is near, and their family, to meet that situation with grace and closure.
    Dream Seers
    Inmost human cultures across history, dreamers who provide reliable information about events at a distance in time have been highly valued. When their visions have involved the possible destinies of nations and armies, they have been called seers and prophets.
    In Spain, in the time of Philip II, a young noblewoman named Lucrecia de León became renowned as a vidente (seer) and a prophet. Her gifts were first revealed when, at age twelve, she accurately described a royal funeral procession in Badajoz; weeks later, news reached her family home in Madrid that Anne of Austria, Philip's queen, had died in Badajoz as the royal couple were traveling to Portugal. Later Lucrecia dreamed the destruction of the Spanish Armada and the death of its admiral a year before those events.
    In her dreams, she functioned as a psychic spy, secretly traveling to the home of Sir Francis Drake in England to eavesdrop on the plans of Spain's enemies. She often roamed the palace of Philip II at night, picking up details of court intrigues. Her information was considered so valuable and so time sensitive by the head of the powerful Mendoza clan that he arranged to have a cleric record Lucrecia's dream reports every morning while an armed courier waited to rush them on horseback to his master.
    While some of Lucrecia's veridical dreams are cases of precognition (the wreck of the Spanish Armada), others are more likely examples of traveling clairvoyance, in which her consciousness was projected across space to view synchronous events happening at a distance. What is remarkable is that she was able to move through time, in her dreams, in very much the same way that she could travel across space.
    I believe this is true not only for a seer like Lucrecia de León, but for all of us. When we go dreaming, we travel in time — to the past as well as the future — in much the same way that we are accustomed, in physical life, to traveling in space.
    Time Is a Kind of Space
    As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in