Do you believe in prophetic dreams and visions and such?

[GreenPartyVoter]

I do. I had one experience while riding to town one day that something very bad was going to happen. A few miles down the road I witnessed a man who failed to slow his car down at a blinking amber light and crashed head-on into a truck. I can still see the way his head whipped up against the windshield, leaving a monstrous crack in it.

When we were awaiting the outcome of the recounts of the 2000 (s)election, I was overtaken by a certainty that if ** took office we would see the worst war we'd ever known. (I do not know if 'we' was Americans and the war was a civil one, or if it meant humanity in general and nukes.)

Then recently I had a dream that I was looking at some contemporary American coins as though they were relics of the Roman empire; I was filled with a sense of awe at touching something from so long ago left over from a crumbled civilization.



Maybe it's all the product of a very busy imagination.. maybe some of it is true. I dunno. But they are very strange experiences either way.

[ZombieNixon]

1. I have to believe in them. I have them.

Unfortunately, they're also completely useless. I have dreams about having a conversation in class about hockey rules. Two days later, the conversation happens. I've had dreams of running into a problem with the computer game I'm coding. The next week, the problem crops up.

Never have I had a prophetic dream that could make the slightest difference to anyone's life. :shrug:

Oh, I also get deja vu about having deja vu. That's not normal, is it?

[lakemonster11]

17. That sort of thing happens to me.

I had a recurring dream/vision when I was little about a boy throwing a translucent block at me across one of those kidney-shaped tables. It finally happened in third grade. It was really kind of a let-down after all those years of build-up. :eyes:

[EstimatedProphet]

42. I have those too, or did in my younger days

[GreenPartyVoter]

45. Well, that explains your username. :^D

[Shine]

2. Yes I do. Not everything can be explained, although we certainly try,

don't we? ;)

I think we have to trust that we are surrounded by Mystery and some things are not meant to be understood, just EXPERIENCED.

[skygazer]

3. I keep an open mind about such things

There are plenty of hard-headed, logical people who have had experiences they can't explain. A friend of mine at work who is the last person one would think of as superstitious was quite shaken when his recently deceased mother appeared to him and told him she was all right now. He still doesn't really believe in ghosts or spirits but he has no explanation for what happened and simply accepts it at face value.

I had a dream when I was a teenager about an acquaintance being shot in the head, only to find out the next day that he had been at about the time I was dreaming of it. Coincidence? I don't know but I don't discount the possibility that I somehow sensed it.

[LeftyMom]

4. I prefer a rational and ordered universe without prophetic dreams and

similar notions, but about six months ago I had a dream that made no sense at the time. It involved details I didn't know at the time and at the time I dismissed some aspects of the dream as just surreal dream stuff, but it all made perfect sense a few months later. Everything in the dream happened and there was no way I could have predicted it all, as some aspects of the dream involved facts I didn't know and had no way of finding out at the time.

It's not the first time that sort of thing has happened to me, although usually the things I dream about htat happen later are more mundane. Frankly, I don't really care for the idea but I guess I'm stuck with it until I get a better explanation.

[LynzM]

5. Yes.

I think there's a lot out there that we can't understand, especially about how our brains work. I've had dreams of situations that later happen (memories? triggered by audio cues, generally), and Briarius has had several dreams of situations that occurred later, one of which I was in, before he ever met me. Wild :)

[RebelOne]

6. Yes, I have had many events related to dreams that have happened.

And I'm an atheist. But I do believe in ESP.

[Whoa_Nelly]

7. Yes

Precognition through dreams or out-of-the-blue visions have come true. Many who know me well, also know this to be true because when this happens to me, I tell someone to document the precognitive event.

This has been happening to me all my life.

[havocmom]

9. You can 'feel' which dreams you need to share for documentation

can't you? We know, sometimes, and feel the need to tell so it gets verified later. Sometimes we just know the dreams that are precognative.

I do it. My mom did it. My daughter does it.

Lots of other stuff, and usually in clusters?

[Whoa_Nelly]

10. Those types of dreams have a different quality to them

The colors, smells, touch of people and/or things, the voices, the sounds....everything...has a different clarity to them. That's how I can tell.

[havocmom]

11. Cool!

You have a PM

[Heddi]

13. I'm totally the same way

I don't dream about horrible stuff happening, but one night I dreamt my husband got a speeding ticket. The next morning when I woke up, I told him that I dreamt he got a ticket and to drive safe that day, and about 5 hours later he got a $200 ticket for doing 80 in a 70mph zone.

Starting a few years ago, I started having very dismal dreams about one of our cats, and I just had this feeling in all of my dreams that she was going to die before our other cat. In August 2004 she was diagnosed with cancer and died that December. Of course that's not necessarly a "prophetic" dream, but it was this feeling...very strong feeling.

Around July of 2004, we lived in Seattle, and the bus I took home drove right by the base of our apartment building and stopped on the other side. Generally we'd always park in the same space and that June, when I was on the bus and passed the apartment, I had a compulsion--absolute COMPUSLION to look out the window at our car because I had a feeling that there was something I had to see there. In late June, someone backed into our car and smashed the front--I saw it as the bus passed by. Again, not a prophetic dream, but such a strong feeling.

My husband has instructed me to inform him any time I have one of my "weird dreams" as he calls them. I've been studying all day and can't think of other examples...but there have been ones.

Like you said down thread--you know when it's a "real" dream vs. a "vision" dream because, at least in my experience, the "vision" dreams have a reality that normal dreams don't. For me, even realistic dreams have that weird, dream-like quality about them. For the 'visions', it's clear. THere's a reality there. It's not a goofy situation where I'm riding in a car, then that turns into a motorcycle, then I'm on the ferris wheel...rather, I'm sitting in the car, my husband is driving and he gets pulled over beside a mountain---just as it happened later that day.

The first one I had was in 2nd grade. I had dreamt that my friends and I were in the playground during PE and some kids were throwing rocks at cars and I said "Don't do that, you'll get in trouble" and the one kid said "Who's gonna tell? YOU??". The next day the exact scenario happened. Same kids. Same cars. Same rocks. I've had people tell me that it was something I created in my mind that day as it was happening, but I specifically remember dreaming it and thinking how odd it was to dream about other kids throwing rocks at cars. Again, the clarity and reality of it has stuck with me all these many years later.

My mom has the "ability" as well. We're somewhat telepathic with each other as well...

---

On edit---there was a time a few years ago when every time I went to the car, I had this compulsion to check the tires because I knew I was going to have a flat. Every day, several times a day i'd check the tires. No dice. Then I went to school one day, was late leaving class and didn't check (even though everything in my body told me to). I got about 2 miles down the road and realized the car was driving really funny. Pulled into a lot and whammo. FLat tire.

The only word I can describe it as is a compulsion. Everything inside of me tells me "check the cat" or "look at the tires" or "check the car on the way home" and it usually begins a few weeks before the actual event happens. I've never had a "compulsive" thought about something that didn't manifest itself. And that's not selective judgement or memory. I'm very aware of the "gut" feeling and this goes beyond "is this a good/bad idea" but "I must do this NOW". It's odd. It's always had a purpose, or something.

[bridgit]

8. very much so...

:thumbsup:

[u4ic]

12. Yes

I've had prophetic dreams; one even told of a very unusual death - I knew the place, I knew how...a truck running into a snowbank - I just didn't know who. I found out a day later, when my neighbour's son was killed by a truck....while playing on a snowbank.

Some seemed to mean nothing, such as dreaming of a particular building, and then passing by it weeks later.

I've also had dreams that were so incredibly real...not prophetic, just more lucid I guess you'd call it...where the sights, sounds and smells are as strong and vivid as in my waking life.

I've also had a few deceased people visit in my dreams.

I find my dream life much more interesting than my waking one!

[Blue_Roses]

14. Yes!

very much so and my dreams (sleeping) scare me sometimes, 'cause they often come true.

I strongly believe in this ability.

[RevCheesehead]

15. I have the ability to sense when a person is about to die.

There's a bright light, a "presence" in the room. I usually sense it when praying with the person or family. This happened to me last Friday at the hospital. We prayed before going into the ICU, and when we got in there, learned that he had died just a few minutes before we arrived.

It doesn't happen every time - but it does whenever the family needed to know that "all is well."

I call it Holy Spirit.

[havocmom]

26. That had to be a comfort, to sense the presence like that

I would give it a different handle ;) but I know what you mean.

[GreenPartyVoter]

27. Wow! :^) Did I ever tell you about my visit to heaven?

[RevCheesehead]

29. no, you haven't.

I'm pretty sure I'd remember that. O8)

[GreenPartyVoter]

32. Well I had this dream.. in fact the only way I knew it was a dream was

the fact that at the end I saw my friend Becky perusing bolts of exquisite Indian print cloth in a store somewhere. Never did figure out the importance of that. :P

Anyway, in my dream I was running down the field behind my parents' house and I felt two invisible beings on either side of me. Not physically felt but just had a sense that they were there. They kept telling me to "Jump!, Jump!" but I didn't understand what they meant. So one got in front of me and the other behind me and each one pushed and pulled til my soul was ripped from my body. What a sensation that was! It was both instantaneous and eternal; and while it didn't hurt exactly it was very uncomfortable, like nails on a blackboard to the power of infinity.

Then the awful feeling stopped and the field and beings were gone. All around me was blackness except for a beautiful magenta light. It looked like a nebula from space except there were no stars visible. And then the next thing I knew I was part of the nebula and it was part of me. Or rather I should say "they" were. I was still an individual and thought of myself as such but I was also connected to everyone else in the cloud. I couldn't tell where I stopped and they began.

And it was just a lovely peaceful, contented feeling I had to be there. No raptures or ecstacy, I'm afraid, but definitely a sweet feeling none-the-less. (My theory is that this is one of the reasons why people reincarnate, aside from having to work out some issues, is that we can only experience certain emotions and sensations while in physical form. Then again, maybe that wasn't heaven but merely its waiting room or purgatory. I didn't stay there long enough to find out the whole story.)

[RevCheesehead]

34. wow - what a cool experience!

Those kind of dreams, visions, or whatever can really offer people great comfort, especially when death is near. Did you have this dream before, or after your mom died?

Thank you for sharing it with me.

[GreenPartyVoter]

37. Oh I had the dream waaaaay back when I was in college. but yes it has

offered me some comfort whenever I lose loved ones. I think that experience has a lot to do with why I have given up believing in Hell and looking at reincarnation, purgatory, and restorative universalism as an alternative to an Angry Father sitting in judgement over people and throwing away the ones He doesn't like.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

36. My mother experienced that at her mother's deathbed.

She said she felt my grandmother's "warmth" ascend to the ceiling at the moment of death.

[RevCheesehead]

38. Yes - a very bright, warm presence....

like the clouds parted, and the sun entered the room, filling it with light and warmth. Very, very peaceful.

[GreenPartyVoter]

40. My dad did not experience that, but he did see the light go out of

my mother's eyes and knew she was gone. I wish that he could have experienced that warm peacefulness but I think even if it was going on at the time he was too distraught to notice it.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

16. yes i do

i always have nightmares before something bad happens

[leftofthedial]

18. I've had seven or eight

they are always about minor, emotionally neutral, but evocative little slices of life that end up happening following a major life event. The dreams are usually two years to six months prior to the major event. I always remember them and often have that little piece of the dream more than once. I can't for the life of me figure out if there are enough clues in them to "warn" me of the major events they seem to be associated with.

Or maybe it's all just a trick my brain is playing on me.

:shrug:

[GoddessOfGuinness]

19. A few days before Ceausecu was deposed

I dreamed about starving children crying and chained to beds in Eastern Europe. It was a horribly vivid dream that made me wake up shaking, and stayed with me the rest of the day.

[DanCa]

20. Yes I do. I know people that had dreams come true.

Allthough I hope the wierd nightmares that I am having lately dont come true. I hate burrowing beetles.

[AlienGirl]

21. I have experienced things like that a bunch of times

Usually it's something utterly pointless, like the time I dreamed I was watching people on TV ski-jump into slushy pools of water and I thought that was really dumb, and that morning when I turned on the TV the Winter Olympics were on and people were ski-jumping into slushy pools of water.

Tucker

[XemaSab]

22. I dunno about prophetic dreams

But I think you can learn a LOT from dreams, even if the lesson only becomes clear later.

I can't explain this succinctly, but I had a dream once, the moral of which was that people who are friends 90% of the time and are enemies 10% of the time are ENEMIES.

A few years later I'd totally forgotten about the dream when SUDDENLY it came back to me at EXACTLY the right time for me to really use the lesson.

[UncleSepp]

23. I have had some, most of which were useless on the surface

My precognitive targeting is off. One of the strangest ones was dreaming about delivering my sister's cat's kittens, on the back porch of my mother's house, with the help of a friend named Scooter whom I hadn't seen in years. My sister lived in Texas, and my mom and I lived in Florida. Several months later, exactly that happened. What I had missed in the dream was that my old friend came back around again, and my sister moved back to Florida, taking her pregnant cat.

I have another dream that I'm curious to see what happens with it. When I first was considering moving to Seattle, I dreamed about a hotel on the water with a big ship next to it, and a weird warren of little shops with wooden ramps. Also in the dream was a structure on a breakwater sort of thing with tall hoppers, like for grain or for gravel. In the dream, there were little people everywhere. I was talking with one guy who was a little person from Indonesia, in a group of other little people, in part of this funny bunch of shops. Something happened in the dream that caused water to leap up out of where it usually was and go up onto the shore, and then the power and phones went out and the roads in and out of the city were blocked off. This Indonesian guy had a plan, and this group of us had to try to figure out what we were going to do.

After living here for a while, I can see that the hotel on the water is the Edgewater Hotel, near the cruise ship dock. I still don't know what the hoppers are for, but they're near the Edgewater. The funny little shops are the bottom floors of Pike Place Market. Water leaping out of where it is supposed to be could be caused by an earthquake under the Sound, and such an event could easily block off the roads in and out - either through shutting down the tunnel and the bridges for safety reasons, or for bad traffic, or who knows. The phones and power also could go out in the case of such an event, which wouldn't be strange either. My best friend told me after she got back from last year's LPA convention that the 2007 convention will be in Seattle - she has invited me to come with her. I think if the convention chooses the Edgewater for one of its hotels, I might go be somewhere else for the weekend ;-)

[lakemonster11]

24. As someone who lives in Seattle,

let me just say that that is terrifying.

:scared:

[UncleSepp]

28. It was the damndest thing to see that hotel

The places all seemed so strange to me that I thought they must symbolize something. It was funny to see that there really was a hotel hanging out over the water, and that there really was a twisty little maze of small shops like that.

Another odd thing was, when I was little - about three - my family moved to Colorado, to a suburb of Denver. I kept looking around at the mountains, looking for the big volcanos. I had this weird idea that someday I was going to live in a place where there were three volcanos nearby, that you could see on clear days, in a range of non volcanic mountains. I also thought I was going to live in a neighborhood where there were houses that all touched each other that had stores in the bottom and living quarters on top. I'd never seen anyplace like that, except maybe on Sesame Street. Now, I live in Capitol Hill, and that's just what it's like.

Probably the oddest thing about dreams is that I used to dream all the time about these tunnels underground that had little shops in them, and tile walls. The underground shops were somehow connected to other tunnels that were long and dark. I'd always assumed that was some kind of metaphor, also. One day I was in Berlin, and went into a subway/elevated rail station near Alexanderplatz. There was a section of pedestrian underpass, and there were my shops - near subway tunnels.

[wildhorses]

25. yes....have them all the time

do not wish to share details here and it happens so often to me that I have come to take it for granted...to the extent that one can take that kinda thing for granted...



it is a double edged sword

[SteppingRazor]

30. No. I believe in coincidence...

and the brain's tendency to make sense of things by organizing them into groups that they don't necessarily belong together in.

[realisticphish]

31. No

The bad feeling stuff... everyone has "bad feelings" about a day, or time. But most of the time, nothing happens, so we quickly forget them. However, when we have a bad feeling and something DOES happen, we always recall it.

And dreams about the future aren't neccessarily prophetic; your brain is just imagining the future. Anyway, in general, I just don't believe in prophecy, or psychic ability, or anything like that

[Maine Mary]

33. Have You Been Watching Dr Phil?

:shrug:

[GreenPartyVoter]

39. No, why? Has he been talking about this stuff lately?

[WritingIsMyReligion]

35. I'm pretty open-minded about such stuff.

I'm no prophet myself, but certainly other people can have "visions." I'm very prone to deja vu, though I do think there is a psychological explanation for that.

[Maine Mary]

43. Yup

Today's show.

[swag]

41. You mean like this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=1178297

[Merrick]

44. The Holographic Theory of the Universe postulates

that we are all small parts of a larger universe, all comprised of the same elements and in so being are analagous to one fragment of a broken mirror - where each miniscule piece contains all that reflect upon it, and even if our conscious minds have become alienated from nature and each other by the trivial, mundane aspects of our lives and modern society, our higher consciousness remains in tune and occasionally sends messages/warnings or whatever of things of gravity looming around the corner.

Ever notice how improbably often you'll be thinking of something or someone and have that thing or person suddenly pop up? Happens to me all the time...

And before anyone dismisses such theories as just post-modern pseudo science, it is grounded in and substantiated by prevailing theories intrinsic to the quantum model of the universe - that all is connected in ways our relatively feeble minds cant dicrectly observe. I'd recommend checking out Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe"

[GreenPartyVoter]

46. I will check out that book some time, thanks!

[Hugin]

47. Cool.

I've been interested in the "Many Universes" concept for years.
But, I hadn't heard of the "Holographic Universe" until this post.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[GreenPartyVoter]

48. When I was a kid I figured that existence is multi-faceted.. I often think

about my counterparts in other dimensions.. the one who died at birth from being an underweight baby, the one who perhaps met and married a different man than I am married to here, the one who never existed because my parents never met....

[Fox Mulder]

49. I have them.

I dream about some mundane even that's going to happen a day, two days, a week, or months in advance. Then when the event actually happens, I remember it from my dream.

Deja vu? :shrug: