If you had (say) a genuinely prophetic dream, how would you explain it to yourself?

[lynne-42]

@Koxinga

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?

That’s a very good question. Sorry for the long (and rather vague) response.

The first thing I do when something I can’t explain happens is retreat to the security of my firmly held beliefs. I think that’s pretty normal. I try to come out again and get some kind of external assessment of what my brain is telling me. Two examples:

A good few years ago, I started doing ‘psychic’ readings using the principles of cold reading, given I have (to my knowledge) no psychic abilities. I wanted to know why so many people were convinced their experiences of readings were real, and I know that dismissing those people as stupid or gullible was just not a valid answer. They weren’t. I never performed without people knowing I was not psychic, just showing them what a reading feels like using scientific principles. It still always worked incredibly well. I have now done hundreds of them.

There were some readings when things jumped into my head which were so accurate that they freaked out the sitter, and really frightened me. A number of times I packed up my gear and decided never to do it again. Always this was in public, with witnesses. Those who were watching the readings could often pick what I had run with, when I couldn’t remember certain aspects of the earlier interaction. I talk a lot and move fast when I am reading, trusting intuition and the experience of doing this a lot of times. But there are still a few instances which really seem to me beyond coincidence, cold reading, or experience. But I can’t replicate them, so how can I know what really happened and what is my brain reconstructing it to fit? So I explain it to myself as still not being psychic, but that I just don’t understand. I don’t have the evidence to do otherwise.

Just recently something happened which I am working on for my doctorate. I can’t be specific because I don’t know where it is leading just at this moment. I visited somewhere and just seemed to have an understanding about the background to the place, with the most limited of knowledge and insight. I just knew. I have now been working on this concept for seven months, with all the resources of a university, academic librarians and my supervisor, and have found so much to back my ideas that it is ludicrous - so much that I knew nothing about. Looking back, with the lack of knowledge I had, I now can’t see how I knew what I knew with such confidence. But now I don’t know for sure if I am twisting the evidence to fit my beloved theory and thereby deluding myself that everything seems to fit so perfectly.

The only way I know to test it is to put it in a formal format and then put it out for others to assess, which is exactly what I am doing. It has to be someone other than my own brain which assesses what my brain believes so firmly.

I guess I just always try to find way to externally assess what my brain is telling me. I have no idea if that makes any sense to you, but that is how I have reacted to such experiences. They have never come in dreams, though.

[kanicbird]

Scriptures talk to this exact thing happening, no explanation needed for what God already told us would happen.

[Lamia]

I had a dream in college that I wound up telling to several friends because it struck me as being so weird. I talked about this dream enough times that I am pretty sure I remember it correctly, and there are other people who could verify what I told them about it. I just started to type out a long description of the dream, but I don’t think it really matters. I’ll just say that it involved my being on a trans-Atlantic flight to London, and that I remembered several details – one of them very odd.

About six months later this dream “came true” in that I was accepted into a summer study tour of England and did indeed fly trans-Atlantic to London. One of the mundane details of my dream about the flight came true too. More interestingly, the odd element of the dream also “came true”, but only in a non-literal way. I was dozing on the plane but woke up and opened my eyes just in time to see a brief scene in the in-flight movie (a British film I’d never even heard of before) that was very similar to the odd detail from my dream. Oh, I did later watch the same movie again on DVD and confirmed that this scene really is in it, I wasn’t just dreaming that too.

Was my dream truly “prophetic”? It was a memorable dream for me even before it “came true”, and I was very surprised to see something that evoked the weirdest and most memorable detail from my dream. And if I hadn’t woken up at exactly that moment I’d never have seen this particular image at all! This made an impression on me and years later I’m still inclined to consider things that remind me of this image to be lucky signs. But in all seriousness, there’s nothing about my dream that defies rational explanation.

I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable that I’d dream about flying to London when I’d recently applied for a summer program in England. It had been much on my mind in the weeks before I had the dream, and I was certainly hoping to that I would soon find myself on such a flight for real. The mundane detail that came true was just that, a mundane detail. The weird detail didn’t literally come true, I was only reminded of it by something I happened to see in the movie. It’s an odd coincidence that I’d see such a specific image in a movie, but it’s a lot less odd than seeing that same thing in real life would have been. Also, although it’s easy to forget this point, a couple of other minor details of the dream didn’t come true at all. For instance, in my dream I was flying first class!

So it all comes down to wishful thinking, coincidence, and attributing special significance to something that reminded me of my dream and that I probably would not have noticed otherwise.

[KGS]

@Czarcasm

In what form does this energy appear, and what machine would you use to detect it?

Question #1 I’ve already answered. Question #2, obviously, is the human brain itself – an organ so complex, we’ve yet to fully understand how it works (indeed, we’ve only scratched the surface) and therefore there’s no artificial analogue we can build in order to perform falsifiable experiments.

[Koxinga]

@lynne-42

A good few years ago, I started doing ‘psychic’ readings using the principles of cold reading, given I have (to my knowledge) no psychic abilities. I wanted to know why so many people were convinced their experiences of readings were real, and I know that dismissing those people as stupid or gullible was just not a valid answer. They weren’t. I never performed without people knowing I was not psychic, just showing them what a reading feels like using scientific principles. It still always worked incredibly well. I have now done hundreds of them.

There were some readings when things jumped into my head which were so accurate that they freaked out the sitter, and really frightened me. A number of times I packed up my gear and decided never to do it again. Always this was in public, with witnesses. Those who were watching the readings could often pick what I had run with, when I couldn’t remember certain aspects of the earlier interaction. I talk a lot and move fast when I am reading, trusting intuition and the experience of doing this a lot of times. But there are still a few instances which really seem to me beyond coincidence, cold reading, or experience. But I can’t replicate them, so how can I know what really happened and what is my brain reconstructing it to fit? So I explain it to myself as still not being psychic, but that I just don’t understand. I don’t have the evidence to do otherwise.

Thanks for sharing your experience! That’s exactly the kind of thing I was interested to hear when I started the thread.

[VarlosZ]

@KGS

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.

Why would it matter that the events are significant? I ask because you’re offering a physical explanation, but, physically, a plane crashing into a building is no more significant than a moderate-sized landslide in an uninhabited part of the world. It’s only psychologically that the former occurrence is at all notable. That’s obviously a *kind *of significance, but for that significance to send ripples of energy anywhere you’re talking about an explicitly psychic phenomenon.

[Quercus]

@KGS

Question #2, obviously, is the human brain itself – an organ so complex, we’ve yet to fully understand how it works

Well, that’s kind of misleading: we have a pretty good idea how individual neurons work, as well as the details of how sensing cells such as vision, balance, hearing, etc. work.

Now we don’t have a perfect handle on how all the neurons are wired together, but that doesn’t mean there’s any reason to think that there are any supernatural effects going on in a brain.
FYI, my answer to the OP is “Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while… and it’s usually a whole forest full by the time he finishes telling everyone about it”