• Question: If you can see something in your dreams and it happens what does that mean?

    Asked by ch9910 to Enda, Jean, Tim on 22 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Jean Bourke

      Jean Bourke answered on 22 Nov 2012:

      I don’t really think it means much. Dreams are generally really weird. We don’t remember them properly and most forget them within a few minutes of waking up. Sometime when something happens that is similar to something you dreamt it may trigger the memory of the dream and your brain my fit the dream around the events. Another thing that can happen is that, since you have at least 3 dreams a night them every now and then surely some will resemble real events.

      If you want to remember your dreams you need to keep a diary beside your bed and note them down as soon as you wake up because otherwise you’ll forget and get them mixed up.

      Though if you’ve been dreaming about major news events before they happen maybe you should contact someone…probably a doctor or similar so they can do mri scans and stuff!

    • Photo: Enda O'Connell

      Enda O'Connell answered on 22 Nov 2012:

      @ch9910

      This sounds a bit like Deja Vu as well, which happens to about two-thirds of us from time to time and can be a bit freaky when it does. Deja vu is when you are experiencing something which you feel like you have experienced before. It can be very unsettling and I know when it happens to me I look around to see if anyone else is feeling weird 🙂

      Deja vu is thought to occur when we partially perceive something, like taking a quick glimpse of an object or situation, and our brains don’t have a chance to put it altogether for us in a picture. We think we have seen the situation before but if you ask the person to say exactly when and where, they can’t be sure. This means the situation probably hasn’t happened before and is more like a brief memory malfunction.

      There is an area of research called parapsychology which studies what they call “paranormal” phenomena like prophecy (like what you are asking about in your dreams), telepathy (moving objects with your mind), reincarnation (coming back from the dead) and apparitional experiences (ghosts and ghouls).

      Most scientists are very sceptical of this type of research and it is often called pseudoscience (pseudo meaning false or fake) as it is not as strict or rigorous as demanded by science. In general, there is very little evidence for any of these phenomena, and what “evidence” there is can normally be explained by the flaws in the methods used.

      In fact, scientists and other are so sure that this are of research is fake that there is a list of prizes waiting to be collected by these researchers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal). One of these prizes is for $1,000,000 to the first person who can demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under scientific testing.

      Maybe you will have a dream about winning it, and then win it by predicting you won it!

      (my head hurts now)

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