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    Thread: questioning what can and can't be learned from a dream

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      questioning what can and can't be learned from a dream

      I'm posting this here with the assumption that divine revelation in a dream qualifies as 'beyond dreaming'.

      From what I have seen, the supernatural intuitions that people get in dreams never bring in new information or understanding. Often there are accurate predictions of things that will happen, and there are spiritual insights that the dreamer may not have recognized previously. But a premonition isn't really outside information, even though the time order is weird. There's nothing in it to suggest that it comes from a source that understands things that we don't understand, or has philosophical knowledge beyond the realm of human philosophical knowledge. I've said this before, that it looks to me that most psychic spiritual insights are essentially plagiarized. Now I'm suggesting that its all plagiarized, that the entire pool of potential inspiration doesn't extend beyond humanity and our assorted demons. I can't think of any counter-examples.

      Lots of people have dreams which they believe contain messages from God, but those messages never contain anything that can't be found in books, and usually the messages contain prejudices and contradictions that the messenger is apparently blind to, but which may be fairly obvious to other people who know more about the subjects concerned. As a simple example, in the 1980's a woman down the street from me believed that China would invade the US based on a dream. She regarded this as a revelation, but actually it wasn't even possible, the Chinese didn't have anything close the logistical resources to get all those soldiers over here. It was a plot for a Chuck Norris movie though, it was an existing thought. The most charitable view is that it was a xenophobic premonition of Chinese immigration in coming decades. But then this is just that time-warp kind of thing again, knowledge of the type that a person would have if they had watched the human movie before, or had some hand in how it plays out.

      Why do people have faith that their religious intuitions are inspired by a benevolent, all knowing God? Is it a kind of vanity? Is it because they can't deal with the idea that they may not be cared for by such a God? It seems to me to be a very unhealthy assumption. It means that the thoughts of the would-be prophet are Truth, while the thoughts of people who disagree are sinful judgements, arrogantly opposing the word of God. But everything I see seems to show that the thoughts of the prophet and the prophet's muse are just thoughts.

      Is aggression and fear the result of some kind of metaphysical fuck-up, before the foundations of the earth were laid, so to speak? Or is it really the only way for things to work? I'm suspecting that nobody actually knows, and that our oracles don't know either, that we're just psychically accessing the same guesses. And the muses, so to speak, that answer our questions by revelation are of two types. There are the ones who say "I don't know but here's a thought about it", and there are the dishonest ones that make pronouncements.

      Saturday I camped next to white water. It was really loud, and kind of wrecked my usual dreaming. I had just one dream that I recall that wasn't about the noise. A painting contractor who was mad because a provided bucket of paint seemed to imply that the homeowner expected a door painted, and the contractor hadn't agreed to do doors. Is there a voice of Truth but we can't hear it over the racket of 7 billion people thinking all kinds of contrary things? Is this metaphor such a truth? Or is it just the most plausible seeming guess that my intuition and personal Fate could scrounge around for? Its looking to me more like a plausible guess. Probably with a false premise behind it.

      I guess what's motivating me here is that I've had it with the way that people lie and abuse power, and I've had it with the same kind of bullshit from our gods and guiding spirits, which seem to be very much like us. Not that what I think about this does very much.

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      in nature there are extreme opposites to every spectrum. light and darkness is the prime example. i believe you can literally apply this to all concepts. if you don't want to believe in God that's fine but wouldn't you agree that for aggression and fear there is the outermost opposite of that , both ends stretching infinitely for either polarity? i understand the frustration that comes from peoples lies and abuse of power but i think for every individual you have to find which personal beliefs you can be at peace with and just be true to that the best you can and try to rise above the rest of the crap in the world. the only person you can control is yourself.

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      One thing about extending concepts to their opposite, is often one extreme can't exist without the other. There are no magnetic monopoles. There are no basketball leagues where every team had a 1.000 win record for the season, even in heaven. I don't think it makes sense to deify and vilify two sides of the same thing. If Yahweh and Satan were complementary expressions of the same spirit, so to speak, I would just think of it as one spirit.

      But if there is an attainable ideal, that something actually can be better overall and its not just a matter of stealing from one hand and giving to another, then yes, I agree that can be envisioned and cultivated.

      Sometimes an essential part of the process of making something better is understanding what is possible as a next step. For example, I don't eat meat because I don't like to kill things. But if I don't feed my kids meat, I run the risk of them growing up malnourished unless I understand what their dietary needs are. I'd rather feed them healthy food, substituting things like cheeze for meat if they prefer that, and let them decide for themselves when they are older. This isn't just a theoretical problem, I knew someone who damaged his stepchild's health through dietary idealism.

      No man is an island. I don't think its reasonable to tell a slave that he can only worry about his own actions, not about the actions of his master. That might be prudent, if he lacks the power to resist his master, but he has to resist him when he has that power. Its not right to let other people abuse you, or to stand by while people abuse other people without ever trying to say or do anything about it. I agree though that its pretty stupid to worry about what other people are doing while neglecting your own issues, since you have the most power there.

      Based on my experience in dreams and otherwise, I think that psychologically we're actually less separate than is commonly assumed. The collective unconscious really is collective to some extent, where other people's desires aren't completely independent of how you experience your own. And of course there is a lot of inertia in either case, patterns that aren't quickly changed, and which aren't improved if you try too hard. How much control I really have over myself and what I should attempt is part of what I try to understand.

      To bring this back to the topic of 'beyond dreaming', part of my original question was the extent to which there is a psychically accessible 'guide' that understands what is true and possible. If you regard a guide as perfect when it is in fact flawed, that can lead to really bad outcomes, because the mistakes reinforce themselves without any possibility of correction. A Jim Jones type disaster would be a classic example of this, in a slightly different context. There are also people who drive themselves crazy trusting their dream intuitions, though none who post on this site.

      In any case, thanks for the thought. I agree I'd do better with a more optimistic outlook. I do the best I can with that without sacrificing my honesty.

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      Quote Originally Posted by shadowofwind View Post
      Why do people have faith that their religious intuitions are inspired by a benevolent, all knowing God? Is it a kind of vanity? Is it because they can't deal with the idea that they may not be cared for by such a God? It seems to me to be a very unhealthy assumption. It means that the thoughts of the would-be prophet are Truth, while the thoughts of people who disagree are sinful judgements, arrogantly opposing the word of God. But everything I see seems to show that the thoughts of the prophet and the prophet's muse are just thoughts.
      I think it is a kind of vanity, like when a football player says a prayer after scoring a touchdown, as if the God who created and maintains 100 million galaxies not only cared or noticed that the player just ran ten yards without getting knocked down, but that that God actually helped out.

      That kind of assumption, that God is involved in our every move, would certainly get tapped when an unusual event like a premonition in a dream happens. Even if that premonition was just a hiccup in a person's perception of time, that person would rather make it an act of God. Why? Both because it explains and justifies the premonition, and because it makes the person that much more vital to things.

      Just a thought...

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      On the other hand if one believes in a God who is omnipotent and omniscious, then why wouldn't there be divine revelation in dreams if one believes that God loves each and every one of us and is capable of paying attention to each? On the other hand, not all claims of divine revelation would be true, of course. And how could one differentiate divine revelation from a vanity that chooses to interpret own thoughts as divine revelation? One could not differentiate the two except by faith. And could an interpretation of a dream as divinely inspired be wrong? Of course.
      Last edited by JoannaB; 04-12-2013 at 05:28 PM.

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      I guess I've always had a problem believing that God has the time, inclination, or purpose to contact individuals... and if He did, why be so cryptic as to show up so vaguely in dreams? Risking being ignored or misinterpreted seems an odd move for a God who is omnipotent enough to simply burn a bush or two. And to help an athlete score a touchdown simply seems insane.

      It just seems arrogant to me to assume that God has chosen to single you out, among uncounted billions or trillions (or more; given all those galaxies), to relay a message -- and then to make that message as cryptic as possible so as to be misinterpreted or ignored. Could there ever be a time that any one of us is that important to God, and if we were, would He really make His message difficult to understand or share?

      That said, this by no means says you cannot sense God's Presence in your dreams, or in the eyes of a loved one. That I think is much different.

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      I believe that God is unlikely to single out just one individual among billions. I think God is much more likely to communicate with each and every one individual if it is true that he loves each of us which is what I believe. The problem with free will is that we are given the freedom to believe in God or not believe in him, and that could be a possible explanation for cryptic messages. However, I think it would be very vain of me to believe that I understand why God does what he does the way he does it. I can speculate, but I do not really understand, and yet I do believe.
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      Quote Originally Posted by Sageous View Post
      an odd move for a God who is omnipotent enough to simply burn a bush or two.
      As I've commented previously, to me a burning bush, which is a source of white noise, makes complete sense as a source of prophetic intuition. Your mind draws out those pops and hisses that fit what the spirit wishes to impress upon you.

      As I've also commented previously, I think that the so-called monotheistic religions aren't monotheistic so much as polytheistic in a totalitarian way. Other competing gods are recognized as real, but are re-branded as evil spirits which take the blame for all the misfortune that the ostensibly perfect and omnipotent god is responsible for.

      A person can say that its not the god that is imperfect, but our understanding of that god. I think this misunderstands the nature of god though. I don't think that those are two different separable things, that a god is independent of our understanding. I think that our thoughts are a part of the god's body, so to speak. People recognize that the god has tremendous power, so they fall over themselves trying to kiss his ass, trying to gain favor by flattering him with proclamations about his virtue.

      If in principle there is a perfectly loving god, unknown to us because of the conflicted or distorted nature of our love, then that is not the god that speaks to us in intuitions. The source of the intuition is that mind and our mind speaking as one, so our character is a part of it also. This seems to be what I experience anyway, and seems to fit what I read from other people.

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      Nope, I really do believe in a monotheistic religion. I do not believe in evil spirits. To be honest I am not sure I believe in the devil. I think the devil is an excuse that many Christians use to blame someone else "the devil made me do it" for their own mistakes. I like the interpretation of hell that says that in the afterlife one may end up in hell which is a separation from God, which often is self-imposed. If God is all love and all knowing and all good, then being separated from him through one's own choices could be hell. This interpretation of hell is not unique to me - I am not sure who the theologian was who came up with it. It appeals to me. And it does not require any evil spirits or devil. Or rather there is a devil, but it is a part of each and every one of us: the temptations, the selfishness, the baser desires that lead us further away from God.

      Edit: In other words I believe God loves us so much that he is even willing to stop loving us if that is truely our choice. And in that sense judgement day may simply be our gaining all the knowledge we need to truly judge ourselves.
      Last edited by JoannaB; 04-15-2013 at 10:48 PM.

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      JoannaB,

      I'm aware of that thought, and even considered speaking to it in my last post. But of course my posts are too long as it is.

      That thought assigns all the responsibility for suffering to people. So instead of evil spirits, you have partially evil spirits, or at least willfully foolish or disobedient ones, and they have bodies and call themselves people. My point wasn't about in what sense spirit exists apart from bodies (though I've posted about that before too), it was that the idea of revelation from a perfect God does not appear to me to fit the available evidence. I'm not arguing that God doesn't exist, I'm arguing that God is not like that.

      I think this issue is related to why people get so tangled up in relation to evolution. Catholic doctrine accepts evolution, but doesn't show how it can be reconciled with the idea of a fall. American evangelicals tend to believe that the two ideas are seriously in conflict, and I think that they're right. One hears such thoughts as that "only man kills his own kind", but the fact is that pretty much all of man's faults are shared by other animals. Chimpanzees for instance are murderously vicious in their interactions with each other. Did God create them that way? If so, how to reconcile that with the story of the origin of man's sin being a choice? I'm not saying that the ideas can't be reconciled, and I have ideas towards that, I'm just saying that people tend to gloss over the contradictions because they don't know how to resolve them.

      In any case, thanks for your thoughts. If we're disagreeing about anything I think that 90% of it is just that we haven't had time to describe our thoughts in sufficient detail.
      Last edited by shadowofwind; 04-15-2013 at 11:16 PM. Reason: that^the

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      Hmm, you've got a good point about the chimpanzees. The main explanation that I can think of is that homo sapiens is so conceited that we erroneously decided that we are the only creature given free will. That would be the main explanation for other creatures having the capacity to do evil deeds.

      If we believe that God created humans and other creatures in his own image, then yes, I suppose you could argue that we are like lesser gods, except that would be too conceited, and humility is a virtue. We are creatures with the potential to freely choose good or evil. We can choose to be more like God, but since none of us are all knowing and all powerful, we are not like God enough to be considered gods.

      I believe that God did not have to build failure into the system. All he had to do was to not be fully involved in order to allow for free will. Of course not all failures can be explained by free will, for example natural disasters how to recognize those with an all loving God. One possible explanation is that if we were not challenged enough, could we truly say that we exercised free will? If we lived in a garden of Eden with all that we ever wanted right there, could we grow into our full potentials? We learn through our mistakes, through making tough choices in situations full of shades of grey where at times we are limited to choosing the least of all evils rather than a truely good outcome. But if the good outcome were always possible and obvious, could we truely say that we made a choice and reached our highest potential?

      In that way even an all loving God would not proclude bad things happening to good people. Even though it is hard for us to understand, because we do not know everything, but it may be that the worst thing happen because we need them to happen in order for us to become wiser and better and stronger, in order for us to make the moral choices without which we would not really have free will.

      And I do not believe God causes natural disasters, but rather he created a world in which natural disasters were possible for our edification.

      Two alternatives to the animals also have free will: it is also possible that animals other than homo sapiens do not have the ability to differentiate good and evil truly as such - although I doubt that given that dogs for example and primates clearly do seem to know that something is "wrong" - but if animals had no knowledge of good and evil, then could such animals truly be said to be capable of doing something immoral (I would say, no).

      The other alternative is if this is all a dream, then which beings are real entities and which are just "dream characters" without their own souls, projections of our subconscious. At least some animals could be just dream characters in such an interpretation. Although I think that it would be a problem for people to realize that their pets were not real and had no souls, and thus I would steer away from that interpretation, I think.

      Only God knows all the truth, in my opinion. Since I believe that Jesus was God, and he was not a vegetarian, I am assuming that eating meat from animals is not immoral. Although how that would work if they do have souls, I don't really know.
      Last edited by JoannaB; 04-16-2013 at 01:17 AM.

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      Quote Originally Posted by JoannaB View Post
      Hmm, you've got a good point about the chimpanzees. The main explanation that I can think of is that homo sapiens is so conceited that we erroneously decided that we are the only creature given free will. That would be the main explanation for other creatures having the capacity to do evil deeds.
      My problem with this is that the 'evil' in my nature does not for the most part seem to be a matter of free will. For instance I have a typical man's love of violence. I can suppress this, and to some extent I can redirect it in more constructive directions, but I can't just choose to not be that way, not within the scope of my life anyway. Some Christians would attribute this to original sin, and some non-Christians would believe that its entirely learned behavior. But its pretty clear to me that its a lot like the aggression of Chimpanzees and other animals, and that its not entirely chosen. Most higher animals thrive by preying on weaker animals, that's how life works.

      A person could suppose that it works this way because of original sin, and I'm quite open to that as a possibility. But then the identity of those who originally chose to sin is shared in some sense by all of us. And that partially collective spirit, as I experience it, is where prophetic intuitions come from.

      Quote Originally Posted by JoannaB View Post
      Of course not all failures can be explained by free will, for example natural disasters how to recognize those with an all loving God. One possible explanation is that if we were not challenged enough, could we truly say that we exercised free will? If we lived in a garden of Eden with all that we ever wanted right there, could we grow into our full potentials? We learn through our mistakes, through making tough choices in situations full of shades of grey where at times we are limited to choosing the least of all evils rather than a truely good outcome. But if the good outcome were always possible and obvious, could we truely say that we made a choice and reached our highest potential?
      This also seems possible to me, that the natural order is for the most part the best way it can work.

      Quote Originally Posted by JoannaB View Post
      In that way even an all loving God would not proclude bad things happening to good people. Even though it is hard for us to understand, because we do not know everything, but it may be that the worst thing happen because we need them to happen in order for us to become wiser and better and stronger, in order for us to make the moral choices without which we would not really have free will.
      I think this only makes sense if violence is an essential part of life, or if we already screwed up before the bad things started to happen. I don't plan to teach my children about the importance of parental love by abandoning them at the mall.

      Whether people deserve better than what they get or not, I can't judge. But I think that some people do, because personal relationships are real, which means that people can help or hurt other people.

      Quote Originally Posted by JoannaB View Post
      And I do not believe God causes natural disasters, but rather he created a world in which natural disasters were possible for our edification.
      Bringing this back to "beyond dreaming" then, if you're interested enough to wade through it.....Following the dream I had during a nap about three hours before this happened (US Airways Flight 1549 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), as I described it in an e-mail to my mom and siblings shortly after I woke up. (Time zone is an hour west of US Eastern.) I've described this before here though I don't know if I posted it in its original form.

      dream
      Thursday, January 15, 2009 12:11 PM
      From:
      [name and e-mail deleted, trying to protect myself from spam and nosy employers]
      To:
      [family's e-mail addresses deleted]
      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.


      In part 4, the reason I "like the sound", is it reminds me of a hammer hitting a skull. (As a side note, someone hit my skull with a hammer once. The sound didn't seem all that cool at the time.) To me the small Ted Nugent-like furry animal represents aggressive malice, and also the positive spirit of courage that it isn't very much different from. To me this is the main part of the dream.

      My point in relation to this discussion is that bad things don't just randomly happen, there is providence involved, and it is somehow intimately connected to our own messed up desires, though there is a higher, unifying intelligence involved also. If you don't find my hammer-on-skull example persuasive, I can private message other more disturbing anecdotes.

      I think that this type of dream isn't best viewed as a premonition even when the image in it very closely matches the event that follows it. Its more of a "synchronous" event, like how Jung described but with an undeniable supernatural component, and even though its not exactly synchronous by a wall clock. The main reason the dream preceeds the event isn't to predict the event, its because its impractical or unnecessary for them both to happen at exactly the same time. I think that what I've been calling dream telepathy is like this also, its more of a matter of synchronicity than a matter of sending a message.

      Restating my initial point, when something supernatural happens generally doesn't make sense to interpret it as the work of a perfectly benevolent God. Can you see why if I were to start interpreting my dreams in that manner, it would have the potential to twist into something really sick? The muse is susceptible to my own hubris and power lust. And yet, its clearly not "me" who is making the dreams, and it is not an "evil spirit" either. Looking at other people's "prophecies", their intuitions seem to me to be a lot like mine in that regard.
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      An interesting point you bring up. The first dream I ever seriously noticed as being precognitive was one that I had a very special feeling about at the time I had it. Two years later it started matching up with an extreme eccentric I'd met after joining a Medieval reenactment group, where one finds many eccentrics as you can imagine. The dream was full of very very specific matches, it's here Epic Dream | Knights Order of Lion Rampant and as the matches kept ticking up, it felt divine. I didn't care one way or another, it simply felt that way. It felt like I had accessed the fabled akashic record. What I did notice fairly early on though, was the odd situation of how identical the opinions in the dream were like my own. After enough time had passed, it was plain to see that the content of the dream didn't reveal anything more revelatory than what I eventually experienced in waking life.

      I also found in a set of dreams I had that some of my objective mistakes showed up. Like, mistaking the location of a shipyard, thinking it was Greece instead of in Asia somewhere. So now I conclude that the content of these dreams are simply the embodiment of my future thoughts in episode form. I noticed from another post shadowofwind that you have come to a similar same conclusion. It does make a mechanism for it easier to model though, using standard physics and neuroscience.

      This is what I think is happening. I think the mechanism for getting one's future thoughts into an earlier dream lies in the fact that our brainwaves are slower in the sleep stages leading up to dreaming than they are in waking life. Since motion slows down time, our dream time would be ahead and out of sync with our waking time, it would be ahead. Therefore, theoretically our dream content could be accessing future brainwaves encoding our future thoughts as they are in our sleeping "now."

      I've made a short video modeling this as a potential mechanism for precognitive dreaming. A Model for the Mechanism for Precognitive Dreaming - YouTube

      This model fits my dreaming experience.
      Lisa
      Weird Dreams | A Case Study In Precognitive Dreams

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      Lisa,

      After watching your video....

      I believe your experiences, and I'm completely with you with the desirability of making progress towards understanding precognitive dreams. And I think your model contains the germ of a very good idea, that there's something about our common waking point of reference, so to speak, that's different than a point of reference from which precognitive dreaming would make more sense. I agree with you that we don't really 'see the future'. I think your model has some flaws that prevent it from working though.

      1. When people speak of brainwaves as being 'faster' or 'slower', they're talking about frequency, not velocity. Light has a tremendously large range of frequencies, but only one velocity in any given medium. Light and electromagnetic waves are the same thing, and that includes brain waves, even though they are interrelated with a biochemical cause. So in terms of motion, there is nothing about brain waves that is faster or slower than any other electromagnetic wave. Relativity seems to me to not apply, for this and other reasons.

      2. Its true that the apparent time order of two unrelated events can appear different to a third observer depending on that observer's location and velocity. However, this can be thought of as recognition of the events being delayed by different amounts due to the finite speed of light. There is no reference frame in which an event can be observed before it happens in its own reference frame, which would be the situation with a precognitive dream of an event. (I know I didn't say that very well.)

      3. Not all information in precognitive dreams is information that I would eventually have had anyway from waking life experience if I had waited. My precognitive experience is a lot like what you describe, but not entirely. Sometimes connections are made intuitively that never would have been made outwardly in the future without the dream. A person acts based on the intuition, and without that action the event couldn't occur. (This isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy since the event often can't be guessed or extrapolated from the action.)

      4. Almost all, if not all, of my precognitive dreams involve the thoughts of other people as well as my own. Generally speaking, I won't get the dream unless another person's thoughts are involved, and the dream includes elements of their thought as well as mine. This was my experience for a while before I noticed the pattern, and it developed further as I started paying more attention to it. Now the 'shared' aspect is stronger than the 'precognitive' aspect. So maybe you can experience this for yourself too if you start looking in that direction.

      5. There are also events which are related in the same kind of acausal way that the 'event' of the precognitive dream is related to the event that it 'predicts'. Dreaming and cognition don't appear to me to even be necessary as a part of the process. Precognitive dreams are just a special case of a more general phenomena that we notice first because of the unusual way that the thought seems to preceed the event. An example of this is two weeks ago when the radio said "what's that smell?" at the same instant I passed over a dead skunk. If that was the only time something like that had happened I'd guess it to be a random coincidence, or a matter of selective attention or something, but this kind of thing happens to me a lot and it seems very much like the same thing as the precognitive dreams.

      I think the scientists who dismiss precognitive dreams as unreal because they can't explain them are arrogant idiots. Its not reasonable for them to believe in things that they have no evidence for. But they're not going to find evidence if they dismiss it off hand and don't pursue it further when it presents itself. If they were wiser they would just leave it open a bit, undecided. We can't change them though.

      I feel bad about criticizing your model. Of course there was no way for you have constructed it to accommodate my experiences. And you're not a theoretical physicist, even though you have some acquaintance with physics ideas, so I can't blame you for points 1 and 2 either. But those are points that will stand out to any physicists who watch your video, and most will just blow you off as a crackpot on that basis, without looking for the truth in the understanding that's behind your model so that it can be developed more fully.

      Mark
      Sageous likes this.

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      Quote Originally Posted by shadowofwind View Post
      Lisa,



      I feel bad about criticizing your model. Of course there was no way for you have constructed it to accommodate my experiences. And you're not a theoretical physicist, even though you have some acquaintance with physics ideas, so I can't blame you for points 1 and 2 either. But those are points that will stand out to any physicists who watch your video, and most will just blow you off as a crackpot on that basis, without looking for the truth in the understanding that's behind your model so that it can be developed more fully.

      Mark
      No need to feel bad at all about criticizing my model. I was aware it would need refining and I appreciate the points you made. I just think the answer lies out there somewhere and it's worth trying to take a stab to find out.

      1. I take your point on this one.

      2. I probably didn't explain my position on this too well in the video. I do think the reference frame of another observer, that being, me the dreamer looking at events simultaneously as opposed to me awake experiencing them sequentially. I had one major dream that involved membership in a group that lasted 2 or so years and my entire tenure there was found in one dream I had more than two years before joining.

      3. I have that too. Having the dream can bring about things that would not have happened without the dreams but, I wouldn't have access in a dream to what you had for lunch today for instance, unless that information was conveyed to me through normal senses anyway. My whole saga would have never happened if I hadn't had my epic dream and showed it to the person who happened to be a main character in it unbeknownst to what it revealed at the time. In many ways I wish I had never done that, so not self-fulfilling prophecy for me either. It's a really bad situation to have dreamt that someone is transgender. Someone who twirled her mustache in meetings saying "You too can be a woman like me" on many occasions in a group that is conveniently blind to what's being rubbed under their noses. Boy can that backfire! Nope, not self-fulfilling prophecy. Walked right into that one blindly.

      4. Do you mean conversations of other people? Or do you just ask them to verify their thoughts later?

      5. I have a very odd coincidence with the book The Miami Giant illustrated by Maurice Sendak and written by Arthur Yorinks. That story could be a dream of my dream life. I have no explanation for that. It's on the level of Apophenia except for the fact that the characters and individual content really do match. Just a selection -


      http://weirddreams.org/assets/images...ien-header.png
      That's the main character in my dreams

      http://weirddreams.org/assets/images...-newspaper.png
      then there was Howie the comedian who matched after I accidentally saved a file at too low of a resolution and his face got squished.
      Damien actually has a golden retriever and does reenactment now covering the Belle Epoc era


      http://weirddreams.org/assets/images...telescopes.png
      I even gave Howe a copy of some pdfs of I had from Early English Books online on watches and telescopes. I had those pdfs even before I met Howie. I didn't go looking for them. How many people have books on old telescopes and watches? No ice tea though, one must be grateful for small mercies.

      This I have no explanation for. I guess some of us just get lucky.

      Thanks for taking the time to comment on my idea.

      Lisa
      Last edited by Weirddreamsorg; 04-19-2013 at 07:48 AM.

    16. #16
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      my two-penny worth

      The EB, (who came into being at the end-of-time, and instantly merged with all things through all time), is infinite.

      so

      to the EB

      you are the center of the EB's universe. Everything else is the EB devoutly serving you.

      U may not be ware of it (and may never guess) but the EB is your personal pure Devotee.

      EB is everything including your body and everything you think you are.

      The advanced game of life is to come into conscious relationship with EB, and dance.

      Synchronicity is the evidence.

    17. #17
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      Sync! sync! sync!

      Is there a thoughtful Intelligence behind the Universe ??

      ***

      Is there is a thoughtful Intelligence behind the Universe ?? - YouTube

      ***
      uploaded less than 24 hours ago (1:19:17) (236 views)

    18. #18
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      Quote Originally Posted by debrajane View Post
      my two-penny worth

      The EB, (who came into being at the end-of-time, and instantly merged with all things through all time), is infinite.

      so

      to the EB

      you are the center of the EB's universe. Everything else is the EB devoutly serving you.

      U may not be ware of it (and may never guess) but the EB is your personal pure Devotee.

      EB is everything including your body and everything you think you are.

      The advanced game of life is to come into conscious relationship with EB, and dance.

      Synchronicity is the evidence.
      The Lord of The Dance - Tommy Maken

      ***

      The Lord of The Dance - Tommy Makem [6/8] - YouTube

      ***
      (136,381)

      I danced in the morning when the world was young
      I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun
      I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth
      At Bethlehem I had my birth*

      Dance, dance, wherever you may be
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he
      And I lead you all, wherever you may be
      And I lead you all in the dance, said he*

      I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees
      They wouldn't dance, they wouldn't follow me
      I danced for the fishermen James and John
      They came with me so the dance went on*

      Dance, dance, wherever you may be
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he
      And I lead you all, wherever you may be
      And I lead you all in the dance, said he*

      I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame
      The holy people said it was a shame
      They ripped, they stripped, they hung me high
      Left me there on the cross to die*

      Dance, dance, wherever you may be
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he
      And I lead you all, wherever you may be
      And I lead you all in the dance, said he*

      I danced on a Friday when the world turned black
      It's hard to dance with the Devil on your back
      They buried my body, they thought I was gone
      But I am the dance, and the dance goes on*

      Dance, dance, wherever you may be
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he
      And I lead you all, wherever you may be
      And I lead you all in the dance, said he*

      They cut me down and I leapt up high
      I am the life that will never, never die
      I'll live in you if you'll live in me
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he*

      Dance, dance, wherever you may be
      I am the Lord of the dance, said he
      And I lead you all, wherever you may be
      And I lead you all in the dance, said he

      optical illusion dance

      ***

      optical illusion dance - YouTube

      ***
      4 weeks old and 1,993,579 views.

    19. #19
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      Quite an interesting video Lisa
      Quote Originally Posted by nito89 View Post
      Quote Originally Posted by zoth00 View Post
      You have to face lucid dreams as cooking:
      Stick it in the microwave and hope for the best?
      MMR (Mental Map Recall)- A whole new way of Recalling and Journaling your dreams
      Trying out MILD? This is how you become skilled at it.

    20. #20
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      Hey Lisa (weirddreamsnorg)

      you wrote (in post 13)

      I've made a short video modeling this as a potential mechanism for precognitive dreaming.*

      ***

      A Model for the Mechanism for Precognitive Dreaming - YouTube

      ***
      I keep trying to run this YouTube on this phone with both my apps but I keep getting the message:

      "This YouTube is Private".

      I have added you to my "friend" list so I don't miss ant of your future posts, or dreams.

    21. #21
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      Sorry about that. I made it private last night so I could add some comment about the issues brought up by Mark about brainwaves and was sidelined by a barfing dog. It's back up now with a note underneath the video. I'll add comments directly to it today.

    22. #22
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      Quote Originally Posted by Weirddreamsorg View Post
      4. Do you mean conversations of other people? Or do you just ask them to verify their thoughts later?
      Typically its not like their thought is in my dream. Its more like there is a temporary mind that is partially them and partially me, and that mind thinks thoughts which would not be possible for either of us individually. Something of who they are is in the thought. This works the other way too, other people have dreams that seem to have me in them, including information that I am uniquely aware of. Or maybe this is the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe from some standpoint the combined mind is persistently real, and my normal experience is a selective personal projection of that.

      Quote Originally Posted by Weirddreamsorg View Post
      5. I have a very odd coincidence with the book The Miami Giant illustrated by Maurice Sendak and written by Arthur Yorinks. That story could be a dream of my dream life. I have no explanation for that. It's on the level of Apophenia except for the fact that the characters and individual content really do match.
      Yes that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about for item four also, even if Sendak wasn't dreaming when he imagined the story. Of course any good author writes things that speak personally to a lot of different kinds of people. But there are cases that are really extraordinary, involving details that it doesn't seem plausible aren't connected to me personally. (I can PM examples to people who ask me, I don't like posting stuff that involves other people.) Sendak writes some weird stuff that you can feel in the magical part of yourself, so if its going to happen easily, its going to happen with him. I'm not familiar with that particular story you mention, but I know "In the Night Kitchen", and "Outside Over There". Of those two, the second one connects most strongly with me.

      Quote Originally Posted by Weirddreamsorg View Post
      Thanks for taking the time to comment on my idea.
      Thanks for your thoughts also. (That's probably the only video I've ever watched that's been posted on this site by the way. I get bored easily and have a pretty short attention span for anything that doesn't have text or guitars.)

    23. #23
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      Quote Originally Posted by shadowofwind View Post
      Lisa,
      An example of this is two weeks ago when the radio said "what's that smell?" at the same instant I passed over a dead skunk. If that was the only time something like that had happened I'd guess it to be a random coincidence, or a matter of selective attention or something, but this kind of thing happens to me a lot and it seems very much like the same thing as the precognitive dreams.

      Mark
      That really does sound like a trivial and ridiculous thing to bring up doesn't it? But from experience, I know that sensation and it isn't looking for signs or matches it's more of an unmotivated seeing of connections that just pop out at you.

      I only had one episode of that and it culminated in my noticing the matches my friend had with the book I mentioned, The Miami Giant. I had bought the book while sightseeing with my visiting Godmother (who appeared in that epic dream for an instant) read through it, thought nothing of it and put it on my book shelf.

      When I told my new acquaintance that she (he to me at the time) matched in detail with my dream she said that she had only had one dream come true, of an injury to her side while in a medieval tournament and then being on a stretcher in the hospital. She said she had a split second of recollection of that dream just before it actually happened.

      I remembered I'd had had a dream similar I said I would dig it out and show her. When I looked a it was a similar dream but revealing to me. It was a young man who had been stabbed on his right side above his right ovary. Then all the hints she'd dropped earlier clicked and I realized she was transgender. I would never judge this from a dream, I asked for confirmation. As I had already said I would show her the dream, not knowing from recollection or connection what was in it, I had a vehicle to tell her I understood her situation.

      So, I thought that was that and it would be the end of things. I mean, how often does this happen? If she wanted to talk she could, if not, up to her. Then the apophenia clicked in. I'd be at work going though files but talking on the phone with a friend and her conversation started matching up with my paperwork. She mentioned her friend called her a siren just when I was reading someone signature who's name was Siren. I think I had at least 24 hours of feeling bombarded by the experience of an abnormal meaningfulness at first it seemed like some weird joke by the universe and I tend not to talk about "the Universe" as an entity. To the extent I said (in my head) okay, "what do you want!" I think I said even, "More clues please!" Then I started making all sorts of weird connections about things not connected until I remembered a dream about a truck that represented my friend and the actual event of my son bargaining with me over the key to the truck as he wanted a backpack he left inside. I wanted a week's allowance from him to tell him were he had left the key (instead of putting it where it belonged earlier) and he was offering me 50 cents for a clue. So funny! Bargaining at 8.

      So, I ended up with the thought that the key to the truck was something found at a discount and since I had just purchased that book at a deep discount I pulled it off the shelf and had a look at it. That book was the perfect gift for my new friend. It indeed was a book about men who wear pumps and pearls and about a character who looked just like my friend who had to say goodbye to Joe Mishbooker after their relationship didn't work out. And my friend, at that time, had to deal with saying goodbye to her ex girlfriend Mish who was about to move overseas after their relationship didn't work out. At the end they say goodbye and the doppelgänger carries on with her life. It was like a gift from heaven.

      After that, the apophenia was gone and I've never those type of connections pop up at me again since. It did worry me at the time since that type of thinking is an early symptom of schizophrenia which I've never had. It was definitely directly related to my being motivated to look at that book again. I don't know how I'd model that. I do think accessing precognitive content in dreams is like being very close to a mental health cliff from my experience. It's not being over it, but it sure is close.
      Last edited by Weirddreamsorg; 04-21-2013 at 03:11 AM.

    24. #24
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      Quote Originally Posted by zoth00 View Post
      Quite an interesting video Lisa
      Thank you. Looks like I need to rework it a bit. I actually have an earlier version that doesn't mention brainwaves. I'll go back to that. It's just a model that reflects how precognitive dreaming is experienced by me and still fits with what we know about physics. I'm not a believer in any supernatural although what I claim to experience is. That actually really bugs me. I think we just don't understand consciousness very well yet. I especially hate the accusation that I claim what I claim because I want to think I'm special. It's like telling me I want to think I'm special because I remembered what I had for lunch yesterday. Then, the idea that I should accept that my memory is fooling me over something that at times is actually objective, in the case of recorded dreams just puts me in an impossible situation. I thought if I modeled it, some folks might at least understand better my experiences even if they don't have them themselves. I know there is a crowd of folks just like myself.

      The state of precognitive dreaming in science should at least be underdetermined by the evidence, meaning, the evidence supports both it existing and not existing so one cannot yet determine what is happening. The evidence is supported by personal experience which I accept is low quality for science. But science can't really claim it doesn't show up objectively yet because it is subjective in nature and objective brain scanning isn't that sophisticated yet to get any objective data. Skeptics are fishing with a big net that will only catch big fish and claiming there aren't any small fish in the water to use the famous analogy.

      There is an idea in philosophy of science by Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend who have suggested that because of underdetermination, the difference between empirically successful and unsuccessful theories or research programs is largely a function of the differences in talent, creativity, resolve, and resources of those who advocate them. More info on underdetermination of scientific theory here Underdetermination of Scientific Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

      Unfortunately I don't feel like forming a counter group to the skeptic's guerrilla skepticism on wikipedia Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia which does influence public thought in this area enormously. For such a group the aim wouldn't be to change the skeptic's minds but to cut into the influence they have. I can imagine that exercise going nowhere while consuming much energy and time. Seems to work for them though. I don't know how many times the skepdic article on dreams and plane crash probability has been quoted to me.

      I think telling personal stories online will probably help to build a base of reports though. That's why I put my site up. Storytelling seems to be the best long term strategy in my opinion and making videos etc. which I need more practice at. Over time the stories will build to identifiable people with documented experiences instead of hearsay which is so easily dismissed. I love the internet for that reason. I documented all the matches I had with my set of precognitive dreams as they started matching because I thought it was the most bizarre thing I'd ever experienced to have a dream match to begin with, thought documenting my dreams might shed some light one day on the phenomena. I benefited enormously by the stories other people posted which helped me feel not so crazy when I was coming to terms with my experience.
      Last edited by Weirddreamsorg; 04-21-2013 at 01:34 AM.

    25. #25
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      Quote Originally Posted by JoannaB View Post

      In that way even an all loving God would not proclude bad things happening to good people. Even though it is hard for us to understand, because we do not know everything, but it may be that the worst thing happen because we need them to happen in order for us to become wiser and better and stronger, in order for us to make the moral choices without which we would not really have free will.
      Even if some suffering is necessary for personal development, I think the degree of suffering experienced by some is simply unconscionable.

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