I’m a dreamer and sometimes I’m a lucid dreamer. I record and analyze my dreams to ascertain what’s going on at my core. My dreams inform me at a deep personal level of my responses to events that have happened, events that are happening now, and events that are yet to come.

“Dreaming, in its purest form, is witnessing life just as it is. We perceive from the moment of our birth. As infants, our minds are unformed and silent. There are no words describing our perception. There are no concepts narrating our emotions. Returning to that state of silent mind, through dreaming, we intensify awareness. In the silence created by absence of thought, we open to perception.” Don Miguel Ruiz
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Though I am not really able to define it myself, my own idea of it is that it is somehow outside everything “learned”. And numbers, the shark fear, to me that’s all learned. Numbers are symbols that we learn, something animals can’t learn (much the same that language itself is really just symbols). The fear of sharks is learned, too. Unless I’ve had my own encounter with one, which would make it a direct experience, it’s a learned or acquired fear upon which I have no “real” — or direct — basis.

I guess I think of intuition as more closely related to instinct than to anything associated with language or learning. But like I said, I can’t totally define it in a way that a psychologist would be able to study it. I guess for me intuition falls somewhere in the realm of what the philosopher Wittgenstein was referring to when he wrote:

“If the answer cannot be put into words, the question, too, cannot be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, it can also be answered.”

Sort of the ineffable stuff, you know? If we can put a question we can answer it.

As far as the incident with my daughter, there were no hints. She was too young to realize the significance of what was happening. I just “saw” the paintbrush color she was holding every time. Weird, I know!!

Cheers,
Miche

Lately (as in the last 4-5 years) I learned to trust my intuition. I don’t know if it’s only subconscious thinking involved in this process, maybe it’s something even bigger than that, but what I can tell you is that my intuition saved me from a few serious mistakes. All odds were really favorable but something told me not to go. And I was right. Looking forward for the next one, to see when intuition really works
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Yes the shark fear is intuition. Our intuition on risk has been demonstrated to be poor in any number of ways (familiarity, control, etc.). I suspect I’m intuitively more afraid of sharks than drowning, but I’m so probability conscious that I take time to understand real probabilities.

As far as your daughter goes maybe somehow in the first instance she was somehow giving you clues that you didn’t consciously realize. Maybe it was a total coincidence. There are people who won multiple lotteries where the odds were trillions to one against it. However the odds are likely that it would happen to someone sometime. We pick out of the jillions (how’s that for a scientific number?) of possibilities those things that stand out and don’t notice the jillions -1 that didn’t turn out so freaky. Your experience isn’t that unusual.

I don’t think intuition is connected to some universal knowing. I think it is just our amazing brain doing amazing things under the covers where our conscious mind can’t get to it. We are amazed at what we don’t understand. I think someday science will figure it out.

Thanks!

I love this topic. Here is my take on it. Yes,you should trust your intuitive sense. But only if you can be honest with yourself that your “intuition” did not come based on thinking from past happenings or future hopes. By believing there is no”right” and no “wrong” with your intuition,you respond to your enviroment and stimulis around you. However, a high percentage of the times we are not using true intuition,we are reprocessing thoughts from the past or creating wishful thinking for the future.

I believe that we are not good at predicting our feelings or behaviors because we choose not to pay attention to our obvious learned patterns.But it is much easier to predict others because we witness their patterns. It is not common for someone to pay attention to their own thought patterns for the purpose of predicting behavior or feelings. We deny these patterns exist and believe we are acting on our intuition.

Intuition comes to most when they are in the “zone”. Unfortunately, we spend more time “zoned out”.

Thanks

I believe intuition is connected to a higher, universal knowing. I know science can’t prove this true, but it hasn’t proven it false, either. (I also had an interesting experience years ago that totally defied all odds of “probability” – I was tired, resting on the sofa and my 3 and a half year old daughter had 8 different colored new paint brushes she just took out of the package. She asked me to guess the color she was holding. I guessed right. She asked me again. I guessed right. This went on for almost 20 minutes… I couldn’t guess one wrong!! I started freaking out about how unreal this was and how maybe my daughter and I have some otherwordly “sixth sense” connection, and how cool that could be… I was also wishing we were being recorded or that someone was around to witness this. At any rate, I wanted to “test” our connection so I took the paint brushes and had her guess. Normal, random right and wrong guesses. Too bad. So I thought maybe it was a one-way thing; I gave the paint brushes back to her so I could guess again. Again, normal, random, right and wrong guesses. That “phenomenal” event, whatever it was that I had experienced, was over. Was that a “hot streak”? Or was that something else?)

This is really a great discussion to open up… too bad you don’t have a forum! Looking forward to the discussions that follow and the next post!

Cheers,
Miche
Miche – Serenity Hacker´s last blog ..Accepting Suffering and A Call for Compassion