Dreams, Premonitions and Deja Vu

[SilentBedlam]

I have a question for anyone who's willing to answer.

All my life, at least as far back as I can remember clearly - say, when I was 12 - I've had the most weird/wonderful/depraved/violent/etc etc dreams, and enjoyed almost every minute of them.

One thing has always puzzled me though: I sometimes have a dream in which the sensation of dreaming is different somehow. I haven't got the first clue how to describe what dreaming feels like, except to say it's dreaming, so all I can say is that I seem to get these two types - "normal" dreams, I get say, 9 nights out of 10, and these "different" ones, maybe once a week, or once every 10 days or so.

Thing is, the "different" ones, nearly always come true, at some point in the six months after the dream.

I keep a dream journal, purely because the subject has fascinated me for a long time, in which I tend to record any dream I have that I remember. It dates back to when I was about 12 I think, though the early entries aren't dated, so I can't say for sure. I've heard that Deja Vu (sp?) is something to do with the brain skipping a beat or something like that, and you see something that you think you've seen before, but I'm not sure that explains why, at the bottom of some of the entries, I've been able to write a date, and say that what I saw, or part of what I saw in the dream happened.

Bloody hell, that sentence was too long.

Anyway - I just wondered if anyone could throw some light on this? I wondered whether being an INTP, it's strong intuition playing silly buggers in my subconscious, and putting together events and ideas that I haven't consciously considered, but it doesn't explain the times I've recognised a place or a building, only to discover from someone else, usually my parents, that there's no way I could ever have seen the place, because I've never been there before.

Ironically, the last time this happened, I was on my way to visit a shrink. My ma, driving me there, couldn't find the building and we drove round the area for a bit looking for it, when I suddenly looked to my right, saw a house as we drove past and knew immediately that that was where I was supposed to be going. The next minute or so played out exactly as I'd seen it before, in my dream, with my ma saying things that I expected her to, and my own responses as we pulled up outside sounding kinda hollow - it felt like I was reading from a script.

When I went home, I looked in my journal, and found the entry for the dream I remembered - exactly as the event had happened, except in the dream, I didn't know who lived in the building I saw, nor did i know that I was visiting a shrink. Strangely though, the "premonitions" never seem to be of anything significant, and they don't occur with any regularity - sometimes I've gone for weeks without "recognising" a situation, other times, it's happened on two or three occasions in the space of 24 hours.

I'm not claiming to be precognitive or anything (just pleasantly insane - it's quantitative, after all), but I'd really like to know if anyone's got some ideas about this, 'cause every time it happens, it leaves me feeling almost "cold" inside, and for a few moments at least, a little peturbed. It doesn't bother me particularly, but I'd love to try and understand why it happens a little better.

Does anyone else experience anything like this? Does anyone know of what I might be describing? Any suggestions/urls would be much appreciated.

Thanks! :blink:

[Dolphin]

On Déjà vu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu):


he term déjà vu (French: "already seen", also called paramnesia) describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously


In recent years, déjà vu has been subjected to serious psychological and neurophysiological research. The most likely candidate for explanation, according to scientists in these fields, is that déjà vu is not an act of "precognition" or "prophecy" but is actually an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is "being recalled" which is false. This is substantiated to an extent by the fact that in most cases the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong, but any circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where and how the earlier experience occurred) are quite uncertain. Likewise, as time passes, subjects can exhibit a strong recollection of having the "unsettling" experience of déjà vu itself, but little to no recollection of the specifics of the event(s) or circumstances they were "remembering" when they had the déjà vu experience, and in particular, this may result from an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the present) and those responsible for long-term memory (events which are perceived as being in the past). Neurophysiological specialist Stephanie Warn (based out of San Francisco) has dedicated research on the subject matter. Her current conclusion is that déjà vu is merely the brain pulsing at an exponential rate which causes a person to recall something he or she saw the moment before.

I have been experiencing a lot of déjà vu, as well as my mind racing.

A long time ago I had a dream that a train crashed into a truck. The next night I had the same exact dream. Yes, I did get the feeling that the dream was somehow different, which is why I remember it so well. A few days later I was supposed to take a train from one state to another. I pleaded with my mother not to go on the train, but I did not have a logical reason do so other than a really bad feeling. Eventually I won, and she bought a ticket for a much later date.

Two days later we were watching the news and we saw a story about a train that had crashed into a truck leaving several people injured. It was the same exact train that I was supposed to take, and it was on the same exact day I was supposed to take it.

I have had more dreams that have come true, but that one is the most interesting.

Intuition is much like a feeling. We do not know why we feel a certain way, and we probably could attach some logic to it, but it is still a feeling. How it really works is beyond me.

[Helios]

related thread

http://forums.intpcentral.com/showthread.php?t=6067

[TPol]

I've had dreams come true, even completely undramatic dreams as you describe. Have also had a few experiences similar to what Helios described in the other thread. Then there's something else I'm just not prepared to talk about -- not trying to be mysterious. Just still reading up on it and finding mostly questionable characters experiencing something similar. ((oh goody)) I've tried explaining such things through coincidence, probabilities, and physics, but not all can be logically explained to my satisfaction. Thus, it remains a mystery. And, it does confound me at times, especially when I am stuck trying to decide whether or not to warn someone based on the information. As a result, I've often wondered if our brains can go beyond time and physical boundaries somehow. This phenomenon is one of the reasons I went searching through the tomes of various religions. I like to have answers. I have none for you -- at least none with which I am satisfied.

[Sir Isaac Lime]

Why is it that when we wake up in the morning, it's almost a cultural standard to jump up as fast as we can, forget the silly dreams and get on with what "really matters"? I think some of the most extraordinary things happen in these states of conciousness. How could something so intense, bewildering and interrelated to our daily lives and how we personally experience the world be brushed over as casually as it is? I think it points to an innacuraccy between how we choose to define the world and how we actually experience it.

The felt impression of experiencing something we've already encountered elsewhere seems intense. It's at first disconcerting then becomes even more and more curious. I think that train of thought, and the reaction to it by the observer and those outside his train of thought, directly relates to just about any remarkable discovery in history. It has to be weird, and turn everything we think we know upside down, or it's really not that big of a discovery. Something feels very relevant, but entirely bizarre. I think when we can grok it into our models we'll discover something huge

[euterpenc]

Why is it that when we wake up in the morning, it's almost a cultural standard to jump up as fast as we can, forget the silly dreams and get on with what "really matters"? I think some of the most extraordinary things happen in these states of conciousness. How could something so intense, bewildering and interrelated to our daily lives and how we personally experience the world be brushed over as casually as it is? I think it points to an innacuraccy between how we choose to define the world and how we actually experience it.

The felt impression of experiencing something we've already encountered elsewhere seems intense. It's at first disconcerting then becomes even more and more curious. I think that train of thought, and the reaction to it by the observer and those outside his train of thought, directly relates to just about any remarkable discovery in history. It has to be weird, and turn everything we think we know upside down, or it's really not that big of a discovery. Something feels very relevant, but entirely bizarre. I think when we can grok it into our models we'll discover something huge

Yes. Why is everyone so intent on proving dreams and deja vu and the like to be meaningless?

[abathur]

It would imply something exists beyond the skin-deep (or otherwise tangible) reality we live in and worship. Science concluding that it is possible to have seen an event before it happened, through deja vu or any other method would be essentially undermining the authority of science--admitting that at least on some level, inexplicable supernatural occurances exist. I'm not going to go so far as to say science IS wrong on this--but science has no motivation to conclude that deja vu has some origin outside the physical, scientifically verifiable realm.

[SilentBedlam]

Hey guys. I really appreciate those responses, thanks. Given me a fair amount to think about :-D

[tinribz]

I keep a dream journal

If you want vivid dreams this is wot to do.

Re premonitions, it is BS. Statistically say in the UK, one person every night will dream that someone dies and wake up to find out that person actually has. Extrapolate, particularly with the metaphoric nature of dreams.

Read Freud if you want to know wot the're about. And leave this supernatural nonsense behind.

[TPol]

Grasshopper: "Master, I'd like to learn how to use the Force."
Master: "If it does not agree with my own reason or my own common sense, the Force does not exist, Grasshopper."
Grasshopper: (looks at Luke and shrugs)
;)

[Geek Engineer]

I think a lot of this déjà vu I have could be explained by what Dolphin pointed out. However there was one time that I can't explain other than maybe just luck or some sort of foresight if nothing else.

I once had a dream one summer about this girl I knew in community college ending up at the same university I was going to at the time. At the time she had been off jumping around a number of different states and she had been writing me sometimes. (as a friend) I thought it was kind of a strange dream at the time, because I didn't think she wanted to go back to school.

I swear it was that exact next weekend that we were at the county fair and we happened to run into her mother who informed me that this she was going to be going to my university next semester. My jaw about dropped to the floor as I couldn't believe that my dream was coming true only a week later.