Have you ever had a dream come true, literally?

@wallabies: “I’m not the kind of person that believes in this kind of thing, but I can’t ignore it anymore.”

Sounds like you might be that kind of person.
What exactly is it that you can’t ignore anymore? Maybe you could provide some details.

@ragingloli Sorry, but I’m flagging that as irrelevant.

@tom_g No, I’m probably the biggest skeptic you’d ever meet. My details don’t matter as I’m wondering about others’ experiences. I think if you’ve had such an experience before you’d know exactly what I’m talking about.

@wallabies – Well, I can’t say that I have had any experience that has led me to believe there is something “supernatural” going on here. Is that what you’re proposing – that there is something beyond coincidence, pattern matching, confirmation bias, and selective memory? I don’t have your details, but is it possible that you (your brain) dreamed of something that was more likely to happen to you because “it” (you) has the benefit of all of your experiences and thought patterns?

If I dreamed 5 years ago that I would live in Boston and meet a famous guitarist one night, I would not be surprised if I found myself living in Boston today and meeting a famous guitarist. Why, because the organ that cooked up this fantasy is the same thing that is driving me to move to Boston and knows that I frequent places that would put me in contact with a famous guitarist.

Anyway, I’d love to hear a possible mechanism that could “cause” these deja vu experiences that aren’t accounted for the fact that we are human.

@wallabies Have you recorded/written these dreams down so that you can be 100% sure that it isn’t Deja vu? From what I know of Deja vu: A memory slips from short term memory into long term memory. So if you don’t have documentation that it really is long term, how can you be sure?

Either way, I’d write these dreams down. If they do end up coming true, you’ll be prepared.

I’ve had some very strong Deja vu myself, but I had no way of knowing that it was anything more than that.

Only once. I dreamed of a helicopter crash and the next day one happened under mysterious circumstances to someone I knew at the time. 0.o

I hope the dream I had the other night doesn’t come true. I dreamed I took my cat in for his summer shave and they made him look like a punk rocker. lol

I have had strange dreams that seemed really connected to reallife events. I once woke up screaming from a dream that was so real, I had to call my parents who were 700 miles away to make sure they were okay. I dreamed I drove in slow motion by a car accident and I could see my father dead on the engine of the demolished car. I couldn’t get my car to turn around and go back to the accident.

In real life, my parents were driving to see me soon after the dream and I thought my dream was based on their upcoming trip and my anxiety and emotional distress over car accidents. I couldn’t shake the dream from my head.

Well, within days of the dream, my parents were behind a car that made a left-hand turn directly straight across in front of a tractor trailer doing approximately 60 mph. The tractor trailer driver slammed on his brakes, jackknifed and came head-on toward my parents’ car. My dad veered off the right shoulder, road against the guardrail and missed the headon collision.

Sadly, the car behind them was hit head-on killing two adults and a small child instantly. A little boy playing with toy trucks in the floor board of the car survived. My mom wouldn’t tell me until she saw me in person. She said the male front seat passenger in the car was dead on the the engine.

It was always troubling to me and haunts me to this day.

@Coloma, the helicopter dream is eerie. The cat dream is eerie in its own way too.

There was one instance. Before I joined the navy, I had a dream I was hanging out on the foc’sle (the very stern of the ship) with some guys just talking.

Fast forward a few years and I’m on the stern hanging out. A guy said something and I felt I knew what he was about to say because of my dream; and he said it.

Please note that I don’t think I dreamt of the future. This could have been a coincidence and I’m not even completely sure of the details I had of my dream.

I was stuck on a level in a video game, I had a dream about how to get past it, when I woke up I tried it and it worked.

As a child, there was a reoccurring dream my parents being on the opposite side of series of swimming pools. Each pool was of a different size, shape and depth. Each dream involved the goal of getting to my parents. These dreams finally stopped about when I was a teenager.

When I was about 45, a co-worker came into my office and put a hotel brochure on the desk. He had just returned from a hotel in Cancun where our company had just taken over ownership. The brochure featured a picture of the hotel’s pool area.Here is a photo of that hotel’s swimming pool set-up. Its structure was so shockingly similar to the image in my dreams that it took some time to work through it and realize that it is just coincidence.

When I was 16, I had a dream that I would accidentally get pregnant and would have a son who was a Libra. A subsequent dream showed me my son at 18 laughing before a school musical concert where he was to sing/perform. I forgot all about that dream.

When I was 19, I found myself pregnant and when I went to the doctor, he said the baby was due on Oct 10th. One night soon after, I remembered the dreams and that was one reason I decided to keep him when everyone else said ‘abort.’ I was in a very bad shape at that time and he gave me a reason to live—so I’ve always felt he saved my life in many ways.

My son never wanted to perform because I was a theater geek and it wasn’t cool to be too much like me. During his sophomore year, he became good friends with a musical theater geek and soon after was performing. His first musical was “Brigadoon.”

Several for me but not many. Also they were about small things. My mother did dream about the death of ‘me’ in a car accident, the exact location of the accident and even a few of the circumstances that followed ‘my’ death. There was a catch though, it was my brother that ended up getting killed in the manner described in the dream and at the location which was dreamt of, not me. She described the dream (2 weeks before the actual fatality) to others where we worked at (my mom and I had worked at the same place at the time) so they were witnesses to what she’d described before it actually happened.

@tom_g The dreams I have include very specific details and circumstances. If they were as general as what you describe, I would not think anything of it.

@Blackberry @bkcunningham @linguaphile @Paradox25 Yes, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about! I don’t have a lot of these dreams. They are quite rare, and I haven’t had one in a long time. I haven’t managed to write any of them down yet, but the next time it happens I seriously hope I manage to so that I can finally be 100% sure what is going on. It’s tough because at the time it seems like just a dream, not very significant. It’s not until later where you are living the dream that it becomes creepy and odd. Now that this has happened a few times and I have taken note, I really want to write them down. I’ve been telling them to my boyfriend, but his memory is terrible (such that we have a running joke about it now) so it has not been very productive. Although some of the conversations I remember clearly, which is how I eventually remember the dream itself. I would feel more sure if he could also remember the conversation. Some dreams are rather benign like @Blackberry‘s and about me being in a particular place under a particular set of circumstances. Others are quite scary, not unlike @Paradox25‘s or the car accident. Some of them have actually led to me taking actions in real life that I might not have otherwise. Of course there is no sure way of knowing if the actions were justified, but I can’t help wondering. Sometimes the overall event occurs but the details are somewhat different (like others have described above). It is all very interesting. I’m not suggesting there is anything going on. I have no idea what the mechanism behind it is. I am not even absolutely positive that it is happening as I think it is. All I know at this point is that I have made these observations multiple times now and so I can’t ignore the possibility and it is certainly worth further investigation. That’s why I am asking this question @tom the skeptic to see if anyone else has had a similar experience. Basically these dreams are like very brief flashes of a movie scene and then that scene subsequently plays out later in real life. Sometimes much later. Time is consistently a missing element.

Yes. I have short intense sequences that months or years later play out exactly as experienced in the dream. At the time I have the dream I can’t the ones that will happen later from the ones that don’t. For me almost always this kind of dream is about nothing in particular, inconsequential slice-of-life kind of stuff.

However, I did have one dream in ‘88 when I was looking for an apartment to buy. In order to make a down payment I would have to sell a heap of stock I had. I’m not very good at market timing and I had been wondering for months when I ought to sell it. Sometime in April I had a dream that I was checking the stock price on July 7, pleased that I had sold the day before.
As 4th of July approached the stock was in the high 30’s. On July 6 it went over 40. I called the broker (a market maker for that stock) and asked what they thought of the price, and they said they really didn’t know why it was up that high. While I was on the phone the price hit 41–5/8 so I told the broker to sell all but a few shares.
By the close the stock was back below 40 and it did not get that high again for another 1–½ years.
I have not had any other stock price related dreams.

Note that questions like this have been discussed in the past here on Fluther. Usually a chorus of nay-sayers jump in to insist that a prescient dream is impossible, that it is a case of “recognition bias”. Sure, plenty of that happens, too.
But, to them I say, just because your ‘science’ can’t explain it doesn’t mean it is not real.

I dreamed once that there was a small stream flowing by the side of our house. It was an odd dream and I didn’t think any more about it until the following evening after torrential rain I was trying to keep the flood waters from getting in to the house. The water was running off of playing fields at the back of our home and flowing down the side of the house just as in the dream. It felt so strange. I kept on working, clearing the drain and making sure the water didn’t build up but I just couldn’t believe it. I almost felt I was in my dream but it was real.

When I was about eleven years old I remember coming home from being at a friend’s house. I went into my bedroom and it was all changed around; my sister had decided to reorganize my room while I’d been gone.
The weird part was that I had recently dreamed of being in this strange room, which matched up with how my sister had changed it. It truly freaked me out.

Thanks for sharing everyone. Regardless of what the underlying mechanism is, all of the stories have been fascinating!

I once dreamed that I could ski moguls perfectly. I went skiing the next day and I did ski them perfectly.