Time and Time in Dreams

This is something I've been experiencing and thinking about for a while. I'm just going to jump right to the point.

Does anyone ever have an experience while you're dreaming that predicts a sound happening while you're sleeping?

For instance, I'll be dreaming, and during my dream I notice a glass falling off a table. I watch it, and as soon as it hits the ground and breaks there's a sound of something in real life (a knock on my door, a bird flying into my window) that corresponds exactly with the moment the glass hits the ground and breaks in my dream. Thing is, in my dream, I watch the falling of the glass entirely, and then when it hits the ground and breaks I'm awoken by an actual sound of something happening in real life.

Is this like some kind of subconscious ESP? It's been happening to me forever and I'm curious whether anyone else experiences it.

a reply to: underwerks

When i'm dreaming many times I wake up to loud banging sounds or usually, really loud knocking. It wakes me up immediately, but on rare occasions i'm woken up by Voices calling out my Name.

I've heard that this is due to coming out from and OBE even though I couldnt remember having an OBE if my life depended on it.

a reply to: JesusXst
What's weird is that the sound I hear in real life corresponds with something happening in my dreams, something like a glass falling where I realize ahead of time I'm going to hear something when it hits the ground and breaks, and then once it does there's a sound in real life that wakes me up at the exact second.

originally posted by: underwerks
a reply to: JesusXst
What's weird is that the sound I hear in real life corresponds with something happening in my dreams, something like a glass falling where I realize ahead of time I'm going to hear something when it hits the ground and breaks, and then once it does there's a sound in real life that wakes me up at the exact second.

It might have to do with something you went through at some point in your life, and falling breaking glass incorporated by you into the dream world is your Trigger. Subconsciously we hold things in, and they generally come out in our dreams.

originally posted by: JesusXst

originally posted by: underwerks
a reply to: JesusXst
What's weird is that the sound I hear in real life corresponds with something happening in my dreams, something like a glass falling where I realize ahead of time I'm going to hear something when it hits the ground and breaks, and then once it does there's a sound in real life that wakes me up at the exact second.

It might have to do with something you went through at some point in your life, and falling breaking glass incorporated by you into the dream world is your Trigger. Subconsciously we hold things in, and they generally come out in our dreams.

Maybe, but I'm only using the falling glass as an example. It's like I know ahead of time in my dreams that something is going to happen in real life and it's incorporated into what happens in my dream. Like if in my dream someone threw a book at the wall, and the exact moment the book hits the wall and makes a noise there's a knock on my door that wakes me up.

a reply to: underwerks

I asked a similar question in a thread many moons agos.

It seems like dreams know when their time is almost up; they do seem predictive in this way.

originally posted by: NarcolepticBuddha
a reply to: underwerks

I asked a similar question in a thread many moons agos.

It seems like dreams know when their time is almost up; they do seem predictive in this way.

It's really weird and makes me think of just how subjective our experience of time actually is. Maybe it has something to do with the concept of an "overmind", a shared type of unconscious consciousness that all of us are part of while in the dream world.

a reply to: underwerks

Hmm, dreams are strange.

The last few months, in those moments just before sleep I've had a similar experience. Basically my brain runs simulation or something of what I'd be seeing if my eyes were open with good accuracy.

I read the back of a newspaper once in my dream like state, compared the folds in my blanket to mountain ranges then opened my eyes to see my blanket look exactly as I saw behind my eyes. It's a strange feeling, literally like I'm seeing with my eyes closed, dreamlike state and not sleeping.

I personally think its the brains ability to predict rather than OBE but what do I know, the brain is a wonderful thing.

Double post

originally posted by: underwerks
This is something I've been experiencing and thinking about for a while. I'm just going to jump right to the point.

Does anyone ever have an experience while you're dreaming that predicts a sound happening while you're sleeping?

For instance, I'll be dreaming, and during my dream I notice a glass falling off a table. I watch it, and as soon as it hits the ground and breaks there's a sound of something in real life (a knock on my door, a bird flying into my window) that corresponds exactly with the moment the glass hits the ground and breaks in my dream. Thing is, in my dream, I watch the falling of the glass entirely, and then when it hits the ground and breaks I'm awoken by an actual sound of something happening in real life.

Is this like some kind of subconscious ESP? It's been happening to me forever and I'm curious whether anyone else experiences it.

Its about time this happened to someone else. I was trying to guess what was in a box by shaking it. Well, when I opened it many months later, the box was empty, which was shocking to me because it obviously wasn't empty when I was trying to guess what was in it. Upon putting something in the box, I shook it and heard EXACTLY what I had heard many months earlier.

So, yes, this happens. People hear things and later they turn out to happen exactly as they heard them any amount of time earlier. I've been waiting for years for someone to come up with an equivalent experience!

I understand what you're saying. It's like the dream knows that you'll hear that noise in real life, and constructs a whole situation beforehand to match it at the exact time the noise happens. Happens to me often, and leaves me baffled everytime. I really would like to know how is it possible...could it be related to how our perception of time is distorted while sleeping? I mean, I had dreams that lasted 2 days (in the dream) during a 15 minute snooze.
Maybe we hear the noise first, and then the brain processes it and constructs a whole situation around it incredibly fast, but we don't perceive it as being that fast because of this distortion in time perception we have while sleeping?

a reply to: underwerks

you beat me to it. I was just about to ask same question few nights ago.
Tea kettle in the kitchen whistles while I am asleep in my bedroom. In my dream before I hear the sound, I stand next to the rail road with train approaching. Train horn signals in my dream with the sound of boiling tea kettle. But before the kettle whistles, my brain constructs a situation where prior to the real sound I see pre conditioned scenario where that sound it put to logical consequence in my dream.
How did I 'know' that the tea kettle was about to whistle?
These sort of things in your dream have a purpose to keep you asleep, protect your rest from destructive noises. In doing so you do not 'hear' the sound immediately. I mean, the sound is there, but your brain is not 'hearing' it per se. The moment noise starts, your brain constructs interpreter situation to 'fit' that noise into your dream, again, to keep you resting and asleep.
Since your brain cannot block noise, it assimilates it into dream scenario. Time gap between you actually hearing the noise and real noise is used to construct situation as continuation of your dream sleep where you are not alarmed or destructed (getting awake). Bottom line, you dont hear the noise right away even tho it's there. Your brain before allowing noise to actualize comes up with scenario where that noise is part of the dream and hence, to keep you sleeping.

That's what I think.

This is one instance where there is a fairly boring explanation for things.
Basically our brains trick us. What we experience as a continuous realtime flow of conscious experience is anything but. The cohesive 'narrative' that our brains create is actually a story our brain tells us after things have already happened, and is cobbled together from information gathered by all the senses combined with our internal model of how things work in the physical world.
I did a whole presentation on this for one of my psychology classes. It's actually quite easy to produce the illusion of freely made choices, while actually 'forcing' people to choose 'right' or 'left' via targeted brain stimulation. The illusion is possible because our internal narrative is not created until after an event has happened.
In much the same way you perceive the sound to happen at the same time the dream glass shatters, when really, you probably heard the sound first, and your brain slaps together the glass falling dream explanation just after the sound occurs.
Basically are brains are good at fooling us, because it really wants every stimulus to fit into a narrative that makes 'sense' to it.

originally posted by: ApisM
This is one instance where there is a fairly boring explanation for things.
Basically our brains trick us. What we experience as a continuous realtime flow of conscious experience is anything but. The cohesive 'narrative' that our brains create is actually a story our brain tells us after things have already happened, and is cobbled together from information gathered by all the senses combined with our internal model of how things work in the physical world.
I did a whole presentation on this for one of my psychology classes. It's actually quite easy to produce the illusion of freely made choices, while actually 'forcing' people to choose 'right' or 'left' via targeted brain stimulation. The illusion is possible because our internal narrative is not created until after an event has happened.
In much the same way you perceive the sound to happen at the same time the dream glass shatters, when really, you probably heard the sound first, and your brain slaps together the glass falling dream explanation just after the sound occurs.
Basically are brains are good at fooling us, because it really wants every stimulus to fit into a narrative that makes 'sense' to it.

I understand what you're saying. I thought about that. But what about when it involves my roommate knocking on my door and in my dream I watch a whole sequence of events leading up to the initial knock that wakes me up? And I'm conscious from the first knock at my door?

a reply to: underwerks

I guess I would ask if that whole sequence leading up to the knock could have ended differently? Was the knock the only possible ending that would make sense with the sequence?

Our brains REALLY want everything to fit into a coherent narrative. We modify our memories of experiences to fit our new beliefs all the time, we actively ignore information that doesn't fit our beliefs or expectations...

Alternatively it could be that the perception of time in dreams doesn't work the same way as it does while awake. The part of our brain that 'fact checks' our experiences against our internal model of how things in the world behave isn't active in the same way while we sleep. That's why we can fly or make impossibly long jumps without injuries, or randomly jump from one era or location to another without any logical way of transitioning. It could just be our time sense is equally distorted while dreaming, so that something that felt like a minutes long experience happened in less than a second.

Just to balance things out after offering a science explanation, here's the metaphysical option:

We commonly think of time like the traffic on a one way street; always moving in the same direction. While we may perceive the flow to speed up or slow down at times, causality only works in one direction; past events influence present events.
I tend to think of the flow of time more like the water in a river. Picture what happens when the flowing water meets a rock sticking up above the surface. Eddies are created ahead of the rock, the result of pressure waves moving against the flow of water/time. I believe that we can sometimes sense this backpressure from events that haven't happened yet. Usually we don't notice them, but if the event/rock is big enough, or if we are in a receptive enough state (dreaming, meditating, etc...) we can perceive even the small ripples sometimes.

I've spent enough time lurking on the paranormal threads to read plenty of stories where people get a bad feeling, change thier plans or stop driving just long enough to avoid impending disaster, that I feel the 'river' view of time is the more accurate way to look at things.

a reply to: ApisM

The river analogy is a really good one. I think what I experience may be a mixture of a different state of awareness and the subjectivity of the perception of time.

Or maybe its an equal combination of my conscious and subconscious playing out together, due to being in the dream world. I could be wrong, just throwing ideas out there.

originally posted by: greenreflections
a reply to: underwerks

you beat me to it. I was just about to ask same question few nights ago.
Tea kettle in the kitchen whistles while I am asleep in my bedroom. In my dream before I hear the sound, I stand next to the rail road with train approaching. Train horn signals in my dream with the sound of boiling tea kettle. But before the kettle whistles, my brain constructs a situation where prior to the real sound I see pre conditioned scenario where that sound it put to logical consequence in my dream.
How did I 'know' that the tea kettle was about to whistle?
These sort of things in your dream have a purpose to keep you asleep, protect your rest from destructive noises. In doing so you do not 'hear' the sound immediately. I mean, the sound is there, but your brain is not 'hearing' it per se. The moment noise starts, your brain constructs interpreter situation to 'fit' that noise into your dream, again, to keep you resting and asleep.
Since your brain cannot block noise, it assimilates it into dream scenario. Time gap between you actually hearing the noise and real noise is used to construct situation as continuation of your dream sleep where you are not alarmed or destructed (getting awake). Bottom line, you dont hear the noise right away even tho it's there. Your brain before allowing noise to actualize comes up with scenario where that noise is part of the dream and hence, to keep you sleeping.

That's what I think.

I am also thinking that your dream mood depends on ambient noise around you. In low level, it would be invoking images that make you calm and comfortable. People living around industrial areas would be more restless and having nightmares. On the other hand, ambient noise too low could trigger an alarm as much as background noise which is too high.

to underwerks
Thinking that sound of your friend knocking the door, just as happens in real life, can be explained that your brain used to hear that sound and reconstructs that noise into most probable dream scenario. Your brain still 'not hearing' that sound until the theme is ready.


cheers)