Thread: help, only help

I don’t know whether anything I say here can help or not, but it looks like nobody else has replied so far, so I guess I should at least try. I haven’t had waking life experiences like the one you describe, but your post reminded me of a lucid dream I had recently, and maybe it would be helpful if I shared my thoughts on that.

In my dream, I seemed to have access to mental content that was external to my dreamscape, and to the dream ‘me’, which was involved in shaping the dream. There were moments in the dream where I had little previews of the immediate future like the ones you describe. To try to clarify - it’s as if I was playing a game of chess with someone, and imagining a series of moves before actually making one, only it was like temporarily entering into an immersive model of the game, completely realistic and yet still distinct from the actual game. It sounds like you’re just using the screens as a metaphor, but it could still could be relevant since what I think happened with my dream was that I was consciously experiencing mental activity that’s normally unconscious.

I believe that that sort of thing is constantly going on in our dreaming and waking lives - that our minds are actively involved in shaping the way we perceive the world. And so that’s how I would interpret your experiences - you’re becoming conscious of mental processes that were unconscious before, and for most people never become conscious. Deciding to focus on dreams doesn’t usually have such profound results, but there are pretty considerable differences in the way that people dream - just browsing the dream journals of dedicated dreamers makes that clear - and it would make sense that focusing on dreams more might have radically different results, depending on the way we’re wired, so to speak.

As far as the spiritual or esoteric aspects of dreams - well, that’s another case where there are probably at least as many opinions as there are dreamers. Although I’ve only had one lucid dream with anything resembling precognition, it’s common for me to have some sort of nonlucid insight into the future of my dream scenarios. It’s never exactly the same each time, so I can’t really generalize, but it ranges from memories of the future - almost always multiple alternative futures the way I experience it - to full-on omniscience, albeit within a completely imaginary dream context. I have also (nonlucidly) attempted to discover answers to questions about the future, which always seemed to involve synthesizing a lot of raw data, like a computer would, I guess. I have never once read an account of a predictive dream that resembles these experiences - but perhaps that’s another case of being aware of mental processes that are typically unconscious.

So as to whether there’s any connection to clairvoyance - maybe? I wouldn’t rule it out. The only time I (nonucidly) tried to look into my waking-life future, what I concluded was that taking a certain course of action would have very bad consequences for me - and I didn’t take it, which makes it impossible to know for sure whether it really would have happened like that or not. It was going to grad school, if you’re curious - and looking back, I do think that not going was a very good decision, even if it isn’t possible to know just how bad the consequences of going would have been.

Those are my thoughts, for what it’s worth. Honestly, I think the main reason I don’t find my dream experiences more disorienting than I do is that I’m just used to them by now, and not in a mindstate where I can easily make comparisons with how my experience of the world is ‘supposed’ to be. Maybe other people have some advice for the false awakening experiences, which do seem to be fairly common among lucid dreamers, including long series of very convincing ones for some.