January 17, 2008

  • Premonition: How Does it Work?

    Yesterday I left my cell phone in my car. This morning I picked it up, and saw that I had a few missed calls. Before I even checked my messages, I thought "Somebody died." I listen to the first message, and it was my brother telling me that someone I know from church (not very well) died.

    Stuff like this happens to me every so often. Oh, my hunches aren't always right, but sometimes they are. Goofy stuff like "that girl you don't know over there is going to come over and talk to you" comes to mind, and then it happens. What's going on? The hunches almost never fit in a "good" or "evil" category. It's usually insight of a non-spiritual nature. So who or what makes these connections? And it's not just me who makes them; for example, another Xangan I know has dreams that foreshadow the future.

    I think it's our subconscious quietly making connections at a rapid, non-trackable rate. I knew it had been a while since anyone I had known had died. And my brother usually doesn't call me during the week, although sometimes he will. So I think there were slight, small clues that something out of the ordinary was going on. But still...how does our brain do it? I wonder.

Comments (15)

  • I have the dreams too. It weirds me out from time to time. Not in a "I'm really freaked out" way, but more in a "what am I supposed to do with this?" kind of way. It makes me wonder... because if it's something from God, then there ought to be a purpose to it - albeit, it may not be a purpose I can comprehend or even see until much later, if at all.

    So I'll dream something. Then months or years later, it'll come to pass... and I'll recall the dream in sharp detail... and then wonder to myself, "Should I do exactly what I did in my dream or should I try to change the future?"

    Deep philosophical thoughts I wrestle with every day.

  • I don't think it's our subconscious making connections at a non-trackable rate. I think that in our dreams we are a little closer to our whole selves, our atemporal selves that simultaneously exists from the point of our creation through to our eventual transfiguration or incarceration... If you think that God is timeless, and someday when we are transformed we will also be timeless, then is time just a (persistent) illusion? Perhaps when we dream, or when our subconscious is left to its own devices, we catch glimmers from beyond the illusion, glimpses of the past (which we mistake for memory) or the future (which is usually a glimpse of something nonprofound and we generally pay them no heed) which we pull from our larger atemporal selves.

  • I have premonitions sometimes as well. Not very often. The strongest one was when I was very young and my mother was telling my sister and I about a new friend we were going to meet. This girl had a very unusual name, "Minette." I remember where I was when my mom told me about her, and I got an image of her face in my head. When I met her, she looked exactly like the picture I'd imagined of her earlier. Very strange.

  • This happens to me, too. The most memorable instance was when I was pretty young... I was watching an episode of Disney's "Tale Spin," when suddenly a vision popped into my head of myself crying up in my bedroom because my Grandfather was dead. The vision really came out of nowhere... he hadn't been sick or anything like that, and like I said, I was watching television at the time and not even thinking about my grandpa. Not too long afterwards, he had a stroke in the middle of the night and passed away. When my mom told me about it, I was in my bedroom, and I of course started to cry. How bizarre.

  • Oh, and RYC: As much as I wish it was, the personal drama isn't at all exciting. I might send you an email though...but only if you send me that super-duper email you still owe me, ha!

  • I like Russo's theory.  I don't know if I'm ready to believe it, but I like it.

  • seeming as i don't believe that the future is fixed, i don't know what to tell you. when i have "prophetic" dreams, they are always metaphorical rather than actual. i do have an unnerving ability to predict when i will get double pinochle when playing two handed games.
    but i'm most likely to believe that those kinds of "feelings" are coincidences.

    RYC: i am a youtube member, so i don't know if that makes a difference. in any case, there is usually a little box that says "embed" over on the right under the posting member information. copy and paste in your text.

  • Sometimes I will have little moments where I feel I have dreamed something that is happening to me at that moment, and I always feel comforted by that, for some reason, as though everything is unfolding just the way it's supposed to.  I guess everyone has those deja vu moments, and we make sense of them as best we can.

    Thank you so much for taking the time to send a link!  I should have thought to click on your site rather than just the one post, I guess.  I will make sure to go back and read further!  (And by the way, we call it being a "crankypants" in our house!)  : D

    Oh!  Is that a tip in the comments about how to post a YouTube video right in your blog?  I have been looking for that - I thought mnaybe it was available only to Premium Xangans or something.

  • Ack - where is the ability to edit our comments?!  "Maybe" we'll get it soon, I hope!

  • I've had moments like that.  I was on the way to a soccer game in high school and I was in the bus with the team (the girls team) and I got this sudden feeling that the bus was going to break down.  I just knew it.  It did.  Creeped myself out a little.  I also knew I was going to win the door prize at my aunt's party once.  Anyway, in reference to your comment from a few days ago, I don't post photos on public sites.   There are creepy people out there, and also I could probably get into some trouble for what I post about my job.  (Or my lack of a job...)

    -Me-

  • i've experienced that too.. but mine is more like a dejavu :)

  • I think it happens to everyone, but I don't think it's a glimpse from an eternal perspective. It's quite a lot of heavy duty neural activity, which we tend to put into a frame of reference that makes sense. Like looking at the clouds and seeing animals and faces and stuff. Really it's just random formations, but we can't help but search for patterns, because that's the way we're wired. About your cell phone experience, do you really think it was a premonition? Or was it just a rapid logical deduction? You saw missed calls from your brother, recognized that it is unusual, quickly ran through in your mind the various reasons he would call, settled on the most likely one, and sure enough, your inferential leap was correct.

  • I think the only possibility is that I'm supernatural.

  • I wonder if that was in reference to me...?

    I've gone through a lot of theories about non-linearity of time, confirmation of "free will" or perhaps refutation of it, and others. I'm currently stuck between "God is giving me a foreglance in order to realize I should change my mind about something" vs. "God gave me the dream so that, when it came to pass, I would be reminded that he is with me and I should not fear or be worried so much about the future." The second sounds more like God's character to me, but sometimes I feel I'm being naive and perhaps there is a more important purpose or reason that I get fore-dreams.

    Do you get fore-dreams, or just the instant premonitions?

    I have asked a lot of people about their experience over my years. It seems there is a distinct group of people who experience the kind of dreams that suzyO, myself, and others experience, and then a lot of people have no idea what we are talking about. I haven't found a pattern among "spiritual" types (of any walk) or their counterparts.

    ok bye.

  • Wow! I've had both dreams (mostly one) and 'premonitions.' Actually, my premonitions are usually about TV shows- if I think about an episode of a show I've seen, usually w/in the next few times of me watching the show, that episode will come up.

    I'm not sure what I think they are. My theories are:
    1) sub-consciously picking up signals from situations and then mentally deducing the truth.
    2) random, lucky coincidences.
    3) I'm psychic (that's a joke.)

    The strangest premonition dream happened last year. I had 2 friends who were dating and I had a very strange dream that the girl was telling people she was pregnant (I was under the impression they were waiting) and then 2 weeks later she found out and told everyone she was pregnant (she had just turned 18 and was still in high school, which made it even weirder).

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