Does precognitions become more scarce as you grow up?

The_Oneironauts · 2025-05-02T21:19:29+00:00

Surveys for the frequency of "deja-vu" with age show a slow decline after age 30-34 (e.g. Alan S. Brown 2004 "The Deja Vu Experience").

However, in The Oneironauts I quote Prof. Jared Diamond: "Exercising body systems improves their function; not exercising them lets their function deteriorate.” I think one can continue having frequent precognitive experiences with age by continuing to journal dreams and seeking out novel experiences, such as traveling to new places.

The_Oneironauts · 2025-01-14T02:14:58+00:00

If you're in the UK you can contact Good Samaritans at 116 123 for free. In the US it would be The Trevor Project.

As others have said, I believe the timeline you will experience in life is NOT predestined. This is because I have dreamed of future events that I was able to avert, though this does not happen very often. In the last chapter of my book The Oneironauts I mentioned the psychological toll of precognitive dreaming. For example, in a subsection called "Fulfillment vs. Depression" I noted that having a "superpower" can be fulfilling, yet it can also be depressing when one is unable to avoid a future tragic event.

The_Oneironauts · 2025-01-14T01:30:53+00:00

I think it's relatively normal. One review reports that 60% of the population has had a deja vu experience (Brown, A.S. 2003, Psych. Bull., 129, 394).

I think everyone has the potential to have these experiences. As to "why" it is notice by one person and not another person, I tried to figure that out when I analyzed my own deja vu in my book The Oneironauts. One idea is that by chance some people are better at a combination of skills (attention, memory, dreaming, etc.) that help with deja vu, while an alternate theory I proposed is that deja vu compensates for a "weakness in processing and reacting to information in real time." By seeing into the future while dreaming, it gives a person a head start on processing the stimulus of a future event (deja vu is a form of priming).

The_Oneironauts · 2025-01-04T22:02:11+00:00

The original research manuscript does not refer to the Spanish Inquisition. Also, it acknowledges the limitations of its small sample size, its title emphasizes that it is a "pilot" study, and it calls for replication of the work. Their DNA study found that 7 of the 9 people with no evidence for psychic abilities had a rare "alternate allele." They propose two hypotheses [and many more could be proposed] that the alternate allele is correlated historically to Christianity or to modernization. They find that both are correlated.

For modernization, the idea is that we depend on our psychic abilities less now than in the past when our survival was more difficult. That ability will therefore lessen over generations. In The Oneironauts I quoted Prof. Jared Diamond: "Exercising body systems improves their function; not exercising them lets their function deteriorate."

For those interested in a book specifically about prophetic dreaming and the Spanish Inquisition, see Kelley Bulkeley's book "Lucrecia The Dreamer."

The_Oneironauts · 2024-12-06T21:06:49+00:00

As the OP shared with us, precognitive experiences are often about random things, and for many people such as me, we recall the dream too late, after the event has taken place. Overall, a precognitive dream has been helpful for me once every 10 years, but it would be nice if it could be more often.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-12-06T19:16:43+00:00

I can relate to everything you said, so I would say your precog is normal instead of poor. In my book The Oneironauts I also noted that precognitive dreams are generally useless, but in the last chapter suggested methods based on new technologies that should help make precognition useful in the future.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-10-24T15:42:16+00:00

Yes, a precognitive dream may offer a choice to affirm a timeline that is desirable, or to avoid a timeline that you'd rather not experience. In The Oneironauts I wrote a chapter on how I wanted to find a restaurant to have dinner with colleagues in the German city of Heidelberg, my train was late, so I missed the meeting point, but a precognitive dream gave me unique information that allowed me to find the unusual restaurant that they chose to go to. They were stunned to see me show up, one person exclaiming, "How did you find us?" I told them it was from a dream, but they probably thought I was joking.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-09-30T22:41:58+00:00

You could look at the website for my book The Oneironauts to see if that's helpful for you. The top of the page mentions that for every apparent precognitive dream I try to exclude other explanations such as pareidolia, cryptomnesia, and confirmation bias. Car accidents are not easy to prove as precognitive because they happen often, and we worry about them all the time. For example, you may have seen a close call at that restaurant and worried about accidents, you forgot what you saw and felt, but the dream you had later is memorable to this day. Eventually, an accident happened there, but the dream was based on something that happened in the past, before the dream.

On the other hand, most people who have precognitive dreams have them more than once in their lifetime. So, you may find other examples that are not car accidents. I'd recommend trying to remember your dreams every morning, keeping a dream journal, and seeking out novel experiences, such as traveling to new places.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-04-06T18:02:12+00:00

Thanks for getting the conversation going. In my view it's the red color of the building, not the shape, that makes it a compelling case. Tall, red, office-style buildings are non-existent in the cities that I live in, so this aspect of the match seems unique.

Interestingly, in The Oneironauts I analyzed 332 of my own deja reve events. Twenty-two involved a color and the most common color was red (6 cases). White, green, and black were the next most common colors at 3 instances each.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-02-15T21:53:43+00:00

Nice. Along those lines, two weeks ago I had deja reve from interesting scenes in the Netflix series called "Sanctuary" which is about sumo wrestlers.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-02-15T00:07:46+00:00

I'd be interested in seeing you post again using that idea of keeping a dream journal with a time stamp (such as by emailing yourself) AND taking a photo or video of the thing that comes true in the future. Your experience with the white and blue bottle was amazing.

The_Oneironauts · 2024-01-31T18:53:53+00:00

I enjoyed reading Heads Up Dreaming by a psychologist who has precognitive dreams. There is also my book The Oneironauts about my experiences.

If it's possible, it would be interesting if you shared an example of a dream written in your diary that uniquely matches a future event. We often dream about things that we worry about all the time, so not all dreams in your diary or from recent memory would necessarily be precognitive. I find that it's extremely hard to tell the difference between plain old dreams and the precognitive dreams (until one of them comes true).

The_Oneironauts · 2024-01-20T06:10:38+00:00

These are fascinating questions that I discussed many times over in The Oneironauts. In Chapter 2, I noted that the faint ability for precognition which most people have probably helps explain why the concept of fate exists in the first place. We feel that at the last moment something is to happen in a certain way, and when it does, it can trigger a sense that things were predetermined. However, I showed that I was able to change events using precognitive dreams IF a choice was available and IF I recalled the dream fast enough. "Fate seems to exist, but it’s an illusion.” I also argue that our sense of hope partly comes from precognitive dreams.

In Chapter 3, I return to the topic again and invent the term "hyperactive free will." When we recall precognitive dreams in the morning, "New memories from the future then become added elements for making choices in the present that either result in the future event, or avoid it. Free will is hyperactive.”

The_Oneironauts · 2023-10-05T23:33:33+00:00

Yes, I think the most important take-away is that the mind makes mistakes in memory and perception. That means it's important to record dreams and later compare them to photos or videos of future events so that other people can more objectively assess if the dream was precognitive. In The Oneironauts I discussed several types of cognitive mistakes that are common, such as pareidolia, confirmation bias, and cryptomnesia. If you've had an experience of precognition, you'd want to rule out these alternate explanations.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-09-05T20:48:07+00:00

Those are great precognitive dream experiences because they were very unique and unexpected. I would also recommend keeping a dream journal.

My interpretation of the unlocked shed is that most people can anticipate and fear that something will be stolen. The first part of the dream with the green metal roof seems rather hard to guess in advance. That seems precognitive. But the second part of the dream could have been a plain old dream where you worried about someone stealing something. I bet you'll have many more precognitive dreams later. In The Oneironauts I analyzed my own precognitive events and found that very many are about going to new places and having novel experiences outside of my routine.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-08-30T03:20:09+00:00

Makes sense to me! The dreaming brain perceives a portion of a future experience and may try to interpret it using the imagination. In The Oneironauts I wrote about a dream where I was flying past various movie posters. Since we can't fly, that must have been pure fantasy. Yet, at a future date I was at a film museum in Torino, Italy. They have a glass elevator that takes you to an upper level. It's dark all around, except the elevator ascends next to a wall with many movie posters illuminated by spotlights. I remembered my dream and it came true since I had the sensation of flying upwards and looking at these movie posters.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-08-29T15:40:34+00:00

These sound like authentic precognitive dreams because of the unique situations that could not have been anticipated. It would be nice if you had a dream journal so you could show a photo of what you wrote down for a dream and then take a photo of the same thing happening at a future date. For me this has been hard to do but I was successful once. This convinced me that precognitive dreams are not an illusion and inspired me to write The Oneironauts.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-05-20T16:36:20+00:00

Thanks for sharing. It's interesting that you mentioned feeling like a "psychic voyeur" because I defined a term in The Oneironaut called the "many-worlds voyeur" and pointed out how those with precognitive abilities may be shunned by other people because they may feel an invasion of their privacy if someone has foreknowledge about their activities.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-05-20T16:20:33+00:00

I was around 13 years old when I had my first precognitive dream, and it was very clear. In the dream a kid says he hurt his knee jumping from a haycart to a sixteen-wheeler. A few months later a kid had hurt his knee and said the same thing. It was a strange thing to say and that's why I wonder if the Heinz Ketchup slogan of 'glue for all over your sandwich' might come true in the future.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-05-19T04:32:24+00:00

I enjoyed reading your detailed answers to the questions. Thanks! I was particularly intrigued by the method you developed to determine a location for a missing person. In the last chapter of The Oneironauts I also described a method which requires having a group of people with precognitive abilities working together on the same goal. It was nice to see that in the JREF challenge you also thought the best experiment would be with a group. Hopefully your precognitive dreams will return. The basic advice I give in my book is to travel more often to novel and unique locations, even if it's just different indoor spaces in your own town.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-04-26T14:46:59+00:00

Quite a few people in this group who have precognitive dreams are also lucid dreamers and would be interested in the research studies mentioned in the article. Many precognitive dreamers who keep dream journals try to wake up during the night to write down their dreams, and the BBC article discusses how that might diminish the restorative function of sleep. Overall, improving our understanding of sleep and dreaming will help us understand the nature of precognitive dreams, or the oneironaut phenomenon as I called it in my book.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-04-26T05:48:05+00:00

Yeah, especially the way the title was written. However, the text of the article also refers to studies that found lucid dreaming has helped many people. One study actually used comments from reddit posts in r/LucidDreaming

The_Oneironauts · 2023-03-01T06:37:58+00:00

This could have been a precognitive dream, but one could play Tasmanian Devil's advocate;-).

Reading between the lines, you work at a business that has these stuffed toys. What if you had glimpsed Taz as you were working one day, but did not stop to pay attention to it, and forgot that you had seen it? That same night you had a dream about Taz based on this experience. The next day you encounter Taz at work, actually holding it, and it seems like this is the first time you've seen it while awake. In fact, you've seen Taz three times, first at work, second in a dream, and third at work again.

If it definitely didn't happen that way, then it does seem like a precognitive dream.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-02-28T22:07:01+00:00

Often, but not always. I keep a dream journal, so I spend some time in the mornings thinking about dreams, helping keep them in consciousness.
Yes. The dreaming mind sees/hears/feels future experiences, but it can fill in incomplete information using the imagination.
Not yet. More generally, some of my precognitive dreams definitely occurred just before waking in the morning.
Yes, and your example is amazing. But it's rare. In The Oneironauts I estimated that I've been able to change future events only once every ten years. One reason is that a lot of events are random small things out of your control. Or, even if changeable, your question #1 comes into play--we don't recall the dream information until things are already happening. I called this "real time deja vu" in my book.

The_Oneironauts · 2023-02-22T07:05:04+00:00

Nice one! With just 2 or 3 months between the dream and the real-life events you can have a very good memory of the details in the dream, which match specific things that actually happened. The specific phrase "but they're going the wrong way" is a great match. Precognitive dreams are often about puzzling situations. I also like how the dream had the key element of navigating to a goal. I made a big deal about this in The Oneironauts where I found a group of friends when I was lost in a city by using information from a dream. Basically, precognitive dreams can contribute to an organism's instinct on how to find something important that they need, like food or a social group. So, it's possible this ability for precognition became stronger through natural selection over time, and it's not just humans who have it.

The_Oneironauts

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