I know this sounds silly but...

[Dimdim101]

I had a bad nightmare the other night that I had a blood clot in my brain/aneurysm and required surgery, and woke up pretty stressed about it all because it was such a vivid dream. Anyway, I completely forgot about it and was feeling better and just thought there’s no point fixating as it’s just a random dream. But then that same night, someone close to me (who I hadn’t told about the dream) randomly said ‘you have a blood clot on your brain’ as a joke and that completely freaked me out! I’m now worrying this is some sort of sign I have one or will die from one soon. I know that’s SO over the top but my brain is fixating a little on this... I just find it so weird that he said that when I never told him about it!

[KK77]

Sometimes we attract the things we fear in the form of thoughts in others. Dreams are a perfect example of our fears being acted out and exposed. But they are still just thoughts, not reality.

[SarahNah]

I worry about stuff like this all the time! Like I'm currently having some head issues going on (same fears to yours) and I keep having dreams or I feel like it's all people are talking about. I think it's like, we're focusing on things more and more. Like maybe you had mentioned something about that fear to your friend before? My friends sometimes try to brush my fears off as a joke to try and help calm me! Not always the best.

Sorry you're feeling this way, I know it's horrid and with you in this feeling :hugs:

[Hypo84]

There is no way to attract those things with your mind. One of the guy that was author in the movie Secret (about attracting good things with thoughts) ended up in a jail. You think he wanted that? :)

[Carys]

Co-incidence, pure and simple. There aren't 'waves and vibes' going through the air that tell people how they are going to die, or what illnesses they may have in the future. If there were then everyone would have advanced notice of life-threatening issues, and pop along to the doctor lol I DO understand fully how the anxious mind starts looking for signs and gets paranoid about them and putting two random and co-incidental events together to create WARNING WARNING....but that is all it is co-incidences. Nothing more, an anxious mind responding to everything as a potential threat. BTW, that seems a rather strange 'joke' to make to someone 'you have a blood clot on the brain'...what prompted it ?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Co-incidence, pure and simple. There aren't 'waves and vibes' going through the air that tell people how they are going to die, or what illnesses they may have in the future. If there were then everyone would have advanced notice of life-threatening issues, and pop along to the doctor lol I DO understand fully how the anxious mind starts looking for signs and gets paranoid about them and putting two random and co-incidental events together to create WARNING WARNING....but that is all it is co-incidences. Nothing more, an anxious mind responding to everything as a potential threat. BTW, that seems a rather strange 'joke' to make to someone 'you have a blood clot on the brain'...what prompted it ?

And bias. You know this is bad so you are on the lookout for it. But if you had a dream about a bottle of milk sitting on a wall would you think of it when you next saw a bottle of milk? You might think "that's weird" if that bottle of milk was actually sitting on a wall but you wouldn't panic about it because it doesn't represent something to be feared by you.

Brains just work like this. They look for associations to be made to highlight to the conscious mind to determine if more should be made of the thought/image. It's part of how we learn. Your subconscious might notice you looking at a chocolate bar, find a memory of you enjoying a similar one and blurt out some nice feelings about how nice it was.

[Dimdim101]

Thank you everyone, I really appreciate the replies. In regards to why he made the joke, we both have an unusual sense of humour and it goes along with that... kind of hard to explain haha. But I totally agree, my OCD just makes me convince myself that these things are true based on superstition which I don’t even believe in...

[Gallowglass]

If you were able to brush the dream off, it wasn't a vision. And if you could attract/cause illnesses by thinking about them, my intrusive thoughts about all kinds of diseases would have given me bird flu back in 2005. I actually do believe in 'superstition' (or magic, I call it...) and have had intrusive thoughts in the middle of summoning rituals. They don't do anything. Because they aren't anything. There is no reality behind them that could be being called upon.

[WorryRaptor]

I get this a lot. It's just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Like, sometimes you'll remember a song you liked a long time ago, and suddenly you're hearing it everywhere and it's almost spooky! Or you hear/think/get scared of something seemingly rare or odd, and then i pops up everywhere. It's not a vision, or a warning, it's just your anxiety making you hyper focused on "clues" :) It really can feel like there is a special meaning to this, but it's seriously just a coincidence mixed with hyper awareness.
I was also terrified of having an aneurysm, and the day I started worrying about it, only a few hours later I was watching some documentary where somebody offhandedly said they lost a loved one due to an aneurysm. I was convinced that this was a sign. A clear MRI told me it wasn't!