When I am about to go to sleep, right before I actually fall asleep, my "mind" gets flooded with images and words from out of nowhere, things that I haven't been thinking about otherwise, and many times the things actually happen at a later date. Anyone else here ever experience this? If so, is there a way to harness this and make it more focused or specific?

The periods of time just before sleep and when waking are actually the time of psychic dreams.  It could be precognitive.  It is also the same level as astral travel which is not the most elevated nor the most reliable source for information or understanding.

Could I please add to Spritalk's excellent suggestions that these are often called HYPNAGOGIC IMAGES.

Basically it is an image experienced by a person just before falling asleep, which often resembles an hallucination.

The theory is that as the mind progressively withdraws from your external, waking reality, nature does not like a vacuum or empty space, and your unconscious mind therefore often tends to fill it with images, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells from multiple sources, only some of which have to do with the outer everyday world.

These experiences may or may not lead on to eventually becoming psychic visions of the most likely future, or be a prelude to an astral projection, or an Out Of Body Experience (OOBE).

The main problem is that they tend to frequently get mixed up with with our dreams which follow them so much and so easily, that they often get forgotten in preference to the contents of our dreams when we are in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep state of consciousness.

Try keeping a dream diary or journal handy on your bedside table, and use a reliable pen to jot down any night memories before stepping out of your bed in the morning.

This should hopefully help you to eventually sort out what are simply random images from your genuine psychic visions of the future, or your astral travelling or OOBEs.

BTW there are also those corresponding images which appear when we are currently in the process of gradually waking up from our sleep - HYPNOPOMPIC IMAGES.

Hoping that this helps,

EoT

What makes you say that about astral travel? Is an OBE any different from that? How can you decipher astral travel from a dream?