Scientific explanation for "prophetic" dreams?

Question

Every now and then, I have dreams that seem to come true. Not of big events, just of commonplace, probable occurences. For example, I dreamed that I was watching a tv show that I regularly watch, and at the first commercial break my mother called and we fought. My mother does call and we often argue. These are not rare events. A couple weeks after the dream, I was watching that show and at the first commercial break the phone rang. I was reminded of my dream and decided not to pick up (better safe then sorry!). Turns out it had been my mother. She left an angry message. This is just one example, but the rest are along the same lines.

Now, my dream was true, but I do not belive that I prophesized fighting my mother. For one thing, that would be the most useless form of clairvoyance I have ever heard of and I have never seen credible proof of prophets. But, what scientific explanation does exist for these deja vu like dreams? Hallucinations seem improbable. Anyone?

Answer 1

The scientific explanation for seemingly clairvoyent occurence usually result from the fact that subtle evidence of an event about to occur may have been picked up in the subconscious mind but filtered out by the conscious. For example, you may have noticed days before the phonecall occured that your mother has been in a bad mood lately and that your mother seems to usually make phone calls at times that your favorite channel has commercial breaks. But your mind was worrying about something  else at the time. Your conscious memory did not pick up the evidence that your mother was going to get angry but your subconscious did. Dreams usually occur as a result of memories in the subconscious surpressed by the conscious. Therefore you may dreamt about your mom getting angry because you had noticed something that gave evidence that your mom was likely to get angry but your mind was distracted with something else. So after you had that dream, your subconsious memory that gave suspicion to your mother getting angry entered your conscious memory and the evidence or pattern that you unconsciously picked up ended up predicting corrrectly. Therefore you unconsciously noticed subtle signs that the event was likely to happen but you were unaware that your mind was doing it until you had the dream.

Answer 2

Dreams of the future come from two places. Either it is from God or from the devil. In terms of it being from God a person might be given the ability by God to know future events because he called to be a prophet etc. In terms of coming from the devil sometimes a person's ancestors were involved in the occult (such as parents, grandparents etc) and as a result that ability to know the future is passed on to them. Probably you can find out if any member of your family was involved in the occult if so you would need to go to a pastor asking him to pray with you and renouncing verbally your family's involvement in the occult and asking God to remove any demonic knowledge that is inside you. I can't begin to stress how dangerous the occult is. Take care!!!

Answer 3

There isn't any scientific data which explains events such as that. Though I have an answer it's not scientific. The closest scientific answer is that we accept the world around us though we don't know if it's real or not.