I don't believe in psychic abilities or paranormal activities.

However, I often have dreams that come true. Sometimes the dreams will have clear details of the event to happen that I could not have predicted based on common sense or intuition. Does anybody have any logical explanation for "psychic dreams"?

(Dream example: I had a dream about a family member, in the dream he had a very secret girlfriend, he absolutely did not want his parents to know about her, especially his father. I didn't see her face, but I saw her hair, her style and her body type. In my dream their relationship was very taboo yet really advanced.

Then in real life:
A few weeks later this family member got "caught" in a very secret relationship (his best friends wife actually, hence the big secret). I'd never seen her before and she lived in a completely different town than him. Her physical appearance matched that of the girl in my dream. His parents where very angry with him when his secret was exposed, his father especially. A week later they moved in together, 3 months later she was pregnant. They are still together today and the wedding is in a few months.

So my dream predicted a girl, I knew it was a secret but I didn't know why, I knew she was "taboo" but I didn't know why, I knew her basic physical appearance, I knew his parents reaction (that was predictable though) and I knew they were moving extremely fast for a new couple.)

Logical explanations?

i have had these too- random guess but i think it happens to girls alot. has any one heard of the house with all of those waterfalls in it? i dreamt about it and i never knew what the crap it was.


about two years later, we go on a field trip to it and it looks exactly like my dream. my friend (i have loads- she is the only one besides me) has these too. i call the psychic dreams premonitions. i have had random ones of random things in the past, but that one was the wierdest.



your psychic fellow, Smartgrl

You have to dream about the things you know. You can't dream about the things I know, and you don't.
Making sense of dreams may be possible, but I doubt there's anything worthwhile there.

quote:

So my dream predicted a girl, I knew it was a secret but I didn't know why, I knew she was "taboo" but I didn't know why, I knew her basic physical appearance, I knew his parents reaction (that was predictable though) and I knew they were moving extremely fast for a new couple.)

Logical explanations?

There's not much in the way of specifics here. If anything, I'd say your friend was dropping not-so-subtle hints about what was going on, and your brain shoved them through to your consciousness through dreams.

Just as likely, though, if not even more so, is that you selectively remember times when you can hammer out a match between your dreams and reality, and selectively ignore the times when you don't, or can't.

quote:

Originally posted by BurningCat:
There's not much in the way of specifics here. If anything, I'd say your friend was dropping not-so-subtle hints about what was going on, and your brain shoved them through to your consciousness through dreams.

This is pretty much what my guess would be. To add I say you probably have an idea of the type of girl he likes / you'd see him with so the dream your mind put together had a good shot at matching reality. Thats the most logical explanation I can think of, still kinda crazy.

odd

Occasionally I have memories of the future... The best example I have: I went to Borders looking for a CD by Raul Midon. The clerk could not find it. I was sure that I had seen him on Leno. About 2 weeks later, he was on Leno.

When the clerk had checked the software they have for music, Midon was not listed. Nor did he show up on the Late Show site.

quote:

Logical explanations?

Hi Alanna,

Maybe I have a couple of pennies that I can spare...

I never really liked psychology, mostly because I was afraid that I'd end up understanding myself, and then I'd really be up the creek without a paddle.

In a Nutshell:

Ahem...anyway, in terms of dreams, and in terms of sleep alone, these are requirements for a normal, happy functioning individual. Our sleep helps to revitalize our minds and bodies. They also help us to reorganize and process all of the data that we've collected throughout the waking hours.

One of the ways sleep assists this is to launch us into our dream state. Through our dreams we perform our analytical processes and organize, re-organize and create commonsensical patterns out of what we've gathered or observed...whether consciously, or subconsciously.

That is what I believe is what you are able to do, perhaps to a much higher degree than most others.

It's my guess that you probably noticed all the "little things”, i.e. visual cues, obvious and mysterious clues, signs and suspicions, etc., and were able to piece this jigsaw into a coherent picture.

It's probably NOT a paranormal-psychic-ESP Amazing-Randi-rama power, but rather something easily explainable. The other path, of course, is for you to put full credence into your supposed or genuine ESP powers.

If you want...there is a simple test that you can perform by yourself...in the privacy of your own home. Get yourself a copy of cards used for ESP, or just make them up by yourself.

One is a star, a square, a circle, a triangle, and a set of wavy lines. Line them up face down and then guess what they are before turning them right side up. Perform this three times.

If you score a solid 9 or better, you probably are "gifted"...or just really lucky.

Any number of times someone's name flashes across what passes for my consciousness. And not long after, that person will be mentioned in the news or on the electric tv box.
I only notice these because I know the name. Names I don't know, don't flash.

quote:

Originally posted by Ming, Merciless the:
I only notice these because I know the name. Names I don't know, don't flash.

So maybe I only notice the supposedly predictive dreams because they seem relevant when they happen in reality and the other hundreds of dreams are forgotten (or in storage) due to the lack of relevance they hold. But then if an event occurs it could "dawn on me" that I did in fact dream about the event earlier. Which would make them coincidences.

Yes, your dreams can't foresee something that would occur to my relatives. You don't know my relatives.
It's very normal to dream about the things you know.
And/or be concerned with relatives who may or may not have problems.
The dreams that stick, become "true" in a random manner, depending on how much your consciousness fixed on the dream.
I try to remember dreams, but fail miserably at it.
As mentioned, I do flash on other's names, which later get mentioned in the media, but hardly in a predictable or coherent manner.
It's always names I've heard.
New names, no flashing.

Just this morning, before getting up, the mind raced around on things psychological, such as Freud being considered a fraud nowadays, and the Rohrshach test also baseless.
Opening the California section of the LA Times later, there was a silhouette, much like the inkblots used in the Rohrshach test.
Odd co-inkydinkys like this occur all the time.

Almost everyone dreams, whether we remember dreaming or not. Hundreds of millions of dreams every night.
Almost all are about perfectly mundane things, and are unremarkable and quickly forgotten. But just by statistical probability, some small percentage of these are going to have some correspondence with actual events. It would be surprising if they didn't.
Naturally, these dreams make a strong impression, whereas the thousands of dreams you had that did not have any actual correspondence with events do not.

Also, people are sensitive to all sorts of subliminal inputs that do not register on a conscious basis. You may be "picking up" on interpersonal or family relationships (for instance) without being consciously aware of them.

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Hundreds of millions of dreams every night.

I hope you're not suggesting that each one of us has hundreds of millions of dreams every night. That would imply--assuming a typical eight hours of sleep--that the average dream lasts less than one half of one one-hundred-thousandth of a second, and that we dream these split-second dreams one right after the other, all night long, without interruption!

No, I meant in the general population.

It's part of what we skeptics call "magical thinking" to be strongly impressed by some coincidence, while quite forgetting the thousands of times the same action was performed without any such correspondence.

You know there could be something interesting here that could appear on the show. There's never been an episode about dreams but there are so many myths about dreams. Yeah it's really hard to prove anything about dreams, we still can't prove for sure anything about them. In all truthfulness, even though we have ideas about why we dream, like in order to organize everything that has made it into our heads that day or week, these ideas are not fact, just hypothetical speculation.

Oh yeah, about dreams being on the show. . .

Maybe Adam an Jamie could get a psychologist to help them dream better. They could start keeping a dream journal and try to achieve lucid dreaming (for everyone who doesn't know what that is, lucid dreaming is where you realize you are dreaming while you are dreaming, and because of this you can control certain aspects of your dream). It's hard to do, but you can train yourself to have these kinds of dreams all the time. Techniques like keeping a dream journal, asking yourself many times throughout the day if you are awake or dreaming(which helps because you'll do it when your dreaming and then you'll realize what's going on), looking down at your hands constantly (this often makes people aware that they are dreaming when they do it in a dream). Maybe they could try to bust the myth that lucid dreaming can help one to figure out certain mysteries about one's dreams, especially reoccurring dreams, because lucid dreaming apparently helps to give one control over one's dreams. In the common reoccurring nightmare where the "monster" is chasing someone down the hall, One can supposedly find out who this monster is by attaining lucidity in a dream, because one can wake up in the dream and turn around to see who it really is. I'm not saying that this is true, but it's something that many psychologist believe is true.
The only problem is how do you make this myth a fun and entertaining one to bust on television. That's not my job though. . . .

The "monsters" in my dreams can never die, no matter how much I beat, stab or shoot them. But I CAN make them go away. Usually there is a point in my "monster dreams" that I actually realize I am dreaming, so I 'think' them away and they disappear.

If I realize I am in a dream I can manipulate many things, but never the phone dialing, trying to run or my husbands actions . However, I can change the entire scenario and change his agenda to that of "adult" interest only.

That's interesting. I've heard so many people say that they can do whatever they want once they wake up in their dream, but I've never had this experience. I have the same thing where even when I know I'm dreaming I still only have a certain amount of control. In scary dreams I've tried to "teleport" or change the scene completely but it never works, but I can fly away. It's funny how only certain things work. Dreams are funny, the whole adult situation is almost a sure thing if you've got the option. Freud may not have been 100% right about all dreams, but he sure had something going on in that department.
Have you seen "Waking Life"? My very first lucid dream was the same exact dream as the one the main character had where he looked at the digital clock and it made no sense and that's how he realized he was dreaming. Then right after his realization he flew up out of his house and over his neighborhood. I had that same exact dream. . . only three years before the movie came out. Weird huh? Clocks never make sense in dreams, neither does the lighting in a room, it usually can't change. All this stuff is very weird, and everyone experiences some form of it. . . to bad there's no way yet to study it scientifically. I guess that's why we still have art.a

If you can control flying away (which I often do) I bet you could learn how to change or manipulate your dreams. What works for me is, once I realize I'm dreaming I close my eyes and ignore the chaos, then I concentrate on something else.

One very strange incident was when I discovered I had the same fever dream as my sister. We both have this annoying dream when ill. The goal is to balance rocks on pins across a gray background. The little rocks have a very high pitched noise as they cross, and the big rocks have a very low noise. If you drop them it hurts. I hate that one.

I have one where I can cover enormous distances like in "Crouching Tiger....". It actually makes sense in the context of the dream, but then I seem to end up having to crawl instead of leap to where I'm going.
Which also makes sense, but I'd sure like to be able to do the leaping part!