Okay, so what IS the explanation for premonititive dreams?

You didn’t dream it, so it isn’t precognitive.

You found a similarity between a dream you were focused on, and an event in your daily life. Nothing more.

So if I dreamed it, how did I not dream it?

I’ve been in a dream group for a few years now, and there certainly do seem to be some precognitive dreams sometimes. Of course, as the rationalist/materialist people will hasten to point out with great energy, it’s not entirely possible to rule out coincidence and attention bias, etc.

However, recently someone I know dreamed of a giant 8-foot tall chicken for the first time ever, and then passed a giant 8-foot-tall chicken statue in the back of a truck that following day. Not a very useful premonition, perhaps, but if someone ran the statistics of freaky coincidences, I suspect it would outweigh the cries of “that’s anecdotal” to at least the point that it might be studied seriously, although that tends to lead to harassment by “skeptics” and “debunkers”.

It seems to me that often the point of dreams (premonitory or not) is to get our attention, which such things do tend to do. Perhaps the purpose is to awaken alertness, curiosity, and attention to other dream elements or related things. Dreams can be very interesting and beneficial to tune into, and uncanny bits can get peoples’ attention. Before the materialist/rationalist craze, dreams used to be taken much more seriously in general.

Some people I know have also had useful premonitory dreams, or at least ones that alert them to serious issues with people they know, such as having a compelling dream about someone they haven’t thought of in a long time, getting them to call that person and it turns out it’s a very good time to have done that.

Asking “what’s the explanation?” is back in the materialist/rationalist mindset that much of modern Western culture is so anxious to cling to. As if there were really a ready answer for everything, and if there isn’t, it can be denied or ignored. There is a lot that people, even scientists expert in a particular field, don’t know. Actual science is about finding the most plausible theories, and questioning what we know, not about just knowing the answer. In the case of premonitory dreams, we really do not know “the explanation”.

One sort of theory involves the idea (whether from theoretical or quantum physics, or other sets of ideas) that time and causation and our awareness of them are not exactly just everything falling forward through time, with the future never accessible. So perhaps premonitions come from some aspect of that.

It reminds me of the study where group A and B are given a knowledge test, then they tell group B the answers, then they check the results, and find that group B did notably better than group A, even though they told B the answers after they took the test.

It represents your hidden desires.

Coincidence. How many dreams have you had that were unrelated to anything that later occurred.

There will be a chorus of ‘recognition bias’ and other dismissals, but I know I’ve had short, vivid dream scenes that later manifest exactly as experienced in the dream. I wasn’t looking for them and with one exception they were all innocuous, unimportant, inconsequential, but entirely accurate. One dream clued me to take action on something and I did follow it’s advice to great benefit. Most of my dreams have no prescient connection and I could never tell ahead of time what plain dream scene might happen later.

Some say string theory provides the possibility of information from other times being available – with the timeline being all bunched or wound up,unadjacent moments could be touching in a way that makes communication possible.

I have had a couple profound precognitive dreams. I cannot explain them away as just a coincidence and I do not believe in psychic ability. I mentally filed it as an anomaly.

There are loads of people here who cry “No evidence!” at so many things, and are snide and deride anyone who doesn’t immediately dismiss such things as hoakum or coincidence.
Perhaps we should respond “No evidence (that we can recognize as evidence)...yet.” The process of scientific inquiry has not stopped.
@Zaku and @dabbler make sense.

For all you believers, I propose a simple experiment. Keep track of events in your dreams and check on how many materialize afterward.

@LostInParadise, why? The “believers” already have noted this.

“Belief” assumes some sort of faith or lack of evidence. Explaining away something as a coincidence without study is actually unscientific. In this case the answer if found could reveal scientific knowledge of nature or psychology. While coincidence gets my ultimate bet I have experienced it myself to a degree that creates enough doubt that I’m rather open minded about the possibilities. Where people cross over into dangerous territory is they will attach some deeper meaning to the phenomena.

Yeah I’ve had dreams like that, but I also know that memories, even recent ones, are mailable, unreliable things and that the mind can be highly impressionable. When something happens in my waking hours that I could swear I dreamt about I cannot be certain that my recollection of that dream wasn’t influenced by what I just experienced.

@canidmajor , But do they have a record of all the things that did not follow after a dream? If one out of 1000 times there is a connection, then coincidence is looking like a good explanation.

I have had several dreams that appeared to predict subsequent real events. One of these dreams I described in a previous answer a long time ago. The similarities were startling but of no practical value.

But, @LostInParadise, they are not needing to prove anything to anybody. You seem to be requiring that they come over to your conviction of coincidence.
And as another point, why must every dream be documented? Personally I have different kinds of dreams, with distinctly different textures (for lack of a better word).

@Yellowdog asked for an explanation. We all have confirmation bias. We tend to ignore cases that do not support our beliefs. That is why I suggested keeping track of all dreams to see if there is reason to believe in anything other than chance.

It is my opinion that it was more prediction than premonition . When it broke your brain just rearranged the events of what happened in your dream to fit real life so you remember your dream differently.

(I am the original poster here)—I’m sure it only DOES happen maybe 1 in 1,000 dreams. But that does not mean it does not happen from time to time.

Here’s another simple to tell about—when I was in eleventh grade, in the Spring, I dreamed I stepped on a nail that went through my shoe, I don’t remember much about the setting. I was thinking about it in the morning after I awoke, still feeling it in the small of my foot, and just chalked it up to some obscure pain in the palm of my foot as being the source of the dream.

Later that afternoon, after school, a friend of mine were painting nautical decorations on the windows of a restaurant as a project for our school’s art club. When we were done we started to walk home, and I stepped on a nail in a board in the parking lot that was just off a curb that I couldn’t see. In fact, I even had a very quick memory of the dream less than a second before it happened. Fortunately I was able to walk to my doctor’s office that happened to be across the street, await for my mother and get a tetanus shot.

I’m sure that I dream lots of things that don’t “happen” but I’m really curious about what we can know about those that DO.

Respectful to those who want to make a scientific case that it’s coincidence and to count occurrences, it is to me too obvious that it DOES happen from time-to-time. I think Deja Vu experiences, while not necessarily vague memories of dreams, may have a similar connection to events experienced when what is now present was the future. They certainly feel similar.

Anyhow, the scientific method does not limit to numbers and experiences with the present and the five senses. I think certain phenomenon can be deducted at least in theory with what we DO know about the Space/Time continuum and string theory or other phenomenon which might occur outside of our hard, physical experiences and what our five senses have access to. I know things like this occur and details or sequences are too specific. Just like to know what others think or believe or have read about.

Just out of interest a man called Dunne investigated this phenomenon many years ago in a book titled “An Experiment with Time.”

One explanation for dreams existing at all is that the brain sorts through all of the information that it has processed, and then prepares for the days ahead by running through a bunch of “what if” scenarios—that can range from mundane to beyond the possibilities of physics. This is an explanation I’ve seen to help explain why sleep seems to help people improve in skills (at least to a certain extent)—the brain has been sifting through previous information and trying to anticipate future experiences.

So, a plausible rationale for why dreams sometimes seem to “come true” is that one of the brain’s many predictions for the night (we have I can’t remember how many dreams each night) wound up being fairly accurate with regard to how things actually played out.

When it feels like my dreams are “coming true,” it’s usually ordinary interaction dreams—which are ones that are more likely to happen—and about something that I know is going on or going to come up, at least in a peripheral sense—so my brain would have “known” to anticipate situations about it.

This may not explain every apparently prescient dream, but it doesn’t have to. There can be several explanations… But I do find that it’s a rather neat explanation, to think that our brains have evolved to anticipate for and practice for the future by running through many different possibilities…. It also taps into something about learning, how the more ways we encounter a situation, the better able we are to adapt in each new instance of it—because we’ve been building a repertoire of responses that we can reassemble as needed… Well, I’ve strayed a little from the main point now… That’s just where my mind went.

@Soubresaut that is along the lines of why I think this happens. I don’t believe it’s really seeing the future but more of mental adaptation and then the subsequent confirmation bias. Our subconscious and background processing is poorly understood. Yet…experiencing it keeps the mind open for things other than “it’s a coincidence”

I kind of skimmed over all these responses, but call me silly but I sometimes believe the brain is capable of calculating probabilities, much like a computer, in some “precognitive dreams.” So what appears to be some kind of magical precognition is really a mathematical probability. It put together pieces and elements of your life, your personality, what you plan on doing in the future, and said, “You will most likely break this.”

On the other hand, it could be mere anxiety. We always have dreams about anxious situations. The simple fact that you were aware of the dream led you to break it. The real question is – would you have still broken it if you didn’t have the dream?

@Yellowdog I still say you didn’t dream it. You dreamt of breaking a lamp; you broke a mirror. Close, but not the same. similar, but not precognitive. Not a premonition.

You were focused on it all day, so what @ScottyMcGeester said took over, and your brain was probably looking for something made of glass to break.

And he knew he was going to be moving breakable stuff the next day. As I said, prediciction not premonition.

But I never knew I was going to step on a nail….

Well, at least this has been an insightful discussion. Thanks to all…

When I was a single Mom I was at the store picking up some toaster strudels for the kids for breakfast the next day, because I would be at work when they got up. It was summertime.
As I picked up the box I had this sudden “vision” of the toaster bursting into flames when the kids used it! It was weird. I shook it off and went on.
Came home from work the next day to find fire extinguisher shit ALL OVER THE KITCHEN!! The toaster had indeed caught on fire. My son is smart, and the first thing he did was unplug it…then went to town with the fire extinguisher! I KNOW he saw a good excuse when he saw one to just go nuts, play fireman saving the family. I mean, what was I going to say?? It was, after all, my own fault.

All I can think of is that it had become over filled with toast crumbs, and the last time I’d used it my subconscious noticed something that it didn’t put to the front of my brain. Maybe one, barely noticeable puff of smoke or something? I don’t know. I just know there is a rational explanation for it, and my son had a blast.

We had one in our group last night. One of us had a dream about a road to a small obscure town she had no known reason to think about. She mentioned the dream and complained about how random it was, then called a close friend in another state. That friend started telling her about her new plan to move to that same small obscure town.