A few nights ago I had a dream about a girlfriend that died suddenly and tragically in my younger years. If she hadn't died there was a good chance that we would have married, we were very much in love.

The dream was very vivid. I could see her, hear her, and feel her just like she was there. I woke up a bit confused, and it took me a bit of time to figure out where I was and that I had dreamed her.

I know it was just a dream, but it has been 48 hours or more and I can still smell her perfume. I think that her perfume was White Shoulders, kind of a mix of new laundry and flowers, very subtle. A pleasing odor.

If I believed in the supernatural I would jump to the conclusion that Becky was sending some kind of message, but I don't believe so I want to examine this in a rational way. Why can't I get the feel of her body and her voice out out of my head? And why do I smell her everywhere?

I have thought of her almost everyday for years, and her memory has gotten fainter, but all of a sudden she is real to me again, like she never died, and is just waiting around the corner for me.

I find that I am missing her as much or more than I did when she died. Out of the blue, thirty-five years later, because of a dream.

I ask myself what's going on?

Perhaps you got a hint of that smell from something? It's amazing the memories, and attached emotions, that can be triggered by smell.

Olfactory memory triggered somehow? Smells are stronger than we give them credit for in our vision-centered world.

ETA. Snap with GI

If I believed in the supernatural I would jump to the conclusion that Becky was sending some kind of message, but I don't believe so I want to examine this in a rational way. Why can't I get the feel of her body and her voice out out of my head? And why do I smell her everywhere?

Since the only real way that our loved ones live on is in our memories and these memories of Becky are arising again, perhaps in a sense she is trying to send you a message? She only exists in your head (and of course the heads of the other people she left behind) and your head has something to tell you about her?

My parents both died around 8 years ago under some pretty horrific circumstances and I frequently have dreams about them. I know that I'm just playing out the memories of two people that had a huge influence on my life, for better or worse. But it's silly not to do the memory of them justice. Just keep in mind that neuroplastcity is such that the memories of them form into different shapes every time you recall them, they slowly drift from fidelity and become more to do with you than they are about themselves when they existed.

Godless Infidel wrote:Perhaps you got a hint of that smell from something? It's amazing the memories, and attached emotions, that can be triggered by smell.

The rhinencephalon is a primitive part of our brains. It's been referred to as the 'smell-brain', and is part of the Limbic system. Smell, memory & emotion are all linked together here. So yes, something as simple as a subtle scent can bring memories & emotions flooding back.

My guess is that the dream unlocked some memories - including lots of sensory memories such as that scent - that your brain had relegated to long-term storage. We all have much more in our heads than is available to conscious awareness at any one time. And conscious attempts to recall things often come up with limited results. Often dreams will bring those memories into conscious awareness. I don't know how this happens, and I'd love to know what the current science is on this. But it does seem to happen a lot.

I'm reminded here of my six foot cockroach incident during my time in hospital being treated for meningitis.

I think it's kind of interesting that the data to construct vivid memories like that is still stored in there, even though we can't immediately recall it to order. I have this vague hope that someday, technology will be developed to assist with retrieving old memories. Won't happen in my lifetime though, sadly.

Just how the fuck does human memory work ? How is it stored ?

Dream I mentioned the other day. The third paragraph is the relevant one.

Animavore wrote:I have conversations in dreams all the time. Why just last night I had a dream I cannibalised some woman. I was frying her 'livers' (seems I forgot my anatomy in my dream, from the position they were in and the fact there were two they were more like her lungs) and too my frustration I kept knocking the pan over and spilling oil everywhere. I eventually got them ready. They looked like two large, thick rashers which deflated as I cut into them. A conglomerate of my sister and niece asked me what I was eating. I told her I was eating some woman's 'livers' and explained that eating human isn't nearly as dreadful as made out. She said, "Oh yeah. I can see her head." Attached to the 'livers' was a flattened head with tufty blonde hair like the skull and innards had been taken out, also it looked a bit crispy.

One dream later after I woke and fell asleep again I dreamt I was renovating a house with my family, my cousin Neil and this guy I know from the pub, a biker. I started telling them about my dream in detail. My cousin didn't want to know, he seemed a bit disgusted, the biker guy was really interested and asked questions. I also went on to tell him about the first dream I had last night.

When I first fell asleep last night I dreamt I was in a Streets of Rage type computer game. Unfortunately I felt like I was moving through molasses and was overwhelmed by attacking hordes. I woke with a start and was startled again to see a guy standing over my bed with blonde, spiky hair and sports jacked with t-shirt and jeans. I've had something like this before and knew he wasn't real but after he wouldn't disappear I couldn't help myself from panicking, I lashed out a heavy kick with my leg which sunk into him and he disappeared.

There was more, so much more bit it's all fading fast into flitters.. There were dragons and cops and Eddie Murphy over a multitude of dreams.

Second time I had something like that. He looked as real as anyone. Freaky shit. If I was of religious mind I'd say it was a ghost.

EDIT: Sometimes I get memories of acid trips and can actually taste the metallic taste of LSD again.

Godless Infidel wrote:Perhaps you got a hint of that smell from something? It's amazing the memories, and attached emotions, that can be triggered by smell.

I think that you might have nailed it. Yesterday I was doing some small repairs on the side of my mom's house near the dryer vent. Mon was drying clothes and she has begun using lavender scented dryer sheets. The memories came flooding back vivid and colorful.

My mom's laundry smells like Becky. It wasn't the dream that tripped the memory of the perfume it was the smell of the laundry that tripped the rest of the memories.

Since I first posted this I have had dreams of Becky almost every night, but it is not the Becky that I knew. Now she is older and so am I and we are married and have children. Not the daughters that I actually had with the woman that I ended up marrying. These are all little boys, and we are all very happy.

These dreams are so real and pleasant that I don't want to wake up from them. When I do wake up and remember that Becky is dead, and how she died, there is what could be called a state of depression that lasts for a good part of the rest of the night and sometimes through the day.

When I was younger I had nightmares about how Becky died, but they eventually passed. We were eighteen. Just graduated from high school. Having a party at my parents house and we ran out of beer. We collected money to buy more beer, but none of us were old enough to buy more beer. What beer and wine that we began the party with came from a ninety mile trip to Wyoming where the legal age was eighteen. Becky said that she knew a guy at the 7-Eleven that would sell her the beer.

She went with a friend of ours to get the beer on his motorcycle. He ran a red light and they were broadsided by a car. He lived, she died instantly. The car dragged Becky and the motorcycle down the road for a hundred feet or so. There was no open casket.

If I'm getting too personal I apologize. It's just that I would like other opinions of why these personal experiences should or shouldn't be taken as evidence of the supernatural?

Maybe Bluetriangle would like to jump in here? Or Mick or Lion?

Oldskeptic wrote:If I'm getting too personal I apologize. It's just that I would like other opinions of why these personal experiences should or shouldn't be taken as evidence of the supernatural?

They're not. Frankly, I've never understood why people think such experiences are proof of anything other than the human brain's ability to remember, imagine, and hallucinate. I believe I remember reading somewhere of a study that showed that smell was the sense that triggered the strongest memories and emotions. I don't think there's anything unexpected in what you're experiencing, Oldskeptic, although it is no doubt powerful.

paceetrate wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:If I'm getting too personal I apologize. It's just that I would like other opinions of why these personal experiences should or shouldn't be taken as evidence of the supernatural?

They're not. Frankly, I've never understood why people think such experiences are proof of anything other than the human brain's ability to remember, imagine, and hallucinate. I believe I remember reading somewhere of a study that showed that smell was the sense that triggered the strongest memories and emotions. I don't think there's anything unexpected in what you're experiencing, Oldskeptic, although it is no doubt powerful.

Yes it is powerful and I pretty much fully understand what is going on. But without my education and skepticism I would probably being jumping on the personal experience wagon and telling my story as evidence/proof of some kind of supernatural event.

Some on these fora have been touting personal experience as evidence/proof of supernatural entities. I would ask them if my dreams of Becky are evidence/proof that she "lives", that we did, or will, get married and have children, or would they explain it in a natural rational way as all of you have so far.

How about it, those claiming personal experience as evidence/proof of Jesus' divinity/God? Am I denying the Holy spirit if I don't accept that my dead girlfriend is somehow alive in an after world and sending me messages.

Maybe she's waiting for me in some other world and when I die I'll go there to be with her and our children. That would be nice to believe, and it would be easy to build a belief system around this delusion. Maybe Jesus will be waiting with her for me to arrive. That's not a giant step if I already believed in the divinity of Jesus.

Oldskeptic wrote:How about it, those claiming personal experience as evidence/proof of Jesus' divinity/God? Am I denying the Holy spirit if I don't accept that my dead girlfriend is somehow alive in an after world and sending me messages.

There's only one way to be sure of messages like these. They have to bring information that was previously unavailable to you and also this information has to be something that only the messenger could have known. For example, meeting a pirate ghost who told you where he buried his loot. I once spoke to a fairly intelligent Christian who claimed this sort of stuff happened exactly to him. He said God would give him information that was previously unavailable to him. This information comes in the form of a voice in his head. So I told him to test it out and being intellectually honest, he was game. He is to pray such that the voice in his head would reveal to him a personal information of mine which I can be 100% sure is not available on my Facebook (by not having a Facebook account). It's been 4 years. Still no news from him. It's not that we have lost contact, we're still in touch and still exchange emails regularly.

Very interesting...

Oldskeptic wrote:Maybe Bluetriangle would like to jump in here? Or Mick or Lion?

Well, since those gentlemen are not here, maybe I'll take a shot at a brief trip into woo-land (even though I'm not a member of the theist tribe). Could it be possible that in your dreams, you are accessing a parallel MWI universe, where your girlfriend did not, in fact, die, and you had 2 sons? Just a thought... (I hope this theory is not correct in the case of Animavore's cannibalistic dream).

Oldskeptic wrote:These dreams are so real and pleasant that I don't want to wake up from them.

When I was in my late teens/early twenties and going through a shitty time (nothing like what you went through though) I used to get these all the time. I would dream amazing things, where I was the person I knew was stuck inside me underneath all my insecurities, my social phobias and other bullshit. I'd wake up and start crying in desperation or lashing out at the wall or my headboard in anger. I just wanted to be able to fall asleep and never wake up.

It's just that I would like other opinions of why these personal experiences should or shouldn't be taken as evidence of the supernatural?

This is going slightly OT but it's along a similar vein. I experience what I guess you could call "phantom memories".

They are more feelings and emotions than images, smells or sounds, although they are triggered by my senses. I get them at completely random moments. Sometimes I'll have three in one day, other times I can go a year without having one. I'll see a tree that reminds me of a tree I climbed before that I know I've never climbed. Or I'll see a house that reminds me of a house I've been in that I've never been in. Sometimes they happen when I'm watching movies set in places of the world I've never been to. I get this recurring one that involves me cycling down a wide road surrounded by tall pine trees and big art-Deco looking houses. They're a bit like deja-vu I guess, but instead of a feeling that I've just done what I've just done it's a sometimes almost overwhelming sense of familiarity that has no right to be there.

If I was less rational I would take them as evidence that reincarnation was possible. I would take them as proof I have lived other lives before this one. Because that's exactly what they feel like. And that's also exactly what they can't be.

Oldskeptic wrote:A few nights ago I had a dream about a girlfriend that died suddenly and tragically in my younger years. If she hadn't died there was a good chance that we would have married, we were very much in love.

The dream was very vivid. I could see her, hear her, and feel her just like she was there. I woke up a bit confused, and it took me a bit of time to figure out where I was and that I had dreamed her.

I know it was just a dream, but it has been 48 hours or more and I can still smell her perfume. I think that her perfume was White Shoulders, kind of a mix of new laundry and flowers, very subtle. A pleasing odor.

If I believed in the supernatural I would jump to the conclusion that Becky was sending some kind of message, but I don't believe so I want to examine this in a rational way. Why can't I get the feel of her body and her voice out out of my head? And why do I smell her everywhere?

I have thought of her almost everyday for years, and her memory has gotten fainter, but all of a sudden she is real to me again, like she never died, and is just waiting around the corner for me.

I find that I am missing her as much or more than I did when she died. Out of the blue, thirty-five years later, because of a dream.

I ask myself what's going on?

I think that...

WAIT!

You dont want to discuss anything supernatural, want to examine this in a rational way, etc etc.

Never mind. Sorry.

I've had a similar experience that I've always had a hard time explaining. This happened a few years ago when my wife was around 2 months pregnant. At that time, we didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. I had an extremely vivid dream of a laughing little girl, around 7-8 months old. The girl's facial features, hairline, eyes etc. were unmistakable and clearly defined. I also remember experiencing odors and some other non-dreamlike sensations in the dream. Now this was pretty much the only time I have had a vivid dream. Most of my dreams are just garbled nonsense that I can barely remember after I wake up. However this dream I could clearly remember in detail, long after the event. After this dream, I was somehow convinced that we were going to have a baby girl. Sure enough, we had a girl, and around 8 months on, she seemed to look exactly like the girl I remembered from the dream. There was even a specific situation that gave me enormous deja-vu, since it seemed to be a replay of the situation in my dream. I've tried to convince myself that this was just my mind playing tricks, and that perhaps I was force-fitting the image of my daughter into the memory of my dream. Even though this is, in fact, probably the case, I still have a hard time convincing myself of it.

Lion IRC wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:A few nights ago I had a dream about a girlfriend that died suddenly and tragically in my younger years. If she hadn't died there was a good chance that we would have married, we were very much in love.

The dream was very vivid. I could see her, hear her, and feel her just like she was there. I woke up a bit confused, and it took me a bit of time to figure out where I was and that I had dreamed her.

I know it was just a dream, but it has been 48 hours or more and I can still smell her perfume. I think that her perfume was White Shoulders, kind of a mix of new laundry and flowers, very subtle. A pleasing odor.

If I believed in the supernatural I would jump to the conclusion that Becky was sending some kind of message, but I don't believe so I want to examine this in a rational way. Why can't I get the feel of her body and her voice out out of my head? And why do I smell her everywhere?

I have thought of her almost everyday for years, and her memory has gotten fainter, but all of a sudden she is real to me again, like she never died, and is just waiting around the corner for me.

I find that I am missing her as much or more than I did when she died. Out of the blue, thirty-five years later, because of a dream.

I ask myself what's going on?

I think that...

WAIT!

You dont want to discuss anything supernatural, want to examine this in a rational way, etc etc.

Never mind. Sorry.

No wait, don't go away. Tell me why my personal experience is valid or not valid, and why I should believe or not believe that my dead girlfriend isn't sending me messages about the wonderful life we share on some other plane of reality.

By the way you spelled "Don't" wrong.

donut get me started on THAT

Lion IRC wrote:donut get me started on THAT

Why not? If I said that I had pleasant dreams of Jesus and it made me believe in Jesus wouldn't you be right there with me? The holy spirit would be speaking to me right?