Can lucid dreaming give one a better understanding of the future?

I have three questions. They all basically continue eachother.

So I've always been told that dreams have been known to hint people about their future and sometimes even explicitly show a person an event in their life [usually a significant one] that hasn't happened yet. Would this be possible to intentionally find in a lucid dream? Like lets say I wanted to know what my family is going to be like when I am older or if I'll even have one at all, would I be able to obtain this information through a lucid dream or do these previews of our lives have to come on their own?
And secondly, I think my fear of dying would be a lot smaller if I knew what to expect. So lets say that you're one of the people who tell me that my dreams WILL be able to give me information about what's going to happen in my life, would it be able to answer the questions I have about death also?
I was also wondering if anybody believes that you can use lucid dreams to communicate with God, if you believe in him of course. I personally do but sometimes I wonder if he's listening to my prayers. I would love the chance to literally talk to him and listen to what he has to say instead of waiting for some mysterious sign to appear and especially recognizing it. I don't think a person like me would be able to tell the difference between God subliminally answering my prayers or a random event happening in my life. If you believe in him, do you think communicating to him through a lucid dream would be possible?

haha I know, I want to do some pretty out there things with my dreams, possibly even some unrealistic things. :) but I thought I would ask anyways.

Dreams are mainly the orchestra of one's internal stimuli and subconscious. So if you are in tune with your dreaming you can open pathways to understanding your subconscious or baser self better.

Time does not exist outside observers, so any future is entirely from your perspective anyway. Time certainly is a messy subject from our limited understanding, but if premonition was possible we would have evidence, not hearsay, and it would affect our understanding of time.

With changes in your mental state you can overcome your fear of death, however there is no magic answer in your dreams about life and death. Dreams are internal so I wouldn't count on being able to get external answers with them. This applies to getting answers from whatever your view of 'god' is. If your god is an internal, personal god then perhaps it is possible. Assuming of course that your god is reality.

I have without attempting to, had dreams about the future, that did come true. On one instance it was as simple as going to a wal-mart when I was out of town to get a toothbrush. Another time I was in jail, and my best friend found out I had slept with his girlfriend.

So my only answer for you is that i have definetly seen the future in my regular dreams, and I am not that great at lucidity in my lucid dreams to seek out the future, but I have a guess that it is possibility

Dreaming about an event and then having it happen later at some point is not the same thing as seeing the future with dreams.

But it is the same thing as seeing a possible future

I'm going to have to ask... Think, did you write down those dreams that happened later or in any way record them? So that you could, after the event took place, look back at your journal and see that you indeed had dreamt that?

Otherwise, it was just a deja vu. I have them alot. At first I thought I had dreamt them before. Just today, while I was eating with my family, when I pulled the rice towards me, I got the feeling that I knew it had happened before.
I don't get it as much anymore, but back in the day, I got these long ones, where I could say while it happened "Wait, I've seen this before..." And before it would end, I would get the feeling I could say exactly what would happen next.

What I mean is, dreaming happens inside your head, uses information from inside your head, etc. (as far as we now :0) So how should it get, read, understand information from the future?

And actually, even though I don't believe in God, I do believe you can communicate with your God. Meaning that when you find him in your dream, you could get any answer about what you actually feel about something. Like what you think you should do in a future situation or anything like that, that you're uncertain of in waking life.

I read of a method to use dreams to catch glimpses of the future. I can't remember the name for it right now though. It basically was like dream incubation, suggesting to yourself that you will have a dream of some future event ... and just like that you have a prophetic dream.

Not sure about the God thing, of all the dreams I've had I've yet to come face to face with some god like being.

There are people out there who believe such things are possible, not only through lucid dreams but through regular dreams, or even meditation. Perhaps give the Beyond Dreaming section of the site a read. Maybe you'll find someone in there who has had the experiences you're wondering about.

One acting as a 'soothsayer' cannot be involved in the proposed future. Why? Simply because by proposing a potential future you may programme your subconsious to direct you toward that future. As this happens subconsciously, unaware to your conscious, you may then feel surprised when that future turns into the present.

I do wish to believe in such things, however.

I will answer with yes, on both reported occasions I did actually write them down.

The first one was just so ackward that when I woke up I had to write it down, becuase I had had deja vu so much in my life, and I have had past dreams that I thought were connected to it.

So yeah I did write them down, the one about wal-mart and a toothbrush, and the one about being in jail sitting on the step freaking out.

Now I can tell you that many regular dreams I have I think might come true haven't (yet). The second thing is that there is no good time frame for when the event could happen it is really random, and both times it snuck up on me, I wasn't waiting for it. To much time had passed and the dream wasn't on my mind anymore until it happend and I realized I had wrote it down to prove to myself.

Right now I'm waiting on a dream I had to come true, that I think has gone stale. It was a cop knocking on my door I had it about a month ago, it was really clear because I was standing in my bathroom looking from the window after I heard the doorbell ring.

**Weird Thing**

A week or two after the dream I found out the police came to my house looking for me on a warrent, but I wasn't home. I knew I had a warrent for not paying my fines since Feb. so it might have just been my sub-concious warning me. I don't know.

All I know is that I have affirmativly had dreams about the future, their significance and timeing is unknowable, and I did not attempt to see the future when going to sleep at all. Just like my natural lucid dreams, these were also natural.

As a side note, I posted a dream I had about my best friend getting shot the other day. That night he went to jail and we don't expect him back soon.

??? connected ???

Once I had a dream where this polish boy was walking with me in the uniform that my school has, he told me his cousin could solve a rubik's cube in under 20 seconds. A few months later a polish boy (different from DC) came to my school and eventually we got talking and he told me his cousin was the fastest speedcuber in Poland.

That's probably one of the best examples I have, but genrally little in signifcant things happen several times a week in my dreams then come true in reality, infact probably about 20-40% of all the dreams i recall are because an event happen during the day that reminds me of the event happening in my dream then I remember the rest. I get dé ja vu that eventually leads back to dreams very often, actually it has happened twice today, one of them was about playing a game that i hadnt played before but I had seen a bit of it in the dream, sometimes if I think fast enough I can see what happened after certain events in a dream. Sometimes though people from real life appear in my dreams and say little insignificant things and then say it in real life the day after.

I'd like to add an update to my dream I thought was not going to come true.

On saturday night I got arrested.

???

How about that.

There is actually a lot of literature out there that identifies the possibility of seeing the future in dreams. Problem is it hasn't been tested, at least not with reproducible results. At a time I might say it is unlikely to have any experience of precognition, no matter how minimal. I have had a strange experience that challenges that though.

This was not a recorded dream. I am not even entirely sure I dreamt it.

One morning I was going to read an e-mail from a friend. We tend to have a lot to say in each e-mail, so I like to set some time aside to not only read it but write back (I do it simultaneously because otherwise I won't remember all the content I need to cover and would rather not read through each e-mail twice).

Anyway, I reflected upon the last e-mail I remembered responding to. As I read through the new message, I had a severe case of déjà vu. Upon continuing, I realized it wasn't just a familiar situation, but instead it was identical to the time I was reflecting upon earlier. The e-mail was identical. I not only anticipated the next bits of information prior to reading it, but I also remembered exactly how I would respond.

I was perplexed. I thought maybe it was an old e-mail, but it was dated for that day and was unread when I accessed it. I looked through all the older e-mails because I never delete e-mails because I delude myself into thinking it will be useful later (just so happens some are). I couldn't find a replica. I even asked him about it and he confirmed that it was a new e-mail that I had never read or responded to.

Even now, I am not sure what to make of it. I cannot explain it. I'd pass it off as déjà vu if my predictions of what he would say in the e-mail weren't so accurate.

Perhaps it is possible, but the issue relies more on control. Can we control it if it is possible? I doubt it, but you never know.

Now, as for talking to God, it might be possible (if He exists), but it is probably unlikely. In the Bible, God commonly communicated through visions and dreams. Perhaps it is possible to communicate Him (probably not actually verbally but more symbolically). I would say that if He were to communicate with someone, it would probably be in an effort to command him or notify him of something extremely important. I seriously doubt He would just chat with us...

I dreamt I made a phone call, and predicted someone would answer or not answer. OMG how do I do it? :)

Be careful when chasing coincidence... it's easy to generalize a future that sort of turns out the way you predicted, especially when it is being piped in from the subconscious as a "metaphorical" image.

Having said that, practiced image streamers and lucid dreamers can get really good at predicting outcomes of things (this is what a solution to a problem is)... but it's not a supernatural power.

Ok, what about one of us trying it. Like in the LD look into or ask about the future of the next day or two and see what happens

a lot of people have had experiences where they have dreamt of something before it happened. I think that everyone might have this happen to them whether they remember the dream or not. But as for purposefully trying to see your future, i'm not sure how you would go about doing that in the first place.

also, just a bit of a warning: if you say anything about god or religion that's not in the religion section, you might just get eaten alive by some of the members on here.

actually.... you might just get eaten alive whether it's in the religion section or not :disconcerted:

anyways... just saying to be careful (not that I would eat you alive or anything tho :chuckle: i happen to believe in god too, but that's not up for discussion) :shakehead:

Begin to use it. You dreamt that you got arrested, knowing that sometimes they come true, and then it came true?

Use your dreams to prevent those things >_o

How many countless number of dreams have you had whether remembered or not where nothing did come true of them? And saying something will happen in the future gives you an infinite amount of time for it or something like it to happen.

I'd like to preface this post by saying that coming from a heavy science background, I'm inclined to not believe in the paranormal or the supernatural. However, certain experiences I'd had through lucid dreaming have given me cause for doubt:

One that sticks out in my mind, involved a dream I had about a year ago. It involved a DC claiming to be my brother, identifying himself as R2-D2. In the same dream, I shared a prison cell with a friend of mine, Aaron, who I haven't seen or spoken to in 6 years. Our prison guard was a replica of a man who plays a prison guard on Prisonbreak in season 1. After the dream I woke up and wrote it all down.

Over the next day, I noticed a few oddities. I was in the fruit and veg, and overheard someone refer to their own brother with the nickname, R2-D2. Later that day I was flicking through the channels on TV and came across an episode of Star Trek Voyager I'd never seen. A 'luck' would have it, the same actor from Prison Break was portraying a guest-star alien on Voyager. This piqued my interest slightly... Then the kicker, talking to my REAL brother later that day, he tells me that while he was out at a pub crawl on the other side of town last night, he ran into (none other than) my friend Aaron, who I have had no contact with in 6 years. Needless to say I performed about 15 reality checks on the spot to make sure I wasn't still asleep.

And while I'm at it, my brother has been using his lucid dreams to predict Aussie Rules Football tipping for the last 2 years, and he is very accurate (he never gets less than 6/8 every week). Although I'd attribute this to the power of the subconscious to calculate odds moreso than an ability to see the future.

A possible explanation
The only half-reasonable scientific explanation I can come up with to explain these oddities, is that by writing my dreams and dream signs into a journal, I elevate the nouns and pro-nouns of those dreams to my conscious and subconscious mind. As such, what my brain would normally filter out at the supermarket as white noise, it picks up on certain words it's already become familiar with that day and I hear it, when normally it would have been ignored.

Unfortunately this doesn't explain my random Officer Bellick sighting, or my brother running into a friend of mine randomly (I live in a city of 1.4 million people. Not small but not exactly huge either).

As for talking to your god - if you believe you can, you can. Does it make it any less special for you if you don't know it's real? This is the point where someone far more religious than I will tell you that's what your faith is for.

Alextanium, in my opinion, you're on the right track with your explanation.

I've always been amazed at how differently I can think in a dream. I make connections that never would have crossed my mind while awake. I can call up vivid memories of places and people that I had previously thought lost. When you are dreaming, your brain is not only interpreting and processing what you see, it is also generating it simultaneously.

I believe that the connections and coincidences you are referring to are always present in reality. I can't even begin to understand why or how they happen, but I've seen enough of them to know they are real. I think they are just a part of our world that we don't take notice of. I don't mean that we are oblivious. I mean that our waking mind is simply too limited to make the necessary connectiions and take notice. When we dreaming, we have access to a different set of memories, and a different type of thought. This type of thinking can make the fantastic connections that sometimes seem impossible.

When it comes to seeing the future, think of it this way. You can sit down right now, and make a list of everything you expect to happen, everything you are scared will happen, and everything you are going to make happen in the next couple years. If you are honest and well informed, you will probably be right about most of it. Nothing magic about it. You ar making a plan, settiing goals, ect.

Do this in a lucid dream, and you can actually witness the events you are predicting and planning. Not only that, but you have access to this higher level of thinking. It sounds like it could be an awesome way of coming to terms with your life, your future fears, and your predictions that are too scary to admit to yourself. I think its a great goal to try in a lucid dream, and a great reason to lucid dream.

I'm not a real religious person, but I am pretty spiritual. When it comes to God, I do know that everyone has their own concept of what and who God is. Just look at all the different religions out there. Dreams would be a great place to meet God. You have a relationship with God whether its based in reality or not. Its real in your mind, which is exactly where the dream is happening.

Basically, I believe that your dreams are a place where you ideas, thoughts, and beliefs can become real and tangible. This is what its all about, right?

When you place importance on your dreams, especially when you think they are an indicator of future events, you are subconsciously elevating the importance of the things in them so that you notice them everywhere. This is related to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. You may have experienced this when you learned a new word and then suddenly noticed it everywhere.

I see Scroll-x has things well in hand here.

The dreams that I have wrote down I believed to be the future, where nothing I would plan. Going to wal-mart to get a toothbrush is rediculious, and it was all the same as what I wrote down months before. The timing and meaning are completely crazy.