Surreal photo of television set sitting on grass underneath starry sky. — Building your intuition can be a lot of fun! Check out these movies and tv shows to help you expand your mind and build your intuition.

How movies and television shows can help build your intuition

Intuition doesn’t really speak literally, it speaks in symbolism and concepts, and some of the ways intuition expresses itself might seem a little bit strange to the modern conscious mind. If you can get comfortable with “strange” things and the use of symbolism, that will really help you on your journey to build your intuition. There are plenty of movies and TV shows that can help you increase your comfort with the strange and symbolic. I’ve put together a few ideas below to help you get started, but first let’s take a couple of minutes to explore what intuition is and why building your intuition is important.

What is intuition?

Intuition is a feeling of knowing rather than a knowing that comes from an intellectual process. Intuitive knowing comes from an accumulation of all the knowledge that we hold; some of this knowledge comes from our personal experiences and some of it comes from inherited instinctual information. You might think of intuition as an animal-like instinct coming from your spirit. Intuition can speak to you through words, phrases, music, images, or symbols that float into your mind. (If you want to learn more about what intuition is, check out this article: Intuition Meaning: Psychologists, Scientists, and Artists On The Meaning Of Intuition.)

Why build your intuition?

Building your intuition is important because we can’t avoid using our intuition, it’s just part of being human. When we avoid acknowledging the role that intuition plays in our life, we lose the opportunity to learn how to use intuition well. I’ve found that building my intuition has so many benefits! When I built my intuition, I was better able to access things that I know, and that helped me navigate the world more effectively. I also developed a deeper connection to myself, and I felt more connected to the natural world and the flow of human history as well. Building my intuition created opportunities to consciously change old patterns of behavior that weren’t helpful to me anymore. Building my intuition also allowed me to access my creativity and energy for life; and it helped me to hear my inner guidance so I can make decisions I’m happier with. Building my intuition gave me the opportunity to better connect and empathize with others and it helped me develop a spiritual connection to the world around me (a connection with soul and spirit). Finally, building my intuition cultivated an inner peace that helps me weather the storms of life. (If you want to learn more about how intuition benefits wellbeing, check out this article.)

There are lot of ways to build your intuition, and the good news is that once you get started building your own intuition it will give you new ideas for how to further build intuition. You can even get started building your intuition with movies and television shows!

Movies and television shows to help build your intuition

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Build your intuition by watching movies and TV shows that use a lot of symbolism, explore supernatural phenomena, use dream-like storytelling devices, and otherwise expand your mind to the possibility of “strange” things. Here are some of my favorite movies and television shows that delve into the strange and symbolic to help you get started building your intuition. P.S. Some of these suggestions are documentary style movies about aliens, psychics, near death experiences, and things like that; you don’t need to believe everything you see in these shows, but letting your mind play with the possibility that there’s more to the world than we understand can do wonders for building your intuition.

The OA - First on the list of tv shows to help build your intuition is The OA. This Netflix original is possibly my favorite tv show of all-time. As the show starts, we meet Prairie, a blind woman who has been missing for years, but she isn’t blind anymore. I don’t want to spoil the fun of watching this for the first time, but it’s hard to overstate how amazingly strange this show is. It’s got interdimensional travel, a mad scientist, strange near death experiences, weird dance moves, a telepathic octopus named Old Night, and hands down the most interesting contrast between season 1 and season 2 that I’ve ever seen in a television series.
Shock Docks: The Visitors – I enjoy most alien abduction stories, but this one is my favorite alien abduction documentaries. In The Visitors, Author Whitley Strieber tells the story of how he was abducted from his cabin multiple times. This is mostly a re-telling of Strieber’s alien abduction story, but there’s a little bit of an “investigatory” angle to it involving exploration of the cabin and the surrounding area.
Life After Death with Tyler Henry – This is a Netflix reality show featuring clairvoyant medium Tyler Henry; you might recognize his name from his show Hollywood Medium. In Life After Death with Tyler Henry, Tyler meets with everyday people to help connect them with messages from loved ones who have passed away.
The Mothman Prophecies – I found this supernatural mystery movie really enjoyable. In The Mothman Prophecies a reporter investigates sightings of a strange winged creature in Point Pleasant, Virginia. In addition to the sightings of strange creatures, this supernatural horror movie has premonitions, inexplicable fluctuations in time, odd dreams, and strange voices.
The Ghost Inside My Child - This is a reality series telling the stories of young children who recall their past lives and the efforts of their parents to match up their child’s past life memories with historical records. I was definitely disappointed this one only ran for two seasons!
How to Change Your Mind – This Netflix show is more of a documentary-documentary than the other shows on this list. How to Change Your Mind is a four-episode documentary on psychedelic drugs. The discussion about the use of psychedelics for psychological research was the most interesting part of this documentary to me. The interview with a man who experienced a “womb memory” (later confirmed to be accurate by this mother) while participating in a controlled LSD study was particularly thought-provoking.
Surviving Death – This documentary series from Netflix provides firsthand accounts of reincarnation and supernatural near death occurrences along with other stories of paranormal phenomena with a bit of research thrown in.
Last Year At Marienbad – I love this movie so much I have watched it multiple times, but this movie is so strange that I still have no idea what’s going on in it and I don’t care. If you like classics or French language movies, Last Year At Marienbad is a good choice for a movie to help build your intuition. All I can say about the plot of this movie is that a man and a woman who may or may not have met before may or may not be involved in a romantic affair. You have to watch this one for yourself to understand the strangeness.
The Butterfly Effect – As a child, Evan had blackouts. As a college student, he realizes he can travel back in time to those blackout moments to change the future by influencing the past. But, Evan soon becomes aware of the butterfly effect, the idea that tiny changes (like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings) can have massive impacts down the line. I love movies that play with the concept of time, so I enjoyed this one.
Twin Peaks – When FBI agent Dale Cooper shows up in the small town of Twin Peaks, Washington to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer he’s in for a strange and supernatural ride. This classic 1990s tv show from director David Lynch is strange and symbolic because well, it’s David Lynch. Twin Peaks was re-booted for a third season (Twin Peaks: The Return) in 2017. The reboot is also a great view if you’re looking to build your intuition. Part 8 entitled “Gotta Light?” is shot in black and white and it’s particularly odd; it’s definitely my favorite episode of the re-boot.
The Gift – This Netflix original Turkish TV series is about a painter on a supernatural journey of personal discovery linked to an archeological site. This one has parallel universes and plenty of symbolism and explores themes of spiritual awakening and trauma processing. I’ll also note that the English dubbing is excellent and I often find dubbing a bit annoying.
Manifest – This supernatural drama aired on NBC so it has that broadcast TV drama feel, but that certainly doesn’t keep it from being strange. Manifest follows the stories of passengers on an airliner that disappeared for over 5 years, at least from the perspective of those on the ground. For the passengers, however, no time has passed. When the passengers return to earth, they discover that the world has moved on without them and that they’re now receiving strange visions of the future and “callings” they must complete.
8 ½ – This classic 1963 film from Italian director Fredrico Fellini is one of those films that gets accused of being weird just to be weird, but I definitely disagree with that take. Yes, 8 ½ is strange, but it’s also a reasonably easy to follow story about a movie director in the midst of an existential crisis that has him re-visiting his life, his relationships, and his latest film project.