Riffing on the current inexplicable thread, I notice one or two folks have had the same experience I have had of a genuinely prophetic dream – i.e., things happening in real life just as you had envisioned while asleep.
If this happened to you, how would you explain it to yourself? And assume that “confirmation bias” is right out–you know that you had never had a dream/experience like that before or since, so you aren’t selectively remembering the one time it came true.
For me, I begin to suspect that our perception of movement in time is a bit more of an illusion than what I’d thought previously. Maybe I’m somehow inhabiting multiple moments of my life simultaneously, and it’s only the narrow window of perception that causes me to identify one of them as “now”.
But I don’t really know anything beyond the fact that it did indeed happen. Hmm. What about you? If you haven’t had such a thing happen before, and then it did happen, how majorly would it alter your outlook on life, the universe and everything?
Do we also rule out the possibility that this is the result of your brain putting together various bits of information and putting it together in your dream-a combination of subconscious cold and hot reading?
I’ve had dreams where the basic elements have come true not long afterwards - such as dreaming that a friend declared himself bi about a year before he came out to anyone in real life. My mother also had a dream a few weeks before my grandfather was diagnoised with cancer in which my late grandmother called her and my aunt, told them that my grandfather had cancer, and properly predicted where.
I explain these dreams that come true as our sleeping mind processing information that our conscious doesn’t want to, or can’t. We are a lot more observant than we think we are. Perhaps my mother noticed that my grandfather seemed poorly in the way that other relatives who had cancer did. Maybe I saw something in my friend’s demenor around another guy. Little things like that eventually add up, and occasionally we dream about them instead of having a waking lightbulb moment.
And as for things that dreams predict that have nothing to do with us - I once dreamed I’d seen a poster that said a band would play my college a few months before it was announced they would, for example - we have lots of dreams over the courses of our lives. We’re bound to dream about something that would match up closely to reality once or twice. It doesn’t mean anything special about us.
Let me get this staight - You’re asking: If I dream about a sequence of events, and then at some point in the future that sequence of events happens, how do I explain it to myself?
If that’s what you’re asking. It’s a difficult question to answer. I have no reference point from which to answer it. As a skeptic I have no way of knowing how I react to unlikely or impossible* events since none of them have ever happened to me.
I guess if it did happen (if an unlikely or impossible* event happened to me) I’d attempt to rationalize it, and then once that fails I’ll accept that the explanation isn’t simple and I haven’t yet discovered it.
ETA:* if it happens it’s no longer ‘impossible’.
I’m in a slightly better position to answer this question than most, I think, because I routinely write down my dreams when I wake up.
It would depend on how accurate it was. If I dreamed that my sister came to my house and told me she was getting divorced, and she called me on the phone the next day to tell me she was getting divorced, I would assume it meant I was worried about her marriage from things I have observed and my fears had been justified. I wouldn’t call that prophetic.
If I dreamed that I saw Mrs. Rhymer dressed in a certain low-cut dress of her’s that I like when we went to our favorite restaurant, and the next time we went to that restaurant she chose that dress, I would think it was mere coincidence.
If I dreamed this week’s Powerball numbers, in detail, I’d call that prophetic.
The brain is a piece of jury-rigged mess that is in no way reliable for memories or experiences. You are hallucinating right now, each and every one of you, and it’s a testable, and proven, fact that the memories you hold most dear and revisit most often are also the least reliable. If something happens to me today and I think to myself “Didn’t I just dream that last night?”, I would just assume my brain took the memories of the dream, and tossed in some of the events of today, mixed them together and came out with deja vu stew.
Even if I had written down the exact event of my dream just upon awakening and knew there was no way my silly confused brain was sullying my dream with my waking experiences, I would still chalk it up to coincidence.
A one in a million coincidence happens to 6,757 people every day. Even a 1 in a billion coincidence still happens to 6 or 7 people every day.
The brain is a vast inference machine that solves a lot of problems and sorts out a lot of information without conscious decision making or thought. How do you think the answer to that troubling work problem comes to you in a flash while you’re in the shower?
I’ve had chronic extreme deja-vu dreams in the past, where I woke up, recalled a dream, sometimes mentioned it to someone, and then had that exact moment replay itself later that day - down to what other people said (and turning to a friend saying "Oh s***, I know what’s going to happen next:___).
Even though I’m pretty close to 100% certain that I experienced the image at least a few distinct times before it, I have to put it down to a blip in the way my mind structures its perception of time, or memory. Generally they occur in situations which I often repeat anyway, like queuing up for lunch at school.
Still, one mustn’t be dogmatic about these things, dontcha know? If I had written down enough specific unusual events which turned out to be accurate, I might have to re-evaluate my entire view of reality
Here’s my explanation – significant events, whether it’s a death in the family or a headline-news catastrophe, trigger rhythms of energy which reflect both forwards and backwards through Time. Stephen Hawking himself has determined that Time is its own dimension, just like the three spacial dimensions, and there’s no good reason to assume that energy & particles can’t travel backwards in Time, despite the fact that we humans sense Time as always moving forward. (Hawking even poses the question: “Why can we recall the past, but not the future?”)
By what mechanism do these energy rhythms travel through time? Don’t have a clue. But sometimes the brain picks up these rhythms, and interprets them as elements of a dream, or a vision, or even just random thoughts. I’ve had many prophetic dreams, but never one so specific that I can describe the future event in specific detail.
I have been told by acquaintances a number of times, that they or a relative is definitely prophetic and often has dreams that have come true. The person firmly believed this to be the case and, I believe, was in no way being fraudulent. I said that if we could identify this ability and test it, that would greatly enhance our understanding of the brain. I asked that they write down the prophesies and share them with someone they trust - immediately they occurred. Then see how many really happened. In no case did they come back with successful prophesies.
As has been suggested above, I think the reason is that those memories are reconstructed and improved by the brain.
Fine, fine, scientific method at work, in the best traditions of the board and all that. But I’m interested in your personal IMHO, that if you yourself did experience something you couldn’t explain – say, a clearly remembered dream where details were later actually specifically fulfilled in real life – how would you handle it? What would you think about it?
BTW, I’m not trying to play gotcha to score some kind of debate points. I’m merely interested in your personal experience and world view.
Fair enough. I guess I would be shocked and then have to analyse it. What is the possibility of coincidence or the likelihood that there was a link to something which had happened during the day which I just hadn’t registered consciously? How often do I have prophetic dreams that don’t come true? (Never - I don’t tend to remember dreams other than those known as night terrors which I do experience.) So, I guess I would be very shocked and have to rethink my beliefs. In fact, the more I think about it, the more shaken I would be.
It’s happened a couple of times, I think, with varying degrees of certainty, but never about anything too exciting or important like a plane crash. Just prosaic details of life that I’m certain I hadn’t thought of before. In high school, for instance, I had a dream that had a few unusual details that were reproduced more or less exactly a few days later when I met my first girlfriend in high school. Just prosaic things about where we were sitting, a certain card game I had never played or heard of before (except in that dream), things we talked about. It happened, but somehow it didn’t seem that remarkable and I kind of avoided thinking about it for a long while.
I guess one thing that interests me if someone had the same experience, whether he or she really would be flabbergasted and promptly undergo a soul-searching reevaluation of one’s belief system . . . or would they just kind of say, “uhhh . . . I don’t know (I don’t wanna know) what that means” and promptly put it out of their minds?
The point, I think, is that if your dreams were constantly predicting the future, some of the predictions would be right just by dumb luck. So the OP is saying you aren’t just forgetting the many wrong predictions that would serve to make the one that came true less significant.
I had a recurring dream for about 10 years prior to 9/11 that we had been attacked and were at war. In the dream I was flying courier flights in my little airplane. I got a call from a friend of mine to fly right seat on a DOD approved courier flight the night of 9/11. Also the company I was working for went out of business (which it did right after 9/11).
I’m also of the camp that, by default,thinks some dreams are bound to happen in real life. Not sure about the recurring part of it. Maybe I watch too much TV. I stopped having the dream after 9/11.
