Premonitions and Deja vu

[Node18]

What do you guys think about these two bizarre subjects? I'm sure we've all experienced deja vu at least once in our lifetime. My mate's mum was telling us how she had a dream of a car crash one afternoon. That same night a car crash occurred not far from where he lived and happened exactly as his mum described it.

I denied it, but it was hard given the circumstances. What kind of explanations can there be for these kind of things? Pure luck and the like? I'd like to hear what you all have to say.

[ghoulslime]

Who can really say?

Perhaps it is a human brain conditioned to projecting order into cognitive disarray?

One might have a dream of a random tragedy, and if a similar event does not occur with any degree of logical (or fuzzy-logical) correlation, the dream is dismissed as just a dream. On the other hand, if a coincidental event happens to transpire after the dream, human cognition might attempt to form an association, warranted or not.

I would venture to guess that there is a correlation between the intellectual capacity of a dreamer and said dreamer's tendency to assign association of events envisioned in the subconscious with any real future event.

Then again, maybe time really does loop back on itself, and the shit has already happened / is happening / will happen at the same time the dreamer is dreaming it.

[Smellyoldgit]

I wonder if the ratio of 'fulfilled' to 'unfulfilled' prophecies has ever been calculated?
The occasional 'dream come true' tends to be remembered and gain fame as the yarn is propagated and exaggerated, whereas the countless millions (?) of alleged prophecies that come to nothing are conveniently forgotten.
I'd summarise the subject as a load of woo, claptrap and complete bollocks.

[Choobus]

The human mind is an amazing thing; what we humans make of it is not always so.

[ghoulslime]

Smellyoldgit wrote

I wonder if the ratio of 'fulfilled' to 'unfulfilled' prophecies has ever been calculated?
The occasional 'dream come true' tends to be remembered and gain fame as the yarn is propagated and exaggerated, whereas the countless millions (?) of alleged prophecies that come to nothing are conveniently forgotten.
I'd summarise the subject as a load of woo, claptrap and complete bollocks.

Woo! Yes, that's the word I was trying to think of!

[fiatlux]

I remember reading somewhere that Deja vu is the result of some kind of timing misfire between the hemispheres of the brain. A firmware glitch, so to speak. Demonstrating again just how every aspect of reality depends on a 3.5 pound lump of mush.

[nkb]

What Ghoulie, Choobus and Smelly said. It's most likely selective memory, combined with humans' tendency to subconsciously twist memories to fit certain situations.

[anthonyjfuchs]

Besides which, recollection of dream details is notoriously unreliable. Dreams don't make sense: they result, I believe, from electrical activity in the brain that sustains basic biological functions during sleep as it fires through memory centers that are no longer occupied with external sensory input. Dreams only start to make sense after we wake and begin (consciously and unconsciously) to impose order on those senseless images. Part of that is "remembering" parts of the dream that weren't actually part of the dream, inserting elements to aid in the sense-making process.

So I'd be extremely suspicious of a story told after the fact of someone dreaming of a car accident that later happened exactly as dreamed. I'd be most likely inclined to believe that this person had a dream involving a vehicle (perhaps even an accident), then later saw a newscast of an actual car accident, was reminded of the vehicle in their dream, and subconsciously inserted the elements of the crash from the newscast into their "memory" of the dream.

If I were to believe that someone had something like a prophetic dream, I would need to know that they recalled certain specific details before their dream was fulfilled in reality. If my wife tells me tomorrow morning that she dreamed that the numbers 3, 19, and 27 would come out in the lottery, and on Saturday, the lottery numbers were 3, 15, 19, 21, 27 and 41, then I'd have a hard time denying that she had some sort of prophetic dream.

[Kate]

But zombie children on the beach that I flew away from under the stars made perfect sense.

[Smellyoldgit]

[Kate]

No, no, no. The shark ate the carcass of knobhead's little black strangled dog. That was so last week.

[Smellyoldgit]

[psychodiva]

ditto what everyon esle said

[psychodiva]

only with typo corrections please

[Humanist]

Living in the Bible belt, I often get the sensation of DejaMoo.
The feeling that you've heard this bullshit before.