Am I seeing into the future?

Factual Questions
21

I think what happened is you had seen a similar scene before but didn’t pay any attention to it. Then one night, your subconscious shows it to you in a dream, for whatever reason, maybe nothing else good was playing that night… and then you notice it the next time you see it for real, because your dream brought it to your attention.

You’ve already said you’ve seen the same car there since. The guy watering his lawn… is he doing it at an odd time compared to the neighbors because he works an odd shift, or is retired?

And the conversation with your wife… you mentioned it started after making a turn. Could it be that the similarity in timing is just due to your wife not wanting to distract you while you make the turn, so as you complete the turn she starts the conversation? Or maybe there’s something else about that turn that just sets something off in your wife that makes her decide it’s time to start talking.

As for the topic of conversation, either all the other similarities cause you to think the conversation is the same, also, or, your wife is like my wife and keeps telling the same stories over and over.

Just in case you are seeing the future, start thinking about lottery numbers before you go to bed and see if you can start dreaming about the winning numbers… and then let me know what they are.

22

I strongly recommend the dream journal idea as well, but not necessarily for the same reasons as others; what you’ll most likely find, should you stick with it, is the vast amount of detail contained in your dreams that you just haven’t been remembering. Typically, your journal will contain details from the last dream or last two dreams you had prior to waking (and usually with far fewer details from the next-to-last). I’ve noticed that I can have as many as five or six dreams in a typical eight (er, maybe ten) hour sleep period, depending on how soundly I’m sleeping. Few of them I can remember fully; even fewer are applicable to my daily life. Remember to write as much as you can in the journal as soon as you wake (keep it by your bed), and write something everyday, even if it’s only a statement that you couldn’t remember anything. In my experience, the journal does not help with the deja vu-esque experiences; out of hundreds of dreams detailed enough to consider, I’ve only had two I would characterize as eerily “precognitive”–but the events which the dreams seemed to fortell were not experienced with the deja-vu feeling, were not life-changing in nature, and the only reason I remembered the dreams during the events is because I had in fact written them down.

IMHO, dreams and deja vu are intimately connected, not in the sense that the latter are always effects of the former, but in the sense that they use the same mental suspension-of-disbelief mechanism. In your dream, rarely will you realize, not matter how absurd the events of the dream are, that you are dreaming; we all act in our dreams as if they are real. If you should become lucid (realize you are dreaming within the dream), it is all too easy to forget it and slip back into the normal dreaming mode. Often people have dreams which seem to be a continuation of other dreams, or dreams that repeat, and the effect of deja vu can be even more powerful in the dream than in real life. Engywook is right on the money: you never seem to be able to take advantage of the deja vu to predict what will happen next, even though what does happen next might still be experienced as deja vu.

Based on my experience, if dreams are meant to be precognitive, then I’m a really crappy psychic. So many dreams are so bizarre and yet so amazingly intense. My best guess is that they are simply another astonishing faculty of the brain that we have completely ignored–like a muscle which is never worked–and so the vast majority of our dreams are mental masturbations. Deja vu, for me, is a similar thing, but it’s simply too easy to write it off as a mental burp. Deja vu in dreams can be devastatingly intense, to the point of ego loss, where you’re constantly forced to question what is real, what is being percieved, and who is perceiving it. It pains one’s skeptical intellect to assign any importance to such random absurdity, but in as much as it is being experienced, it is real. And much of our waking reality is a result of actions or words that usually begin as thoughts, a process which we take completely for granted but which, when you really consider it, is truly magical. Dreams use the same basic currency–thought–and if they manifest in our lives as actual events, you have to wonder: is it really precognition or merely visualization?

23

I think this can, partly at least, be explained by what Mangetout said. I’d just like to add my own perspective/examples:
You dream. It’sa what you do. Out of all the dreams you remember, a few seem to ‘happen,’ Coincidence. It realtes to people thinking that when they walk by streetlgihts, they go on/off. They don’t. You do not control streetlights. Think of the dozens, or hundreds of streetlights you pass before one goes off, obviously you notice the one that goes off, so you think it happens to you. Think again, how many of those streetlights are the same? I.e., don’t the ones that go off/on tend to be the same ones that go off/on? Yeah, you’ve got super-powers all right…

24

Yes, I too have had such dreams. Some are scary because they seem to take place a decade before the event really happens. However, I can dismiss them because I never wrote the original dreams down, and I’m not totally sure I’m not just creating false memories of past dreams. (One theory explains deja vu experiences as our current memories somehow being wrongly “tagged” by our minds as having happened long ago.)
Here’s one which shakes my own skepticism: waking up from a really disgusting nightmare this friday morning. In the dream I was watching a group of people die, one by one, by being incinerated in blazing yellow-orange incandescent flow. Yes, this was about 25hrs before the space shuttle disaster.

I commonly remember dreams, but I never have remembered nightmares (well, maybe once every five or ten years), and this one was powerful enough to wake me up. Also it was an odd enough incident that I almost told people at work about it.

If it was one of those infamous “prophetic dreams”, then it was totally twisted by symbolism. The nightmare had nothing to do with reentry disasters. This was a small group of people on the other side of a river of lava. They looked like american tourists. They were walking around on the surface crust as if there was no danger, as if it was ice cold, with their feet inches away from the flow under the crust. They were “wrongly” wearing short summer clothing, not vulcanologist heat suits like they should have been, and they were walking around and talking as if they had no idea of the danger. I was only watching this, unable to communicate with them. In a few moments each one broke through the cold crust, each one vanishing into the blazing lava stream but leaving a small fire which moved past in the flow, a fire which had once been a human being moments before. The whole group was gone, and there was just the lava flow and the small fires moving past on its surface. That’s when things became disgusting enough that I pulled loose and woke myself up.

Creepy.

The people in the nightmare had very little resemblance to those killed in the shuttle. They were all caucasian, various ages, and there was a young mother with short black hair who had a son with her on the lava crust, aged about 9 or 10.