I Cannot Imagine...

[Retorth]

So when we think "Gee, I feel like I've been in this situation before", it's actually false?

[leo-rcc]

Not in all situations. I think that that is a much to broad explanation. Sometimes things really have happened before on a different day that are similar. But the brain doesn't always keep all the details so you get a feeling of having done something before or having been somewhere before.

[Retorth]

Oh I see, so it isn't so much a "premonition" as it is a recalling of a previous event that is similar to the current so we tend to think that we've experienced it before.

[Violet]

I can easily imagine an afterlife... and how horrible it would be...

Anyway, the Buddhists have one reasonable thing with their reincarnations: they are cyclic. Cyclic designs make a lot more sense than do linear designs.

[fr0d0]

Well in the case of my dreams I live through a moment. I clearly remember the moment, and do so several times. Then ultimately I live through that moment. It isn't a case of purely thinking "I've done this before". For instance: for years as a teenager I repeatedly dreamed of pulling out of a garage and a big lorry coming at me along the road. I was scared. About 3 years after the first dream, I was learning to drive (Id never been behind a wheel in my life before this). The instructor took me into this garage I was unfamiliar with and in an area I was unfamiliar with, and we filled up. Pulling out of the garage, there was this lorry bearing down on me, and I was scared. Thinks to self... hmm. This sort a stuff has happened to me a lot.

[Violet]

I don't remember my dreams... I like to think "luckily". Dreaming is a seemingly random process of organizing data, and forgive me if I call your incident "the same meager coincidences that happen every day"...

Which to me allows for the possibility of such things as an afterlife... although a great distaste for them

[Retorth]

Which to me allows for the possibility of such things as an afterlife... although a great distaste for them

Interesting. How do you feel that an afterlife is one of the possibilities? Just curious.

[Violet]

Cyclic: Birth, Life, Death, Between Death-Birth, Birth.
Cyclic: Rain, Evaporation, Condensation, Rain.
Cyclic: Big Bang, Expansion, Retraction, Condensation, Big Bang.

Cyclic things make more sense than linear things:
Beginning - Point B - End.

Which makes a whole lot of sense /sarcasm. However much it might be easier to imagine an afterlife (Nothing can be created, nor destroyed: only transfered is the energy)... Our life is not due to any soul, but rather the physical matter that makes us.

All of these cycles are alike in that their different stages have different attributes. The circle of life isn't about our one life... but like rain: about life itself. A more realistic cycle of life therefore looks like this:

Cycle: Accumulation of the Building-Blocks of Life from other life, Birth, Life, Death, Dissipation of the Building-Blocks of Life to other life.

But there remains the possibility an afterlife.

[Rhizomorph13]

Sae,

Nice post, you get my first thumbs up ever for that. I think deja-vu might be memories from previous lives. It is too bad that you don't remember your dreams. The dreamscape is a fun playgroud and lucid dreaming is like making yourself god of that imaginary realm. When my life has been boring I can always turn to my dreamlife. I can fly there, shoot fire out my eyes, manifest weapons when attacked by warriors of my own creation. Good times! Once I discovered lucid dreaming I stopped having nightmares.

Fr0d0,

I've had many prescient dreams myself and they were very specific down to every motion of my body during acrobatics that were supposed to shake the deja-vu feeling and only increased the "coincidence" that felt totally remembered by me. I still have them every once in a while but not as much as when I was a child.

Rhizo

[Violet]

I prefer mentally creating situations when i am awake I try to imagine myself empathetically in situations, so that i can avoid getting into bad situations, and know what to do if those bad situations occur

When i do that though... times are rarely good The situations I imagine are usually rather depressing...

Perhaps I feel i don't remember dreams, because I essentially dream when I am awake?