Crazy synchronicity between Lucid Dreams and Life Events

[imapdxpunk]

Hi there! I'm new on here, and decided to join today because i've been having the most intense experiences of my life lately. I don't know whether to act on any of these events or to just let them pass. For example, about a month or so ago I had a very lucid dream that I was traveling all over the United States in a small plane. One place I distinctly remember seeing on a map was West Virginia for some reason. Today I am posting this with heightened emotions, as my roomate informed me that he is leaving on a whim in September to travel to West Virginia. I felt a slight pull to go there, but maybe I am just experiencing future events? It's very odd and weird things that frighten me have been happening the past two years or so. There are so many things I want to say and get input on but i don't know what questions to ask or what to say. I guess I can start by sharing my most notable experience in the past two months. I had two lucid dreams separately in the same night during the same sleep period. The first lucid part I was climbing up my neighbors balcony to get to my third story apt. (which i actually did in march after drunkenly locking myself out). After struggling and slipping I finally got my hand above the railing and to my absolute shock, I saw and felt myself grabbing my hand and pulling me up. Directly after the initial shock of feeling and experiencing this, the dream quickly faded into a different scene/dream and i dont remember anything. Later on in the dream, I can remember having a party and it just suddenly was completely lucid and everyone was looking at me. I felt nervous, then they pointed at the sliding glass door and said, hey aren't you gonna help yourself out over there? Confused, I walked onto the balcony, and feeling strong deja vu i realized what was going on and that I was on the other side of the dream this time. I looked and saw myself with glasses and the old haircut i had when i was 15-16, but with the lip piercings i have currently. I was afraid to touch myself thinking something bad would happen to me/us but i realized i was the only one that could do it, so i pulled myself up and as we stood there, it faded again into un-memorable dreaming. I am having trouble figuring out what lucid dreams are. According to the little reading I've done on it, about all of my dreams that I remember are lucid. It feels like they've been getting more and more real. I.E I've been able to do things like find old address books that were lost and look up numbers that I lost and remember them upon waking. What exactly is a definition of a lucid dream? And does it really matter? Thank you for reading I look forward to conversing!

[MadMonkey]

Thats cool that you saved yourself like you were time traveling or something. Lucid dreaming is just realising that your dreaming while your in the dream. Anything esle like vividnes or even having control over the dream is not being lucid but they can be more vivid and its way beter to be able to control the dream.

[ruba]

Dude, that's the most amazing story I've read in the last few months on dreamviews! Especially the balcony story! it's even made me login again since weeks, just to say this well I doubt whether you truly understand the definition of Lucid Dreaming. As madMonkey said, it indeed is realizing that you're dreaming, regardless of the vividness, etc.

[Fonzythedog]

Yes, what the others said. My first (and only so far) lucid dream was pretty hazy and I don't remember many details. I remember stopping in my tracks and thinking 'Oh my god. I'm dreaming'. I then checked my hands and noticed they were weird. Then I woke up from excitement haha! But yes, that's a pretty amazing story. I've had Deja Vu moments like that too. I'd rather not go into them though, since they're quite personal hehe.

[Clyde Machine]

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of being aware within dreams, which allows you to take control of the dream's aspects if you so choose. This also gives you access to your waking-life memories and reasoning, meaning you can create goals in waking life and try to remember to do them in the lucid dream. That was a great story, the balcony story, and the thing about going to West Virginia is very cool, but I'd be willing to say it's just coincidence, and that you shouldn't go along with your roommate. Follow their updates when they get there though, so you'll know if something is going on that you might be able to link to the dream. If there are more "signs" pointing toward going to West Virginia with them, I'd say give it serious consideration; however, I would be very hesitant to act on a dream's signs, as dreams tend to be very....abstract and different, and taking everything that coincides with real life as a sign would be more than dangerous. Keep a skeptical lens on when looking at the links.

[OldMan]

Hi Imapdxpunk. Great story! Right - down to business. Coincidences are a fascinating area in multiple ways. One of those ways is coincidence awareness manipulation or 'false responsibility'. This is a technique used in some cults and cultish groups, as well as many traditional 'spiritual' systems in many different ways. It has some interesting, positive versions - such as omen diviniation, where that's used to create a sense of connection and significance with the world and things around you; and it has some quite disturbing uses, mostly in manipulating and controlling people. First of all, we are very selective in the information we notice about the world. And we're so good at doing that that we can take on board a set of ideas, such as Marxism or Fundamentalist Christianity, and then set in place conscious and unconscious percpetual filters which then control our awareness of the world around us, making our beliefs seem self evidently true and reflected in the world. A Marxist sees evidence of Marxist ideas everywhere. A Fundamentalist Christian likewise 'experiences' the truth of their beliefs all around them. This phenomena is so strong that it creates something which I'm sure you're aware of, as we all are - the person who doesn't just think you're wrong, they think you're stupid, mad, evil, etc. for not accepting what they say. That happens because to them, what they believe isn't just a belief, it's a self evident truth, right in front of them, all around them, and anyone would have to be mad or evilnot to see it/acknowledge it to! 'Coincidence sensitivity' is a related phenomenon. First off, coincidences are actually statistically necessary and predicted in any chaotic system. It couldn't be chaotice without them. Imagine throwing up a hundred coins and not being able to draw a straight line between three or four coins - that would be an unbelievable coincidence. Far from being evidence of external influence on our chaotic world, coincidences are a mathematically essential aspect of it. NO coincidences would, ironically, be far more of an indicator that we live in some kind of controlled or designed world subject to external controls. What this is getting at is that coincidences happen all around us, all the time. But we can become much more sensitive to noticing them. Especially when people begin thinking about things - say, coincidences - they'll notice them more and more. But even when people just begin thinking more deeply anyway, about anything, we, as amazing cognitive beings, tend to 'bounce' off things we see, read, hear etc. For example, you see something on Star Trek and that connects with something you're pondering, and we see that as a deep coincidence, and apply significance to it, when in fact, it's part of how our minds work - sometimes called 'ambient relevance' - just bouncing ideas off whatever is around. Sometimes that is manipulated. If someone joins a group which involves pondering their ideas, then just the fact that we are pondering statistically causes more incidents of 'ambient relevance'. I've seen myself unscrupulous people use this phenomenon to make the person it's happening to believe that it's not just a psychological phenomenon, but due to the 'power of the group's belief' - for example, a Marxist might say you are acheiving revolutionary consciousness, or spiritual cults might say you are becoming more aware of the truth, and the power of their teaching is such that it 'does mad things to your awareness'. And that'spart of a wider range of techniques used to make a recruit think that these ''spiritual'' guides have some kind of power over events in your life. And it does feelvery real when it happens to you like that. And we can also do it to ourselves. We can make ourselves coincidence sensitive, and we can make ourselves think that it is due to something else, such as magic of some kind. I don't dismiss that - I just say that there are other ways of looking at it, such as the fact that coincidences, even amazing coincidences are happening all the time as statistical essentials in chaotic systems, but we're not always sensitive to them for various reasons. Having said that, some coincidences are astonishing - and even some series of coincidences can be astonishing coincidences! So it comes down to what significance you ascribe to them. But significant coincidences, mathematically, HAVE to happen - and they have to happen to someone. And if that someone is you, it's the observer paradox - if it happens to you, it seems abillion to one against, even though it was actually a trillion to one that that WOULD happen - to someone. With dreams, there's other dimensions in that we can 'deep read' them - that is, see significance which isn't necessarily there until we pair it up with something else that happens. Again, we can be very selective in how we do that, 'managing' coincidnece occurence quite neatly and effectively. And our dreams can also process a lot fo subconscious predictions about the world, like a computer- mnay of which weren't necessarily all that hard to predict, actually, given a computer as powerful as the human brain.