Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

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> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside,

I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the elevator started to go into free fall and I was sort of floating above the floor of the elevator. When it hit the ground I woke up with a start - I remember thinking that it seemed unusually vivid. Went back to sleep and a few hours later the events of 9/11 were all over the news. It was a weird feeling. I've had dreams about earthquakes that happened hours later (even saw a map of the location in the dream), dreams about married friends getting a divorce that soon did (2 different couples), even a very quick dream about my mom dying... the night before she did (she had been ill, but she wasn't considered ill enough to be hospitalized, it was completely unexpected).

I don't know what to make of these dreams.

Yeah, me too. Many of us have had dreams that were strangely prophetic, powerful, or both. I often try to think of it as the subconsciousness of the pattern matching brain managing to piece together something that the waking mind missed or too busy or afraid to dig deeper into.

But of course, it cannot explain everything. Like you said, there are sometimes dreams preceding events that simply can't be expected or explained in anyway. Yet it happened. Maybe it is a selection bias and we tend to focus on those dreams that hit the mark and forgot all about those that didn't. But still, these dreams were always too vivid for me to forget and I often forget most dreams.

I can't help but think there might be something more to our dreams, even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it.

>> even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it.

"shouts it down" sounds like some rebeliousness or anger. Might want to figure out who that's for. ;-)

Well, who else but for me? I make a living by thinking analytically about technical matters with sound logics and clear evidence. But that part of me wants to think about stuff that is completely opposite of what I normally do. So they are mad at each other. Kinda schizophrenic, I know.

But that is just human, right? Frankly, I would be more afraid of someone who never argue or debate an idea within themselves than someone who does so occasionally.

I think they were just making a joke on the assumption that “shouts it down” was a typo for “shuts it down.”

I can relate somewhat to your comments. I suggest you may be describing what is called Synchronicity by Jung.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed my mind reading powers were happening in real time, experience of the moment only exists in my memory. So it is possible that my brain imagined that experience.

Maybe recording dreams on physical notes is the way to go to account for possible memory shenanigans.

Or indeed it could be that one can recall a dream that happened by chance to be analogous to a real event.

One does have to wonder if it is a case of us reconstructing the timeline after the fact. What we think as being the way it happened and how it actually did could be very different. But when it feels so real it can be hard to dismiss.

Semi related. I remember see someones story about how they would talk to god when on LSD, so one day they figured, get a note pad, ask what the meaning of life is and then write it down to study the next day.

They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." It felt so profound at the time but was probably meaningless.

> They did that and all they had written down was "Walls."

dude, that's deep

No but really, a lot of revelations I've had on trips, the extremely skeptic would disregard as nonsense, but I consider there's some sense there, only it comes from a different kind of lateral thinking and can get lost in translation.

If you think about it, even a single word, in your sober state of mind, carries huge amounts of information that we take for granted. If you shift those symbols around a bit, then you can have a single word like "walls" be the epic conclusion of a meaningful thread of ideas that you think is so obvious, you will be able to unpack later by just reading the word.

But while you were tripping, you're basically incapacitated precisely because you're devoting so much energy to following these symbolism labyrinths and then of course the trip is over, and the sober mind state has too many other background operations to worry about, so you can't "unpack" that meaning anymore.

Nah, one time I was startled by a phone ringing full seconds before it actually rang. The person I was around was startled by me reacting to it, because "nothing was happening", then the phone rang. Unless we both simultaneously falsely constructed that memory :) lol

You live for 700,000 hours. There's bound to be plenty of weird coincidences during your lifetime. You're not a psychic.

Human perception is not fully accounted for. My speakers used to crackle right before my cell would ring. Could be something like that. Just because you can't imagine that someone's account as being real doesn't make it not so.

No way? Damn, I had no idea I wasn't this thing I hadn't ever claimed to be! Huh.

Thank you very much for sharing this. Without going much into details, you are not alone with this - there are people that have the same abilities. It is scary sometimes, and rarely can be used beforehand. Maybe you and these who has this experience often, are wired differently, and are more tuned to the Universe's radio than the rest of us...

The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream, like no trousers or teeth falling out dreams. I've had it many times. It usually centres around a skyscraper and a lift shaft and the lift going higher or lower than it is supposed to.

My dreams have never coincided with any real-world events that I'm aware of. My dad has several stories about his dreams "coming true", though. I don't completely write it off as nonsense, but I do suspect there's a strong element of confirmation bias, some embellishment and the "broken clock being right twice a day" effect.

I find common recurring dreams really fascinating. I can understand the teeth falling out one as losing your teeth is a primal fear: you lose your teeth, you die. But no trousers, skyscrapers, lifts, school etc. are all learned cultural things and I wonder why so many people seem to place the same significance on them.

> The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream

Sure, I've had falling dreams before as most everyone has - for me those are usually lacking in context, I'm just falling - often I find those transform into flying dreams. This one was quite unique in that I was in an elevator in a very tall building (I live in suburbia, I'm very rarely in high rise buildings, maybe once every 5 years). Also the physics seemed correct: elevator starts free falling, I push off the floor and appear to float in relation to the elevator, elevator crashes and I hit the floor. This is one of the things that really struck me about the dream when I woke from it - that the physics were correct.

My first thought was that this is random mumbling, but didn't down vote you. Then again, if it offers any consolation, my mother dreamt the exact same dream, 3 times, exactly the night before her close family member would die.

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