Please help this humble Straight Dope acolyte. Once every few months I’ll have a dream about some ordinary event – me just going about some normal business. Days or weeks later, I’ll experience that exact events of the dream.
For example, I once had a dream I was driving with my wife and daughter to my in-laws. As I turned a certain corner into their neighborhood a saw a red sportscar parked under a streetlight and a man watering his lawn, and my wife began discussing a specific subject with me. I had forgotten about the dream until the exact sequence of the dream happened in reality a few weeks later.
The dreams have specific enough situations, details, conversations and feelings that tell me these dreams aren’t generic. Many of the details I have no control over, either in the dream or in real life, so I don’t think I’m willing these situations into happening. Over my lifetime I have experienced this phenomenon probably two dozen times.
I don’t believe I’m psychic and seeing into the (apparently mundane) future, so what psychological phenomenon am I experiencing? I don’t think its déjà vu as defined on http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_113.html since I know I’ve experienced these situations before, just not in real life. I anxiously await the wisdom on this message board.
I certainly think the false memory phenomenon is a possibility. Another possibility I thought of before I wrote the original posting is perhaps I am linking a dream and an event that are vaguely similar, noting the similarities and dismissing the differences - voila! I can see into the future. However since I’ve had these types of dreams often enough I tend to think “I bet this will happen in the future” immediately after the dream occurs, almost like I’m leaving a mental Post-It note. Maybe that’s the key. I haven’t tracked these dreams through journaling, but next time I will to get a better idea of what’s happening.
I used to experience a similar phenomenon myself; I would (seemingly)often, and without any good reason, start hearing a song in my head or be thinking about a scene in a film I had seen years ago; I would turn on the TV or radio, minutes later (or just the same day, in the case of scenes from films) and hear/see exactly the thing I had been thinking of.
It even got to the point where I would recognise the thought intrusions and ‘post a mental note’ as you put it, but it turns out that I was just being very understanding with myself; when I tried physically writing down the intrusive thoughts, it became clear that I was just having lots of them and only remembering the ones that match up - even with the ‘mental note’ thing the phenomenon still occurs - a dozen non-matched events evaporate easily from the mind (you said yourself that until you saw the red car etc, you had completely forgotten the dream), whereas a single match persists.
There is an explanation, which I don’t happen to buy into, in terms of natural causes for this effect – “forerunners in dreams.” Do a search on the phrase “deja vu” in GD threads from the last six months for some background. There’s a classic book documenting such experiences by, IIRC, J.W. Dunne, named An Experiment in (or “with”) Time.
Jberto, I can validate what you are experiencing for I have experienced as well. However, you don’t know you’ve seen into the future until it has passed. At that point, you know you have experienced it before. For me, it varies in degrees from a word-for-word experience to a fuzzy “hasn’t this happened before?” feeling. This isn’t just some form of “heightened awareness” from a familiar setting, either. It is from places I’ve never been (but soon enough, it happens in reality) and even exact statements of which I could have no prior knowledge. And yet, it happens to me.
For me, I can only conclude this IS what is happening when people experience a deja vu. It may be a forgotten event from a forgotten dream. And yet, when I can pinpoint it to an exact moment in a past dream, I have no doubt it’s the root of deja vu.
But what does it mean? And, how do you use it for your advantage? It is hard to know just which dream sequence will occur in reality…and just when will it occur??? Wish I knew!
Well, if you combine some paranormal stuff with a little sci-fi, you could say that you might be seeing/dreaming one possible future. This assumes you buy into the sci-fi theory that the future is mutable, with many possible “branches”. Then if you allow for the possibility that there is some “leakage” from this pool of possible futures that some people can tune in to, it would be theoretically possible that you are seeing the future. You could even go so far as to say the dreams you have that “come true” are those that are of the branch you/we (that’s a whole other story) are on, while those that don’t are from a different branch.
Not that I believe this to be the case, but I guess it isn’t any sillier than a lot of what passes for “respectable religion”.
"Later today… youre going to eat some…ice cream. But you’ll eat it too fast and… you’re going to get an ice cream headache!"
I…Know you’re home…Why aren’t you calling…
Therein lies the key. You dream about going about your ordinary business, and lo and behold! You later end up going about your ordinary business. OK, so there’re some specific details, like a red car under a street light. But really, red cars under street lights aren’t all that rare.
One might attach a bit more significance to the dreams where you’re not going about your ordinary business, and the events then occur. But I don’t know about you, but none of the dreams I’ve had involving me having superpowers and keeping intimate company with Princess Leia and Arwen Undomiel have ever come true.
Hopefully I can clarify the “ordinary event” comment I made in the original post. What I meant was the events weren’t particularly exciting or different from what I might experience during a normal daily routine, however the sequence of events and certain specific details were exactly the same.
In the case I cited in the original post, the event began feeling familiar once I entered the neighborhood, felt strangely more familiar as I saw the car under the streetlight and once I saw the man watering his lawn.
Chronos cited:
Chronos has a point - after this event I started looking for the red car and noticed it is often parked in that spot. Regarding the lawn watering, the events took place during the summer - such an uncommon time for a midwesterner to water their lawn. However in both instance he was the only one watering his lawn when I rounded the corner.
The lynchpin however was the discussion with my wife. It seemed like in the actual situation she asked me word-for-word exactly what she asked me in the dream, and that she started talking at the same exact point in time in both instances. And the conversation wasn’t something normal or mundane like, “So how was work?” It was something more out of the ordinary, “Did you hear Sheldon had a vasectomy?”, although now I can’t specifically recall what that was. The conversation afterwards continued the same way for a few sentences in both instances.
Malden mentioned:
No offense taken. I’d actually like to see that skit - it sounds hilarious! I don’t find these events troubling at all - I’m just curious as to what’s going on.
I get this too… often enough that I was able to do a little experiment: do I remember what is going to happen next?
The fact is that I never can. Everything that happens, I remember it happening before… but only as it happens.
This would support the false memory argument. If there’s nowhere else to put the experience of this having happened before, it gets assigned to a dream. But I’ll bet my next month’s beer supply that I never had that dream. I suspect that dreams don’t really work in the same sequential way as waking experience, anyhow… dream sequence, I’m guessing, is an illusion.
There’s a very logical explanation for deja vu that, if correct, is an important insight into how consciousness works. (Sorry, I read this in a psychology textbook in college - Kalat, I think - so I can’t provide a link.)
Best analogy is that it’s like buying the Sunday paper and discovering that you got two TV guides this week. One of the things the brain does is assemble perceived events and makes them coherent as an “experience.” This is no easy job, and sometimes, errors do happen. One common error is that some aspect of the experience gets “loaded” twice.
So when you’re having this experience, you feel like this has happened twice because you have experienced it twice. The separation is only a fraction of a second, but you might perceive that it’s several weeks.
You can’t see into the future. It doesn’t exist. It never has. It is not predetermined. If it were, you’d already know the answer to your question…we all would.
Count me with those who recommend starting the dream journal. If you can go back to hard written evidence that something specific and uncommon happened to you days or weeks after you dreamed it and wrote it down, then you’ll maybe have something.
Preach it. Except for me, it’s Arwen in Leia’s Jabbakini. Best of both worlds.
At about 1:30PM I was driving back from the bank and I had to cross a railway track at an automatic level crossing; the gates went up and I drove across the tracks, looking carefully both ways, thinking to myself how horrible it would be if a high-speed train passed through as I was crossing.
I returned home tonight and saw on the news that there had been not one, but two incidents of trains colliding with cars at level crossings (one of them fatal to the car driver) - these incidents actually took place on the very same line that I crossed - one of the incidents happened in the morning, before I drove across the line, the other happened about an hour after I crossed it (although some miles from the actual crossing).
ooooOOOOooooOOOOoooo Spoooooky, eh?
[spoiler]Actually, no
EVERY time I cross a level crossing, I think to myself how horrible it would be if a high-speed train passed through as I was crossing.[/spoiler]
I’ve had the same experience, and for what it’s worth, the dreams feel different from “normal” dreams at the time I’m dreaming them. There’s one specific dream sequence which gave me that feeling and definitely hasn’t happened in reality, but I will definitely know the moment if and when it happens. (I’m standing in a school hall with a baby boy in a stroller, waiting to pick up a little girl with brown hair and a blue plaid skirt from kindergarten; somehow, I know they are my children, and also that I’m not going to have any more. I’m 26, single, no kids, would like three.) Check back with me in fifteen years and I’ll tell you if the family fits the description – 'til then, good luck with the dream journal, you’ll probably find something before I do.
Jberto, couldn’t you investigate this systematically? Next time you have a dream that seems a likely candidate for being a prophecy, write it down in as much detail as possible and get as many people as possible to read it (get them to sign and date it as well). With a bit of luck one of them may be with you when it comes true - in which case they’ll look at you with a new respect…
Even if you’re on your own when (if) it happens, you can compare the reality with what you wrote.
I haven’t experienced anything like this, but I wonder if it is significant that you were with your wife in the example you describe? I, (and millions of others) can ‘predict’ what my husband will say next with uncanny accuracy (I’m not being facetious here), even if what he says is a bit out of the ordinary. Thought patterns seem to get v. close with people who’ve lived together for ages. The other stuff, as Chronos points out, can be explained because the ARE predictable. Sweet dreams.
