"Psychic" Dreams

[flume]

I had a seemingly psychic dream when I was a kid. I had an intense dream in which my grandmother died. I woke from the dream, got up, and found that my grandfather had died that night.
For some reason I didn't take this as a suggestion that I was psychic, just set it aside in my mind as an unexplained event. Eventually it occurred to me that there had been an early morning phone call to my parents and there had probably been loud exclamations and activity, loud enough to have disturbed my sleep and to have become incorporated into my dreaming. The dream was vivid and grim and I still remember it, even though it was a different grandparent who had actually died.

 

[Billy]

In the UK we were taught that a billion was a million million, but someone went and changed it - here it is copied from the oxford dictionary:

2. billion (100%)
One thousand million (abbreviation bn. or b.). This usage is followed by all modern authors; a billion was once used to refer to a million million, but this meaning can safely be ignored unless dealing with long-dead authors, when the convention used ...
(From A Dictionary of Economics in Economics & Business)

They don't say exactly how long dead these authors need to be before you can safely ingore them - and what sort of deal would you be doing with a long dead author anyway?

 

[allanb]

I think the connection between dreams and subsequent events can be explained quite simply, and the likelihood of dreams "coming true" can even be quantified, in a very rough way.

Let's estimate that in the English-speaking world there are only ten million people who (a) are sufficiently literate to describe an experience, (b) are sufficiently interested to report it to a newspaper or a discussion group or somewhere else where it will be read, and (c) sometimes have dreams. I think that's only about 2½% of all English speakers, so it's fairly conservative.

Let's estimate that, among these people, the average frequency of a dream that is remembered is one a week.

The number of remembered dreams in that group of people would then be about half a billion (i.e. 500 million) a year.

From 500 million dreams, how many would probably bear a close resemblance to some subsequent event? Your guess is as good as mine, but "plenty" would be a safe answer.

And I haven't even considered non-English dreams.

Why look for anything more complex?

 

[arthwollipot]

I'll always dig my heels in about this one. It follows a simple exponential law:

a million is a thousand thousands
a billion is a million millions
a trillion is a billion billions

It's how I learned it, and it took me a long time to realise that when people talked about six billion people it wasn't actually as many people as I thought it was.

 

[-42-]

what appears to be "paranormal" -- can be explained by simple probability. Random behavior of the brain.

Not only probability, but there are many other possible explainations. You could have adapted a past dream to more aptly fit an event that has transpired or a past memory of someone speaking of a dream or you reading about a dream or event.

For example, You dream you are driving down a street at night in New York, stop at a stop sign, and a black man in a pimp get-up points a gun at you and tells you to get out of the car. The car you are in is a car you owned when you were 17. You get out of the car and he drives off.



A month later, You are in San Fransico in a rental car at a stop light, and a mexican man sticks a knife through the open window and tells you to get out. You do so, and he drives off.


You immediately recall the previous dream incorrectly, and assure yourself that you dreamed it as the future event occured. This memory can be quite convincing and you are positive you dreamed it exactly as the event took place.

Or, You could have heard someone else speak of this same exact dream or read about a similar dream months before. When the event happened to you, you swear that you actually dreamed it even though you never did.

 

[thaiboxerken]

I wouldn't say that they are always random coincidences. For example, if a family member you know is ill dies, and you had dreams about it, then it really wasn't very random at all.

People mistake dreams for psychic visions mostly due to pop-culture telling people that psychic visions are real.

 

[arthwollipot]

-42-: You've hit on exactly the point I was making about deja vu earlier. You experience the "malfunction" of the recognition centers of the brain, and your brain modifies existing memories or manufactures new ones to fit the sensation of recognition.

 

[davidsmith73]

Just estimating the probability of dreams resembling future events is not sufficient as an explanation, to me anyway, because you haven't empirically tested the hypothesis that "precognitive dreams" are the result of coincidence. To do that you have to set up an experiment so that coincidence can be measured in some way. This has been done in the Dream Telepathy experiments conducted at Maimonides Medical Centre by Charles Honorton and others who went on to develop the ganzfeld technique in response to the results of these experiments. At least from the results of the Maimondes studies, it looked as though coincidence wasn't an explanation.

 

[Chaos Trigger]

Perhaps one day there will be the possibility to say "we know for sure that it was no coincidence".

 

[Einzig]

This topic is very interesting to me. arthwollipot has an interesting perspective.
What I think a lot here do not realize is that this is not a Million Dollar Challenge test situation. What is wrong with dreams only sometimes being of a correct predictive nature?
It is like seeing an image of a person and based on their hair and clothing, predict what kind of person they are. You can be right (looks like a metalhead and thus often loves medieval things, games, listens to music a lot, describe themselves as loner but are often very social ) or you can be wrong. I think no one claims to be psychic when making assumptions on how a person in a photo is like and we do that all the time when meeting someone for the first time.

In my idea it is the same with dreams specifically about people around you that you really know and can make even more accurate predictions about.
As far a I know dreaming is about processing events that happen. Ofcourse that includes those you socialize with.

If you know that a friends parent and grandparent had a certain illness and your dreams process that in making a predictive situation on your friend ending up in the same situation, would the word psychic/coincidence/nonsense have to come to mind at all? If you dreamed a detailed situation of her laying in bed, saying certain words about it, another friend or parent being there, how unlikely is it that is can be seen as a rather reasonable predictive thing in my opinion. After all, you know which is the nearest hospital, their vocabulary, whether they would stand near the person in bed or not as they are known to have a hard time dealing with such an event.

I have had many predictive dreams and in two cases I could say what a friend said as he would say it. So the theory of deja-vu that arthwollipot has, I would say, does not apply. Nor as I said, do I think it is a psychic ability as much as predicting that someone that wears black leather and wears a lot of jewelry and has a bit of a gothic style likes some sort of metal music. The brain can make predictions based in the situation it encounters during the life of a person. Anyone can do this, and you're not always right about the predictions you make in everyday life, nor in dreams. Does not mean that no predictions are real predictions that you can later see to be true. That's my theory.

 

[bjornart]

gnome- Is that true?

I agree that it was true thirty years ago, but in every geology text I have read since 1970 , US, UK or European, the word 'billion' has meant 10^9 , as in 4.6 billion years.(bya)

What do you mean by "European"? If you mean: in English as written by someone in a European country other than UK/Ireland, you're correct. We've noticed the UK knuckling under to US short scale pressure and use the form most common in English. In most European languages, however, the long scale is the norm. I've only direct experience with the Scandinavian languages, but Wikipedia agrees with me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_(word)#Notes_on_current_usage
A billion is a million squared, a trillion is a million cubed, a quadrillion is a million q... uadded...

 

[Starthinker]

Speaking of dreams, I've had a reoccurring dream where I am trying to get to Brazil. I am either stuck in an airport or get sidetracked along the way. My dream doesn't explain it but it's just an overwhelming desire to get there and some obstacle is always in my way. So either there is something in the back of my mind making me think about Brazil (women, perhaps?), it's just a weird coincidence that's feeding itself (the more I dream about it the more likely I am to dream about it), I'm predicting the future (althought I can't fathom why I would ever want to go to Brazil or how I would ever afford to), or someone or something is causing me to dream about it (dreams from an outside source?).

Maybe at some point I will travel to Brazil and remember these dreams and as such one could maybe think it was the third explanation but for now I'm pretty sure it's one of the first two. If it were either of the second two it would be really neat, but I'm not that optomistic.

By the way, yesterday I found a brazil nut, of all things, in the back of my desk drawer? Coincidence? Hmmm.

 

[shandyjan]

I feel that so-called "prophetic" dreams are actually a specific instance of deja vu.

And I feel that deja vu is a malfunction of the circuits in the brain responsible for recognition.

It is well known that there are areas of the brain that "light up" when you recognise something - whether it be a sight, or a smell, or a taste, or a thought. There are people who have had this area of the brain damaged, and they cannot recognise anything.

My hypothesis (and I admit that I haven't the facilities to test this) is that deja vu is a brief misfiring or a malfunction of this recognition center in the brain. It makes us believe that we recognise something when it actually hasn't happened to us before.

I once had a deja vu experience of having a deja vu experience... of having a deja vu experience... of having a deja vu experience... I think you can see where this is going. The original experience which sparked the original deja vu is long forgotten. But I had this recurring deja vu seven times. That is - I have a memory of recognising the experience for the seventh time. I think I also have a dim memory of the sixth time, but apart from the certain knowledge of the number of times, the early ones are now lost to my memory.

Prophetic dreams are simply another manifestation of deja vu. You may or may not have dreamt something similar to the situation, but the recognition circuit fires and you experience the deja vu. Researchers now understand that memories are not explicitly stored in the brain - they are reconstructed "on request" as it were, and are frequently modified in the process. When the recognition circuit misfires in response to a particular trigger, the brain manufactures a suitable memory, and modifies it as necessary to closer resemble the trigger for the recognition impulse, because after all, it was "recognised".

So the "prophetic dream" may or may not have been an actual dream you had. If it was, it may or may not have closely resembled the event that triggered the deja vu. But the deja vu process makes it resemble the trigger event. If necessary, the deja vu process can manufacture the memory from whole cloth.

That's my theory, anyway. Until we get a device where we can play someone's dream on a screen, I don't see how it's testable. But I think it is at least plausible given what I know about neurology and how memory works.

Wow that made sense to me. The deja vu thing is fascinating in itself, but putting it to the dream.... I can imagine it. The deja vu experience of a deja vu experience, well I had a dream where I dreamt I was dreaming, where I dreamt I was dreaming... that was strange and hard to explain to someone when I woke up.
I do think some dreams come from things you are hearing while asleep, and can explain some prophetic dreams.
I am sure it happens to a lot of people and they don't think they're supernatural. The same way the television speaks to you, or about you, most of us realise we feel asleep with the tv on, some who are more unbalanced believe the tv announcer was really speaking to them, or the news report mentioned them.