Dream-warnings of the dead

[Elaro]

I was having a conversation with a friend and we were discussing the evidence for souls, and life after death. Now, she said that after her grandfather died, her mother would dream of him "a day or two" before she learned of the death of one of her family members (on her side and on her husband's side). My friend says this happened "every time" someone in her family died. She says this was happening for 20 years or so.

Now, I'm skeptical and I attributed this to memory playing tricks on her. But now I'm curious. Have you guys heard of a similar phenomenon?



(BTW, she's a Christian that believes the Bible is a web of lies. Go figure...)

[Surlethe]

I was having a conversation with a friend and we were discussing the evidence for souls, and life after death. Now, she said that after her grandfather died, her mother would dream of him "a day or two" before she learned of the death of one of her family members (on her side and on her husband's side). My friend says this happened "every time" someone in her family died. She says this was happening for 20 years or so.

Now, I'm skeptical and I attributed this to memory playing tricks on her. But now I'm curious. Have you guys heard of a similar phenomenon?

No, and it's more likely it's her memory playing tricks on her. There's nothing concrete about this phenomenon, and there are a variety of explanations aside from memory tricks. For instance, perhaps all the family deaths have been from protracted illness, and she subconsciously connects protracted illness with her father.

Or perhaps she has actually dreamed of him a few days before every death. This doesn't mean it's significant: there are 6 billion people in the world; why wouldn't it happen to someone?

(BTW, she's a Christian that believes the Bible is a web of lies. Go figure...)

What's wrong with that?

[K. A. Pital]

A more serious case of the following was reported recently on TV.

A woman's kid got killed by some bandit goon on the street, and the woman claimed she saw her kid come in a dream and tell the name of the killer, which she then reported to the police.

Incidentally, it was the man.

I wonder if she knew the man beforehand, but the news made is so that apparently it was a totally random person...

[Surlethe]

Incidentally, it was the man.

How did they know? Did he confess? Was it under duress?

I wonder if she knew the man beforehand, but the news made is so that apparently it was a totally random person...

Like I said, in a world of six billion humans, random shit happens.

[K. A. Pital]

How did they know? Did he confess?

Ah, I have that news segment. Yes, he did. Apparently they knew each other beforehand. The one who was involved in crime needed money, so he killed his "friend" and hid the body.

[Panzer Grenadier]

So it wasn't a totally random assailant, but someone the kid knew and therefore the mother possibly could have known. Perhaps she had other evidence against this man, than a supposed dream. Besides, if someone was randomly killed maybe just maybe the police might start the investigation with some of his friends?

[LadyTevar]

Well... there is a case where a man was convicted of killing his wife, based on his wife's testimony from the grave.

The Greenbrier Ghost

[Shrykull]

Reminds me of that movie White Noise. I think all that phenomenon is an image being overlayed from another source. I don't exactly know what it's called, but I remember once we could see on our tv the faint outline of a video game someone else was playing in the other room.

I've heard of something called Vanic Radiation which you can pick up from electronic equipment if you have the right equipment and see what's on someone else's screen (anyone have a link to it, I can't find anything on Vanic Radiation in a web search) either way it's nothing supernatural.

[Kanastrous]

I remember once we could see on our tv the faint outline of a video game someone else was playing in the other room.

Sounds like RF signal leakage. Maybe.

[ray245]

I was having a conversation with a friend and we were discussing the evidence for souls, and life after death. Now, she said that after her grandfather died, her mother would dream of him "a day or two" before she learned of the death of one of her family members (on her side and on her husband's side). My friend says this happened "every time" someone in her family died. She says this was happening for 20 years or so.

Now, I'm skeptical and I attributed this to memory playing tricks on her. But now I'm curious. Have you guys heard of a similar phenomenon?



(BTW, she's a Christian that believes the Bible is a web of lies. Go figure...)

Well...there can be good things from those dreams at times. My parents, aunts and uncle have a dream when my grandfather died.

And guess what? From the dream, my grandfather give my aunt the numbers to buy for lottery and she won quite a lot if I remember. The same happened when my grandmother died. Someone in the family won the lottery as well.

Sure, we did not won too much, but we did won some money though.

The usual belief here is, whenever someone dies in the family, there is usually a high chance you will win the lottery in some way or another. Although, many have said it depends on how filial you are...

Maybe it is pure luck? I depends on your belief mostly.

[PeZook]

Things like these happened to my mother, too. I think that women are just good at subconsciously picking up subtle clues that precede death, especially of a protracted disease. Also, if you've seen a person die, and you spent weeks at his/her side, you can tell how someone else is progressing if they are suffering from a similar illness.

My parents can actually spot potential lung cancer patients just by looking at someone who smokes heavily, because they've already seen two people die of it. And when you think about it, the symptoms are not really something arcane, they're obvious if you observe carefully.

[Darth Wong]

I have relatives who make similar claims. The problem is that there's no way of telling whether it's true. They might even sincerely believe it's true, but recollection of dreams is so foggy that someone could easily project a made-up memory on top of a vaguely related dream and then believe that it really happened that way.

Same goes for this spooky story of the dead son telling his mother who his killer was. If this really worked, and wasn't just some case of a reporter repeating a bullshit story or leaving out an important detail, then why the fuck isn't it happening all the time? There are thousands and thousands of murders every year, a significant fraction of which go unsolved. How many of those people would like to nail their own killers, if this were indeed possible?

[PeZook]

Same goes for this spooky story of the dead son telling his mother who his killer was. If this really worked, and wasn't just some case of a reporter repeating a bullshit story or leaving out an important detail, then why the fuck isn't it happening all the time? There are thousands and thousands of murders every year, a significant fraction of which go unsolved. How many of those people would like to nail their own killers, if this were indeed possible?

You know, I had a similar feeling, namely that there are probably tons of stories similar in nature, but where the name was completely wrong. Of course, those stories are not reported at all. The mother in this case probably nailed it because she suspected the guy all along, and it just happened she was right.

[Lagmonster]

ISame goes for this spooky story of the dead son telling his mother who his killer was. If this really worked, and wasn't just some case of a reporter repeating a bullshit story or leaving out an important detail, then why the fuck isn't it happening all the time? There are thousands and thousands of murders every year, a significant fraction of which go unsolved. How many of those people would like to nail their own killers, if this were indeed possible?

You would be surprised how often this story appears in folklore; in England this style of ghost story has been copied literally hundreds of times. Professional folklorists categorize the "ghost comes back to identify/find revenge against their killer" type of story as one of the most common, and certainly one of the oldest; There is a famous story that originates with Cicero and has been re-told hundreds of different ways about a person who is murdered and who appears in a dream to a loved one to tell them where to find their body. There's a similar one told by Pliny the Younger, whose depiction of the classic haunted house is the base inspiration for all others, and whose ghost was wholesale copied by Dickens for the chain-rattling Jacob Marley. In either case, swap out the names and the environment and it could literally be a carbon-copy of thousands of identical stories about people who dream about the dead or receive otherworldly messages identifying their corpse or killer.

The most famous story of this kind is that of William Corder, the Red Barn Murderer of England. In this story, William murdered his girlfriend and buried her in a barn. Her sister, Ann, then has dreams in which she sees Maria's ghost telling her where to find the body and who killed her. This is even recorded in the court details, which were kept in a book bound with Corder's own skin and which still exists today. Anyway, the townsfolk eventually gave in to Ann's nagging and, amazingly, found the body. The court filed dozens of charges against William (including one of forgery) because they had no real evidence that he killed Maria, but a jury still only took half an hour to sentence him to death. It's been speculated that Ann was actually having an affair with William and had been plotting with him to murder Maria so they could run off together, but this has no more substantiation in fact than the nonsense that she 'dreamed' it all. William Corder did actually confess to the killing while in prison, and later facts made it clear he likely did murder her, making Ann's dream testimony moot, but it has gone down in history as one of the only recorded instances in which a supposed dream led to the discovery of a corpse and a conviction and execution of a murderer.

[Turin]

You would be surprised how often this story appears in folklore; in England this style of ghost story has been copied literally hundreds of times. Professional folklorists categorize the "ghost comes back to identify/find revenge against their killer" type of story as one of the most common, and certainly one of the oldest

Of course, there's a bit of trouble with this sort of evidence for the origins point of such stories into the "collective memory," as it were. People tend to interpret "this has been told through the ages" as "this has been told through the ages because it's really happened over and over again! Wow!"

It's similar to how conspiracy theorists pooh-pooh evidence against their pet theories by saying "that's what they want you to think!"

[Lagmonster]

Of course, there's a bit of trouble with this sort of evidence for the origins point of such stories into the "collective memory," as it were. People tend to interpret "this has been told through the ages" as "this has been told through the ages because it's really happened over and over again! Wow!"

It's similar to how conspiracy theorists pooh-pooh evidence against their pet theories by saying "that's what they want you to think!"

With a lot of folklore, origins can be hard to trace, but with the 'dead who warns family in a dream of their killer' story, this can actually be traced back to Cicero. In his version, the victim comes from Arcadia (a pastoral region known for 'innocent' types), and they go to Megara and stay at an inn where the owner murders the traveler and conceals the body in a wagon of manure, until the victim's ghost appears to a friend and identifies the facts of the murder. Not only is this story thousands of years old, but it's easy to point out that many of the classical ghost story authors had classical educations and would have received inspiration from Pliny or Cicero.

Understanding folklore has a lot to do with understanding how people fantasize and how imaginations work; with most people, bad dreams often involve something bad happening to people we love, so if you had a dream that your father was chased by a big scary monster and the next day learned that he'd had a heart attack in the night and died, if you were the gullible sort, you'd vaguely realize that you'd just DREAMED about something bad happening to your dad, and with each passing day your memory of that dream would become closer and closer to 'I dreamed my dad had a heart attack and came to me just as he died' and less like a fuzzy generic nightmare.

One really telling aspect of this kind of folklore is the fact that people almost NEVER respond to tragic dreams the day they have them, as though they were premonitions. Weeks or even months pass between the dream and the discovery of the tragedy - ample time to screw up your memory of the nightmare and even the exact night the nightmare occurred so that it coincides properly with the tragedy.

[Darth Wong]

This is a real conversation I had with my sister-in-law about this kind of thing (obviously working from memory, so words or phrases could be wrong, but this was the general gist of it):

HER: I dreamed that she would die, and when I woke up, I found out she died.

ME: Or at least that's how you recall it now. Folklore is filled with stories like this but it's never properly documented. Nobody ever writes down a detailed dream before finding out about the real-life event which they supposedly foresaw.

HER: I did!

ME: Really? Let me see.

HER: Well, I don't have that diary any more. It was lost.

ME: Ah, right. I see

HER: Don't roll your eyes at me! You said that stories like this are never documented, and I disproved your claim!

ME: How? You haven't got any documentation. You only recall that you once did. How is that different from people who just recall the premonition story itself?

HER: It's different because I wrote it down!

ME: But you conveniently can't come up with the actual piece of paper proving this.

HER: I don't have to. You wanted documentation, I gave you documentation.

ME: I don't see it.

HER: I already told you, I LOST IT!!

ME: Then you don't have documentation, do you?

HER: You're a very close-minded person.

[Lagmonster]

This is a real conversation I had with my sister-in-law about this kind of thing (obviously working from memory, so words or phrases could be wrong, but this was the general gist of it):

You should take a look at the diary of an individual who actually DOES write down each dream they have and tries to match it to a real-life event because they believe they are psychic and receive visions; the explanations and meanings they ascribe to their dreams are more imaginative than the dreams themselves. I knew one girl who dumped her boyfriend because a recurring dream-image of birds 'told her' that she wasn't going to get married. She used her adamant belief in her interpretation of her dreams as an excuse for her decisions.

[Zac Naloen]

I could say I've encountered this, the night my grandfather died I was having a dream of a conversation with him right as I was woken up.

But if you think about it logically, i'd known for a couple of days he was close to death. naturally it would be on my mind and in my dreams, that I got woken in the middle of a dream generally means I am more likely to remember said dream.


hence thinking i'd perhaps had some sort of clairvoyent moment that really wasn't.

[Surlethe]

Memory is a really tricky thing, anyway. Just last Saturday, I'd borrowed my parents' car to take my siblings somewhere. I woke up Sunday and panicked because I didn't remember returning the keys to where they belong. I distinctly recalled leaving them in my pocket as I walked back to the dorm from dropping the car off at my parents' house.

Then I remembered that I'd been dropped off at the dorm the previous night and my brother had driven the car back.

What are the chances that I'm the only one who unintentionally makes shit up? Since dream memories are worse than real memories, it's likely that this happens a lot more with dreams, especially since you don't have actual context and witnesses to help back up your memory.

[tim31]

This is only a related anecdote, but it's an example of whether you choose to see something as coincidence or something more.

On New Years Day 2002 my Uncle Tony called from the UK. It was an hour before midnight over there, and he spoke to my mother(his sister-in-law), my sisters, and myself. To me he imparted a list of films he thought I should see, and wished me luck in the impending start of my university degree. He told me to be sure to look after my mother(who was recently divorced). Collaborating with my family members later, he appeared to have had similar words with them.

Ten days later he was found with one leg out the door of his car at a site he was scheduled to inspect(he worked for British Rail). He had suffered a massive heart attack with no prior history and an apparently clean bill of health.

Rationally, the coincidences are just coincidences. But I chose to believe he knew he was going to die because it comforted me.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Well, the world is full of the inexplicable and the bizarre. I've always figured there's something to all these ghosts and white noise and hauntings and globes of light and UFOs and whathaveyou, but the current explanations (e.g., people's restless souls and aliens or angels or demons or shit) are preposterous and these are the kind of things we can focus on explaining once we've already gotten important things done, like teleportation. And good, cheap cake. And FTL.

[Lagmonster]

Well, the world is full of the inexplicable and the bizarre. I've always figured there's something to all these ghosts and white noise and hauntings and globes of light and UFOs and whathaveyou, but the current explanations (e.g., people's restless souls and aliens or angels or demons or shit) are preposterous and these are the kind of things we can focus on explaining once we've already gotten important things done, like teleportation. And good, cheap cake. And FTL.

There's nothing to ghosts and white noise and hauntings and globes of light (orbs) and UFOs. There are just a lot of people with big imaginations and little rational sense. A lot of poltergeists, for example, turn out to be hoaxed by people who thought they saw something fly off a shelf one time, and who continued to perpetrate the hoax by moving other things themselves specifically because they wanted desperately to be believed for the one time they couldn't explain it.

By the way, if you have a lot of poltergeist activity in your home and you have an open fireplace, the number one way to stop it is to install a chimney cap.

[Kanastrous]

HER: I dreamed that she would die, and when I woke up, I found out she died.

ME: Are you sure you didn't murder her while sleepwalking?

[Darth Servo]

This is a real conversation I had with my sister-in-law about this kind of thing (obviously working from memory, so words or phrases could be wrong, but this was the general gist of it):

Is this the same S.I.L. who's kids your kids beat the crap out of in back-yard soccer?