J. W. Dunne "An Experiment With Time"

[VolsungerCelibate]

I'm sure most people here have had some prophetic dream which seems to occur the next day, if not directly then, but sometime in the future rising a sense of Deja Vu. I felt as though I was having these when I was able to accurately guess my test scores a day before they were released because I had seen them in a dream.

J.W. Dunne has done some experimenting with this concept of precognition coming to the conclusion that during the unconscious dream cycle the dreamer experienced their entire life in a single moment, future mixed with memory and imagination. He conducted experiments of reading the first half of detective novels and dreaming the second half and comparing the two, and he found a striking similarity. 

Has anyone here experienced this future telling?

[Cyber Viking]

I'm going to get very personal with this post, but for the matter of pursuing truth I'm going to share. I hope no one minds. When I was a small child, I had recurring dreams of my father as a terrible vampire who preyed upon me. I was scared but also confused by these dreams, as I loved my father and looked up to him deeply. At one point I actually shared that I had a nightmare with him involving a vampire (while never actually telling him he was the vampire) My father became enraged when I told him about my dreams, he knew that he was the vampire somehow (even though like I said I didn't tell him that part) and it drove him mad with rage.

Well, when I got older and my father started to lose his inhibitions, he started molesting my sister, and even me at one point. My subconscious was warning me he was a predator before I even consciously understood. Is what I went through prophetic? I don't know.

[a system is failing]

I don't have any clairvoyant dreams, but a semi-recent (last 5 years) one sticks out in my mind. After people you know closely die I believe its common to see them in your dreams. I would see mom in dreams many many times in a two or so year period after she died. The setup in every single one of these dreams is that somehow she is actually still alive / somehow she has longer to live than we thought and so we try to do a bunch of fub stuff together before she dies for real. There was only one encounter that differs this. I remember I was talking to her in the living room, no memory of the conversation. This was maybe 6 or so months afterward. I don't know why but suddenly I just say. "Wait a minute. You are not my mom. You are actually a demon, disguised as my mom." and all I remember after that was getting furious as hell and screaming at (what appeared to be) her to get the fuck out of my house, and never ever come back. Afterwards the ordinary type of dreams I have about her resumed. That was the only aberration. 

I have no idea what the fuck it means but I get the feeling kicking the "demon" out spared me of some kind of disastrous consrquences or life changes. Like someone horrible was later going to show up in my life and my actions during that dream prevented it.

[anthony]

I often have some really specific phrase or run of words pass through my mind in a way that always sticks out, and when that happens I tend to hear that at some point in the next few days. But I think so much at all times that it's surely inevitable that I'll be thinking things I hear, and I could then assign those things importance or prominence in my mind retroactively.

[turnip]

Dunne seems like an interesting person, but on the idea that dreams are a mixture of memory and future premonition/precognition, here I think Bergson's ideas may be a bit more coherent. Namely, that dreams are entirely memory, and that memories do not belong to the past in the way that people think. Memories are not stored in the brain at all; you are within memory. The function of the brain would not be to store and retrieve memory like a computer, but "tuning in" or creative synthesis of memory. This would explain a lot of other weird phenomena too, like memory transfer via organ transplant, etc.

The idea this is getting at overall is that reality itself is "alive." You will discover intelligent arrangements of fate if you look at things the right way, or sometimes even if you don't. Dreams are perhaps one way to do that (I've been particularly interested in lucid dreaming recently), but I think that if your waking thoughts are always banal your dreams probably will be too.

[Polytropos]

Dunne seems like an interesting person, but on the idea that dreams are a mixture of memory and future premonition/precognition, here I think Bergson's ideas may be a bit more coherent. Namely, that dreams are entirely memory, and that memories do not belong to the past in the way that people think. Memories are not stored in the brain at all; you are within memory. The function of the brain would not be to store and retrieve memory like a computer, but "tuning in" or creative synthesis of memory. This would explain a lot of other weird phenomena too, like memory transfer via organ transplant, etc.

The idea this is getting at overall is that reality itself is "alive." You will discover intelligent arrangements of fate if you look at things the right way, or sometimes even if you don't. Dreams are perhaps one way to do that (I've been particularly interested in lucid dreaming recently), but I think that if your waking thoughts are always banal your dreams probably will be too.

Memory is experience and imperfect reproduction. There is no qualitative difference between how it is produced in the mind and how imaginations are produced in the mind, same faculty. Haven't read Bergson on this but it's a pretty straightforward conclusion of Kantian so that's probably where he got it from