I'm not talking about people who claim to have dreamed of 9-11 or the Asian tsunami or things like that before it happened. What I'm thinking of are dreams where the events in the dreams set up a dream event which turns out to be an incorporation of something that is happening in the real world.
The specific example I was thinking about was a dream I remember having when I was 9 years old. I was on a bus in India, having fallen asleep. In the dream, I was being chased by a gorilla. This chase happened for some time. For some reason I stopped running and turned to face the gorilla, and it took a swing at me. At the moment of impact, I was awoken by a large piece of luggage falling on top of me, which had fallen from an overhead bin.
For a long time thinking about that dream, I had thought that perhaps my mind had filled in the swing of the gorilla as soon as I woke up. But now with my experience with lucid dreaming and the reading I have done, understanding that dreaming is a largely real time experience (there can be dreams where more time passes, but according to Stephen Laberge this happens largely through cinematic like "time lapses"), it doesn't seem to be a case of my mind filling in the data. Was my subconscious somehow aware that I was going to be struck and did it come up with a story to explain it? Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but I seem to have vague recollections of other similar dreams. I’ve certainly had tons of dreams where the dream incorporates a sound or event which occurs in the real world, though I can’t think of any other than this one where the dream seemed to set up something so random. If it’s something like an alarm clock, you know it’s going off at a certain time. But that’s not the case with a piece of luggage falling from an overhead bin.
