I had a dream a long time ago that I was in a classroom with long tables arranged into two long rows facing each other, and I was sitting next to a girl who was looking at a page in a magazine mainly covered in text, but a box in the middle of the page had a picture of little birds flying around. It lasted what felt like only a moment, but it was distinct.
This Thursday, my creative writing class switched classrooms from one in Murdock to one in Bowman. The tables were long, and we arranged them into two long rows. I hadn't realized at this point that it was familiar, because it was such a long time ago that I had the dream. But near the end of class, the girl next to me was reading through a story in her NewYorker magazine, and as she flipped the page, I saw the birds flying in the box in the middle of the page. Suddenly the dream came rushing back to me, and it felt like I had seen the future - which is really weird.
But it got me thinking about determinism again. If Freud is right and dreams do access our unconscious, maybe those rare dreams we have in which we feel like we've predicted the future are in fact a part of our unconscious that is telling us that it already knows everything that is going to happen. Maybe it's proof that everything is already determined. It certainly isn't good proof, but it is something to think about.
I think the idea that dreams use our subconscious minds to guess at future events is very interesting, and there may indeed be a grain of truth in it. However, I do not think that dreams can predict everything, because human beings do not have access to all possible knowledge. The Universe is incredibly huge, if not infinite in size, so all the variables contained within (which determine future events) are too many in number for the human mind to comprehend. Even if our mental capacities are much greater than they may seem to our conscious minds (and there is evidence that this is true), it is virtually impossible that they are great enough to comprehend the nature of the entire universe.
ReplyDeleteThat said, we can predict some events with relative certainty, even by using only our conscious minds. For example, if I drop my pen from three feet up over my bed, I can predict with virtual certainty that it will fall through the air and land upon the bed. The primary variables involved are relatively few in number, and thus predicting the event is simple. Thus, it is possible that our subconscious minds can take even more variables into account than our conscious minds, and as a result can predict more complex events. However, as it is currently impossible to know which dreams may be indicative of future happenings and which are random brain firings, repressed memories or desires, or simple reruns of things that have happened to us recently, it is not practical to base future activities off what we witness in dreams.
P.S. I also posted this on my own blog if you'd rather read it there.
I couldn't agree with you more - there's no possible way our brains could hold that much knowledge. It's just interesting to think that maybe we have the knowledge of what happens specifically in regard to ourselves. So I have no idea what you are going to do when you wake up thirty days from now, but somewhere in my unconscious I might have the knowledge of what I'm going to do when I wake up thirty days from now. So basically our unconscious might have the information pertaining to our own actions - what we personally see, do, smell, hear, say, etc. - but nothing more. After saying that, though, a lot of what we do is affected by outside forces, so maybe what I'm saying is impossible. I don't know, but isn't that the beauty of it? :)
ReplyDeleteBut in response to your last point, I also agree that we absolutely should not base our future activities off what we witness in dreams because it's not like we're always accessing the knowledge of the future in our dreams - it might only be rare occasions that we get that information. We aren't able to differentiate a dream from a premonition, so until we can (who knows?) we should stay away from thinking of our dreams as premonitions.