Comments on: Visitation dreams: When the Veil between Worlds is Thin

By: Ryan Hurd

Ryan Hurd — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:10:18 +0000

thanks for commenting Olli. I am a big fan of Katja and Antti's work - I wrote a piece about their theory here. Clearly, our ancestors are those who were good dreamers, but we are still missing the crucial mechanisms that account for how dreaming improves learning/memory. But there are actually some excellent scientific studies that are peer reviewed and with statistically significant results that indicate that anomalous information does come through dreaming cognition. (Not this this directly answers the "life after death" question, of course). Check out Charles Tart's "the End of Materialism" for a very readable review of the last 30 years of research into parapsychology. The truth about mainstream science treatment of anomalous psychology is that "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

By: Ryan Hurd

Ryan Hurd — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:57:12 +0000

synchronicities like this is what dreamwork is all about Lee!

By: Lee Adams

Lee Adams — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:13:08 +0000

I found it very interesting that you would talk about the book “The Dreamers Book of the Dead” because I was just talking with a professor about dreams and she said I should read some of the writings from Robert Moss. It was kind of cool to see that come up on your site a few days after I looked up Robert Moss and his writings. At any rate, its something that always dumbfounded me why individuals dream of the after life or dead friends and family. I think your article helps further my understanding and has me asking more questions.

By: Olli Erjanti

Olli Erjanti — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:25:27 +0000

Dreams do seem to be mainly about threatening situations. A Finnish scholar Antti Revonsuo has in fact put a theory about the issue called Threat Simulation Theory of dreams.

The main idea being that since people dream mainly of threatening situations there must be some explanation for this in our biological evolution. Maybe we practice threatening situations in dreams in order to cope with them better if we meet them while awake?

If you are interested I would recommend the following work for a lengthy introduction:

Threat Simulation- The Function of Dreaming? A dissertation study by Katja Valli (2008):
https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/42466?locale=len&author=

There is a downloadable pdf of the study in the page.

Anyway as Ryan stated the dead visitation dreams will never convince a skeptic about the after-life question. Too bad there are only anecdotal stories about encounters that bring new information for the dreamer. It is quite easy to make other explanations about how the dreamer got the information if there is no controlled study setting.

Self-respecting scholars won’t start this kind of studies because nothing worthwhile has been discovered on the studies done so far.

-Olli Erjanti