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Originally Posted by Showtime
In all "its" glory =] great dream IMO |
HAHA, thanks showtime. That's pretty much dead on.
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Originally Posted by Periwinkle
I don't get cool dreams but apparantly I can see the future in them. Everything I dream tends to become a reality (a moment where i go hey dejavu?)
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This is actually a pretty common phenomenon among males (Not the kind of deja vu where you go "I've done almost this same thing before" but rather the kind where you go "I've experienced this before, even though it is happening now.") There are no good explanations for this. Some scientists have called it momentary disruptions in the temporal cortex which cause us to think that we have experienced it before with absolute certainty. This is bunk IMO, as I can occasionally clearly remember the dream in which I experienced it. The 2 most memorable occasions are when I dreamed that I was sitting around a table with a dozen other people in my local gaming store and we were having some sort of communal discussion. The weirdest things were that there was no table that big in the store and I didn't know most of the people around the table. About a half a year later I had let the dream go as an anomaly.
But, in the meantime, I joined a huge D&D game at the store with 14 people in it. To play we pushed together a bunch of tables in the corner of the store and one evening I looked up while we were discussing something for the game and I realized that my dream was coming to pass. I did not know most of these people half a year ago, the store had changed appropriately, 2 people were absent. Even more than that, the experience was the exact same down to my heartbeat, visual input (what my eyes could see), and breathing. It's like looking into an infinite mirror. It lasted about 5 seconds, then the feeling passed as that was all I remembered from the dream.
The most potent occurrence was in elementary school. Similar deja vu experience but lasted hours. I told my friend as we were walking to school about the dream I had that felt so real. I told him what happened and down to the finest detail it all happened that morning. It was kind of disappointing because I 'remembered' that we would be out of chocolate milk that day.
Bizarre stuff, to say the least. Now that I've got my bachelor's in psychology I can offer a couple explanations as to why you can't remember your dreams all the time and why they often seem to slip through your grasping mental fingers.
Behavioral (the kind of psychology that's actually a science) explanation: Associations are formed between stimuli and those associations are what you remember. So, when you see something familiar, you remember past actions in which that stimuli was present. Example: You see a calculator, you are likely to remember math class. In dreams which you experience that which hasn't yet occurred, there are no relevant stimuli because you are not actively engaging in any action, therefore no association is made. You are merely an observer with the best seat in the house. When you wake, those stimuli in your dreams aren't remembered because they aren't relevant, just like if I was to ask you what you had for breakfast a week or a year ago. If it isn't important, the mind doesn't process it and it is simply stored with the other irrelevant stimuli. Similarly for normal dreams, no useful information is being gathered about the world (in terms of associations and the reinforcement of behavior), so the memory isn't processed for the organism to consider for purposes of reinforcement.
The deja vu hits when you receive the exact same stimuli as you did in the dream.
Cognitive (pseudo-science) explanation: Memories function as a cognitive web, with similar things being linked to similar things and memory flows along those links. Things in your dreams usually lack links to anything else in your web, and so can't be accessed until the links being formed by living through your life finally connect to it. Instant deja vu.
Mind you, I have no idea what causes the dreams in the first place. The mind is still a largely unmapped place. It's even thought that we may remember everything and simply lose the information in the retrieval stage, like scooping water with your fingers. No one knows what causes dreams for sure. If what me, Periwinkle, and many others are experiencing (including some of my high school friends) is actually happening, it has incredible implications for both the study of the mind and physics. It may even give us insight into the nature of time itself.
At current, however, none of this is testable. So none can say for sure one way or the other. Seeing as how we can't use it for any useful purposes at the moment, it lies in the realm of odd observations and we must move on to things we can actually use to help people. It's something I'd like to study one day should the technology become available in my lifetime.