Ever imagined a place...then found it here on earth?

bylinebree · Mar 13, 2006

Not to get woo-woo mystical or anything, but has anyone had this happen?

I once dreamed of weird, humpy mountains rising from the sea - and then saw photos in a bookstore of the same place, in China. Never been there, didn't recall seeing that exact photo before. Never had a particular interest in China, either! But there they were, and even near the city someone spoke of, in the dream. (strange twilight zone theme swells to crescendo)

Last night...doing research (again) for a certain type of natural/geological place to see if an aspect of my fantasy kingdom was on track. Boom! I found a tiny country in the Balkan area that gave me chills...it was SO MUCH like everything I imagined, it was spooky. So much for being original?!

Maybe it was growing up on National Geographic - and those long-buried images were stored in my brain, unaware.

I don't believe in reincarnation, btw - but sometimes this stuff gets weird! :Shrug:

Euan H. · Mar 13, 2006

Last night I dreamed that I won the lottery, was awarded the National Book Award, and woke up to find Paris Hilton beside me.

Here's hoping, eh?

Jamesaritchie · Mar 13, 2006

Euan H. said:
Last night I dreamed that I won the lottery, was awarded the National Book Award, and woke up to find Paris Hilton beside me.

Here's hoping, eh?

Well, I'd love to have two out of three. But I'd rather wake up with Lassie beside me than Paris Hilton.

Adam_Atlantian · Mar 13, 2006

I've dreamed of people i've never meet and met them later. never places. of course it's hard to tell. I'm writing a series of fantasy novels on Atlantis. i could be right on track. Hope all goes well with your kingdom.

Euan H. · Mar 13, 2006

Jamesaritchie said:
But I'd rather wake up with Lassie beside me than Paris Hilton.

Well, if that's what floats your boat, you go right ahead with that. I won't judge you. :e2brows:

Anya Smith · Mar 13, 2006

bylinebree said:
Not to get woo-woo mystical or anything, but has anyone had this happen?

Last night...doing research (again) for a certain type of natural/geological place to see if an aspect of my fantasy kingdom was on track. Boom! I found a tiny country in the Balkan area that gave me chills...it was SO MUCH like everything I imagined, it was spooky. So much for being original?!

I don't believe in reincarnation, btw - but sometimes this stuff gets weird!

It's called synchronicity. I've had this happen with sceneries and people too. It is not so much reincarnation as the so called morhic resonance field, where images, ideas, concepts, inventions, etc. are stored. Sensitive minds somehow reach in and pick these things out.

DamaNegra · Mar 13, 2006

No, but I've seen pictures of places and landscapes that I have never imagined even in my wildest dreams. This beautiful planet is full of surprises to anyone

Lady_Kristin · Mar 13, 2006

This has happened to Diana Gabaldon a couple times with her Outlander series.

I read about it in one of her chats.

And I've dreamt of a place only to see it in person months later. It's happened to me a few times. But... things like that tend to happen in my family every now and then.

It's "normal" for some of us. :tongue

DaveKuzminski · Mar 14, 2006

There's an article in the current Reader's Digest about a Psy-Spy which might provide some clues on why this phenomena of dreaming up an environment only to find it actually exists apparently occurs.

bylinebree · Mar 14, 2006

Euan H. said:
Last night I dreamed that I won the lottery, was awarded the National Book Award, and woke up to find Paris Hilton beside me.

OK, I didn't mean as "In your dreams, dude!" - I meant one that turns out to be TRUE or you see, experience it, etc! Not to squelch your fantasies, or anything

Lady: The synchronicity idea was very interesting...looked it up in Wikipedia, etc. This led to a six-degree of separation of the topic, which led to 'apophenia' which is a psychiatric term meaning the 'connections' you make are actually 'meaningless or random'...'a link between psychosis and creativity.' (Wikipedia site) Uh-oh.

Had it happen again two nights ago about a temp job I took to bring in money whilst working towards my six-figure break as an author -- but it turned out to be NEGATIVE synchronicity, shucks! I wasn't asleep, either...just dozing.

DamaNegra: you are soooo right about our planet - have you ever heard of Mountains of the Moon in Africa? Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA? Surreal and beautiful!

Lady_Kristin · Mar 14, 2006

Actually, I'm not sure what you'd call this type of thing other than a psychic awareness/intuition. I've always seen synchronicity as profound coincidences:

You think of someone for the first time in years, and run into them a few hours later. An unusual phrase you’d never heard before jumps out at you three times in the same day. On a back street in a foreign country, you bump into a college roommate. A book falls off the shelf at the bookstore and it’s exactly what you need.
http://www.flowpower.com/What is Synchronicity.htm

Whatever it is... it's pretty fascinating. This is a little bit different I guess, but I've dreamt of a place in Venice before, only to see the exact same picture in a book years later. And in this same dream my grandmother (deceased) was there, wearing a beautiful dress. During this entire dream, my thouughts were focused on that beautiful dress Grandma was wearing. And well... I found that exact same dress in a store a few days later. There was only one, and it was in my size and on sale. I always figured that was a gift from my Grandma. Only "bad" thing was that I had to pay for the dress, as Grandma didn't miraculously drop a $20 bill to the ground :tongue

.

Sorry for babbling. I love this kind of stuff.
Kristin

Diana Hignutt · Mar 15, 2006

In college (eons ago), I once had a dream where I wrote this fantastic new song (I play guitar). The next day, I figured it out and jotted down the lyrics I remembered. Of course, it turned out I had "written" Eric Clapton's "Presence of the Lord."

alaskamatt17 · Mar 16, 2006

Well, I've had this happen a lot, but to me it always seems like deja vu, not something that happened in a dream. It inspired a really cool short story idea, but I don't want to give it away. It has a lot to do with predicting one's own death, though.

Mike Coombes · Mar 16, 2006

Jamesaritchie said:
Well, I'd love to have two out of three. But I'd rather wake up with Lassie beside me than Paris Hilton.

#

that paints kind of bizarre pictures in my head.

Paris Hilton would be pretty low down my list too, but probably just above other species.

bylinebree · Mar 18, 2006

alaskamatt17 said:
Well, I've had this happen a lot, but to me it always seems like deja vu, not something that happened in a dream. It inspired a really cool short story idea, but I don't want to give it away. It has a lot to do with predicting one's own death, though.

Does sound like a cool story, alaskamatt.

Dreaming is really the exception rather than the rule for me. My dreams are just too weird, disjointed and punchy to mean much. Waking up to Lassie would be an improvement, actually.

As a Christian, I know of but don't practice occultic stuff -- but still can't deny that I have these little "blurbs" of coincidence, second sight, precognition and so forth that don't fit into anything in my theological experience.

But I do know the Creator and His universe is more complex than a few narrow ideas can capture and waaaay more than my simple lil' mind can comprehend. So I stay open to the possibility that there might be aliens; there might be powers and forces I can't define. Synchronicity, or whatver we may call this phenomena, is another "maybe."

Many times I know before a raffle or drawing if I'm going to win, or not. That's always fun. I sometimes know a certain person is going to call me, just before they do. Sometimes I'm singing a song, turn on the radio -- and it's playing right then.

Not a place imagined, but still fun and weird. Most of us probably have these coincidences happen.

Celestia · May 2, 2006

Thanks to Googling "synchronicity" I found this great writers' forum.

That was synchronistic in itself because I'd been surfing the net looking for a forum like this over the past few months.

Synchronicity happens most often to me when I'm working on a manuscript and are usually related to the story or characters.

The most recent of these involved going to a renaissance fair several days ago looking for a little inspiration for my latest story which takes place in the early middle ages. While there, I had a tarot reading encouraging me to take my writing more seriously.

Last Friday I had a marathon inspiration event of about three hours where I zapped out 3500 words with little effort. It was a scene in which my skeptical heroine goes to a ren fair and ends up having a past life regression and seeing her "soul mate" from a previous life.

Three days later, I Googled ren fests which linked me to entertainers which linked me to a comedy act I'd watched at the ren fest recently. That was linked to one of the comedians' web sites -- one who had picked me from the audience to participate in their show -- and it turns out he's also a metaphysical speaker who's into past life regression.

How about that?

I have many more such stories. There really is SO much more "out there" than we're aware of.

badducky · May 2, 2006

I wouldn't want to lump Lassie and Paris Hilton into the same category. One is a genuine celebrity that worked hard to get into the deserving grace of the limelight. The other is Paris Hilton.

I'd much rather wake up next to Oprah. Could you imagine the book sales?

bylinebree · May 3, 2006

'ducky, you kill me!

Shweta · May 3, 2006

My friends and I ran a dark ages roleplaying game once, starting out with with no research whatsoever on the area save for a map.

We picked out a town, made up a lord of it, had him die. Then it occurred to us to do some actual research, and we found out that we had the name of the lord right and the year he died. And the presence of a young son too little to take over ruling.

None of us had ever researched medieval Spain before.
I was a bit spooked

It seems to me that "sychronicity" is the closest thing anyone has for an explanation for psychic phenomena that seem to break with our notions of causality. I've done spooky-accurate tarot readings, too, and again, there seems to be no direct causal link between a reading and the world outside it. But they line up anyway.

By the way, if anyone's interested, there's a (rather stats-heavy) paper by professors at Cornell and U Edinburgh on "psi". The paper's controversial, of course. It's possible that the studies being discussed are not nearly as comparable as the authors think. But eh, I found it interesting.
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/psy1.html

bylinebree · May 8, 2006

Sometimes I do wonder if we've just "absorbed" stuff into our brains, filed it away and forgotten about it. Then it "surfaces" and seems like a brand new idea to us as we've lost the context of the information over time, cluttered mind syndrome or such.

That would be more 'senility" than 'synchronicity' but the latter is a very intriguing concept, ha.

Oh, and the 'psi' thing reminds me of reading Catharine Asaro's series (Quantum Rose, Last Hawk..?) where she uses the term 'psi' for the royal dynasty's psychic ability. I will check out that paper when I have time, thanks.

Shweta · May 9, 2006

At least some of it is likely to be memory. It's the cases where that rationale is unlikely that I finid really intriguing.

SeanDSchaffer · May 9, 2006

I've had that happen before....

I imagined a mountain range, in which part of Wyverinia Chronicles took place, which I called the Pinnacle Range. I found out, some time into my writing of the book, that there is a place in Southern Oregon--right by Crater Lake, I believe--that has a large group of pinnacle rock formations that very much resembles my original idea of the Pinnacle Range. The only major difference between my mountain range and the real place is the size of the pinnacles in question. My pinnacles were giant mountains, the size of, say, the Rocky Mountains for height.

The Southern Oregon pinnacles, needless to say, are quite a bit smaller than my Pinnacle Range.

bylinebree · May 9, 2006

Celestia said:
Thanks to Googling "synchronicity" I found this great writers' forum.

That was synchronistic in itself because I'd been surfing the net looking for a forum like this over the past few months.

Synchronicity happens most often to me when I'm working on a manuscript and are usually related to the story or characters.

The most recent of these involved going to a renaissance fair several days ago looking for a little inspiration for my latest story which takes place in the early middle ages. While there, I had a tarot reading encouraging me to take my writing more seriously.

Last Friday I had a marathon inspiration event of about three hours where I zapped out 3500 words with little effort. It was a scene in which my skeptical heroine goes to a ren fair and ends up having a past life regression and seeing her "soul mate" from a previous life.

Three days later, I Googled ren fests which linked me to entertainers which linked me to a comedy act I'd watched at the ren fest recently. That was linked to one of the comedians' web sites -- one who had picked me from the audience to participate in their show -- and it turns out he's also a metaphysical speaker who's into past life regression.

How about that?

I have many more such stories. There really is SO much more "out there" than we're aware of.

I say that's downright...synchronistic. Eeeyyiiii.
Mine have been much less "deep" so I admire the complexity of yours!

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave."

Shweta: The medieval Spain 'coincidence' really is spooky, way beyond memory or random. Way to throw out a great example.

Language stuff: When I created names/places in my book, I had some exotic, east-European sort of feel in mind and made words up...or so I thought. Recently I googled a few names and they all came out either Turkish (never been there, never studied it) or Slavic in some way. I named a mountain range the "White Mtns" and kept thinking it seemed incomplete; then in googling I saw the "White Carpathian Mtns" and said 'ah-ha, that's it'

Isn't it fun? :e2BIC:

September skies · May 9, 2006

I imagined a beautiful place once and often used it as a setting in stories (as a young girl) and then about 10 years ago, I stumbled across it. It was everyting I imagined! Everything was there - down to the tiniest detail - a hummingbird. I was speechless and it became my special place.

bylinebree · May 12, 2006

SSkies,
Your special place sounds beautiful, really. Glad that happened to you--we all need those kinds of places. One of mine is in my perennial garden out front. Another is on my deck, looking at the mountains.

It does make one wonder how time and space and our human selves all connect, doesn't it?

When I try to explain my 'weirdness' (inability to remember schedules, lack of awareness of time passing and sequential-stuff, for ex) to others, I've come up with an 'explanation' like this: "Sorry, but I seem to be loosely tied to the space-time continuum, I do apologize for ___ (my latest faux-paus)"

This makes perfect sense to me, anyway!

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