Dreaming the trivial future

I do something similar, Rod, but I don't think it's time related. I fly. Not very far, mind you, just short distances, like across the kitchen. Do you do that as well? What does this phenomenon, if real, suggest about the nature of space-time?

Rod, do you know that this phrase is usually considered to be Voltaire's rejection of Christianity (or at least the Church as he knew it in France)? That may be how you became familiar with it. I can't account for the coincidence though.

The only blogs I read comments on yesterday were yours and Volokh. MAYBE the phrase was in the NYTimes, but it was definitely around yesterday, because it's in my babelfish history.

In high school (in the early nineties) I had a recurring dream of standing in front of my parents house, everything covered in gray dust, and I was the only person left in the neighborhood. I was an anxiety-fileld child, so nuclear war, I wondered? It didn't make sense until I returned to my parents' neighborhood--in New Orleans--in October 2005. I was the only person around for blocks, maybe miles, and everything was still covered in dried gray mud and marsh grass from the storm. Other similar coincidences have occurred as well, but that's the most memorable. If only I could use this power for good!

On the topic of your question about dreams and time, you might look at J. W. Dunne's Am Experiment with Time. I've read only some of it so far and am not endorsing its conclusions, but for what it's worth, it is a book that quite interested C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. For documentation of their interest, see the memoir collection We Remember C. S. Lewis (ed. David Graham) and Verlyn Flieger's study of Tolkien, A Question of Time. I believe Dunne is mentioned in Lewis's That Hideous Strength, where the character Jane Studdock has "psychic" dreams.

Well, the only thing like this that happens to me is that ever since I was a little girl (I'm 54 now!), from time to time I have a recurring dream that a tornado is bearing down on my house and I am trying to get my family into the basement and things are going so slow while the tornado bears down on us. When I was younger, it was me and my parents and sisters in the dream, now it's husband and kids, and always the house I am living in at the time. I live in Virginia and tornadoes are pretty rare here. I attribute this dream to 2 things: even though tornadoes are rare here, we did have one when I was in 6th grade and I was on the school bus at the time and it got so black we couldn't see and the bus had to stop because of the wind. Then we found a tree blocking the road, when we got home found that tornado had ripped part of porch roof off and knocked down chimney. Also, when I was a kid, The Wizard of Oz was on the TV every freaking spring and I watched it at least a dozen times.

My husband, however, had occasionaly had precognitive dreams. He dreamed about someone shooting Reagan 2 months before it happened and about the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. This scared the crap out of him and he asked God to take this "gift" away and he hasn't had anymore precognitive dreams, not lately anyway.

This post seems familiar for some reason: http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/08/bad-dream.html

I wrote you at the time about Dunne's book; see here for a summary: http://thinkingculture.blogspot.com/2004/11/experiment-with-time-by-jw-dunne.html

Then again, maybe there's more to it:

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness."

- Miller from Repo Man again:

I have this feeling that I was here before...only this computer and desk were not here, neither were these walls....and there was sand as far as the eye could see....

Mine was even more trivial, but just as odd. I woke up with an image of an apple, ham and cheese sandwich in my head. I had never heard of such a thing and thought I had perhaps invented something new. Later that day, we went to a restaurant for lunch to celebrate a coworker leaving our company.

On the menu, there was a "Vermont Sandwich," which was *gasp* an apple, ham, and cheese sandwich. Even weirder was that our departing coworker was from Vermont. I actually ordered something else, though.

OK, here's something weird. I've been having trouble sleeping these past few nights, with non-specific anxiety dreams keeping me awake. My mother and I both have what I suppose is a very mild sort of "gift" for being open to the numinous. Completely unsought, I should say; it's just that we both manage to intuit things, and "know" things spiritually, and on rare occasions have experiences I can only call mystical. Nothing really dramatic; it's just something we've noticed.

After that odd synchronicity this morning, I thought to call my mom to see if she'd had any weird dreams. When I got her on the phone this morning, she blurted out that she'd had a terrible nightmare last night, that involved me being in a city, and in danger. She couldn't remember details, but she said it was so anxiety-producing it woke her up, and the dream continued when she went back to sleep. She said it ended with me being okay, but the dream really rattled her.

Ugh.

When I got her on the phone this morning, she blurted out that she'd had a terrible nightmare last night, that involved me being in a city, and in danger. She couldn't remember details, but she said it was so anxiety-producing it woke her up, and the dream continued when she went back to sleep. She said it ended with me being okay, but the dream really rattled her.

I assume she's aware you lived in New York about 7 years ago, right...?

Oops - forgot the translation of the verse:

The universe confounds me and I can't imagine
that this clockworks exists and has no clockmaker.

Not the same thing, but I was at a meeting in the early 1990s in which the late Karla Turner spoke (at City Place).

She was a former UNT English professor who had experienced alien abduction (or whatever the phenomenon is), and had become somewhat of an authority and/or known researcher on the subject.

At this meeting, she or someone during the Q&A session mentioned or asked something about the digital clock flashing "11:11" and/or regularly waking up at "11:11." When the person said this, several of the people in the audience (who I assume were also "abductees") became visibly shaken, because they all had experienced it. It was totally unplanned and very eerie to me.

I've had them since childhood, too. Like Rod, nothing massively important, just mundane stuff. Or really weird. When I was a kid, there was a lady who worked the sign in desk at the YMCA, handing out towels and stuff, and I had a dream about her one night in which she said, "I like my mustard on the bottom slice." Several years later, I got to work during their clean-up week in August and when we broke for lunch one day, I walked into the break room to hear this very lady tell a co-worker, "I like my mustard on the bottom slice." What It All Meant was beyond me, to say the least.

I believe I've read that one of (perhaps "the") purpose of dreaming is sorting and storing information. In the process of sorting our brains compare memories for significance - potentially resulting in strange dreams. It is likely that our brains contain enough information to predict a high probability for some near-future event, but that our conscious minds haven't thought of it. This might be especially the case for trivial things, which we tend to not waste awake time on.

Marty, your husband's experiences sound similar to mine, only mine involved the Columbia, not the Challenger. Like your husband, I prayed for mine to go away, and they have, for the most part.

As for the weird dream thing, I think most people have experienced something like that, though I'm not sure if these experiences are truly paranormal or merely some demonstration of the brain's capacity for action which we don't yet understand. For instance, the dream of a person we haven't seen in a while right before we run into them--how do we know that our minds aren't aware on some level that this person is someone we generally see at intervals of greater than 365 days and less than, say, 500 days? So somewhere after the 365 day mark our subconscious mind triggers dreams about that person which increase both in frequency and in our ability to remember the dream until we actually do run into the person--at which point our dreams seem quite mystical to us.

The oddest, and funniest, experience I ever had involved a piano I bought in high school--I only played by ear, then, and wanted to teach myself some basics of reading music (which never got very far, unfortunately). Before I'd really begun practicing, I dreamed one night that I got out of bed, went down to the piano, and played the melody to "Yesterday" perfectly. In the morning when I woke up, I was curious enough to try it, and sure enough when I put my hands on the keys and pressed them in the same order I'd dreamed them, the melody was "Yesterday," a song I didn't know and didn't even like.

What was even weirder was years later when a radio announcer said, "Coming up next--this "Beatles" song was written when its composer dreamed the whole melody one night, and got up and wrote the song the next day!" Sure enough, it was "Yesterday." Which only proves that our subconscious minds are fond of mediocre music, alas. :)

Ted, flying in dream means that person is growing, it happens usually to young people, i used to fly very often when i was young. (also on short distance)

About coinsidences. The most recent which i can remeber was a dream about St. Petersburg. This city has been special to me untill very recent times, to such degree that just anyone's talking about it made me nervous and jealous. I often saw it in dreams, (most often before my first and last visit there), dreams were usally fantastic, with strange buildings and strange people, once i even saw there my late granddad living in a halfruined wooden barn by railways. Granddad looked happy as he always was and treated me with a cup of cocoa.

This winter i saw Petersburg again after a long break. Me and unknown girl in long skirt were driving in roofless jeep along tidy streets, sometimes old fashioned trams passed by, i thought the scenery was like Moscow in 30ies or 50ies as i imagine it, the weather was like in early June, the girl near me was very young, sophisticated and intelligent as i always imagined citizens St. Petrsburg. She had a task to show me something. I felt near her like a moronic kid, was embarrased to say someting. We passed by streets very fast, in some yards were big red flowers of unknown sort and i said: It's February! In Moscow at this time is usually snow. Even if there is no snow flowers don't blossom anyway. She was silent for some time and then graciously repiled: it's St. Petersburg, you see...
We arrived to Dvortsovaya Square, on one side was Hermitage 3 times bigger than in reality, on the opposite was Isaakiy Cathedral painted light blue, narrower taller than real and generally looking not like itself. The girl crossed herself and prepared to enter, i thought if i cross myself and bow like everyone that girl would never guess that i'm not christened, then i thought that it doesn't interest her, but i crossed myself, then passing threshold i stumbled and thought: what for i decided to pretend? I decided to stay at the square to wait untill she comes out, and meanwhile studied the square - on the top of Hermitage were bronze statues size of a house each, and on the tops of drainpipes were hanging bunches of icicles which were also of enormous size and looked rather sinister, but beautiful. And i started to think: It's all Roman, everything is like in Rome here. It is Rome! Rome. And woke up repeating that.

The following day i had a boring minute and googled in the net some old articles of one writer, and in the one i found there was a description of his trip to St. Peterburg! You couldn't have guessed by title. In that article he said that some places of St.Petrburg reminded him Rome. And i thought what a surprise to read it today :)

Oh, no doubt, but as Jung saw, there are coincidences, and there are *meaningful* coincidences.

No offense, Rod, but that's semantic nonsense. A coincidence, by definition, cannot be meaningful. Either something "just happened" or it was planned. There's no in-between; i.e., no mean, unless you yourself make it one.

A friend who reads this blog just e-mailed to say that one night he had a bad dream in which the vice president shot somebody. The next day came the news that Vice President Cheney had been in a hunting accident in Texas, and had accidentally shot somebody. That's not a coincidence; that's a meaningful coincidence.

Not shocking. Cheney is portrayed as a vicious SOB. He likes to play into the image. So your friend dreamed of him capping someone. He could have just as likely dreamed of Cheney beating someone to death with a bat. It just turned out that the next day it happened similarly to what had been dreamed, so the link was reinforced in your friend's mind. I'm sure he, like all of us, dreamed of a gozillion other things lacking real-world correspondents, so they've been forgotten.

But Jung believed that when you had a couple of these meaningful coincidences, which he called synchronicities, occurring close to each other that you should pay attention to your dreams, because they are about to disclose something meaningful to you.

If Jung had said you can use them as inspirations or intuitions for understanding the world, I wouldn't disagree. If he's saying this is some evidence of the supernatural, well, he's full of it--which I understand was often the case.

Reminds me of my favorite Woody Allen Nostradamus prophecy: "In the New World, there will be a place called 'California' and a man named Joseph Cotton will live there."

Spooky!

Time to call in that most eminent of *eminences grises* among pre-1945 Tory anarchists, Albert Jay Nock, from, of course, The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, a book "too good to be true" in the words of one critic, to which will nod in accord all for whom the book has proved the transforming where-have-you-been-all-my-life companion of a lifetime:

"My father told me of a strange incident in his mother's life
which made such an impression on him that he remembered it
clearly, although he was no more than five or six years old
when it happened. While he was playing in the garden with
two of his sisters a very large grey bird appeared, circled
slowly two or three times overhead, and settled on one of the
window-sills in my grandmother's bedroom. My grandmother
came to the door at once, apparently in great distress, and said,
"Come in the house, children; your grandfather is dead." Some
weeks later (those being the days of sailing-ships) she got a
letter telling her that her father had indeed died in his home
in Staffordshire at precisely that hour. His illness was short, and
his death wholly unlooked-for; he was supposed to be in the
best of health. If my grandmother ever gave any account of
her sensations at the moment, my father did not know of it;
no doubt she did, but he was unlikely to have heard anything
about it, since such matters were not much discussed in the
hearing of children. The odd thing is that my grandmother
would be the last person whom one would associate with any
metapsychical or superpsychical or extrapsychical (or whatever
the right word may be) experience. She was preeminently
placid and wholesome of mind, abounding in the unimaginative
good sense so typically English of the Midlands, and one would
say quite insensitive to impressions originating at all outside
the commonplace."

mises.org/books/nockmemoirs.pdf
p. 10

>

Richard, I seem to remember a Brady Bunch episode to that effect once.... ;)

I also note that several people on this thread - including Rod - have made a point to note the apparent "randomness" of this supposed phenomenon. I humbly suggest that therein lies the answer to this "mystery" - they're entirely random coincidences, and have no intrinsic meaning other than what one decides to ascribe to them.

How's that for reductionist and materialistic?

I'm so glad you asked!

My night hours overflow with dreams.... it's like going to a double feature at the movies every night, or curling up with a book of short stories. My dreams are always vivid, creative and complex. It's as if my dreams transport me to a parallel universe for the night. The kooky thing is that when my dreams pull from the "real" events and people of my daily life, they usually reflect an OPPOSITE plot of my "real", waking hours --- so my parallel universe is also my "bizarro world". If in my daily reality, my dreams work things out to be a "success", then in my dreams they'll be a "failure". If I dream about someone who loves me, in the dream they hate me. I also will find myself laughing when I should be crying - and visa versa. I often wake myself up laughing or crying at the oddest things.

I don't know what all this could possibly mean, and after decades of dreaming like this I've given up trying to figure it out. During my waking hours I live a reasonably stable, healthy, and happy life, in a reasonably stable, happy and healthy family - so I guess my dreams really don't "mean" anything.... (like my husband often likes to remind me).

Miss Mary

I completely agree that *Most* of the time dreams are defragmenters.
But rarely, every so often, a different type of dream does take place. And those are the type I'm talking about.

But I wasn't just talking dreams. I'm jumping from the completely rational to what we at my Church call 'The Life in the Spirit'. There are actual Gifts of the Holy Spirit - like Word of Knowledge that fall in line with some of the occurrences mentioned above.

Sometimes I've known someone is about to die. I guess this is common among some nurses. They recognize signs, etc. But with no real medical training, I'm not sure I can attribute it to that. And it's not as if I want to know. I see someone in passing. And Just a really strong thought comes my way.

I can ignore it but it's there. I think as a Christian I do believe there are metaphysical realities that we have yet to or may never grasp til we get to heaven. And to me There's no denying the power of the Holy Spirit. I've seen people truly miraculously healed through prayer. As yet to be proven doesn't make something that's true, less true.

The one thing that stood out to me in these posts was someone mentioning Rod's words were also the words of someone as they were denouncing Christianity. Was that right/accurate?

If so, I'd just throw in the standard caution from the NT to test all spirits. That those from God can say "Jesus Christ is Lord". All others should be rebuked. There's a reason why God's Spirit is called the *Holy* Spirit. It's because there are others. Nothing at all to be afraid of, God's won the victory. But since this blog is a fairly powerful witness to the Gospel. It's always good to be wide awake to understanding these teachings and recognize the whole concept of spiritual warfare. And to test. God's Blessings. and.

pax christi

The way I remember the meaning of ecraser is the wonderfully Gallic term for roadkill, "ecrase' dans la rue." Dream Cafe used to have an elaborate version of a patty melt listed on its menu by that name . . .

Another weird dream phenomenon I used to have when I was younger was having dreams that I was not in. I mean, I *was* in the dream, but I was not myself.

I remember dreaming that I was an old Irish man walking home at sunset, past the pub. Another time I was a Portuguese sailor in what appeared to be the 1700's, and we were sailing through the South Pacific in search of a place called the "Sandwich Islands". Later I found out that was the name Captain Cook had given what are now the Hawaiian Islands. My other 18th-century dream was that I was a young woman who found my husband out in the fields, apparently murdered. I can still remember the overwhelming grief and loss of that dream. Another time I was a young Scandinavian or German girl; I was braiding my long blonde hair and putting it up in a hairstyle of long braids wrapped around my head, in a whitewashed room with an oval mirror. There was another one involving being at a formal party of some sort in Philadelphia on a cold, clear winter night.

Most of these dreams occurred from ages nine or ten until fourteen or so, then they pretty much stopped. Yet I can still recall them as clearly and vividly as if I just woke up from them.

I don't believe in reincarnation or anything, but it was rather weird to have so many dreams like that. My husband says it is evidence that I was a nerdy weird kid ;) Has anyone else had dreams in which they were someone totally different than themselves?

Three weeks ago or so, I had gotten up a little earlier than usual and went to the kitchen to start breakfast.

I started with coffee, but as I reached for the coffeepot a really odd thought occurred to me: "There's a cockroach in the coffee-maker." And the thought was just as plain as could be -- any more clear and I would've actually heard the words out loud.

And so I gingerly opened the lid, and sure enough a little light-brown cockroach was right there, plain as could be. (I know, I know -- Ewww, squared.)

Now there was no way I could have seen the cockroach without opening the lid. And the cockroach was very small and completely silent. And, I'm definitely NOT in the habit of seeing cockroaches in my coffeemaker.

But there he was, and I am absolutely positive that there was something freaky going on with my consciousness.

that if all other trades resembled it, there would soon be no carried them from his workhouse to his shop, he must have valued