• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Dreams That Have Come True

Another thing occurred to me ... Does the name 'Winona' have any significance for you (or would have had, back in 2004)? I've been acquainted with two Winonas (friends of friends) who were sometimes addressed as 'Nona'.

Nope! Never met a single one. Never met a Nona at all, that I know of.
 
Any grandmothers in your life, Ulalume? Around here 'nona' or 'nonna' is sometimes used as an abbreviation or pet name for a grandmother and the name may have entered your consciousness under that guise.

But a fascinating account all the same. I'm another one who'd like to see a verbatim account as written in your notebook (only because I am very well away of how the mind can 'retcon' dreams to fit a scenario, not because I doubt your word).
 
You know, I'm not particularly secretive, but I do draw the line at posting copies of my diary entries online. Not when they contain private information about myself and others. I still have a tiny amount of decorum!

Personally, the questions the dream raises are rather different. For instance - if it was a precognitive dream (and of course that's a huge if), what was the point? No one was helped by it. Why dream of a crime that would happen the next year, in another state, hundreds of miles away, to someone I'd never met? Or that I wouldn't even learn about until this past summer? Especially considering that similar crimes happen distressingly often?

Even if some foreknowledge had come to me that one day I would learn of this terrible story (which then expressed itself in a dream) - it still doesn't answer why it would be this particular case and not another.

Of course, if it wasn't a precognitive dream, there's not much point in discussing it at all. Any meaning it had would be irrelevant, if you see what I mean.
 
I do draw the line at posting copies of my diary entries online.


I'm with Henry on this. You can always change any identifying details!

'Knowing' dreams are interesting to read about. Here's one of mine, which I can share without breaching anyone's privacy:

A few years ago someone one another board described how her daughter had been harassed at work by someone driving very close behind her.
At about the time of that incident I was asleep across the Atlantic dreaming that I was a passenger in a car whose driver was doing the same thing to a young lady of the same appearance who was also getting on with her job. It was as if I could see it happening, very weird!

So when the poster complained on the board about it I posted my dream and we were stunned. Highly enjoyable!
 
... Personally, the questions the dream raises are rather different. For instance - if it was a precognitive dream (and of course that's a huge if), what was the point? No one was helped by it. Why dream of a crime that would happen the next year, in another state, hundreds of miles away, to someone I'd never met? Or that I wouldn't even learn about until this past summer? Especially considering that similar crimes happen distressingly often?

Even if some foreknowledge had come to me that one day I would learn of this terrible story (which then expressed itself in a dream) - it still doesn't answer why it would be this particular case and not another. ...

I completely agree with your questioning this. Let's take a step back and consider how this unfolded for you ...

You had a vivid dream with some specifically detailed features (most especially the word or name 'Nona'). You gave some thought to whether it might pertain to a similar situation in your local / known environs.

From the beginning you ascribed (however tentatively) two key features to your characterization of the dream:

- It represented a reflection, knowledge, or foreknowledge of an actual event involving someone else

- Certain features prominent in your dream (or recollection thereof) were definitive for that event

Phrased another way ... You primed yourself to at least entertain the notion the dream related to some real situation involving another person.

At this early point the dream became an object to be matched against 'reality'. You didn't find anything that matched, at least not back then.

At least a decade or more later (I'm guessing from your phrasing ... ) you happen across an actual news story that fits the general features of your 2004 dream, occurred at some time (a year) after you had that dream, *and* focuses on a person whose given name matches the mystery word 'Nona'.

How many similarly tragic storylines occurred in the mean time? All too many. Why didn't you match the dream to any of these numerous potential analogues? And why, after a decade or more, did you sense you found the match in a story from far away and a year after the dream?

Based on your descriptions it seems you were keyed on the mystery term 'Nona'. I say 'term' because it was you who associated the word with the woman in your dream and took it to be her name. This set a relatively strict criterion for a match that would really strike you as significant (as opposed to matching against any of the sadly numerous stories that could be construed as matching all other features of the dream).

In other words, you're the one who set yourself up for an open-ended search to match one out of who-knows-how-many similar stories if and only if the key criterion ('Nona') was included.

Once this framing of the situation was in place it became something akin to the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare meme - the open issue was how long it would be before one of the myriad 'real' news stories matched closely enough to be acceptable.

(NOTE: Yes, I'm deliberately being coldly critical, but with regard to the dream and its interpretation per se, not you ... )
 
I completely agree with your questioning this. Let's take a step back and consider how this unfolded for you ...

You had a vivid dream with some specifically detailed features (most especially the word or name 'Nona'). You gave some thought to whether it might pertain to a similar situation in your local / known environs.

From the beginning you ascribed (however tentatively) two key features to your characterization of the dream:

- It represented a reflection, knowledge, or foreknowledge of an actual event involving someone else

- Certain features prominent in your dream (or recollection thereof) were definitive for that event

Phrased another way ... You primed yourself to at least entertain the notion the dream related to some real situation involving another person.

At this early point the dream became an object to be matched against 'reality'. You didn't find anything that matched, at least not back then.

At least a decade or more later (I'm guessing from your phrasing ... ) you happen across an actual news story that fits the general features of your 2004 dream, occurred at some time (a year) after you had that dream, *and* focuses on a person whose given name matches the mystery word 'Nona'.

How many similarly tragic storylines occurred in the mean time? All too many. Why didn't you match the dream to any of these numerous potential analogues? And why, after a decade or more, did you sense you found the match in a story from far away and a year after the dream?

Based on your descriptions it seems you were keyed on the mystery term 'Nona'. I say 'term' because it was you who associated the word with the woman in your dream and took it to be her name. This set a relatively strict criterion for a match that would really strike you as significant (as opposed to matching against any of the sadly numerous stories that could be construed as matching all other features of the dream).

In other words, you're the one who set yourself up for an open-ended search to match one out of who-knows-how-many similar stories if and only if the key criterion ('Nona') was included.

Once this framing of the situation was in place it became something akin to the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare meme - the open issue was how long it would be before one of the myriad 'real' news stories matched closely enough to be acceptable.

(NOTE: Yes, I'm deliberately being coldly critical, but with regard to the dream and its interpretation per se, not you ... )

Good points.

There's another thing - the young woman in my dream looked very much like Nona Dirksmeyer, and it's when I saw her photo that it truly felt uncanny.

At the time of the dream, I felt the girl Nona resembled Dru Sjodin, a college student who had been murdered the year before. I was only peripherally aware of this case, but I had certainly seen her picture in the news. It had occurred to me that Sjodin's Scandinavian-sounding name and appearance were the reasons for the word "skol" in the dream - although I knew the girl was not Sjodin, and there was such an eerie, pressing sense of the future in the dream, hence why it made me so nervous. Obviously, I don't believe that every dream is a sign of things to come.

There is a picture of Dru Sjodin here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Dru_Sjodin
and a picture of Nona Dirksmeyer here:
http://media.arkansasonline.com/img....JPG?673328f4bb9263a287d110865e74e7950bdf1585

IMO there's more of than a passing resemblance between them.
No idea if this means anything objectively, but it is one of the reasons I reacted so strongly upon learning this.
 
Ahhhhh ... Thanks for the additional info.

The Dru Sjodin murder occurred 13 months before you had the dream, and it kicked off a nationwide debate over sex offenders and a multi-year campaign resulting in 'Dru's Law' a couple of years after your dream.

If you'd followed (even if only passively) the news of these events it could be that the ongoing Sjodin story had stuck in memory and helped frame the dream.

It makes a lot more sense to me that the apprehension and threat symbolized in the dream referred back to Sjodin (or at least resonated with memories of her story), and the appearance of 'Nona' in the dream was a peripheral / tangential aside that turned into the primary match criterion for the dream as a whole.
 
This is a very interesting topic.

To shove my two-pennyworth in...

I had a lucid dream a few years ago (lucid both in the fact I knew I was dreaming and that it was very very clear in details). I remember being in a small dark room with bare brick walls, running my hand over the wall and marvelling at how good my brain was at recreating the 'detail' of brick wall, colour, texture and so on. In this room and pushed up against the wall was a wooden sideboard. Again, I touched the sideboard and was impressed by my brain's ability to imagine this fully coloured, textured and firm surface. I even rapped my knuckles against the wood.

Since that dream I have been in many historic houses, sheds, rooms with bare walls and wooded sideboards against them. I have never once thought 'ooh, I dreamed this...' even when, to my recollection, the details have matched. Admittedly the details were simply a small dark room, bare brick walls and dark wooden sideboard. Occasionally I've recalled the dream when I have been in the situation, but never in a 'I dreamed this' way, just in a way that I was impressed once again with how my brain had created the textures and colours and how I had been able to experience them from 'inside my head'.

So for a dream to be prescient, do a special set of circumstances have to exist in order for the dream to register as an 'extra-ordinary' dream? How many details must match, or does there have to be a 'feeling' about the dream?
 
This is a very interesting topic.

To shove my two-pennyworth in...

I had a lucid dream a few years ago (lucid both in the fact I knew I was dreaming and that it was very very clear in details). I remember being in a small dark room with bare brick walls, running my hand over the wall and marvelling at how good my brain was at recreating the 'detail' of brick wall, colour, texture and so on. In this room and pushed up against the wall was a wooden sideboard. Again, I touched the sideboard and was impressed by my brain's ability to imagine this fully coloured, textured and firm surface. I even rapped my knuckles against the wood.

Since that dream I have been in many historic houses, sheds, rooms with bare walls and wooded sideboards against them. I have never once thought 'ooh, I dreamed this...' even when, to my recollection, the details have matched. Admittedly the details were simply a small dark room, bare brick walls and dark wooden sideboard. Occasionally I've recalled the dream when I have been in the situation, but never in a 'I dreamed this' way, just in a way that I was impressed once again with how my brain had created the textures and colours and how I had been able to experience them from 'inside my head'.

So for a dream to be prescient, do a special set of circumstances have to exist in order for the dream to register as an 'extra-ordinary' dream? How many details must match, or does there have to be a 'feeling' about the dream?

Highly scientific answer: dunno.
 
I find with lucid dreams That I easily remember the details and keep on remembering after some time.
Ordinary dreams dreams seem to flitter away soon after waking.
 
i would say its impossible for any dream not to accord in some way to a future reality, its a question of significance ... its not useful to dream of a ladder and then next time you see a ladder cry precognition

also as dream and memory are so apparently closely linked its essential the post-dream/pre-actual event account is used as reference or origin, rather than a recollection of the dream supplemented by a period of real time afterwards which is obviously going to add to and otherwise change the interpretation of the experiencer and hence their retelling of the original dream ...

from last page :
without the document post-dream and pre-actual event i dont see how a dream can be held up as truly prophetic ... only retrospectively prophetic
 
Precisely why this dream stayed with me for so long and in such detail, Iris. Which means that it was one that I can easily use for comparing circumstances - being in a brick walled room with a sideboard. A dream which has 'come true' on many occasions, but never had the redolence of a 'prescient' dream when I had it. Which is why I was wondering what denotes a dream that foretells the future from other dreams?
 
Ahhhhh ... Thanks for the additional info.

The Dru Sjodin murder occurred 13 months before you had the dream, and it kicked off a nationwide debate over sex offenders and a multi-year campaign resulting in 'Dru's Law' a couple of years after your dream.

If you'd followed (even if only passively) the news of these events it could be that the ongoing Sjodin story had stuck in memory and helped frame the dream.

It makes a lot more sense to me that the apprehension and threat symbolized in the dream referred back to Sjodin (or at least resonated with memories of her story), and the appearance of 'Nona' in the dream was a peripheral / tangential aside that turned into the primary match criterion for the dream as a whole.

I understand your point of view. The reason I think it was not simply a chance matching of circumstances is something not possible to quantify scientifically - the ominous "feel" of the dream that has made it stick with me for 14 years.
 
I understand your point of view. The reason I think it was not simply a chance matching of circumstances is something not possible to quantify scientifically - the ominous "feel" of the dream that has made it stick with me for 14 years.

I know what you mean about dream experiences 'sticking with one' long afterward. There are incidents or lessons from dream experiences that have influenced me as much or more than waking life experiences - including their serving as the key junctures where a current path was confirmed or course change was decided.
 
My two-penneth: Any dream that I have had (that possibly fit that category)- have had a feeling throughout the dream that "someone" was trying to tell me something or a sense in myself that "this is important, pay attention to this." Otherwise they have been so strange that I have then sometimes thought , Oh so THIS is what that dream meant...when something similar reminds me of it in reality...possibly pre-cognitive? !
 
A quick search of "skol" brought this up :
"exclamation: skol
  1. used to express friendly feelings toward one's companions before drinking."
So maybe "no skol" would indicate the opposite of friendly feelings?

Language in dreams can be so poetic rather than literal. One word elegantly carrying several possible meanings, all of which are apt.

It must be distressing to have had that dream with so many seeming connections to a real and horrible event a year in advance. I believe that it's possible to pick up on things that are not fated, but likely to happen if nothing is done. In our culture it would have been impossible for you do act on this dream, since we don't value dreams and you had no acquaintance with the victim. Predicating this on its having been a precognitive dream, it's less mysterious to me that how people can "tune in" to trending events at times, than that you would be afflicted with this particular foreknowledge when you were in no position to help. Seems very unfair to you!
 
Was watching my little grandson chasing clouds of some sort of insects yesterday evening when we were minding him.
He had such a look of joy and as I looked at his wispy blonde hair I was reminded of a dream I had before he was born of him holding his parents hands and being so happy.
I did tell them at the time but they probably thought I was just being strange.
 
I had a dream Friday night that I was exploring an old mansion and found an old fashioned wooden wheelchair. I proceeded to sit in this chair, only for it to start vibrating and swaying. Saturday I received an invitation from a friend to visit the cinema, and ended up watching a 4DX showing. As the cinema seat swayed and vibrated along with the movie my dream came to mind. Possibly I'm reaching to link the two.

I've had a few similar dreams of random events that could loosely fall into the description of premonition. For example I dreamed of walking towards my house and looking up to see a long, thin, grey UFO hovering and wobbling over my roof. The following day I was walking towards my house, glanced up and stopped dead in my tracks to see a long, thin, grey UFO wobbling in place over my roof. It then canted to one side and flew away, it was a seagull.
 
I have written before of this dream: Lucille Ball Dies in another thread.
The only other that comes to mind is this one that happened some years back. My wife and I have been using the same chemist/drugstore for years and there once was a young lady who worked there for a few years and then left for another job. We would occasionally see her once or twice a year whilst at the bank, newsagents etc. Certainly, she was not someone we saw regularly.
One night I dreamed that we at the chemist and she was showing everyone a brand new tattoo of a large flower on her foot.
The next time I saw her, yes, you guessed, it, we were lined up in a supermarket queue, she in the next aisle. It was summertime and hot, she was wearing sandals with a large rose tattoo on her right foot.
 
Perhaps I'm jumping the gun a bit, but I may have another entry for this thread. Luckily, it's rather more lighthearted than my previous one. :)

During the Christmas holidays, some folks were writing down their dreams as part of the twelvetide fortune telling method - ie, an old legend that your dreams during the twelve days of Christmas predict events in the coming twelve months of the year.
(My whole list is written down here if anyone is curious)

There was a bit of a hit for January, when I dreamed of some sort of experiment happening on the moon. A few days later, the Chinese space program landed a probe on the dark side of the moon.

The one that's really caught my attention is a bit wackier though:
"Dream, December 28th -
My son and I are walking down the road when we meet our new mail carrier, James "Bobo" Faye from Finding Bigfoot. He greets us very cheerfully and hands us each a copy of Reader's Digest."

As a prediction, this is absurd, but consider this recent event - not too long ago, Yithian posted this announcement about a bunch of Fate magazines for sale. For those who don't know, Fate magazine is sort of a less skeptical US version of Fortean Times. Chock full of cryptozoology reports and such. I've loved it since I were a youngin' and basically, I wanted those magazines! As a gift, my son (the one in the dream) bid on them and won. Significantly, the magazines from that era are digest-sized.

I wasn't thinking about the Bobo dream at all until it had already happened.

Consider it - Bobo Faye, a bigfoot hunter, delivers my son and me digest-sized magazines. In reality, my son buys me a load of digest sized magazines about such things as bigfoot. And "Faye" has just one letter different from "Fate."

Eh? Eh? :wink2:

The one place this really fails as part of the twelvetide fortune-telling method is that it should have happened in April. But I'm not complaining.
 
I'd never heard of that but it seems to work! Will be trying it this xmas!
Maybe we should do this as a sub-group - record our dreams over the twelve days somewhere on this site and then report back on any successes and get others' views on it!
 
Maybe we should do this as a sub-group - record our dreams over the twelve days somewhere on this site and then report back on any successes and get others' views on it!

We may've held experiments like this before, or mind-reading or summat anyway. No doubt I was crap at it!

You're right though, it's a good idea.
 
Last edited:
A seeming precognitive/telepathic dream that dissolves on deeper consideration. This morning i texted a friend to tell him that last night i dreamed several different people telling me "Tim (him) is leaving his job/the company/changing jobs". He was amazed by this and reported he was currently sending off job applications for other companies. Seems cut and dried..i saw the future or read his mind. Except that i now remembered noticing a few days ago on facebook him marking his interest in attending an event..a jobs fair of some kind. Its still possible my dream was "psychic" in some way, but the need to imagine so has crumbled like dust.
 
As a youngster I shared a bed with my sister and first thing in the morning I'd recount my dream to her. I loved having stories read to me and I thought it was wonderful that stories could go through your head even while you slept, although some of them were unpleasant/scarey they were usually at least interesting. I can still remember some of them and I guess it was the fact I'd put them into words that has cemented them there. Of course the telling meant it was an ongoing process of story development so no doubt I'd have been filling in the gaps to make a sensible narrative. So of those remembered dreams how much was unconscious dreaming and how much was waking creativity? After at least 65 years I can't possibly say.

So the habit of reviewing dreams was set from an early age with me but much to the relief, I'm sure, of my subsequent sleeping partners I no longer feel the need to recount every single one of them!!! However there have been a few times when I've woken from one suddenly and with the thought that 'it wasn't my dream' ie not me sorting out my mental filing system. I did tell those to my partner at the time not so much because I thought they were prophetic but to see if they could remember what news item might have triggered it off. That they subsequently came true is intriguing.

These handful of dreams (not many over a lifetime it has to be said) have significantly informed my awareness of us not knowing all there is to know and consequently interest in things 'fortean' (love that word). But they offer nothing by way of proof to anyone else, they have made ME aware but what help are they to anyone else? That being said I'm really enjoying this thread and will share some of them with you once I've taken the dog for a walk. it would be interesting to get input as I'm always looking for so called rational explainations while secrectly hoping I won't find one of course <whistle>

Sollywos x
 
Right so here goes. First off a bit of background. In the early 1970's I was absolutely devasted by the the still birth of my second baby just like the first. While getting over the birth physically and trying to come to terms with what had happened I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. (Jigsaws are my favoured tool for healing ... while one part of your brain is engaged in solving the puzzle the other part can get on with grieving.)

So whilst the TajMahal shining white against a brilliant blue sky was forming piece by piece I was also falling down a deep well of despair, trying to cling to the sides, momentarily slowing my fall but nevertheless I kept falling and I was trying so hard not to reach the bottom. I'd only ever wanted to be a mother and now I was going to have to face the question of what to do with the rest of my life and I didn't feel at all capable of anything. I'm explaining this to convey the terror/grief I was feeling and how much it was entwined with said iconic building.

The dream.
I was standing with a big crowd of people in front of the TajMahal and had a good view as I was at the front. I wasn't sure exactly why we were there, we seemed to be waiting for something to happen.
Then a gasp went up as smoke started pouring from one of the minarets only two of which were in my field of view. It was coming from about an eighth of the way down. Ah thinks my dreaming self we are waiting to see if a Pope has been elected, now what colour smoke means what ... oh hang about do they an equivalent of a pope in Islam?

Then a huge gasp went up and as one the crowd turned to look at the second minaret which also had the same big puffs of smoke streaming out. Then a voice from behind exclaimed 'Oh my God there has been a TERRIBLE terrorist attack!!'

Then I woke up with the 'that was not my dream' feeling. At first I'd assumed there must have been a news item concerning the Sub Continent that I'd seen the night before but had not really taken in. Partner couldn't remember there having been one and neither could I find mention of a recent one anywhere.

I spoke about the dream several times as that voice had had a powerful effect on me. My partner had concluded that I'd got football muddled up with religion (as indeed some do lol) and hooligans mixed up with terrorists and that the smokey towers bit was to do with the old Wembly Stadium!

No doubt some of you will be ahead of me on this one! A few days later a friend rang and ordered me to turn on the TV and there it was! The clear blue sky, two towers shining white against it with smoke pouring out from the upper levels, crowds of people wondering what the hell was going on and yes 'oh my god a terrible terrorist attack' indeed! The feeling of utter despair and those people falling down all echoing back to what the TajMahal is linked to in my mind plus the Islam connection.

So am I stretching a point, the imagery seems pretty clear to me but ...? Just a coincidence? Or did my sleeping self nip ahead a few days, read a headline got the salient points and conncocted a story?

Sollywos x
 
My condolences on your losses Sollywos. I REALLY wish there was a suitable button for these moments.
 
Thank you catseye xx I wondered whether or not to include that detail but I wanted to try and explain just why the TajMahal had such deep meaning for me and why my dreaming self used it!

Sollywos xx
 
Last edited:
Back
Top