[throwaway24124]

I would strongly suggest reading “Time Loops” by Eric Wargo if you’re interested in investigating this feeling more. There are many (documented!) instances of people “remembering” and dreaming about real events in their lives that haven’t yet happened. But of course, the scientific evidence for precognition is pretty flimsy. If it’s real, it seems to have a very small/rare effect.

[hnbad]

The reason the scientific evidence is flimsy is that this can almost entirely be attributed to selection bias: it feels important when you make predictions that are correct, it doesn't feel noteworthy when you make ones that are wrong - you'll probably even forget about them by the time they turn out to have been wrong.

Plus our brains are pretty good at predicting what will happen based on things we've seen before and most people have intrusive thoughts (though these are usually based on actions rather than just things happening, e.g. throwing a baby out of a window or jumping in front of an oncoming train). Our memories are also extremely malleable so if a prediction didn't match exactly our brains will happily adjust the details to find a match or we'll ignore details that don't match because they don't seem as important as the ones that do.

It's spooky but the real wonder here is that our brains work somewhat reliably most of the time to begin with. Even our vision is a complete mess - ranging from the physical blind spots in our eyes to various forms of "blindness" (e.g. change blindness) and the work our brains have to do in order to compensate for saccades (i.e. why you don't see motion blur every time your eyes move).

[M3L0NM4N]

There have been many occasions where I've been somewhere I know for a fact I haven't been before but can vividly "remember" being there, just as a still frame of what I was looking at in that moment.

[dpig_]

My theory is that the brain is temporarily using a lossy delivery protocol - you're receiving short-term memory packets out of sequence and its causing you to feel like you're "remembering" the present.

There is no basis for my theory and it's fantastical horseshit.