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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Dreams of Anticipation?

A guy I work with dropped his car off at a shop yesterday afternoon after he got off and then came back to our office because he didn't want to wait at the shop while it was being worked on (the shop is within walking distance of our office).  He was already off for the day, so he decided to just take nap.  I noticed when he had just dozed off, so I decided to shoot a rubber band at him just to mess with him.  He woke up and told me he was dreaming that someone was pulling a tree branch back, and when he felt the rubber band hit him is when the person let the branch go in the dream.  So his subconscious mind interpreted getting hit by the rubber band as getting hit by a tree branch.  But the question in my mind is why was he even dreaming about someone holding a tree branch back?  It's almost as if his subconscious mind knew he was going to get hit by a rubber band and it began preparing a scenario to fit what was about to happen.

Others have probably experienced similar dreams.  A dream where something happening in the dream corresponds to something that's really happening, but it's not necessarily just the single instance that your mind interprets a certain way; it may be that your mind prepares a scenario to correspond with what is about to happen before it even happens.

So in the example I used above, why was he dreaming about someone holding a tree branch back as I was preparing to shoot him with a rubber band?  Was he just randomly dreaming about a guy holding back a tree branch and getting hit by that branch just so happened to be the most convenient way to interpret the impact of the rubber band at that precise moment?  Or was his subconscious somehow aware of what was about to happen?  If so, how did it become aware?  Was it some sort of unconscious telepathy?  Or was his mind just able to somehow sense the movements I was making to prepare the shot?  Could he sense my intention?

I don't know that it necessarily classifies as precognition, but it seems that the subconscious mind may be able to anticipate something that is about to happen and prepare a dreamlike scenario for it.

3 comments:

  1. great post. i've had this happen several times, but never thought about this way. interesting.

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  2. When I asked him about it again, he thought maybe that you dream faster than time goes in reality, so maybe the whole dream happened in just that instant that the rubber band hit him.

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  3. Well technically, our dreams are pretty fast in occurrence within the brain's activity. But we otherwise "sense" them as being long and drawn out, though it was taking place in the span of mere seconds or a few minutes... But our body and other areas of the mind "act out" the dream in longer time spans.

    Still quite interesting and very... time-based paralleled?

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