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Precognitive Dreaming-A rational explanation?

Daryl17

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Hey all at the JREF, ive been reading this forum for months now but after an experience I had recently, I decided to sign up myself. I had an experience in which I dreamt something which occured the very next day, this sort of thing has happened many times and the pin point accuracy of the dreams I would say rules out coinsidence. After asking a few friends I have come to find out it seems fairly common and im sure some members here have probably had similar experiences, now I dont believe in psychic ability as such so id like to get some possible rational explanations as to what it could be.
Thanks in advance
Daz
 
Daryl17 said:
Hey all at the JREF, ive been reading this forum for months now but after an experience I had recently, I decided to sign up myself. I had an experience in which I dreamt something which occured the very next day, this sort of thing has happened many times and the pin point accuracy of the dreams I would say rules out coinsidence. After asking a few friends I have come to find out it seems fairly common and im sure some members here have probably had similar experiences, now I dont believe in psychic ability as such so id like to get some possible rational explanations as to what it could be.
Thanks in advance
Daz
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How many times do your dreams not happen?

Could it be that the ones that seem to come true are just the ones you remember.

And how accurately are you really remembering? Are you sure you're not retrofitting you dream to fit what happened.
 
I think that the most common explanation for these types of dreams is that you are engaging in selective perception - you're only remembering those dreams that contained elements which actually occurred.

There may also be some retrofitting going on - you remember a dream having elements vaguely similar to what actually happened, and your mind fills in the rest of the blanks.
 
Do you remember the dreams before the events happen or do you get the feeling that the events that just happened were what you dreamed the night before?
 
GregC said:
Do you remember the dreams before the events happen or do you get the feeling that the events that just happened were what you dreamed the night before?
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Sometimes I remember them as they are happening, but the recent one I remembered beforehand and it happened later that day.
 
Daryl17 said:
Sometimes I remember them as they are happening, but the recent one I remembered beforehand and it happened later that day.
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Well, then there is only one rational explanation. The one that is running through the minds of skeptics as they read this thread.

That you are lying.

I don't believe that though, since I myself have had similar dream experiences.
 
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Limbo9 said:
Well, then there is only one rational explanation. The one that is running through the minds of skeptics as they read this thread.

That you are lying.

I don't believe that though, since I myself have has similar experiences.
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Well the fact is im not lying and this similar things happen to people alot.
 
There are a few explanations:

1. You are a liar.
2. You are retrofitting the dream and memories of the dreams to current events
3. Confirmation bias

The only way to rules out these explanations is with objective testing.

You can also keep a journal and write down your dreams as soon as you wake up. See if what you "remember" actually is described by what you wrote down in your journal afterwards.

Well the fact is im not lying and this similar things happen to people alot.
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Neither of these allegations are established facts.
 
OK but could we rule out the idea that I am a liar as I can guarantee I am telling the truth and other people have come forward with similar experiences.
 
Even if you dream the exact, precise future, it's like monkeys and typewriters.

How many dreams does a person have in their lifetime? Statistically, won't they probably eventually dream something that happens later?
 
I have had similar experiences and I am not a liar. What I believe is happening is nothing more than a coincidence. Dreams often include a lot of stuff that could potentially happen in real life, so it would be silly to assume that something you've dreamed about would never happen afterwards in real life anyway. Also, consider that dreams are very hard to remember in detail, so if you factor in false memory syndrome, it doesn't really seem very supernatural anymore.

Besides, dream content is almost impossible to research. Except for Nightmares, and Lucid Dreaming, I am not aware of any other aspect of dream content that is actually scientifically verifiable.
 
Lying is always a possibility but I've had these sort of dreams myself. I've even thought about the dream before the event takes place in real life. The dreams may take a day or a few years to come true. Since I've had only 3 or 4 dreams that came true out of many thousands of dreams, I will go with possibility #4, which is coincidence.

For example I once had a dream that involved a poweder blue 60's Lincoln Continental, the kind with suicide doors. In the dream, the car had fake wood paneling, which is something the Ford company never put on the 60's Lincolns. The next morning, I was driving along and I saw a powder blue Ford station wagon. It was the same color as the car in my dream and it even had the fake wood paneling! I felt like I had experienced a prophetic dream, then I realized there were some major differences between the car in my dream and the one in real life. Even so, it was a very weird experience for me even though I realize the dream was only a partially accurate. I can imagine how a less skeptical person would react in the same circumstances.
 
I would say that you probably have to discount every instance in which you did not remember the dream until the event happened.

Roughly: Thoughts are processed by both sides of your brain. Sometimes, your senses hand over information to one side but are momentarily delayed in getting the information to the other side. A gap of even a fraction of a second is all that is required. When the interpretive side of your brain gets the information late, it seems to have come out of nowhere. Your brain, uncomfortable with information that doesn't have an apparant source, decides that it has not received contemporanious information but is, in fact, processing a dream or a memory.

This phenomenon is so common that we cannot rule it out if the feeling only comes over you when the supposed pre-cog event happens.

Keep a detailed dream journal. If you think something has come true, write it down and then compare it to your journal entries. Even then, so long as you dream about concrete people and places known to you, there will still be some accidental hits.
 
Daryl17 said:
now I dont believe in psychic ability as such so id like to get some possible rational explanations as to what it could be.

Daz
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I don't really buy that. If you didn't then most likely you'd just write it off as coincidence and go about your merry way rather than signing up for a forum and posting. Just a hunch tho ;P


Either you're retrofitting what you dreamt, it's coincidence, or you're subconciously (or actively) creating the situations to adhere to the dream.
 
...and predicting things that are going to happen is pretty well the brain's whole function, that may have at least partly to do with it.
 
Quasi-Prophetic dreams

bjb said:
I once had a dream that involved a poweder blue 60's Lincoln Continental, the kind with suicide doors. In the dream, the car had fake wood paneling, which is something the Ford company never put on the 60's Lincolns. The next morning, I was driving along and I saw a powder blue Ford station wagon. It was the same color as the car in my dream and it even had the fake wood paneling!
Click to expand...

I think it's possible you saw this car the day before the dream but were distracted by something else, although your brain stashed the image away for processing later. The image came back to you in the dream and it got the usual embellishment that dreams are endowed with. The next day the car was still in the area and you happened on it again -- a coincidence. Because your brain batch-processed the first encounter during the dream, you recalled the dream encounter rather than your previous encounter.

My theory of dreams is that they are side-effects of the way the brain processes new information that it didn't have time to process during waking hours -- batch processing. This I've concluded after reading many science articles on dreaming. I've observed and read that dreams almost always reference something that happened the day before the dream occurred.

I doubt the OP's claim the dream predicted the event with "pinpoint accuracy" and wonder if it's an exaggeration. Would the OPster please supply specific information about the dream and the later event that would demonstrate the pinpointedness of the prophesy?
 
Daryl17 said:
OK but could we rule out the idea that I am a liar as I can guarantee I am telling the truth and other people have come forward with similar experiences.
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Hi Daryl, welcome.

And don't worry about the insinuation that you might be lying - it's not a specific slight on you, it's just that you're talking to a bunch of sceptics, and to them you're an anonymous person on the internet. Lying is always a possibility when people are discussing their personal experiences on this board, or any board.

But, most of the time, unless there are pertinent reasons to question someone's account, discussions can take place with the unspoken preface "(If you're telling the truth as you see it...)".
 
Speaking personally, I have had many quite striking 'precognitive' dream experiences, which for quite a long time were a staple of my 'reasons to believe in weird stuff'.

However, when I finally had the fortitude to turn my scepticism in on my own beliefs instead of just trying to demolish everyone else's, I realised they were actually perfectly explicable as a product of:

1) Confirmation bias (noticing the few hits and forgetting the millions of misses)
2) Shoehorning (things become predictions only after the event you'd like to think they were predictions of have taken place)
3) The malleability of memory (especially memories of dreams - they're like bubbles to me, you try to grasp them and they slip away or burst)
4) My idiosyncratic tendency to experience strong 'deja vu' feelings when tired or stressed
5) Wanting to believe I had mystical powers
6) Error
 
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