Dreams: Fiction or Prediction?

[Shadow Bahamut]

I'm feeling philisophical and i'm currently deep in thought....so i began thinking of this...

Have you ever wondered whether or not our dreams or nightmares have logical explainations, or whether they're just simple stories made up in our minds?
Most of us have experienced the state of "Deja-vu" right? Have we actually "been there before", or was it apart of some dream that we havent remembered until that situation triggered something in our mind?
Scientists have tried to explain that "Deja-vu" is simply something in our mind that is triggered to make us think that we have been in that situation before, but what would be the purpose of that? especially if that situation is completely insignificant in our life.
I've had dreams, some insignificant and some quite significant, that have come to reality and come true. I'm not saying that i'm a millionare with a huge mansion, but there's a few things that i have thought about, and dreamed about, and it's happened. Almost like Deja-vu.

What do you think about our minds? can our human minds make accurate predictions, or are they simple predictions using the past and present events in our lives to make a reasonable assumption of what the future holds? Is the future predictable? and what do you think the whole "Deja-vu" thing is all about?

feel free on comments/explainations , etc.

[LunarWeaver]

I think dreams are just another case of something humans understand initially so we made up a larger meaning for it than there actually is. In my opinion, people who say they dreamt something happen before it happened see it that way because they want. Similar to how we see faces in clouds or what have you.

[Dr Aum]

I think dreams are just another case of something humans understand initially so we made up a larger meaning for it than there actually is. In my opinion, people who say they dreamt something happen before it happened see it that way because they want. Similar to how we see faces in clouds or what have you.

Yes. One of the many types of small-scale apophenia that humans experience.

[Christmas]

I predict that an EOFF member will post after me.

[Mirage]

I really didn't want to be the one fulfilling Christmas' prediction :(.

Anyway, Of course it is possible that something you dream of will happen, but think of all the thousands of dreams that don't happen! On top on that, humans like altering dreams a bit as they experience something similar.

[Shadow Bahamut]

i know that there are millions of dreams that you dont remember and dont come true, mainly because some are so far from the truth or so far from reality that it would be impossible.

i do see that dreams can be seen as predictions because we want them to, but i am talking of the ones that are almost identical in situation. I'm not talking about anything deadly significant, but the silly little things that occur in a dream, and then happen within the next day or so...

[kikimm]

Yeah I don't think dreams are predictions. And they had better not be I swear to God. Otherwise I'm going to be like eaten by sharks and having spiders crawling all over me and not being able to walk like a normal human being and that would just be bad.

[Jessweeee♪]

Some believe that your sub-concious pieces things together and calculates what will happen next, so if it DOES happen it may seem familiar.

[Shadow Bahamut]

yeah, i've just read a report where "Deja-vu" has been re-created in a lab with 24 different people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5194382.stm

they say that its 2 parts of the mind that recognise different things, and if the two parts recognise something familiar at once, then it may seem as if you have witnessed the event before...

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

I think dreams are more of a way of our subconscious to tell us something. Most likely something we either realize but do not admit it to ourselves, or that we are unaware of at a superficial level. I have had dreams that I have remembered that were related to situations in my life at that time.

That said, I do not think all dreams have meaning, though some do. I tend only to remember dreams that evoke strong emotions, usually nightmares. Most of the time they have meaning, sometimes they do not.

As for precognitive dreams, I cannot say. I am somewhat torn with the idea that we can predict the future. I do believe that certain events are meant to happen but not everything.

I have had déja-vu before, various of times, not of late though.

[Besimudo]

Albert Einstein was born with the Sun in Pisces, the most romantic, imaginative and dreamy sign of the zodiac. Legend has it that Einstein's Theory of Relativity was prompted by a dream. Scientists today are still puzzled at how he managed to arrive at the notion of Relativity. It was inspiration, the muses of sleep and dreams, the ability to shift and dissolve boundaries and to tap into the infinite and collective unifying knowledge. All of these are the special province of Pisces.

[Mirage]

I've had many deja vus, and they always seem to happen on hot summer days. I've always been of the impression that they were "short circuits" in the brain, and never thought of them as very important.

[Kanshisha]

well its just a fiction..a dream is like what your thinking of in your sleep...

[Renmiri]

Relativity was not really "news", Einstein himself said he created that by "standing on the shoulders of giants" like Newton, Maxwell and others who came before him. His real breakthrough work came after, with the Special Relativity work. He almost created a whole new branch of mathematics just to explain the physics of it. Perhaps that is the dream of which you speak of ?

I've heard that dreams are what we see from our subconscious work in processing the facts and emotions we ran through the day. So in this sense, we could never see the future on them. Yet we do. Curious thing the human mind!

[Dr Unne]

I've had dreams, some insignificant and some quite significant, that have come to reality and come true. I'm not saying that i'm a millionare with a huge mansion, but there's a few things that i have thought about, and dreamed about, and it's happened. Almost like Deja-vu.

Given that people are thinking all the time, and dream many dreams every single night, chances are that some will turn out true due to random chance. If on the other hand every single dream (or a significantly large number of dreams) you dreamed turned out to be demonstrably true the next day, then it might mean something. I'd bet this is not the case.