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Declassified CIA Files

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,517
..put online, including regarding ufos, Stargate and Uri gellar...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38663522

"Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception.

Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer.

Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner"."

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That Uri Geller stuff is pretty amazing.
Maybe he is the real deal?
 
I used to think Geller was genuine in the old days but then how do stage magicians and illusionists accomplish similar tasks...? Could Geller have used stage magic to somehow know what was drawn..? Did he have any access before the task?
 
Derren Brown does the same as Geller with tricks. You just have to know the right tricks.
 
That was my thought. I'd love to believe that Uri has inexplicable powers, but my guess is that it's something much more mundane - a combination of poor test procedures, some cold reading, a possible wish by the CIA to get more funding and thus improve the results etc etc. I do think that Uri had the best spoon-bending/mind-reading shtick going - and he wowed a whole country back in the 1970s. Me and my friends got into trouble as a result of trying to emulate him - bending our cheap metal school canteen cutlery (by physical means) until it was on the verge of braking and then putting it back on the plate at the end of the meal. I don't think we were very successful!
 
I'm very much a scoffer of gellar..his endless showy amazement when he does what he supposedly always does is my main complaint...but time again there are these stories of experiments or spontaneous incidents which seem to indicate he may in fact be real. Or at one point was.

So playing devil's advocate against my usual position on him I'd say the fact other stage magicians do the drawing trick doesn't really tell us very much. One assumes that a CIA experiment in which, we are told, the drawing being "seen" took place in a different room is an entirely different prospect from a stage or tv act involving a volunteer from the audience who may or may not be real, access to and control of lights, mirrors, cameras, assistants, the drawing pads themselves etc etc. Some or all of which we can imagine is involved in the stage act.

I think in one of Will Storr's books he uses the line "just because bank notes can be forged doesn't mean every fiver is snide."
 
I've tried looking up how the "psychically reproducing a drawing" trick is done, and from teh answers..or mere suggestions..available, its very hard to see how any of them apply to the (albiet..pardon the pun..sketchy) outline of the CIA report, that the drawing being copied was done in a separate or even "sealed" room.

Here is a very convoluted special pad/hidden carbon paper version of the trick:
http://www.freemagictricksandillusions.com/remoteviewing.html

On the other hand this author claims to have observed at close hand what exactly Geller was up to when he did the trick on him (though again its hard to see how this would apply to the CIA claims)

http://psychicinvestigator.com/demo/GELRSKP.htm
 
Gattino, that psychicinvestigator piece is great. And quite sad in a way - not even sophisticated in his cheating!
 
I've just read anaccount of the cia files in the Mirror newspaper..and what it describes is very different.

"According to the now-released papers, in one section of the week-long series of tests Geller was asked to sit in a sealed and monitored room.

A word was then selected at random from a dictionary.

The first word selected was "fuse" and from that a firecracker was drawn by someone outside the locked room.

The picture was then taped to the wall outside Geller's enclosure and the spoon-bender was then told via intercom the drawing had been done.


According to the CIA papers: "His almost immediate response was that he saw a 'cylinder with noise coming out of it'.

"His drawing to correspond with it was a drum, along with a number of cylindrical-looking objects."

The second word chosen was "bunch" - from which the examiners drew a bunch of grapes.

The report states: "Geller's immediate response was that he saw 'drops of water coming out of the picture'.

"He then talked about 'purple circles'.

"Finally, he said that he was quite sure that he had the picture. His drawing was indeed a bunch of grapes."

Whatever that is its clearly not a magic clipboard or the presumed process of cheating described by the journalist in the article I quoted earlier.
 
One possibility..often forwarded by modern defenders of famous victorian mediums who appeared to have done impossible things in test conditions but were nonetheless on other occassions caught cheating...is that geller may have once had abilities which have faded, or were never as reliable as his fame and showmanship demanded he pretend they were, and so he filled in the gaps between genuine wonders with subterfuge to please his audience andkeep his star shining.

I went to see a medium perform at a spiritualist church over a year ago..and it was clear cold reading, generalisations, or plain wrong....until it wasn;t, when it was make you sit up straight odd, teh amount of agreement about names and relationships from particular audience members. It made me speculate at the time that maybe,unable to conjure the dead on demand for an impatient audience, they simply bluff and blag until the real stuff starts to come through.

It's certainly curious.

Though of course no doubt a magician of a skeptical bent would immediately wonder why the pictures had to be taped to the wall outside the room...what would that mean in practice and why would he require it (if it was indeed his suggestion)
 
I have thought that of a few people who claims to be mediums. The demands of performing a perhaps elusive ability all the time every time must lead to a temptation to fall into old tricks.
 
Just as a side note, I'm currently rereading Invisible College (1975 pb) by Vallee...in it he goes into the Geller case for a few pages. Fascinating stuff......
 
I have thought that of a few people who claims to be mediums. The demands of performing a perhaps elusive ability all the time every time must lead to a temptation to fall into old tricks.
I don't buy that myself. The whole "it doesn't work like that" thing is just too convenient for those who claim to have special powers. And if I was to be very cynical, I'd say that 'occasional hits' using 'powers' which come and go on a whim, could be hard to distinguish from 'guessing'.
 
I don't buy that myself. The whole "it doesn't work like that" thing is just too convenient for those who claim to have special powers. And if I was to be very cynical, I'd say that 'occasional hits' using 'powers' which come and go on a whim, could be hard to distinguish from 'guessing'.
It;s a reasonable suspicion...but then pretty much everyone here has had "paranormal" experiences, largely of the "psychic" variety...and what all of us can attest is that it doesn't happen on command or with any reliability at all. But it nonetheless (personally) convincingly happens.

So if there are people with a greater tendency to experience these things than average (just as there are people who can run faster or lift more than most people, or solve math puzzles quicker) I'm not sure why we would expect their control over it to be all that great in absolute terms, or the extent of their abilities to be extreme. Their "visions" may be clearer than yours or mine but no more frequent...or maybe more frequent but not much clearer.

The protest that in effect "i'll only believe it if you can do X" always strikes me as not very scientific in itself. It's demanding a thing have a particular nature rahter thn simply studying what its nature is. The usual examples are if you mention precognition people want to know why you don't dream the lottery numbers then. (how?!) Or if you propose telepathy they will demand you tell them the sentence in their head , like you were reading a book or listening to a radio broadcast. In those circumstances "it doesn't work like that" seems an honest answer.
 
It;s a reasonable suspicion...but then pretty much everyone here has had "paranormal" experiences, largely of the "psychic" variety...and what all of us can attest is that it doesn't happen on command or with any reliability at all. But it nonetheless (personally) convincingly happens.

So if there are people with a greater tendency to experience these things than average (just as there are people who can run faster or lift more than most people, or solve math puzzles quicker) I'm not sure why we would expect their control over it to be all that great in absolute terms, or the extent of their abilities to be extreme. Their "visions" may be clearer than yours or mine but no more frequent...or maybe more frequent but not much clearer.

I take your point, but for a person to self-assert that they appear to have a greater than average run of 'experiences' is no more compelling that throwing five sixes in a row with an unloaded dice or picking winning lottery numbers. In a world of 7 billion people, lucky streaks will happen to someone. Someone will pick the lottery number. It doesn't mean they're psychic. Even if they think they are - it only happened to them, a sample size of 1 in 7 billlion. Someone is almost always at the end of the Bell-curve.

By the same token, every night millions of people will dream of a plane crash. almost all are forgotten after waking, except for the day there was a plane crash.

(As an aside, if it was possible to pick winning lottery numbers by some form of pre-cognition, then the total of jackpot wins, and other wins for that matter, ought to be, statistically speaking, larger that one would expect by chance for the number of tickets bought. Has anyone looked at this? All the data is there I'd have thought.)

The protest that in effect "i'll only believe it if you can do X" always strikes me as not very scientific in itself. It's demanding a thing have a particular nature rahter thn simply studying what its nature is. The usual examples are if you mention precognition people want to know why you don't dream the lottery numbers then. (how?!) Or if you propose telepathy they will demand you tell them the sentence in their head , like you were reading a book or listening to a radio broadcast. In those circumstances "it doesn't work like that" seems an honest answer.

I agree, that the demand itself is no more scientific than the claim in the first place. But if one can't observe a phenomenon one can't study or verify it. There have to be some conditions for a phenomenon surely? Nothing is truly random. Otherwise it is only faith or belief.

To be 'open minded' I must believe the claims of the 'gifted' unreservedly or I am a 'skeptic'. In a world filled with hucksters, crooks, con-men and marketing, exactly why should I believe the 'gifted'?

(Doubly so if the gifted need a donation or entrance fee.)

It's possible, in the way that almost anything is possible, that (say) precognition doesn't work to order or that somehow it prevents it's own use for (for example) picking winning lottery numbers. But it seems a stretch doesn't it? I might buy 'greed' as a blocking mechanism for 'psychic powers', but what about the altruists who is planning to give away his lottery winnings to charity?

So I stand by my own assertion, which is that the persistent claims 'that it only happens when an independent observer isn't looking' is most likely to be indicative of fakery, even if it's unwitting or self-delusion.
 
By the same token, every night millions of people will dream of a plane crash. almost all are forgotten after waking, except for the day there was a plane crash.
That itself is a common assertion that I'd object to. If "almost all are forgotten" where did the statistic that "millions of people dream of a plane crash" come from? You can't count forgotten/unreported experiences! It's no more than an "its probably so" assertion - albeit a popular one - with no discernible data to back it up. At least none that I'm aware of.

The same is usually said of winning the lottery. It is incredibly common for the actual winner of the lottery to declare they dreamt of it. Google it and you'll find page after page of news stories, almost on a weekly basis. The assertion equivalent to the plane crash one is often made in retort...what about all the people who dream of winning the lottery and don't, they say. Well, my response is what people? How and when and where were failed dreams of lottery winning counted in order to make such an assertion that this vast unreported reservoir exists?

I pay far more attention to the content of my dreams that the vast majority of people, as my contributions to these boards demonstrate. I can tell you though I've sometimes speculated that maybe this dream could be a clue to buy a lottery ticket or whatever I have never, in the hundreds and hundreds of dreams I've recorded to some degree or other over the last several years, never dreamed I won the lottery nor dreamed of a plane crash. The idea that we're all having such dreams all of the time..or sufficiently vast numbers of us are..doesn't seem to have anything much to support it.


(As an aside, if it was possible to pick winning lottery numbers by some form of pre-cognition, then the total of jackpot wins, and other wins for that matter, ought to be, statistically speaking, larger that one would expect by chance for the number of tickets bought. Has anyone looked at this? All the data is there I'd have thought.)
Again, I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming to "pick" lottery numbers by active prediction (except in the tabloid mag astrology column kind of way of telling you your "lucky numbers"), so the statistical outcome you describe simply doen't apply. Claims of foreseeing the lottery win tend to fall mostly into the category of dreaming of winning just before you do so. Rarely are the actual numbers said to be involved. So if precog dreams of winning the lottery exist they would by defintion only be experienced by those who do - that is, were always going to - win the lottery, so the overall number of winners would not go up at all.

Occasionally some reported stories of winners who dreamt it do involve seeing the numbers and picking them as a consequence. But it's much rarer and clearly not intentional so its hard to see how it could have any statistical effect on the overall outcome of lottery payouts.
 
That itself is a common assertion that I'd object to. If "almost all are forgotten" where did the statistic that "millions of people dream of a plane crash" come from? You can't count forgotten/unreported experiences! It's no more than an "its probably so" assertion - albeit a popular one - with no discernible data to back it up. At least none that I'm aware of.

Good point. My specific of 'plane crashes' however was used to illustrate the probability that in a population of 7 billion, millions of dreams with some specificity occur daily which might appear to predict the events of that day. Many millions don’t. For ‘precognitive’ appearing dreams to have significance they need to occur more often than by chance over a whole population.

For one person to dream of a particular disaster and then claim ‘precognition’ doesn’t really have any statistical significance UNLESS a far greater than usual number of people had the same dream. Or the dreamer predicted several such events in sequence and they then occurred, but even the latter would only have significance if in such a large population (billions) it was unlikely to happen to someone by chance.

The same is usually said of winning the lottery. It is incredibly common for the actual winner of the lottery to declare they dreamt of it. Google it and you'll find page after page of news stories, almost on a weekly basis. The assertion equivalent to the plane crash one is often made in retort...what about all the people who dream of winning the lottery and don't, they say. Well, my response is what people? How and when and where were failed dreams of lottery winning counted in order to make such an assertion that this vast unreported reservoir exists?

From a scientific method standpoint, this claim of 'knowing' after the fact is a post hoc hypothesis. "I won and now I recall thinking I would win". These are quite rightly damned for the most part by the scientific community with good reason. It’s otherwise known as making the facts fit the theory (and sometimes vice versa). As evidence this is flimsy at best.

Secondly, I'd suggest that an awful lot of people do the lottery because they dream of winning a big prize. They hope to win a big prize. Every night before a draw they dream and wish it was them. Amazingly, the very few who win, recall thinking 'it was going to be them'. Given that memory recall is shaped very much by the present conditions when you recall the memory, it’d be a bigger surprise if loads of winners didn't think they were certain to win 'this time'.

In the third place, the web and the newspapers will print whatever sells the story. The headline, “Lottery winner never expected to win anything and thought it was all down to random chance.” isn't going to do it. Lotteries work by selling a dream, not the actual chance of winning. The media sells themselves by printing the story people want to hear. So, not evidence in any meaningful way.

I pay far more attention to the content of my dreams that the vast majority of people, as my contributions to these boards demonstrate. I can tell you though I've sometimes speculated that maybe this dream could be a clue to buy a lottery ticket or whatever I have never, in the hundreds and hundreds of dreams I've recorded to some degree or other over the last several years, never dreamed I won the lottery nor dreamed of a plane crash. The idea that we're all having such dreams all of the time..or sufficiently vast numbers of us are..doesn't seem to have anything much to support it.

I also recorded my dreams over a period of three months in their totality as I’ve indicated. Once I’d got to the point they became continuous narratives, I seldom came across anything that was not related to the day-to-day anxieties and social interactions at the time. Certainly nothing I would class as precognitive or predictive in any unsupported way (that is to say, that could not have been reasonably predicted with the available data). My sample size of ‘1’ has the same validity as yours I’d respectfully suggest. For me, not dreaming of a lottery win might just well indicate I'm so unlikely to do so, it's not worth the brain power. Not dreaming about plane crashes likewise might just indicate I wasn't flying anywhere at the time nor was anyone I knew.

I agree that if we don't all record our dreams then we can't say that dreams are occurring to all the people of any specific thing in what proportions in a 100% definite way.

We could say with some certainty for example that everyone dreams about sex on a regular basis, even though we haven’t noted everyones' dreams. But, out of seven billion people, it's a very reasonable bet that some of them dreamt 'tomorrow night was the night' and got lucky the next day. That's not precognition unless it happens more often that you would expect by chance. Even if it happens to one person once a week for a six months and no-one else, it might well be out of a very large population that is what you might expect, like tossing a coin once a week for six months and always getting 'heads' (Odds of 1 in 67,108,864. If a billion people were doing that, you might expect 14 odd folk to get that result).

My argument is that if only 'X' had a precognitive dream, it doesn't prove pre-cognition. To do that one would need everyone's dreams over a period and to see a 'spike' in dreams about, for example, a ‘specific disaster’ ahead of the actual ‘specific disaster’. If you want me (for example) to believe 'X' is prcognative (despite wanting to believe such ability exists), I'll need to see some proper evidence it wasn't a 'one off dream' out of billions of dreams, that was simply coincidental.

Again, I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming to "pick" lottery numbers by active prediction (except in the tabloid mag astrology column kind of way of telling you your "lucky numbers"), so the statistical outcome you describe simply doen't apply. Claims of foreseeing the lottery win tend to fall mostly into the category of dreaming of winning just before you do so. Rarely are the actual numbers said to be involved. So if precog dreams of winning the lottery exist they would by defintion only be experienced by those who do - that is, were always going to - win the lottery, so the overall number of winners would not go up at all.

Occasionally some reported stories of winners who dreamt it do involve seeing the numbers and picking them as a consequence. But it's much rarer and clearly not intentional so its hard to see how it could have any statistical effect on the overall outcome of lottery payouts.

If, in a large population, a significant number of people had the ability to pick numbers for, e.g., a lottery draw, then there would undoubtedly be more winners than we would expect by pure chance. Otherwise, it is indistinguishable from chance, and so is therefore ‘chance’.

(I'm assuming that the ability to pick lottery numbers for oneself, doesn't in some mysterious way stop anyone else from doing so, so that the overall result is statistically valid.)

If your argument is that the winners are winning entirely by chance, but the ‘lucky’ ones are getting a foreshadowing, then, as I’ve said above, due to the natural hope of winning and the likelihood winners will recall thinking this time it would be them, forgetting all the times they threw their ticket in the bin and had another drink, then we're back to post hoc hypothesising.
 
My sample size of ‘1’ has the same validity as yours I’d respectfully suggest.
But how did your observations in anyway contradict or differ from mine? Unless I've misunderstood you you too after noting all your dreams for a prolonged period found no evidence of random, casual or predictible dreaming of unfulfilled plane crashes or lottery wins. Your testimony has only doubled the available sample and confirmed the observation!

Now clearly there *are* dreams that "everyone" supposedly has.. teeth falling out, unpreparedness for exams, running for a bus or train etc. Suggest it to a room a of people and nearly everyone will say yes they've had that dream.. and it strikes me that the claim of lottery/plane crash dreams being common is meant to fall in that category, but - as far as I can detect - it doesn't.

My own view about the big box office precognitive dreams of disasters and assassinations etc is an extrapolation from my own observations of my dream material, and the confirmatory testimony of various writers who have also noticed precognition in dreams. And that is that our ordinary dreams contains material that turns up in our own near future, that it is almost entirely trivial in nature - and so of little interest to anyone else even when noticed - and that these glimpses of the future relate only to one's own experiences. In the case of news stories - such as plane crashes - the dream appears not to be of the incident but of one's own experience of reading or hearing about the incident. If a coming news story bleeds into your dream and its something "box office", its that tiny percentage of exciting examples which is taken up by others and reaches the tabloid news rooms and the popular imagination and then further works its way into hollywood scripts as full on waking visions of doom from some higher power.

Does precognition exist? My own conclusions can't be expected to convince anyone else, but for me there is no doubt left and someone else's disbelief, I have to accept, is none of my business. But if my own experiences convince me that precognition is a cast iron fact then I'm left with two options. a) I'm "special", and psychic, one of an elite minority of our species. Well I don't buy that for a second. or b) What I observe in myself is true of everybody all the time..we all get "stuff from the future" leaking into our dreams and daydreams...but the vast majority of people don't notice, pay attention or record the fact. They just shrug "that's weird" and instantly forget about it. This is what *I* deduce is the truth of it.

So if my starting point - again I appreciate its not yours - is that Precognition is a genuine and universal thing, then it has to be reasonable to assume that some individuals will experience that faculty in ways and to a degree that varies from the average. In the case of dreams theirs may be more vivid, more easily remembered, or more literal than mine. And these people are the ones who would inevitably percieve themselves a "psychic", with its implications of having a special power or "gift"..and finding its not that reliable or controllable like some kind of superpower would be, they - I imagine - would be prone to building up a whole set of superstitious explanations for whats necessary to make it work...a whole fanciful lexicon of charms and excuses encompassing vibrations, spirit guides, negative energies and the rest.

Just my opinion.
 
So if my starting point - again I appreciate its not yours - is that Precognition is a genuine and universal thing, then it has to be reasonable to assume that some individuals will experience that faculty in ways and to a degree that varies from the average.
This might be so, in fact I would like it to be so, but you've not made a case for this being so.

But, it's as well we have different ideas and opinions or it'd be a dull old world.
hat_tip.gif
 
I've had precognitive dreams, but since we all have x number of dreams per night, at least a few per person are likely to be seen as precognitive, by chance alone.
 
But my contention is that its not a few. I used to think it was, until I paid systematic attention to them..I found that when I did the fragments of future , if I can coin a phrase, turned up several times a week, (potentially every night, if I'd been less conservative in registering hits.) So, for me and many others like me, its the sheer frequency and volume of the material which belies the assumption its just a game of averages. Beyond that of course is the actual content. One might suppose for example that if I dreamt of a mouse and next day saw a mouse that would be chance. But what if I dreamt of a mouse wearing a hat and next day saw a mouse climbing out of a hat..isn't that something more? And what if a third element were in teh mix, such as the presence in the dream story of someone unexpected who, like the mouse and the hat, turn up in the real life matching, albeit altered, sequence of events. Is that still one coincidence? Or 3? And f such multiplying elements creating a resemblance between dreams and the next day's events were to happen with almost monotonous regularity at what point is more sensible to say this isn't just a reflection of statistics?
 
It maybe worth rehashing old material to explain why I'mso personally persuaded of these things. I appreciate no one in a white coat would accept it as proof of the paranormal.

In December of 2014 for two strtaight weeks I recorded and transcribed every dream every night..4 or 5 recordings per night. Here are the more notable examples from that single 14 day period, as reported at the time. I may have to break them up into a couple of postings.

In each case I describe the real life incident first, followed by the apparently matching dreams that preceded it as noticed in my notes as I went along. Each entry is divided by an asterisk. I'll remind you to avoid the temptation to concentrate on differences as a dream which is built around the future (if indeed any are) is no more likely to be literal and accurate than one built around the past...they are in the end just nonsense stories. It's the details the stories are built around that match.

TWO WEEK DREAM DIARY PART ONE


Event: Monday 15th - the main letter in the newspaper's problem page was a woman whose friend suggested the woman's boyfriend struck her as gay. When challenged the friend backtracked and tried to spin it into a compliment on how stylish he was etc. to avoid offence

Dream: night before,Sunday 14th - dreamt of friend being told by an indian man who looks him up and down that he looked like that type (antisocial teenagers). When challenged I tried to spin it into a compliment on how young and stylishly he dressed to avoid upset.
*
Event: Wednesday 17th - my sister visited and complained of a peculiar smell in the house (I detected nothing) and began cleaning. She also said one of our brothers would probably be joining us for christmas dinner for the first time, making me mentally count if we had enough chairs.

Dream: night before, Tuesday 16th - A smell of soiled nappies and my sister was somehow in charge of clearing it up. In a separate dream the same night my sister also appeared carrying a spare fold up chair from the junk room and I wonder aloud who it's for.
*
Event: Saturday 20th - tv listings show an obscure afternoon christmas movie called Mr Miracle.

Dream: 3 day earlier, Wednesday 17th - I was selecting a superhero comic book from shop shelf. I named two titles, one of which was Mr Miracle (a real but fairly obscure DC character)
*
Event: Saturday 20th - Two New York policemen, one of them Chinese, were shot in the head, from the side, while in their police car. One report had an officer saying they may not even have seen their killer. A second quoted witnesses saying they had stumbled out of the car, one clutching his neck. Both were rushed to a city hospital where they were pronounced dead.

Dream: 5 days earlier, Monday 15th - I dreamt I was a policeman, sent out to join manhunt for a suspect. Encounter 2 cops, partners, one was Kye Young, the Chinese boy from my class in school. He starts complaining he can't see me in his peripheral vision. I see a shadow in his eye and say its just a cataract. Then I notice a large shadow descending..blood..his eye his heamoraging and we need to get him to hospital. I mention that its in New York.

Dream2: 3 days before event, Wednesday 17th - 2 dreams. A shootout in a police station, I'm taken to hospital. Followed by a dream about being in hospital and the medics are concentrating on my neck.
*
Event: Sunday 21st - start watching a recording from a few weeks earlier of the movie Forbidden Planet. The announcer before it begins says how influential it was and was the inspiration for Star Trek...something I've never heard claimed before but became immediately obvious once it started.

Dream: night before, Saturday 20th - in a shop again, the shelves are lined with painted collectors plates of Star Trek scenes..alien landscapes etc...but one showing clear images of Kirk and Spok is deemed unavailable.
*
Event: Sunday 21st - Matteo puts up a new facebook profile picture. It shows him alone in some form of cafe (food and counter visible behind him), with a stranger visible back to back with seat behind him. His skin tone is red under the lighting and has his hand to his mouth holding something in it as if a cigarette (in reality it was a lollipop)

Dream: Night before, Saturday 20th - Matteo was alone in a cafe, there was something different about him, I remarked he seemed spanish, in my mind's eye there was a green tint to him, he was smoking and pretending to extinguish the cigarette..which is later given to the person sitting behind him, seat back to back with his.
*
 
TWO WEEK DREAM DIARY PART TWO


Event: Sunday 21st - The final of the Apprentice TV show. Alan Sugar chooses one of two contestants to be the winner. The loser was a woman whose business plan involved ladies lingerie.

Dream: night before, Saturday 20th - An office in which someone's being congratulated on their promotion, the previous holder of hte job being a woman who's being interviewed by police. quote "There's very much a touch of Are You Being Served about it - Mrs Slocombe" (the head of ladies wear in the aforementioned sitcom). A reference to there being an older boss with his face under plastic (Alan Sugar has had plastic surgery to remove his bags)
*
Event: Monday 22nd - comedian John Bishop presents a Christmas tv variety show. He does a routine about being at the airport on the way to a holiday in Barcelona. He references the zig zagging queues around the ropes. At the end of the show high kicking dancing girls in glitery leotards are joined by him, two other comics, and Simon Webbe in glittery short short uniforms. Webbe turns around staring intently for a prolonged period at the girls behind him. The show ends with the slow fall of artificial snow onthe stage over Bishop and the other acts.

Dream: 2 nights earlier, Saturday 20th - after an earlier section of dream involving Simon Webbe, presumed to be inspired by the Strictly dancing final that was on before the dream, he turns up later in an unrelated scene asking if I mind if he puts some tv show on..its set in spain, partying music..i guess ibiza or marbella.. lots of modelly under 30s and some kind of catwalk. A dress or outfit worn by a woman, which exposes her thigh/stocking top, gets the attention of Simon Webbe who licks his lips. John Bishop is there..I imitate him then become him..JB is compering what's going on. It's televised. At some point, despite being set in "sunny spain" he's simultaneously holding an umbrella and under rain.

Dream: 1 night earlier, Sunday 21st - A scene of a stretch of land going down to the ocean, having to make a zig-zaggy path down to the beach "something to do with holidays"
*
Event: christmas night, 25 December - Xmas special episode of Dr Who. There were bodies of crew members under sheets. They awoke. They had monstrous heads...I misheard the Doctor's first words onbeing asked what they were as "devils!" (I had to play the moment several times on iplayer to find out he actually says "deaf") ...they were in fact spider like alien creatures called dream crabs (likened in the plot to the face huggers from alien) pressed against their faces, their multiple sharp limbs embedded into the victims skulls. These insectoid monsters descended from the ceilings like spiders on webs. They could only see you if you saw them so you had to close your eyes to avoid being seen. They sent their victims into a deep cosy dream while they used them as food. One was caught and kept in a glass sample jar. One of the minor characters I recognised as being played by the son of the late Patrick Troughton, a former Dr Who.

Dream: 4 days earlier, December 21st - A dream set at home on christmas day turns to referencing people doing and selling images of "prophetic spiders" which I compare to "paul the octopus" (the world cup predicting creature from a few years ago). These spiders are drawn descending from the ceiling.

Dream: 2 days before, December 23rd - trying to recall an "adventure" on the street below which somehow involved the shape of a body under a sheet, someone unconscious and having to do someting before we're seen and before they wake.

Dream: night before, December 24th - first dream - Dr Who. I'm his assitant. "his head and various monstrous appendages" keep popping out of a doorway or window. Each represent a glimpse of his timeline and his multipile incarnations, I glimpse Patrick Troughton in the "three Doctors". // Second dream same night - the "devil" is in the house. I can't decide if its in humanoid form but the constant image is of black scorpions or beetles/insects, which I refer to through out as the devil. I wonder how to get rid of him and pressing a cross tightly to his face suggests itself. We put food in a large glass jar and put these arachnids in and cover it so they can't climb out, with the intention to bury them.// Third dream same night - some kind of plant with sharp stick/stem/spike/root or somethign which pierces a bulb or tomato which becomes part of it and grows around it.
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Event: Boxing Day, 26th December - middle brother brings me wrapped presents, novelty gifts. A comic anthology of stories about Robin the boy wonder, plus a Bobble head toy of Burt Ward as Robin.

Dream: Night before, 25th December - quote from dream recording "Batman and Robin, as in Adam West and Burt Ward, are walking along...."

and on...and on....and on....
 
Miracle Man, eh? The product of Jack Kirby's fevered but somewhat scattershot creativity.

All this seems to prove is that you are very good at recognising similarities and patterns.

Or maybe- just maybe - you are getting messages from the future, but they are of no apparent use for predicting the future. You can only recognise their importance after the event.

This is quite similar what happens in John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Cramer posits the existence of advanced waves that come from the future, but they carry no usable information until they are integrated with the whole of the timeline- in other words, until after the events predicted have occurred.

In your case, you might be able to see the future- but it is indistinguishable from all the random information in your dreams, and predictive information can't be distinguished until after the event has occurred. I don't expect that this is the real reason for predictive dreams, but you could probably use the idea as an exposition dump in a supernatural or SF novel if you were so disposed.
 
Well my first conclusion is that there is no "in my case", as I believe I'm observing what absolutely everybody is experiencing if they pay attention to it.

A heightened sense of pattern spotting I have for sure, but I would contend that merely suggests a greater ability to notice what's there rather than a tendency to imagine what isn't really there.

The question of using it to predict before the event is of course the key one. The tendency to try and intepret the dream as one goes along always leads you astray, but is nigh on impossible to break. A classic example was one attempt to make a prediction about the real life outcome of a dream which I "knew" was likely to relate to an upcoming trip to oxford. In laying out the details on here I referred to a tower...in the dream it had been a lighthouse, which I knew to be impossible in oxford as its inland..so I decided it was symbolic of some other kind of tower where a particular encounter would happen, and mentioned the word lighthouse only in parenthesis. Come the day and no such incident happened at any tower. Later that evening I noticed on facebook someone had checked us in to a pub where an appropriately matching event had occurred, the name of hte pub, which I hadn't noticed at the time, was..the lighthouse. Logic and the compulsion to interpret the dream imagery forbade me from concentrating on that detail in trying to predict the outcome of the dream.
 
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