
In the case of my dream, the foretold future depends on the decision of the parents to have another child and the biological factors of whether that child is female and looks like the girl in my dream. And even if all those factors are in place there is still no certainty that I have had an insight into the future. Statistically a healthy couple already proven to be fertile and attempting to conceive are very likely to have a child. If they do have a child, I'm at least 50% right that the child will be female. Pretty good odds. This is the type of prophesy where confidence trickster clairvoyants have a field day... Good stats, good luck and the wind in your favour is taken by our trickster friends to be hard evidence of their future telling abilities. But predicting something highly likely isn't really all that much of an achievement.
There can often be more than one way to claim a prophesy has come true. Take my dream for example. The child I dreamed of had dark hair. Now commonly a lot of babies are born with dark hair, so I could point to that and say hey - look my dream came true. Conversely if the child happens to be born blonde I could wait until the hair darkens and then proclaim my clairvoyance. Tricksters aside, this kind of ambiguity muddies the waters for the most genuine seekers of truth. In my case, it means that even if everything happens exactly as I dreamed it, I have no single point in time to which I can point as irefutable proof I have foretold the future. Objectively I may never know if I the future I foretold has been realised.
Again, specifically in my dream there is the naming of the child to be considered. In telling my friend of my dream, am I foretelling what she will name her child or am I influencing what that child will be called? Would the future I foretold have come about without my intervention? Will that future only happen because I happened to have had a dream and mentioned it or -- and here's the philosophical bit -- was my intervention necessary and possibly even pre ordained to bring about that future?
I don't know the answer. I'll be interested to see what happens now after the events of my dream. As a Tarot and runes reader I will always be interested in the future and in looking ahead to see what we can learn and predict about events to come. I just think sometimes we need to remember that there can be more than one future and in prophesising we need to remember that not every future we foretell will necessarily come true.