further speculation about dream premonitions

As I've written previously, dream telepathy seems to be very closely connected with precognition for me. This subject has never made sense to me, it seems to be causality violating. But here's a sort-of-new brainstorm about how it works. By how I don't mean a scientific model, I just mean a slightly better description of what happens.

When I experience something, there are physical, sensate aspects to it, and emotional aspects, and maybe deeper aspects having more to do with conscience or identity. My hypothesis is that every aspect is in some sense "in the present moment", but that moment is only physically temporal for the physical part of it. So, for instance, if you make a moral choice, you're actually doing it "when" you experience it, at the spiritual level that you're doing it. But that "when" is outside of the time that physical events are ordered in. Nature or Providence has some kind of mechanism for constructing physical experiences that provide the sensate side of the experience, but there's some freedom in terms of how those events are worked into all the other circumstances that are going on in the world.

When I dream something in early morning, I experience the emotional part of it in some degree of detail, because its almost been turned into a physical event. My mind finishes making an image around it, which is the dream. Then when the remainder of the thought finishes externalizing after I wake up, the events are remarkably similar to what I dreamed, because the underlying "thought" is the same. In other words, since the dream and the event are close together, the event has already been largely predetermined, which adds detail that is revealed in the dream. But this can also happen for some particularly significant events even when the time separation is greater.

So my point is that there really isn't any "causality violation" time paradox stuff going on, but it seems that way if you don't recognize that the different "levels" of experience are not all in the same kind of time.

The reason the 'telepathy' tends to accompany premonitions, is the context that occurs in isn't in the most physical kind of time and space either.

I realize this all sounds kind of New Age, and isn't a new thought in that sense. I think the part of it that's new for me is the recognition of the presence of my identity in the experience. It was more abstract and theoretical for me before, I was thinking of it as if it were outside of myself, so it didn't make as much sense.

I actually had an experience like this today, a dream last night that seems to parallel today's activity as long as I interpret it symbolically. I'll just post my dream journal entry here - I described the synchronicities as well as just the dream itself:

Drifting in the Trench
Besides the Bad Machining dream there was something else - they might have been the same dream but didn’t seem connected. This one came first. I was driving really fast and kept going around the same tight curve with a field next to it. It was a farmer’s field and the crops, whatever they were, were beginning to come in, but they were very low - just about ankle height. Each time I went around the curve I was going a little too fast and drifted out into the field, and either couldn’t slow the car down or didn’t want to, so I floored it and ripped a drift staying parallel with the curve of the road but tearing through the dirt and the crops sideways. I don't remember driving anywhere else, but I kept going around this same curve again and again.

In the later ones I was in a trench - either one that I had made by going over the same route again and again, or already there hidden under the crops and revealed by my constant driving over it. At first it was wide enough that my whole car fit inside it. Also at first it was just a few inches deep, maybe half a foot, then a foot deep and it got deeper each time until the hood of the car was level with the ground outside the trench. At first it was wide enough for my car no problem, but as I moved around the curve it got narrower and suddenly there were big blocks of stone or concrete - maybe similar to gravestones, no they were more cube-shaped actually but about the size of a normal gravestone. These were arrayed along each side of the trench with spaces of a few feet in between each, and my car still fit in between them at first, but as the trench itself got narrower I began to get scared that I was going to start hitting the blocks. It got way too narrow, and I wasn’t hitting them, though fearing I would at any second. It was almost as if they were illusions, or immaterial. Or maybe the car was? Something must have been immaterial or I would definitely have been hitting them. Though in a way it seemed like I was making the car shrink or get narrower - I was sort of shrugging my shoulders together in a shrinking motion and wishing I could make the car itself shrink like that, and it seemed like maybe it was working? Oh and each time I made the turn inside the trench I wasn’t drifting sideways anymore but just going forward.

Somehow I made it all the way around the curve each time without hitting anything, even though the trench even without any blocks in it should have been too narrow toward the end.

* * * * * * *

Today a few hours after waking from that dream I dug a pair of trenches for the water to drain off the street - the water that had formed the ******** Glacier and now the ******** River (******** being the name of my street). There's a minor water line break under the street that the water company says isn't high enough priority to fix yet, which became a huge ice sheet during the cold weather recently, but is now just a rivulet running along the edge of the road and making a few big puddles. My trenching trick is working so far - I made 2 curved trenches parallel to each other - had to use the old rusty pickaxe that I found in the shed to break up some rock under the dirt that at first seemed to be blacktop. So the confusion about whether the blocks were stone or concrete matches the confusion over whether there was blacktop under the dirt or just some broken rock. Turned out it was just gravel and maybe a few broken pieces of blacktop - it wasn’t the street itself as I was afraid. If it was blacktop I wasn't going to break it up to dig there.

The 2 trenches curve the opposite way from my dream trench, but they do get narrower as they go, because it was a lot easier to dig close to the street - farther away there were bushes and plants of all kinds everywhere and roots underground and more gravel in the dirt, plus I had to dig deeper as I went so the water would continue to flow downward. So the trenches did actually get both narrower and deeper. The old rusty pickaxe broke - or the head just came off it. I suppose it could be fixed, and it turns out to be a very useful tool.

Possibly making it all the way around the trench in my dream each time without hitting the blocks or the narrowing sides when I thought I was sure to hit them correlates with the fact that I was able to successfully complete the trenching and it worked, despite the necessary narrowing. The water flowing through the trenches is like the car drifting around the curve - and making it all the way when I didn’t think I could equals the water making it all the way to a point where it can sink out of sight into the soft dirt but is obviously still flowing underground, so the trenches were a success.

Oh I should add - I had been trying for a while now to think of a solution to the problem of all the water running down the street. My friend, who now lives in the basement, had said something earlier about putting a low row of sandbags down about as high as a speed bump, to channel the water off into the edge of the woods and down into the ravine there. He never actually did it though, and last night I walked out and looked at the area for a while, thinking about what might work (I didn't have much confidence in the idea of sand bags). So really in a sense, the dream might not be predictive so much as working out a solution presented symbolically. The weird thing is, I still didn't have the idea even after waking from the dream, to dig a pair of trenches, until I went back out there again and looked some more, then suddenly it occurred to me - probably unconsciously spurred by the dream.

So was the dream Predictive, or Problem-Solving? Possibly both - I guess really it was both. Weird situation. But pretty cool either way. Plus now after reading your descriptions shadowofwind, I understand better how a predictive dream can work - symbolic rather than completely realistic.

Here's another tidbit for people who think its irrational to believe in dream premonitions unless we can propose a plausible mechanism....

I've ranted before about how scientists solidly understand electromagnetics (light) and eye anatomy, and may talk about these things when asked about color, but actually have no idea what color is. According to this, scientists lack even a basic understanding of memory also, notwithstanding all the confident talk about synapses we've been hearing for decades:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...m-neuroscience

And yet, nobody doubts that we have memories, because we experience them.

Of course it may be rational for a person who does not have identifiable premonitions to doubt that other people have them. Up to a point. Its true that a great many people can't be trusted to relate their experiences objectively and honestly. But commonly there's also false pride or envy involved. People who fancy themselves expert or adept in some area tend to resent the suggestion that other people may know or have experienced something significant and relevant that they themselves are ignorant of.

Anyway, we can't control all of that. My main point is we shouldn't doubt ourselves. It is healthy to question ourselves, and cross-examine ourselves, but we don't have to deny things fundamental to who we are because of other people's hangups.