Nosfer said:

Situations presented that may or may not be true doesn't sound like they would be very worthy of being called "visions"

History Channel has it's Nostradamus Effect, but there is another "Effect" and that is that it is very easy to retrofit an event to a "prophecy" I read a book on his prophecies back in the 80s probably and it was funny how the same quatrain that is now being used to say he predicted 9/11 was being used then for some other event.

You say you saw the Cole bombing. Was the Cole named? How are you certain that was what it was. When was the vision in relation to the event (night before, week before, year before etc?)

3 does not sound like that significant a number relative to the number experienced and saying "they just haven't happened yet" leaves a lot of wiggle room.

The fact that many were not verifiable or not direct hits indicates that there is a lot of chance going on. (Even a broken analog watch is still correct twice a day)

Do you have any idea of the numbers of visions that you had in those six years? One a week for 6 years would be a bit more than 300 visions? But only 3 hits makes the percentage less than 1% which is pretty low, all things considered. I'd be interested in hearing the details that you saw of the Cole bombing and when the vision occurred.

These are visions. There is quite a difference between these "thoughts" and normal dreaming thoughts. The very stringent requirements that I had for determining a direct hit is what keeps only 3 in the running. The other visions looked very much to me like the things that were happening (usually in russia), but without exact names or exact dates I could not mark them down in my book as exact hits. This doesn't mean the others were just brain farts.

Premonitions have been had and used all through human history. There is no set requirement that exact names and exact dates have to be given for a premonition to be useful or for it just to exist. However, it IS  necessary that any *verifiable* vision have exact dates or exact names and circumstances, and for it to be documented and notarized (with a time signature) before the event occurs. These are exact hits. Its hard to get exact hits, at least with the untrained modern mind, but this doesn't mean that all other premonitions are misses.

In the personal vision that I consider a direct hit, a long lost friend of my mother's was named, a diagnosis for an illness was given, the length of time that the doctors had missed the illness was noted, and the final doctor that gave the diagnosis was named. I documented this vision (which I thought was meaningless because I did not know these people), and three days later my mother came over and told me the story of how her long lost friend contacted her with a crazy medical story that matched my vision in every detail. I showed her the timestamped document, and she pretty much freaked out.

The USS Cole was less of a direct hit, but direct enough for my standards. Two ships were shown to me, and they were on the open sea. One ship was american, and the other ship, it was told to me, was owned by a joint alliance of the Russians and the Chinese. This second boat sent out a small boat from its side, and in a very shocking swirling movement,  a hole appeared in the side of the american boat.  Three weeks later, the USS Cole was bombed, and a secret alliance between Russia and China was discovered.  What the dream implies, though, is that the terrorist bomb that made the hole was connected to this alliance. It seems possible to me, but that is not something I can verify. Also I did not get the name of the boat or a date.

The third direct hit vision was about a subway bombing in Russia. In this case I got the location of the bombing, the time of day, and the weather conditions. Not as impressive as knowing a secret alliance or a diagnosis,  but close enough for me.

Shamans and other metaphysicians in the past didn't necessarily need all the exactness, since they weren't in doubt of the messages.  Maybe this is why they got so good at getting these messages.

I would not blow Nostradamus off so lightly. I read him once in the 80's too, and thought it was all just garbage. But I have taken a second look, and to do so with a keen eye you must learn how he thought, and I don't mean "think like a person from the 1500's".  Nostradamus was one of the most successful plague doctors of his time. He was so successful with curing his patients that the inquisition jailed his wife and children while he was gone and they died in prison while waiting for thier witch trials. He did not wear the doctor's cusomary "crow suit" that was supposed to protect him from sickness. he insisted on examining his patients' bodies, which was not only unusual but frowned upon by other doctors. He prescribed rose hips (vitamin c) to the sick, and was laughed at for it.  He was a bright enough guy that it would be brash to ignore any of his work, in the same way that ignoring Leonardo Da Vinci's war machine drawings eventhough his paintings were so impressive would be a mistake. Nostradamus was no dummy. Nostradamus studied Iamblichus and Ptolemy intensely, and wrote his prophetic verses following thier instruction, and was smart enough to create a fail safe in his verses by implementing a rhythm and rhyme along with cataloged numbers to keep people from being able to change his verses without detection. John Hogue is a great author and discusses these issues at length in his books. If you are interested in premonitions at all, then the most famous/infamous of all visionaries is probably a better person to really examine than someone like me. I am really here just to share with you guys some weird experiences and watch crappy ghost shows.

captainsteve said:

Kira, sorry if I offended you, but, robots, visions, spirit visits, UFO's, haunted houses. Most times I've seen posts of such claims they end with- as soon as my mom lets me get my drivers license I'll investigate further. 

Good luck with your investigations.

You don't offend me captain. I honestly think your silly posts are adorable.

Nosfer said:

I don't want to distract too much on Nostradamus other than to draw the parallel of fitting prophecies after the fact. Those who elevate him as an infallible prophet take some pretty creative liberties to get some of the prophecies to almost fit. That's not blaming him so much as his "interpreters"

Or is it just that you haven't really looked into it?

LOL, and so it begins…A sure sign.

I am really asking you a question here…. have you REALLY looked into it? The study of Nostradamus, in an effort to prove or disprove his claims of prophecy, takes more than just reading a few quatrains and deciding they are too vague to continue reading.  Nostradamus's quatrains are very complex. They use alot of symbolism from jewish mysticism, requiring you to look into that subject. He uses latin, old french, german, and other languages, picking words that often have dual meanings in thier native tongue. He uses number riddles and anagrams to disguise place names, person names and dates.

Why write prophecy if you are going to clothe it in enigma? Well maybe his goal is not to just blab to everyone all about the future. A book blatantly outlining the future would no doubt be destroyed by someone who doesn't like what it says, or changed by someone who wants to be the winner in some war, or the book would be rendered useless for some other political or religious purpose. Maybe Nostradamus was trying to let a few people who would take the time to really study what he was doing discover that seeing the future is possible, by the use of the ancient methods in his occluded verse. Seeing through time is possible.

To protect his work from being changed Nostradamus used a checksum. If a quatrain is changed, it is easily detectable by someone familiar with his work (and with the language it is written in). People don't create complicated checksums and write thousand page books using these checksums for giggles. There is something more to his work, something worth investigating. If you needed to google "checksum" just now, then you have not studied Nostradamus enough to deserve to have an opinion at this point. Even if you do not agree with Nostradamus's vision of the future, his quatrains are worthy of study if only because _The Centuries_ has been on the New York Times Best Seller list since 1558.

Nosfer said:

I would say when the signal to noise ratio falls well below 1 that the original meaning is lost like the reliability of the signal. In the case of the Cole vision it appears that the ratio is 0.25 and over all it seems to be about 0.005 Can some gems actually be sneaking in? I won't deny that possibility at all, on the contrary in fact. But overall reliability? No If the success rate is as low as it apparently is in this case, what benefit to we reap when one has no idea which of the visions to pay attention to and which were the result of too much pizza the night before?

I think you are making alot of assumptions here concerning "reliability".

Nosfer said:

You yourself put the hit level pretty low. Again…what were the stringent requirements you applied?

Also — a lightning rod will get hit my lightning only 3-4 times a year, out of hundreds of local lightning strikes. Does this mean that the rod is not really attracting lightning?