new theory about dream telepathy, precognition

One of the things I've been puzzling about for years is how a capability like precognition in dreams can develop and persist in nature when it seems to be rare. I have a new idea about that. The short version is that its actually far, far, more common than it appears to be, but it stays almost entirely subconscious, so we don't recognize its happening. I'll attempt to explain why it usually stays subconscious.

Typically thought involves a combination of conscious reasoning and unconscious intuition. In sci-fi cliche, if there were intelligent machines, they would be very 'logical', and intuition would not be something they could exercise easily, if at all. I think the opposite is actually true. When a software neural network is evaluated, it is very difficult to come up with 'reasons' for the outcome that can be readily explained. Although it is logical, it is for the most part not an if-this-then-then-that kind of logic that lends itself very well to expression in human language. The amount of parallel and stochasitic computation involved with the best software 'artificial intelligence' is so massive that it in a lot of ways it behaves more like intuition. And if a person wants to explain the reasons why it behaves the way it does, that explanation is something extra that needs to be added on, it is not simply an expression of its behavior. I think that human intuition is like that also.

Metaphor in a dream is sometimes one means of attempting to bridge the gap between intuition and the kind of thinking that we do consciously. There's little point to this though unless the expression of the intuition through a metaphor actually results in understanding that allows some kind of constructive action that wouldn't be possible otherwise. I think that most of the time, the subconscious part of the mind can influence conscious activity well enough without having to explain or communicate anything. People make all kinds of daily decisions without recognizing the reasons. And even when they do consciously have reasons, those explanations aren't always the real ones.

I think that most precognitions aren't reported to the conscious part of the mind because the subconscious part doesn't need the cooperation of the conscious part in order to act on the precognition. And I think a primary reason it doesn't need conscious cooperation is the subconscious part can act directly by itself, influencing outcomes through whatever magical mechanism it uses to sense possible outcomes. So there's a huge subconscious power struggle going on all the time, as people attempt to manipulate events for their own advantage, and our conscious minds are almost completely oblivious to it because our conscious efforts would interfere more than help.

So if an unusual person can sometimes see the future with some reliability, the thing that makes them unusual isn't that they can do this, its that their subconscious would bother trying to present it to them in this way. The future isn't a set place of things that are going to happen, which is one reason for the folly of attempts to predict lottery outcomes. Its an infinite dimensional realm of possibilities that is extremely fluid and mostly impossible to explain to the part of the mind that is good at reasoning about immediate objects and events.

To go back to an older analogy I've thought about before, suppose you have a million fish that live in a cave, and all seem are completely blind except ten of them. One way that would be possible is if they evolved from fish that can see. Another possible explanation is that the other 999,990 of them aren't actually blind, they only appear to be. These are very different explanations, but they're not mutually exclusive. To put this analogy more in context, I'm not suggesting that prehistoric people were more overtly psychic than we are. I'm suggesting that there are other worlds that we're psychically related to where the people are more overtly psychic. Caves that are better lit, so to speak. And I'm suggesting that we're far more psychic than we usually seem to be, but it isn't necessary to be aware of it, because it isn't necessary to act on it, because we act subconsciously through psychic means also.

Also....It seems to me that the 'rewards' the conscious mind is concerned about are not entirely the same ones that the subconscious mind is chases after. This is natural, since their capabilities are different. As I've mentioned previously, I'm pretty sure that some kind of loss of potential is connected to the manipulation of luck. Some invisible part of a person hardens and begins to die as a consequence of too much overt psychism. I don't understand this, or the conscious part of me doesn't anyway, but I think I can sort of feel it. As a possibly bad analogy, chemistry depends on a degree of ambiguity in the motions of particles, and any time a particle is forced by an interaction to commit more specifically to being in a particular time and place, an important aspect of it is diminished.

I used to think that a primary tradeoff with conscious thought is that when you make a judgment about what something is, you partially substitute a caricature of it for the reality of it. And you confine your mind in the web of interrelated caricatures. I still think that's true, however, I think there's something more to it than that. The mental action that is involved in the judgment also alters or limits the actual thing, not merely one's mental representation of it. I think that's true for actions of the subconscious mind also, and that one reason it remains elusive and mysterious to the conscious mind, is that communication with the conscious mind is a type of action that is limiting in this way.

I'm not trying to suggest that thinking is bad, discernment is bad, or that taking definite stances on things is bad. But there is a tradeoff involved that the conscious mind isn't fully equipped to understand and steward. More becomes possible as the conscious part of the mind becomes more mature and patient. I think there is something analogous to wisdom on the subconscious side also. Although the subconscious side has a timeless quality to it, it connects with the world in a way that is appropriate for a particular time and place, so from that standpoint the subconscious mind changes.