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Precognitive Dreams

I had one of those "well, yeah" moments this morning on the topic of why precognitive dreams are so often about trivial things, telepathic dreams don't convey useful information, etc. (Where's the thread with the story of the guy who shared a dream about being killed? That was the trigger for this thought.)

I'll have to set this up by explaining a neurological theory of dreaming which I find more or less convincing. Under this hypothesis, what happens when we dream is that the brain is in the process of housekeeping - making new connections, weakening old ones, testing synapses, reinforcing connections needed in order to learn new facts or tasks, etc. In the course of doing this, the various areas of the brain are subjected to stimulation in a chaotic (I hesitate to say random) fashion, much as a neurological patient would be. Dreams are the result of this process, as we attempt to make sense of these chaotic stimulations and the sensory data they present. Urgent real-life sensory data like a full bladder or pain, or the sensory leakage that occurs during the process of waking, can also be incorporated into dreams, distorted by the contingency with the chaotic images - this is why so many of my dreams involve a frantic search for an acceptable restroom and end with getting up in the middle of the night.

Now, consider - if (I admit this is a big if) the peculiar abilities known collectively as psi are normal brain functions, then they must be stimulated in the same way as other brain functions in the course of nightly maintenance. The imagery generated would be as random, fragmentary, and nonsensical as for any other brain function, and would be incorporated into dreams in the same manner. Sometimes, real sensory input from the future, another brain, or whatever would also be incorporated into the dream, but since it's only a test run, the odds of getting anything useful in this way, or remembering it if you do, aren't very high - you're a lot more likely to get mundane test data cheek-by-jowl with a random review of motor skills and the color blue.

This is one of those nifty little untestable theories, alas, and only works if two unproven conditions - one a reasonable hypothesis currently working well enough for many practical neurology purposes, the other a very tentative hypothesis which all tests have failed to demonstrate - happen to be true, but I thought if it couldn't get a sympathetic hearing here, it couldn't anywhere, so there it is, for what it's worth.
 
Intriguing!! Certainly worth a little consideration...

I just don't like the idea of an untestable hypothesis/ theory because they often get discarded without serious consideration...

But just cos' its untestable now doesn't mean it will be in the future. That's why it's always good to think outside the box...
 
Last night I dreamt I was watching news reports about Pope Benedict XVI dying in his sleep. Given that he is 80, works fairly hard, and we all have to die sometime, what timeframe and circumstances when his death does occur do you think would still allow me to claim this as a precognitive dream?
 
This could equally go in Minor Strangeness, but the other night I dreamt I was looking up actresses in a film I was planning to watch next, and couldn't understand why one younger star was listed as being born in 1929 when I knew she was about 30. After watching the film when I was awake, I looked up her older co-star to see that she was born in... 1929 exactly!
 
I've noticed that since giving up electronics and reading for a psychology degree, my dreams have changed considerably. The content is unremarkable in itself, but I'm recalling wholly different dream-scapes and situations to those I recall from before. The theme of change is all over the fragments I recall on waking.
 
Me and my Brother are twins, we both had the same dream that all the family would be around my Grandfather's hospital bed. This was before he was even I'll. We thought not much of it. But then some months later we're with the rest of the family around his hospital bed, all of us in exactly the same positions as in our dreams. My Bro couldn't take it and he fainted. My Grandad died a week later. We've always blame ourselves because we have dreams that come true all the time. We coukd of stopped it, but its always hard to determine which one will come true. It's not as frequent now days how ever, I don't know why.
 
I had one of those "well, yeah" moments this morning on the topic of why precognitive dreams are so often about trivial things, telepathic dreams don't convey useful information, etc. (Where's the thread with the story of the guy who shared a dream about being killed? That was the trigger for this thought.)

I'll have to set this up by explaining a neurological theory of dreaming which I find more or less convincing. Under this hypothesis, what happens when we dream is that the brain is in the process of housekeeping - making new connections, weakening old ones, testing synapses, reinforcing connections needed in order to learn new facts or tasks, etc. In the course of doing this, the various areas of the brain are subjected to stimulation in a chaotic (I hesitate to say random) fashion, much as a neurological patient would be. Dreams are the result of this process, as we attempt to make sense of these chaotic stimulations and the sensory data they present. Urgent real-life sensory data like a full bladder or pain, or the sensory leakage that occurs during the process of waking, can also be incorporated into dreams, distorted by the contingency with the chaotic images - this is why so many of my dreams involve a frantic search for an acceptable restroom and end with getting up in the middle of the night.

Now, consider - if (I admit this is a big if) the peculiar abilities known collectively as psi are normal brain functions, then they must be stimulated in the same way as other brain functions in the course of nightly maintenance. The imagery generated would be as random, fragmentary, and nonsensical as for any other brain function, and would be incorporated into dreams in the same manner. Sometimes, real sensory input from the future, another brain, or whatever would also be incorporated into the dream, but since it's only a test run, the odds of getting anything useful in this way, or remembering it if you do, aren't very high - you're a lot more likely to get mundane test data cheek-by-jowl with a random review of motor skills and the color blue.

This is one of those nifty little untestable theories, alas, and only works if two unproven conditions - one a reasonable hypothesis currently working well enough for many practical neurology purposes, the other a very tentative hypothesis which all tests have failed to demonstrate - happen to be true, but I thought if it couldn't get a sympathetic hearing here, it couldn't anywhere, so there it is, for what it's worth.
Nice idea, I like that.
 
I'm going to put this on record (pretty pointlessly I suspect) but I dreamt I was in Italy in some kind of leaning building. A tour guide stressed that the lean was caused by the same issue as the tower of pizza - so inferring that it wasn't the famous tower. Anyway long > short it fell down while I was in it.

I wouldn't bother but I did dream about the Hastings pier fire the day before* so maybe I will get "lucky" this time.

* I dreamt about water rushing off the pier from an unknown source and impeding disaster. For people standing on it When it happened the runoff from the fire hoses had a similar effect when viewed from the same spot as in my dream! I've grown up in Hastings so I'm very familiar with the pier.
 
I have had precognitive dreams in the past, not so many now.
They were mainly of people I was to meet later on. I remember dreaming of an unusual bag my mother in law bought for me and my husband could never surprise me with a gift as I would have dreamt of it already.
 
I suppose the strangest dream was when I was about to become engaged to a man I had been going with for some time.
I had a dream where there was a group of men dressed in robes.
I was told I was not to marry this man and I was shown how it would turn out if I married him or another friend.
I was told that the man I was to marry had a heart shaped birthmark on his arm.
Anyway I did break up with that man probably because every time we tried to go into a jewellers for a ring it was like a brick wall in front of me.
I met the man who was to become my husband and it wasn't till a few months later that he took off his shirt at the beach and I saw the birthmark on his arm.
 
It was a twilight place with a group of men dressed like monks in brown robes. The leader who did most of the talking radiated kindness and there was another who seemed unfriendly and kept disagreeing and I had the words "the adversary" in my mind. The others seemed friendly.
 
It was a twilight place with a group of men dressed like monks in brown robes. The leader who did most of the talking radiated kindness and there was another who seemed unfriendly and kept disagreeing and I had the words "the adversary" in my mind.
Ah, not what I'd hoped then.

As reported by me on another thread earlier in the year I came across an account of two unrelated people accidentally discovering they'd had the same dream from different perspectives, and they involved monks. But in those stories they were red robed Buddhist monks. I thought yours might be a third part of the puzzle.
 
I'm currently working in Ireland alone in my isolated Fortean compound art studio in the middle of nowhere, at the moment with my wife working back in the U.K. I had a very interesting lucid dream last night which let's just say I hope is proved to be precognitive when we're reunited next month! :) Cooooor...
 
I'm currently working in Ireland alone in my isolated Fortean compound art studio in the middle of nowhere, at the moment with my wife working back in the U.K.
That sounds fascinating!
Do you have an art website?
 
That sounds fascinating!
Do you have an art website?
Thanks Mytho :) Not at the moment, I'm doing 5 paintings for a re-issue of an 80s occult book called The Book of Wyrd. The commission is for these tarot type pieces that I'm re-imagining as the originals were quite poor, crude pen and ink drawings done by the author. Also just completed my solo limited edition cassette tape of ritual soundscape music, thought producing it in analogue would allow it to capture some better energies.

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Here's one of interest..I've not been looking at the precognitive dream group on facebook to which I contribute, for a while. But a build up of 3 or 4 posting notifications lead me to check the page last night. Here'swhat one chap wrote on 27 NOVEMBER....and note he's dismissive of it being literally true, rather surmising it will represent a similar event. ....

"David Bowie dead at 72. I heard that message in last night's dream. I am most certain that David Bowie will not be dead in the next couple of days. I checked and he's only 68. But I am certian two more subtle premonitions here will come to fruition. An entertainer I have admired since childhood will die. I will hear and not read of this person's death. I will feel that same sense of loss I had in the dream. That feeling is what the active unconscious inferred from the data it received when it clearly did not have all needed information to form a cogent image. There will be a lot of about this PD that will be correct and statistically phenomenal. Unfortunately, the paranormal big kahuna of getting the name correct will not be accomplished. The plus here is that we'll still have Ziggy Stardust around."
 
I had a very, very vivid dream last night, unusually immersive and detailed. No outright surreal or obviously dreamlike aspects.

Basic narrative: I was with others, some I know, some I do not, but none especially close or otherwise significant to me. We were on what looked very much like moorland, in an open compound of what looked like wooden Nissen huts, like a military camp but none of us were in uniform or appeared to be engaged in that kind of activity. There were no nearby woods or whatever, the odd tree maybe, we were on rolling hills and the light and colour suggested it was British or Irish, around late Spring or early Autumn. The compound appeared to be on the side of a shallow hill, with the crest behind us.

There was noise from above us. Several of us walked up, and on a nearby hill was what looked like a brick-built Ziggurat, around a hundred feet high. Suddenly a medium sized aeroplane, dark grey in colour banked sharply and crashed into it. The plane disintegrated and the building collapsed into rubble like lego bricks falling apart. No explosions or obvious casualties. Just an eerie, dusty silence, then wind and rain, quickly becoming snow.

That's where it ended. As I say, completely realistic and cogent. It felt predictive in some way. I don't normally post my dreams, but this one felt important.
 
Just been dreaming that chef Gordon Ramsay had died. Not saying it was precognitive, I'm just putting it out there in case.
 
I had a very, very vivid dream last night, unusually immersive and detailed. No outright surreal or obviously dreamlike aspects.

Basic narrative: I was with others, some I know, some I do not, but none especially close or otherwise significant to me. We were on what looked very much like moorland, in an open compound of what looked like wooden Nissen huts, like a military camp but none of us were in uniform or appeared to be engaged in that kind of activity. There were no nearby woods or whatever, the odd tree maybe, we were on rolling hills and the light and colour suggested it was British or Irish, around late Spring or early Autumn. The compound appeared to be on the side of a shallow hill, with the crest behind us.

There was noise from above us. Several of us walked up, and on a nearby hill was what looked like a brick-built Ziggurat, around a hundred feet high. Suddenly a medium sized aeroplane, dark grey in colour banked sharply and crashed into it. The plane disintegrated and the building collapsed into rubble like lego bricks falling apart. No explosions or obvious casualties. Just an eerie, dusty silence, then wind and rain, quickly becoming snow.

That's where it ended. As I say, completely realistic and cogent. It felt predictive in some way. I don't normally post my dreams, but this one felt important.

Perhaps bringing to mind the recent aircraft and helicopter collision near Hoddesden which has large open tracts of land in the area and farms which could have Nissen huts on their land? Just a thought.
 
Despite being deeply involved in the observation of dream precognition myself, I do wonder why so often people link dreams of plane crashes to the subject - we all do - when major incidents of planes crashing are a relatively rare occurence. No doubt - if you accept precognition exists - any major crash that fills the news will have had people dream about it beforehand. But every time someone dreams of a plane crash they report it anticipating it being a premonition..something we don't do with other violent dreams. Hollywood probably has a lot to do with it.
 
Despite being deeply involved in the observation of dream precognition myself, I do wonder why so often people link dreams of plane crashes to the subject - we all do - when major incidents of planes crashing are a relatively rare occurence. No doubt - if you accept precognition exists - any major crash that fills the news will have had people dream about it beforehand. But every time someone dreams of a plane crash they report it anticipating it being a premonition..something we don't do with other violent dreams. Hollywood probably has a lot to do with it.

Interesting point that - I wonder if it is the fact that plane crashes are so rare that makes someone dreaming about such an incident believe it may be precognition. Is it a common dream ? I've never dreamt of such but I don't watch Hollywood movies either.
 
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