Following is the second half of a post in another thread which went off topic, repeated here so that people can respond in a fresh thread if they want to.

All of my dreams are metaphorical, none are movie-like reproductions of waking life scenes. Even when I dream of people I know, they almost never look like they do in real life. Their physical characteristics shift around from moment to moment depending on what aspects of their personalities they are exhibiting. Many of my dreams are more specifically literal than this one though. It depends on the type of subject I'm thinking about leading up to the dream, and how directly it can be represented with sounds and images. For me, this dream is first of all a study on the nature of desire.

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Following is a relatively early precognitive dream which had in late morning then e-mailed to my mom, brother, and sisters.

> Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 11:11 AM
> Subject: dream
>
>
> > I realize other people's dreams are usually boring
> and meaningless. I thought I'd send this one along
> anyway, since its kind of weird. Read it if you want to.
> >
> > Generally I find that every smallest detail in a dream
> has some clear meaning, and I can tell what it is, but this
> one I have no idea. Actually its four dreams, which are
> related.
> >
> > 1. I'm in a windowless building or basement-like
> area that is stone or some other hard material. It has two
> levels, separated by a few steps and a low wall. I startle
> some kind of small, furry animal. There is water on the
> wall, the steps, and the lower floor, which I start wiping
> up. I assume I must have knocked over a cup of pop or
> something. Mom thinks it was sprayed by the startled
> animal. I say there's no way an animal that small could
> produce that much fluid, which doesn't have a strong
> smell. Mom still thinks its from the animal. ('Mom'
> is not necessarily mom, just a mom-like person or
> principle.)
> >
> > 2. I'm singing the ahh-ahh-ahh part of 'child
> in time', for enjoyment since I could only hope to hit
> those notes well when I'm asleep.
> >
> > 3. I'm listening to several songs, apparently
> that I have composed, which appear to be hymns of praise to
> the small furry animal. (One composition is clearly a
> modification of 'stranglehold'.) The only lyrics to
> any of the songs are 'leo-leo-leo'.
> >
> > 4. I am sitting next to a building watching someone
> repeatedly throw something like a shotput. It clangs
> against something metallic. I like the sound, I pick the
> ball up and smack it against another metallic contraption
> that is set into the side of the building, that has parts
> that vaguely resemble a cluster of bells. This starts an
> increasingly loud resonance, sustained by some kind of
> positive feedback. One of the 'bell' parts splits
> in half.
> >
> > Now there is even a louder bell-like noise, and a
> low-ridge behind the building starts to swell and break, as
> if there's magma pushing up in it. I start to run, then
> intend to first to go to another building adjacent to the
> same courtyard and retrieve my child, even though
> there's apparently no hope of having time to do that.
> The nursery is the same building in which I startled the
> cat-like creature.
> >
> > After waking I feel the line from Ecclesiates about
> the golden bowl being broken and the pitcher by the well
> being shattered.

A few hours after that a plane went down in a bird strike:

US Airways Flight 1549 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part '4' of the dream is the bird going into the intake and shredding the engine, in slow motion. Leo represents the spirit of the pilot. The "moral of the story" is that aggression, or Ted-Nugent-like-assholery, is close to courage, and that I should seek to develop the one into the other. (Pretty much of my dreams connect to personal growth questions I am studying on.) The singing in part '3' expresses the feeling of celebration that people had in relation to the event. The adjacent building mentioned at the end of '4' and in '1' is the fuselage of the plane. Part '1' about the relationship between 'leo' and the water on the floor is an argument about spirit and causality. Note that in '4' I seemed to have caused the accident, though I don't think that I did. Part '2' of the dream connects how I feel about all this.

A skeptic, particularly one who doesn't work much with metaphor, would say that I'm just reading stuff into that. Or by some stretch of faith it could "just be coincidence". (Notwithstanding that I've had hundreds of such dreams, this being just one of a few dozen most notable examples.) And of course I could be lying, after all, lots of people do. So I'm not looking for people to believe me. In fact, I would encourage them not to, since a lot of what people say is not trustworthy, for a variety of reasons. But I do hope for people to at least accept the possibility of what I'm saying, rather than ruling it out completely. That uncertainty, the conscious relaxing of the belief into a working hypothesis, is an opening for discovering something new.

I know enough physics to be able to say with confidence that there is no conceivable physics explanation for precognition. If a person needs an existing mathematical model in order to believe in something, then they can't believe in this. For now I have to accept that I don't have that type of explanation, and we are all probably a long way off from finding one, though I'm trying to help build modest steps in that direction.