Strange Precognitive Dream

My father in law recently died after being hit by a bus. He was in a coma for 5 days but his injuries were just too serious. On the night that he had his accident, (before we knew about it) my boyfriend woke up in a cold sweat. It was a cold night. He went back to sleep and had a dream that we were both near a local railway bridge in the car. We got out of the car and looked into the sky. The light went dark and he saw a white point of light drawing a pattern in the sky. Then all the lights went out and all we could see was the pattern in the sky. The next day we found out about the accident. We went to the hospital and out of the window of the Intensive Care Unit, there was the rail bridge where we had stood in my boyfriend dream, right next to the hospital.

This is an instance of a brain defense function in my opinion. I'm no expert but from study and experience it seems likely from the story. I'm just going to give a few points of observation.

1. Dream Context
   If he woke up in a cold sweat, and then went back to sleep to have the dream it tells me two things. First, he could have awakened from a deep sleep in which darker dreams occur and can spill over into the REM cycle as well. During times of dream sleep in which stress is present in mind, physical symptoms often present like the cold sweat, or cramps, headache, chest pain, nausea, sometimes injury associated with the dream. You can also have things outside the dream that would affect it like noises, something eaten, movement etc.. Secondly, if he indeed go then into or back into REM sleep he would more easily remember a dream in that cycle.
   
2. Precognition
   This seems like a fairly common kind of precog dream. I'll expand on that idea for a moment. There are different kinds of "future seeing" dreams that I have seen or heard others recollection of. You could have a dream in which you see exactly what happens with everything in the scene exactly in its place. These seem to be very uncommon. Then it seems people always have dreams with elements of the scene changed. There might be a normal situation carried out in front of the dream when a suddenly a close friend comes in with the head of a horse. The important principle to understand i think is really this: Your subconscious is plugged into the collective unconscious when you are asleep. This can predict future events but not always. In simple terms, it is a stockpile of possibilities from which our brains can "download" or "transmit" information. Any possibility can pop out which means you have to take everything with a grain of salt yet by your own experience some things are a little more. In this realm, its what we can learn from the dream that interests me. You have specific imagery that is personally related to you by your own subconscious. The imagery in the dream is associated with the person and in turn is associated to the event by the location. You have to do the positive thing when it comes to these types of dreams even though many times they depict events which we are unable to control. Sometimes the symbolic things in the dream are those things we can control and the state they appear in the dream indicates its real life condition.
   
3. Brain Defense
   So our brain is always doing something productive in mechanical terms and in this particular situation i think it is a form of brain defense. Essentially, the brain brings events and information from the pool of collective unconscious and synthesizes it with already present information. This then presents in dreams so it seems. The brain would be using this dream in defense of certain stress that would occur should his father die. Those kind of stressful feelings were already experienced in the dream state and the brain had already succeeded in simulating the feeling(a weaker version) and associated it with an image. This in a way prepares you for the real thing; this is one of the greatest utilities of dreaming.
   

These are all my personal thoughts so also take them with questions. I have had some similar dreams and it scared me because i felt out of control. Some events cannot be avoided but many can. Its good to see his brain is so in touch with the world. I would suggest he continue to listen to his brain, don't turn it off because the truth is scary, there isn't anything you can do about the truth, but you can change your approach to the truth.