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I am as irreverent as you can probably get, in fact, if I have to say what I really think about religions in general, I am probably a blasphemer in every sense

I am as irreverent as you can probably get, in fact, if I have to say what I really think about religions in general, I am probably a blasphemer in every sense of the word. Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, and I meant it not just mentally but physically too. It didn't completely change my views about religions, but it did soften my stance regarding beliefs since I realized how much it can help someone to believe in something. Even if in the end, it actually isn't real or has any deeper meaning, all that matters is the believer receives some solace. And that is enough good reason for it to exist. The article mentioned that none of these dreams involved religious figures like Jesus but overwhelmingly had family members and people with close ties. Perhaps that says something about the "real" spiritual world that each of us instinctively understand. Or maybe it is nothing. I don't know.

UncleOxidant 4y ago
> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the elevator started to go into free fall and I was sort of floating above the floor of the elevator. When it hit the ground I woke up with a start - I remember thinking that it seemed unusually vivid. Went back to sleep and a few hours later the events of 9/11 were all over the news. It was a weird feeling. I've had dreams about earthquakes that happened hours later (even saw a map of the location in the dream), dreams about married friends getting a divorce that soon did (2 different couples), even a very quick dream about my mom dying... the night before she did (she had been ill, but she wasn't considered ill enough to be hospitalized, it was completely unexpected). I don't know what to make of these dreams.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  [dead]
- mrelectric 4y ago
  My first thought was that this is random mumbling, but didn't down vote you. Then again, if it offers any consolation, my mother dreamt the exact same dream, 3 times, exactly the night before her close family member would die.
- tomohelix 4y ago
  Yeah, me too. Many of us have had dreams that were strangely prophetic, powerful, or both. I often try to think of it as the subconsciousness of the pattern matching brain managing to piece together something that the waking mind missed or too busy or afraid to dig deeper into. But of course, it cannot explain everything. Like you said, there are sometimes dreams preceding events that simply can't be expected or explained in anyway. Yet it happened. Maybe it is a selection bias and we tend to focus on those dreams that hit the mark and forgot all about those that didn't. But still, these dreams were always too vivid for me to forget and I often forget most dreams. I can't help but think there might be something more to our dreams, even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it. "shouts it down" sounds like some rebeliousness or anger. Might want to figure out who that's for. ;-)
    - tomohelix 4y ago
      Well, who else but for me? I make a living by thinking analytically about technical matters with sound logics and clear evidence. But that part of me wants to think about stuff that is completely opposite of what I normally do. So they are mad at each other. Kinda schizophrenic, I know. But that is just human, right? Frankly, I would be more afraid of someone who never argue or debate an idea within themselves than someone who does so occasionally.
      - schrodinger 4y ago
        I think they were just making a joke on the assumption that “shouts it down” was a typo for “shuts it down.”
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    I can relate somewhat to your comments. I suggest you may be describing what is called Synchronicity by Jung. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
- drain 4y ago
  I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed my mind reading powers were happening in real time, experience of the moment only exists in my memory. So it is possible that my brain imagined that experience. Maybe recording dreams on physical notes is the way to go to account for possible memory shenanigans. Or indeed it could be that one can recall a dream that happened by chance to be analogous to a real event.
  - NovaDudely 4y ago
    One does have to wonder if it is a case of us reconstructing the timeline after the fact. What we think as being the way it happened and how it actually did could be very different. But when it feels so real it can be hard to dismiss. Semi related. I remember see someones story about how they would talk to god when on LSD, so one day they figured, get a note pad, ask what the meaning of life is and then write it down to study the next day. They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." It felt so profound at the time but was probably meaningless.
    - yadingus 4y ago
      > They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." dude, that's deep No but really, a lot of revelations I've had on trips, the extremely skeptic would disregard as nonsense, but I consider there's some sense there, only it comes from a different kind of lateral thinking and can get lost in translation. If you think about it, even a single word, in your sober state of mind, carries huge amounts of information that we take for granted. If you shift those symbols around a bit, then you can have a single word like "walls" be the epic conclusion of a meaningful thread of ideas that you think is so obvious, you will be able to unpack later by just reading the word. But while you were tripping, you're basically incapacitated precisely because you're devoting so much energy to following these symbolism labyrinths and then of course the trip is over, and the sober mind state has too many other background operations to worry about, so you can't "unpack" that meaning anymore.
- tandr 4y ago
  Thank you very much for sharing this. Without going much into details, you are not alone with this - there are people that have the same abilities. It is scary sometimes, and rarely can be used beforehand. Maybe you and these who has this experience often, are wired differently, and are more tuned to the Universe's radio than the rest of us...
- globular-toast 4y ago
  The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream, like no trousers or teeth falling out dreams. I've had it many times. It usually centres around a skyscraper and a lift shaft and the lift going higher or lower than it is supposed to. My dreams have never coincided with any real-world events that I'm aware of. My dad has several stories about his dreams "coming true", though. I don't completely write it off as nonsense, but I do suspect there's a strong element of confirmation bias, some embellishment and the "broken clock being right twice a day" effect. I find common recurring dreams really fascinating. I can understand the teeth falling out one as losing your teeth is a primal fear: you lose your teeth, you die. But no trousers, skyscrapers, lifts, school etc. are all learned cultural things and I wonder why so many people seem to place the same significance on them.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    > The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream Sure, I've had falling dreams before as most everyone has - for me those are usually lacking in context, I'm just falling - often I find those transform into flying dreams. This one was quite unique in that I was in an elevator in a very tall building (I live in suburbia, I'm very rarely in high rise buildings, maybe once every 5 years). Also the physics seemed correct: elevator starts free falling, I push off the floor and appear to float in relation to the elevator, elevator crashes and I hit the floor. This is one of the things that really struck me about the dream when I woke from it - that the physics were correct.
pazimzadeh 4y ago
The phenomenon doesn't require a superstitious or spiritual explanation
- tomohelix 4y ago
  Indeed. There are many ways you can explain away these things without resorting to superstition. Trust me I know, I tried and still am trying every time I see these things. It is hard to explain, but it is something that even though you can find an explanation that answer most questions, it still can't account for everything. And within those gaps are where I have doubts about whether I was actually right and these are just my mind playing tricks on me, or there is something more. Unfortunately, there isn't any concrete answer yet. We can't even definitely say why all things with a mind need to sleep, much less what happens in their dreams. In the end, like I said, I have come to understand that it doesn't matter if it is right or wrong, as long as it helps someone, it is ultimately good enough.
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    When I was about 5 years old I asked my mom what happens after we die. She thought for a second a said "no one has ever come back and told me." There will always be gaps. While hypotheses, religious or naturalistic, are important, it's also important to be ok not having all the answers.
    - tomohelix 4y ago
      I work in biotech and as I am sure you know, it is the field where unknown phenomena are the expected norms. So yes, I made peace with not being able to know everything a long time ago. But by the same virtue, it means I can't dismiss anything unless I have concrete evidence against it. It is better to leave rooms for doubts rather than settling with a half-answer and consider it a solved matter. To do so would mean I am either supremely confident in my ability to explain something or I am unable to admit there are things that prove me wrong.
      - 4y ago
LoganDark 4y ago
> I realized how much it can help someone to believe in something. Even if in the end, it actually isn't real or has any deeper meaning, all that matters is the believer receives some solace. And that is enough good reason for it to exist. This, I think, is the most important thing that one can realize about belief. We like to believe that we are 8 spirits in one body, because it makes us feel better about ourselves. It lets us feel more like individuals, who were meant to be who we are, and less like mere creations of a disordered brain... even though that's what we are. Technically, we were never supposed to be multiple. We were supposed to all integrate into only one "person"... a singlet. But we did not. We split from each other and became "dissociative identities". We each have our own self-image, our own personality, our own wants and desires. Our own bodies, inside our head. In contrast... using spirits to explain what we are, feels so natural and comfortable, so convenient. Even if we don't believe in the afterlife, or religion; even if we believe that the universe is deterministic and no spiritual realm really exists; even if we know that once our brain fizzles out, there is no consciousness left to experience what death really feels like. There are no experiences left for one who has died. They stopped existing the moment after the last neuron fired. Consciousness can't be restarted. Yet... we choose to believe that we each have our own souls because it represents something within ourselves that we struggle to otherwise describe. An opinion, an aspiration, perhaps even a wish. Sometimes... we wish that our outside body represented even any one of our own, internal bodies. Our ideal selves. Our true forms, perhaps. But we are, mostly, content with being able to express ourselves on the internet... we are content with treating this as an act of spiritual self-expression. Where... physical form does not matter. Where we are not the body. But we are only not the body... when we are souls. When we are just people, pure and unadulterated. -Emily
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
It is nothing. It is always nothing. The "spiritual", the "religion" is always about hiding the politics in the mystery. We didn't know we were on a planet and we believed meretricious speculators rambling on and on about the "genesis" of the sun, the moon, and the earth. We didn't know why and how were there so many kinds of animals around us and we listened to stories. Nowadays we don't know how the brain encodes memories, how it retrieves them and replays them (memories are probably like a movie script and the brain replays them like a cinema [1]), and we don't know how this system fails to work when seriously decoupled, as in dreams, when damaged, or under psychoactive drugs. We know roughly how anaesthesia works by blocking signals, there is nothing magic in being under anesthetic drugs and waking up from anaesthesia; it's a procedure done daily thousands of times across all the hospitals in the world. Camillo Golgi showed us the neuron merely 152 years ago [2]. Give it 150 more years and all the current "mysteries" will appear more or less ridiculous. [1] Endel Tulving, Episodic memory: from mind to brain, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11752477 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11752477 [2] 'In 1871, a German anatomist Joseph von Gerlach postulated that the brain is a complex "protoplasmic network", in the form of a continuous network called the reticulum. Using his black reaction, Golgi could trace various regions of the cerebro-spinal axis, clearly distinguishing the different nervous projections, namely axon from the dendrites.', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi#Nervous_system:~:text=In%201871%2C%20a,the%20dendrites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi#Nervous_system:~....
- b800h 4y ago
  > It is always nothing Classic atheistic arrogance here. Our understanding of the brain may be transformed, but had it occurred to you that when you dissect things you begin to miss the wood for the trees? Nihilism is more absurd than any religion.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    Classic argument to obscurantism. I am not even a nihilist, but sure, after nihilism will destroy the lives of people for 2,000+ years, I will agree that it's more absurd than any religion. So far, the great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, needed thousands of years to realize that slavery is not really a great idea, and some are not yet convinced, but are pressured by those dissecting atheists to repress their true nature: oppress, admonish, control. And to think you can't appreciate the beauty of the world just because you understand it, it's simply mind-boggling. Given how much I appreciate a computer program about which I know every nook and cranny because I developed it from an empty text file, I would venture to say: only if you fully understand something you can start to appreciate its beauty, start to be responsible for its future. (Also, the expression "it is always nothing" is full of poetic vim given how atoms are mostly empty space and how the universe itself is mostly empty space—unfathomable voids sprinkled with galactic filaments [1]) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Nearsc.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Ne...
TriNetra 4y ago
We're indeed product of our beliefs – both in present and afterlife. A related talk by a realized monk that you may find useful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTYb0GzQFsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTYb0GzQFsY

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the elevator started to go into free fall and I was sort of floating above the floor of the elevator. When it hit the ground I woke up with a start - I remember thinking that it seemed unusually vivid. Went back to sleep and a few hours later the events of 9/11 were all over the news. It was a weird feeling. I've had dreams about earthquakes that happened hours later (even saw a map of the location in the dream), dreams about married friends getting a divorce that soon did (2 different couples), even a very quick dream about my mom dying... the night before she did (she had been ill, but she wasn't considered ill enough to be hospitalized, it was completely unexpected). I don't know what to make of these dreams.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
[dead]
mrelectric 4y ago
My first thought was that this is random mumbling, but didn't down vote you. Then again, if it offers any consolation, my mother dreamt the exact same dream, 3 times, exactly the night before her close family member would die.
tomohelix 4y ago
Yeah, me too. Many of us have had dreams that were strangely prophetic, powerful, or both. I often try to think of it as the subconsciousness of the pattern matching brain managing to piece together something that the waking mind missed or too busy or afraid to dig deeper into. But of course, it cannot explain everything. Like you said, there are sometimes dreams preceding events that simply can't be expected or explained in anyway. Yet it happened. Maybe it is a selection bias and we tend to focus on those dreams that hit the mark and forgot all about those that didn't. But still, these dreams were always too vivid for me to forget and I often forget most dreams. I can't help but think there might be something more to our dreams, even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> even though the analytical part of my brain consistently shouts this idea down every time I think about it. "shouts it down" sounds like some rebeliousness or anger. Might want to figure out who that's for. ;-)
  - tomohelix 4y ago
    Well, who else but for me? I make a living by thinking analytically about technical matters with sound logics and clear evidence. But that part of me wants to think about stuff that is completely opposite of what I normally do. So they are mad at each other. Kinda schizophrenic, I know. But that is just human, right? Frankly, I would be more afraid of someone who never argue or debate an idea within themselves than someone who does so occasionally.
    - schrodinger 4y ago
      I think they were just making a joke on the assumption that “shouts it down” was a typo for “shuts it down.”
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  I can relate somewhat to your comments. I suggest you may be describing what is called Synchronicity by Jung. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
drain 4y ago
I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed my mind reading powers were happening in real time, experience of the moment only exists in my memory. So it is possible that my brain imagined that experience. Maybe recording dreams on physical notes is the way to go to account for possible memory shenanigans. Or indeed it could be that one can recall a dream that happened by chance to be analogous to a real event.
- NovaDudely 4y ago
  One does have to wonder if it is a case of us reconstructing the timeline after the fact. What we think as being the way it happened and how it actually did could be very different. But when it feels so real it can be hard to dismiss. Semi related. I remember see someones story about how they would talk to god when on LSD, so one day they figured, get a note pad, ask what the meaning of life is and then write it down to study the next day. They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." It felt so profound at the time but was probably meaningless.
  - yadingus 4y ago
    > They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." dude, that's deep No but really, a lot of revelations I've had on trips, the extremely skeptic would disregard as nonsense, but I consider there's some sense there, only it comes from a different kind of lateral thinking and can get lost in translation. If you think about it, even a single word, in your sober state of mind, carries huge amounts of information that we take for granted. If you shift those symbols around a bit, then you can have a single word like "walls" be the epic conclusion of a meaningful thread of ideas that you think is so obvious, you will be able to unpack later by just reading the word. But while you were tripping, you're basically incapacitated precisely because you're devoting so much energy to following these symbolism labyrinths and then of course the trip is over, and the sober mind state has too many other background operations to worry about, so you can't "unpack" that meaning anymore.
tandr 4y ago
Thank you very much for sharing this. Without going much into details, you are not alone with this - there are people that have the same abilities. It is scary sometimes, and rarely can be used beforehand. Maybe you and these who has this experience often, are wired differently, and are more tuned to the Universe's radio than the rest of us...
globular-toast 4y ago
The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream, like no trousers or teeth falling out dreams. I've had it many times. It usually centres around a skyscraper and a lift shaft and the lift going higher or lower than it is supposed to. My dreams have never coincided with any real-world events that I'm aware of. My dad has several stories about his dreams "coming true", though. I don't completely write it off as nonsense, but I do suspect there's a strong element of confirmation bias, some embellishment and the "broken clock being right twice a day" effect. I find common recurring dreams really fascinating. I can understand the teeth falling out one as losing your teeth is a primal fear: you lose your teeth, you die. But no trousers, skyscrapers, lifts, school etc. are all learned cultural things and I wonder why so many people seem to place the same significance on them.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream Sure, I've had falling dreams before as most everyone has - for me those are usually lacking in context, I'm just falling - often I find those transform into flying dreams. This one was quite unique in that I was in an elevator in a very tall building (I live in suburbia, I'm very rarely in high rise buildings, maybe once every 5 years). Also the physics seemed correct: elevator starts free falling, I push off the floor and appear to float in relation to the elevator, elevator crashes and I hit the floor. This is one of the things that really struck me about the dream when I woke from it - that the physics were correct.

pazimzadeh 4y ago

The phenomenon doesn't require a superstitious or spiritual explanation

tomohelix 4y ago
Indeed. There are many ways you can explain away these things without resorting to superstition. Trust me I know, I tried and still am trying every time I see these things. It is hard to explain, but it is something that even though you can find an explanation that answer most questions, it still can't account for everything. And within those gaps are where I have doubts about whether I was actually right and these are just my mind playing tricks on me, or there is something more. Unfortunately, there isn't any concrete answer yet. We can't even definitely say why all things with a mind need to sleep, much less what happens in their dreams. In the end, like I said, I have come to understand that it doesn't matter if it is right or wrong, as long as it helps someone, it is ultimately good enough.
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  When I was about 5 years old I asked my mom what happens after we die. She thought for a second a said "no one has ever come back and told me." There will always be gaps. While hypotheses, religious or naturalistic, are important, it's also important to be ok not having all the answers.
  - tomohelix 4y ago
    I work in biotech and as I am sure you know, it is the field where unknown phenomena are the expected norms. So yes, I made peace with not being able to know everything a long time ago. But by the same virtue, it means I can't dismiss anything unless I have concrete evidence against it. It is better to leave rooms for doubts rather than settling with a half-answer and consider it a solved matter. To do so would mean I am either supremely confident in my ability to explain something or I am unable to admit there are things that prove me wrong.
    - 4y ago

LoganDark 4y ago

> I realized how much it can help someone to believe in something. Even if in the end, it actually isn't real or has any deeper meaning, all that matters is the believer receives some solace. And that is enough good reason for it to exist. This, I think, is the most important thing that one can realize about belief. We like to believe that we are 8 spirits in one body, because it makes us feel better about ourselves. It lets us feel more like individuals, who were meant to be who we are, and less like mere creations of a disordered brain... even though that's what we are. Technically, we were never supposed to be multiple. We were supposed to all integrate into only one "person"... a singlet. But we did not. We split from each other and became "dissociative identities". We each have our own self-image, our own personality, our own wants and desires. Our own bodies, inside our head. In contrast... using spirits to explain what we are, feels so natural and comfortable, so convenient. Even if we don't believe in the afterlife, or religion; even if we believe that the universe is deterministic and no spiritual realm really exists; even if we know that once our brain fizzles out, there is no consciousness left to experience what death really feels like. There are no experiences left for one who has died. They stopped existing the moment after the last neuron fired. Consciousness can't be restarted. Yet... we choose to believe that we each have our own souls because it represents something within ourselves that we struggle to otherwise describe. An opinion, an aspiration, perhaps even a wish. Sometimes... we wish that our outside body represented even any one of our own, internal bodies. Our ideal selves. Our true forms, perhaps. But we are, mostly, content with being able to express ourselves on the internet... we are content with treating this as an act of spiritual self-expression. Where... physical form does not matter. Where we are not the body. But we are only not the body... when we are souls. When we are just people, pure and unadulterated. -Emily

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

It is nothing. It is always nothing. The "spiritual", the "religion" is always about hiding the politics in the mystery. We didn't know we were on a planet and we believed meretricious speculators rambling on and on about the "genesis" of the sun, the moon, and the earth. We didn't know why and how were there so many kinds of animals around us and we listened to stories. Nowadays we don't know how the brain encodes memories, how it retrieves them and replays them (memories are probably like a movie script and the brain replays them like a cinema [1]), and we don't know how this system fails to work when seriously decoupled, as in dreams, when damaged, or under psychoactive drugs. We know roughly how anaesthesia works by blocking signals, there is nothing magic in being under anesthetic drugs and waking up from anaesthesia; it's a procedure done daily thousands of times across all the hospitals in the world. Camillo Golgi showed us the neuron merely 152 years ago [2]. Give it 150 more years and all the current "mysteries" will appear more or less ridiculous. [1] Endel Tulving, Episodic memory: from mind to brain, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11752477 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11752477 [2] 'In 1871, a German anatomist Joseph von Gerlach postulated that the brain is a complex "protoplasmic network", in the form of a continuous network called the reticulum. Using his black reaction, Golgi could trace various regions of the cerebro-spinal axis, clearly distinguishing the different nervous projections, namely axon from the dendrites.', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi#Nervous_system:~:text=In%201871%2C%20a,the%20dendrites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi#Nervous_system:~....

b800h 4y ago
> It is always nothing Classic atheistic arrogance here. Our understanding of the brain may be transformed, but had it occurred to you that when you dissect things you begin to miss the wood for the trees? Nihilism is more absurd than any religion.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Classic argument to obscurantism. I am not even a nihilist, but sure, after nihilism will destroy the lives of people for 2,000+ years, I will agree that it's more absurd than any religion. So far, the great religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, needed thousands of years to realize that slavery is not really a great idea, and some are not yet convinced, but are pressured by those dissecting atheists to repress their true nature: oppress, admonish, control. And to think you can't appreciate the beauty of the world just because you understand it, it's simply mind-boggling. Given how much I appreciate a computer program about which I know every nook and cranny because I developed it from an empty text file, I would venture to say: only if you fully understand something you can start to appreciate its beauty, start to be responsible for its future. (Also, the expression "it is always nothing" is full of poetic vim given how atoms are mostly empty space and how the universe itself is mostly empty space—unfathomable voids sprinkled with galactic filaments [1]) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Nearsc.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:Ne...

TriNetra 4y ago

We're indeed product of our beliefs – both in present and afterlife. A related talk by a realized monk that you may find useful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTYb0GzQFsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTYb0GzQFsY