Dreams that predict the future?

So for a very long time I've experienced the phenomenon of having deja vu moments where I immediately realise, hey, I dreamt this. I never remembered the dream in question until the very moment of the occurrence, and it was always a few seconds of something insignificant; like just walking from point a to point b, or sitting in a room smoking weed. Recently though I had a very significant predictive dream. Unlike the dreams I've had in the past, I remembered this dream as soon as I woke up, it was vivid and the next day the exact same situation played out.. I was laid off, I remember looking back and seeing my boss give the little finger beckon and I immedeatly knew my job was over. I suppose my main musing in all this is that, is there any way this talent can be refined, or even combined with lucid dreaming. I would really like to engage in a discussions with people who have had similar experiences.

The way I see it, the only use of being able to predict the future is being able to prepare for what it going to happen. After all, if we predict something to happen but don't accordingly make any adjustments until that something happens, what was the use in correctly predicting that something would happen? Sure, we can claim bragging rights or think about the novelty of it, but what is the use in that?

There's no way to predict whether a given dream is going to predict the future or not, so to reliably make use of all of the predictions dreams may make, we have to assume every dream is making a prediction of the future and make adjustments to the future according to what we think is the prediction of the dream. If we assume a prediction won't manifest itself, it really isn't much use as a prediction. If we take the predictive power of only 50% of the dreams seriously, the other 50% may just as well make some or all of predictions that came true that we didn't take seriously.

That said, if I were to attempt to tap into the possible predictive power of a dream, after being lucid, I would simply ask a dc or the voice-over of the dream to tell or show me what is going to happen in the future.

So literally an hour ago I was wondering if anyone else experiences deja vu in dreams. I do quite often. Most of the time I don't consciously recall the dream it came from and as I become aware, the feeling of deja vu fades. For me, I find its the setting of the dream that triggers deja vu not so much the sequence of events... its a strange feeling and not quite the same as deja vu while awake.
The precognitive dreams I have had have always been very spontaneous, and very few. I had more of them when I was younger. One thing I can say is that my predictive dreams weren't very useful. I agree with dolphin - I didn't know my dream predicted the future until it happened...

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Originally Posted by dolphin

The way I see it, the only use of being able to predict the future is being able to prepare for what it going to happen.

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Another use is in proving there to be a spiritual/metaphysical aspect to the world; that's plenty big enough of a deal in my opinion -- in fact much more significant than the effects on my own personal life.

I don't, in fact, think dreaming has spiritual/metaphysical powers like that (seeing the future, mind-to-mind communication, etc.), but if it were, it would be a big deal.

However, I do think that dreaming is metaphysically relevant, in that it's intertwined with questions like the "hard problem of consciousness". But that's another subject than metaphysical powers. (which is the subject of this thread)

Another possible "use" of dreams predicting the future is to wonder whether time is truly linear, and also whether our reality is a dream of sort, and if we can co-create the future in our dreams.

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Originally Posted by JoannaB

Another possible "use" of dreams predicting the future is to wonder whether time is truly linear, and also whether our reality is a dream of sort, and if we can co-create the future in our dreams.

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I see it more of a testament to universal consciousness, like I'm thinking our DCs are quite possibly other people linking with us on a subconscious level rather than manifestations of our own consciousness. After all, don't they say every face we see in our dream is one we've seen before, even if just in passing on the street.

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Originally Posted by mooseantlers

I see it more of a testament to universal consciousness, like I'm thinking our DCs are quite possibly other people linking with us on a subconscious level rather than manifestations of our own consciousness. After all, don't they say every face we see in our dream is one we've seen before, even if just in passing on the street.

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Wouldn't that mean that potentially hundreds of people are sharing the same dream on a regular basis though? Also, I don't see why the brain couldn't produce a unique face, I've always taken issue with that saying. The mind has memories of thousands of facial features, is it not possible for it to blend those details together by chance and produce a face you've not seen before? I feel like it ought to be, I don't see any reason why that couldn't happen.

Honestly I'm a bit surprised to see this idea still floating around Beyond Dreaming given it's a sub-forum where ideas like "dreams could be alternate, parallel realities which means infinite possibilities" are common. If it's easy enough to entertain a notion like that, why not the concept that the brain can come up with new faces too? I mean the brain compartmentalizes; it forms images/concepts of cheeks, eyebrows, eyes, noses, etc. separately, as well as faces as a whole. I would say that the faces you see may all be based on faces you've already seen, but unique faces are sure to pop up.

I had this happen to me too. It was funny though Caz I dreamt about something that happend the next day and instead me saying the exact words I said in the dream Id say something a bit different and it would alter just a few details but the result was the same. What happened in my dream happened in real life - the focus of the subject at hand or the result. I would intentionally tweak my reality (usually my words) to see if my dream still predicted the future and it still did. It was crazy cool. It happens for 3 days straight and so I was like "what am I going to dream tonight?" All excited... But then it stopped. I will say it's kind of a bummer I couldn't keep it going (but I didn't even know how it was happening/possible). I'd love to have some more of those dreams.

Do these dreams have a name?