Reality Mocks Itself.

January 5, 2007 9:14 AM

Devil's Advocate-Filter: Help me attempt to debunk my own incident of dream precognition

I had a rather specific dream the other night that I managed to write down (as I try to with all my dreams), though it seemed inconsequential at the time. Last night very unusual circumstances that were beyond my control arose which caused this dream to be completely re-enacted in real life. This has never happened before (though I am prone to deja vu feelings and have wondered if my dreams played a role in them).

If I didn't have it written down, I'm not sure I'd believe it myself, and it certainly has had a great impact on me. But for the sake of learning, I would also like to consider it against scientific (or at least rational) theories that shoot down or otherwise explain dream precognition. Can you throw some at me?

posted by hermitosis to science & nature (56 comments total)

A person will dream about millions of events, images, sounds and feelings in their lifetime. In the real world, billions of different things happen every day. Through plain blind chance something will match up between dreams and reality.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 9:17 AM on January 5, 2007

You'll probably have better luck with this if you tell us what the dream actually was. "I was tieing my shoes and then I sneezed" is a different can of worms than "A door-to-door vacuum salesman asked for my hand in marriage"
posted by 0xFCAF at 9:18 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yeah, we definitely need to know:

A) What you think you remember dreaming.
B) Exactly what you wrote down.
C) What actually happened.
posted by empath at 9:23 AM on January 5, 2007

Nearly everyone here will tell you it's selection bias, and rabidly so. It may be just that, but it appears that almost all the people who offhandedly reject things like this have never had the experience.
posted by milarepa at 9:25 AM on January 5, 2007

Hoverboards has pretty much nailed the general case for precognition of all kinds. It's confirmation bias.
posted by empath at 9:31 AM on January 5, 2007

I've had similar experiences without the writing-it-down part. Has there been research into nonlinear memory that could explain this?

For instance, let's say that last night's dream involves a friend calling for the first time in three years. The following day, the friend calls.

I'm particularly interested in the idea that in real, linear time, the dream memory did not happen first. Rather, when the friend called, my mind created the dream memory and placed it "before" the call in time.
posted by odinsdream at 9:31 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

To counter milarepa, when I was writing down my dreams for a class (which included waking up several times a night, and averaging about eight remembered dreams per evening), I had about a 30% success rate for accurately predicting the future. It was mostly mundane stuff, with an occassional very weird concurance, but the answer really was that I noticed more things that were extremely similar to my dreams rather than my correct predictions of the future. So yeah, I've totally had the "OMG, I dreamed that!" moment, and have had that moment many times, but upon reflection it was a) rarely exact, and b) rarely anything I couldn't have predicted while waking, if I had really thought about it.
posted by klangklangston at 9:33 AM on January 5, 2007

Milarepa:

Most people will tell you that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia. Those people have probably never heard voices, though.
posted by empath at 9:34 AM on January 5, 2007

For instance, let's say that last night's dream involves a friend calling for the first time in three years. The following day, the friend calls.

And the 800 times you dream about friends calling you and they don't call you, you forget about it.
posted by empath at 9:36 AM on January 5, 2007

If dreams predicted the future, a whole hell of a lot more of us would die by falling off of buildings.
posted by empath at 9:36 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

I dreamed I was in a rock and mineral store where I wanted to find something interesting to buy, but weirdly my eyes wouldn't work right and I couldn't see the merchandise or read the price tags well enough to know what was what. Finally I gave up in frustration and left with nothing. At the time it just felt like one of those money-burning-a-hole-in-your-pocket dreams.

Three days later I booked an appointment with a doctor's office I'd never been to, so I could get a new prescription for contact lenses. On my way there I noticed a rock and gem shop that I'd never seen before and decided to swing by after my appointment. This didn't trigger any recall because going into stores like this is not very unusual for me, as I'm a natural history buff. Anyhow I discovered as I was leaving the office that the doctor had neglected to tell me that he had put drops in my eyes that fully dilated my pupils (not a usual part of my exam), which meant I couldn't see anything at all in close range. (When I asked him, he apologized for dosing me without warning me or asking if I had driven to the appointment).

So as I was trying to figure out what to do with myself, I found myself at that mineral shop on the corner, and enjoyed the irony that I couldn't really do any shopping now. I couldn't even see the street-signs or the clock on my phone. Then as I entered the store anyway, I remembered the dream. Just as in the dream, the harder I tried and the closer I held something to make out what I was seeing, the messier it all got-- the effect of the drops is way stranger than just typical near or far-sightedness. The eeriness of the situation caught up with me and it was both alarming and pleasurable to be reliving my dream exactly. And yes, finally I remembered that I had somewhere else to be and I had to leave without having the slightest idea what they had in stock.

Certainly there are elements in the dream that I am familiar with in my life, but this particular combination is very specific, and the incident I just described took place only three days later. The main facotrs, such as the location of the doctor, the proximity to the shop, and the use of the drops, are things I had no prior awareness of. I didn't even book the appointment until yesterday morning.

Does that help?
posted by hermitosis at 9:41 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

The New York Times had a very interesting article on amazing coincidences some years back. Long story short, amazing coincidences are statistically inevitable. Sure, the odds of that specific dream predicting actual events a few days later are extremely poor, but the odds of something like that happening are extremely good.
posted by adamrice at 9:41 AM on January 5, 2007

While the first paragraph may not be word-for-word what I wrote down on Jan 1st, it's pretty damn close (I don't have my notebook with me here though).
posted by hermitosis at 9:43 AM on January 5, 2007

Also, for the record I know that it is common for people to have trouble reading things in dreams, but actually I normally do this just fine, and besides that it was more than just the reading-- in the dream it literally seemd as if I was going blind for some unknown reason.
posted by hermitosis at 9:45 AM on January 5, 2007

A good portion of dreams that I can remember have that "I can't see clearly" drama in them. It sucks.
posted by Doctor Barnett at 9:47 AM on January 5, 2007

Empath, touché.

Though I think hearing voices, and writing down the exact thing that happened or telling someone beforehand what will happen are a little different.

Also, I guess I just object to the fact that the people dismiss it as nothing but selection bias, as if their designation as such makes the experience meaningless. It's a "move along nothing to see here attitude," but these same people have never had the experience. That's all.
posted by milarepa at 9:48 AM on January 5, 2007

I might be misunderstanding, but surely booking the appointment after having the dream makes matters less weird, not more weird? After dreaming about having trouble with your eyes you took specific action that led to you having temporarily screwed-up vision. And you went into a gem shop because you often do.

That narrows the coincidence down to the fact that the new doctor used some unexpected eye-drops. Doesn't it?
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 9:49 AM on January 5, 2007

I'd be much more inclined to go with pre-cognition if you'd never been to a rock and gem shop before.
posted by empath at 9:52 AM on January 5, 2007

I doubt that the dream had an impact on my booking an appointment soon afterward-- I've been trying to find a new doctor for a while now, but it has taken me weeks to paw through the list provided by my insurance.
posted by hermitosis at 9:54 AM on January 5, 2007

Devil's Advocate-Filter

Well, I guess I have to chime in here.

You say you had scheduled the doctor's appointment to get a new prescription for contacts--the "blindness" aspect of the dream may have been an expression of anxiety about being able to get the correct prescription, or having to visit the eye doctor, or something similar. You may not have made the appointment until yesterday, but you knew before the dream that you would need an eye exam in the near future, yes?

It's a "move along nothing to see here attitude," but these same people have never had the experience.

What makes you think they haven't?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:55 AM on January 5, 2007

To clarify a bit, I just think that there is a third option, apart from "confirmation bias, move along!" and "weird spooky ESP precognition". It is: that our dreams might affect our future actions in ways that might be mysterious to us, but not in principle inexplicable or in any way paranormal.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 9:57 AM on January 5, 2007 [2 favorites]

Also, I guess I just object to the fact that the people dismiss it as nothing but selection bias, as if their designation as such makes the experience meaningless. It's a "move along nothing to see here attitude," but these same people have never had the experience. That's all.

Well. no experience has inherent meaning. If you want to assign some personal meaning to any kind of 'wierd' event, that's fine. But it's not translatable to anybody else, and you shouldn't expect others to take it seriously, except as some insight into your personality. Especially random folks on the internet who don't have any particular interest in you personally.

Besides dreams, I'm thinking of things like "Oh, I saw a rainbow on my dead mother's birthday, so I know that she's doing okay in heaven." Sure-- personally meaningful, but not objectively meaningful.
posted by empath at 9:59 AM on January 5, 2007

game warden: Yeah, I have what I call 'rehearsal' dreams all the time, about things that are weighing on my mind, and they often play out in real life very close to the way I dream about them.
posted by empath at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2007

What makes you think they haven't?

Obviously, it's a bit of presumption on my part, but everyone who I've encountered that offhandedly dismisses the phenomenon as meaningless eventually admits they haven't experienced it. And conversely, most skeptics I know who had the experience find it very hard to dismiss it as meaningless afterwards.
Sorry for the derail.
posted by milarepa at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2007

Empath, my question in response to that is: why would we only be able to preconceive of events in which we were doing something completely foreign to us? Or does your comment only refer to the burden of proof?

Clearly there is no doubt that I dreamed something, and then that exact scenario took place. With that factor beyond question, and with only the relationship between those two events to ponder (if indeed there is one), only half of this issue revolves around what I would be able to convince other people of. The rest of it lies in what I personally am able to stretch myself to believe. In my own mind, it makes more sense for an incident of precognition to include very real-life elements (such as my being in a rock shop) that, despite taking a turn for the specifically aberrant, are recognizable as real. Whereas if I had dreamed I was picking termites out of a mound and suddenly couldn't see, I wouldn't have seen last night as having anything to do with it.
posted by hermitosis at 10:05 AM on January 5, 2007

Because people dream about things that they do often or are planning to do or are worried about doing.

And since you visit rock and gem shops often and were planning on visiting an eye doctor, there's nothing about the dream that would have been out of the ordinary in your life.

If you had dreamed about something completely unrelated to your normal life, and then that exact thing happened, it's far less explainable then dreaming about something you could have reasonably expected to happen happening.
posted by empath at 10:12 AM on January 5, 2007

DevilsAdvocate: "You say you had scheduled the doctor's appointment to get a new prescription for contacts--the "blindness" aspect of the dream may have been an expression of anxiety about being able to get the correct prescription, or having to visit the eye doctor, or something similar. You may not have made the appointment until yesterday, but you knew before the dream that you would need an eye exam in the near future, yes?"

Good point. But really isn't the issue more than the sum of its parts? Yes I've been to a rock shop, yes I have known that I would be seeing an eye doctor sooner or later. Any single element of the dream is not strange in itself. It's all of them in concert working together, combined with the freshness of the dream and my specific record of it, that make the experience add up to something that I feel is outside of my ability to dismiss it.

Any coincidence can be reduced in the same fashion. Sure it makes all the sense in the world that you could run into your third-grade teacher at a gas station in a tiny town a thousand miles from where either of you live, for example. All you have to do is gather enough of the story to explain how it turned out that way. But in that moment when the coincidence happens, what you feel is two parts of your life merging atypically, and that moment is greater than the sum of its parts, whether you go on to believe that there was anything literally surreal or supernatural about it.
posted by hermitosis at 10:16 AM on January 5, 2007

Unusual coincidence: rock shop coming up in dream and real life over the course of a few days

Rational justifications: you admittedly frequent such shops, making their appearance in your dreams and real life likely, also the dream may have subconsciously helped trigger your determination to visit the shop

Unusual coincidence: Problems reading in both dream and real life

Rational justifications: inability to read is a common element in dreams. Stuff being done to your eyes is a common element in eye appointments.

Unusual coincidence: both the dream and the event ended the same (you left without purchasing anything).

Rational justifications: as with your decision to enter the shop in the first place, you can argue that, given your foreknowledge of the dream, this outcome was motivated by the dream rather than predicted by it. Your brain, as soon as it "recognized" the scenario, drew the conclusion that you would be leaving without buying anything, and found rational (but in fact surmountable) reasons for your doing so.

Other rational issues: obviously the dream didn't make enough of an impact that merely, say, the appearance of the rock shop - or the fact that you were doing something involving your eyes - triggered a memory of it. Your journal description of the dream was probably pretty light in detail so you may have retroactively, subconsciously altered your memory of the dream scenario to better match the event as it occurred - basically mapping details over the poorly remembered dreams, increasing both your sense of connection between the events and your sense of the vividness of the dream. You must also take into account that your sense of the significance of the connection is founded in part on the experience of apprehending the connection while the real life event was happening - that "alarming and pleasurable" eeriness you describe.

None of this is "scientific," it's just more or less common sense analysis of the situation. In terms of how big of a coincidence the proximity of these elements in your dreams and life are - although discussions of confirmation bias often indulge in faux-statistical exercises to come up with some bogus analysis I'd argue it is impossible to give even a realistic ballpark on these odds. Way too many variables, many (i.e. the true average composition of your dreams) impossible to determine.

Still: can you honestly argue it would be "impossible" for this to be a coincidence? Are the chances of this sort of correlation one in a hundred? One in a thousand? One in a million? The core argument of confirmation bias in these sorts of considerations is that given the billions of dreams, and billions of significant life events, happening every day, such coincidence is not merely not unlikely, it is absolutely inevitable. You remember them, they seem significant and unusual, because the brain is wired to look for patterns.

None of this proves anything of course. But I would certainly argue that, given there is no known scientific mechanism for information to travel into the human mind from the future to the past, coincidence remains the most parsimonious explanation.
posted by nanojath at 10:18 AM on January 5, 2007

Empath: up until that moment after the appointment, I had thought the big coincidence of the afternoon was actually finding a huge mineral shop on 34th Street in that particular part of town-- it seemed very strange to me. So that part of it still has a little bit of an unreal flavor to me. Don't know if that has any bearing on your point :)
posted by hermitosis at 10:21 AM on January 5, 2007

hermitosis: Was it a general match in that all the elements were there or was the rock shop and your inability to see well exactly the same?
posted by milarepa at 10:23 AM on January 5, 2007

And isn't your response, hermitosis, pretty much just a summary of the human condition? Scientifically (it can be argued) there is nothing "significant" about our lives. We are phenomenological events of energy and matter which in every rigorously scientifically studied circumstance follow the same thermodynamic principles as stars and comets and the microdiamond crystals growing under under tons of pressure in the methane-flooded chasms of Neptune. But it sure the hell feels significant to us. Subjective human experience is what it is and scientific explanations frequently fail to do it much justice. Nevertheless the "numbers" on your experience remain unconvincing to the outside observer. It is insanely unlikely for a twelve digit number someone pulls out of the air to match one randomly selected by a computer, but people win the lottery every month.
posted by nanojath at 10:26 AM on January 5, 2007 [3 favorites]

Every single thing you did to bring about the real-life situation you chose to do yourself, with the exception of the fact that the new doctor gave you eyedrops you weren't expecting. You chose to finally make an appointment, and you chose to go into the gem shop after noticing that your vision was impaired.

I don't see how you can easily rule out the idea that the dream prompted you to do these things on some subconscious but entirely non-paranormal level of which you're unaware. That would be a lot less odd than precognition.

That would reduce the coincidence to the fact that the new doctor did something you weren't expecting, which since he was new isn't necessarily a huge coincidence. Also, at a stretch, maybe the proximity of the gem shop is a second coincidence.
This is totally different to the situation in which you dream of meeting an old teacher who you haven't seen in years, then meet them the next day in the middle of nowhere. In that instance, your lack of control over your ex-teacher's movements would make the coincidence much greater, or alternatively strengthen the argument for precognition.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 10:27 AM on January 5, 2007

everyone who I've encountered that offhandedly dismisses the phenomenon as meaningless eventually admits they haven't experienced it.

I think speaking of "the phenomenon" as if it were a yes-or-no, it-did-happen-or-it-didn't experience is inaccurate, I think. Surely there's a continuum based on how closely the dream corresponds to what subsequently happens, and how unlikely it is?

I admit I've never had a dream correspond as closely to subsequent events as hermitosis's example here. I have had dreams "come true": more than one, in fact of the sort where I talk to person X about topic Y, and then the next day, or a few days later, I do talk to person X about topic Y. In my cases, it was easy to see that there was a non-supernatural explanation, as I had been thinking "I need to talk to X about Y" prior to the dream.

And conversely, most skeptics I know who had the experience find it very hard to dismiss it as meaningless afterwards.

Ah, but this is just confirmation bias (and I'm playing a bit loose with the term here, including not just coincidence but also non-coincidental but non-supernatural explanations) on a global scale. Given that any number of people may have dreams that seem precognitive, some fraction of them will have dreams so close that it seems impossible, to the person who had the dream, that it was mere coincidence. Yet on a global scale, it is inevitable that someone would have such a closely matching dream. Kinda like the fact that the chances of a given person winning the lottery are less than the chance of being struck by lightning. Yet, someone is going to win the lottery. To that person, it may seem like Divine Providence that they won the lottery, considering how unlikely that outcome was. The person who has the apparently-prophetic dream says "it is almost impossibly unlikely that I would have had this dream just by chance," while everyone else says, "it is reasonably likely that someone would have had a dream like that by chance."

(Oh, and I don't consider this a derail, as this discussion is directly applicable to the original question.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:33 AM on January 5, 2007

Very good, nanojath.

You are right, my journal entry is pretty light in detail (usually just a few notes are enough to help me recall almost everything about a dream, from exact sentences to the position of the furniture).

One strike against my perception of this as a precognitive experience is that I remember the layout of the dream-store very clearly, and it does not exactly match the store in real life. And in the dream I could see just fine up until the moment when I entered the shop-- when suddenly there was something I wanted to see quite badly.

However it seems to me that, had I genuinely received an premonition of a future event in a dream, I would most likely receive an just an impression of the experience, nothing exactly resembling the real life experience (though we react to things in dreams as if they were happening in real life). And while the vision snapped into focus and merged with my scenario last night, in my memory I can recall them distinctly and individually with equal clarity.

Thanks for those thoughts; I have a lot to consider, I suppose.
posted by hermitosis at 10:33 AM on January 5, 2007

I'm not sure this needs to be debunked. I think confirmation bias and other skeptical approaches are worth considering, but it's also worth considering that the brain is sometimes good at predicting the future, sometimes with eerie specificity. This might be just because it's a massively powerful computing machine, or because it's also a funky receiver that somehow, sometimes picks up possibilities over a timeline as they get closer to resolution, or for some other reason nobody's thought of yet.

I'm particularly interested in the idea that in real, linear time, the dream memory did not happen first.

Or maybe time isn't quite as linear as we think it is and one of the thing the brain does is try to order things linearly but it doesn't always get it right.

Or it might be luck and imagination.
posted by weston at 10:42 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

milarepa: As I just mentioned to nanojath, they were somehow both merely elements and yet obvious matches at the same time. Sort of how when you dream about the house you grew in growing up, it may have extra rooms or have other dissonant details, but is immediately recognizable as that house.

The thing that was the clearest match was the kind of blindness. The weirdness of beign able to at least partially discern things far away, but then to have them get blurrier and more spectral as I moved closer (I'm normally near-sighted, so this weird far-sightedness was pretty scary). I hadn't had those drops since I was a teenager, and I don't remember the effect ever being so strong. The experience of picking up what I thought might be a chunk of fluorite and moving it back and forth trying to see it, trying to discern the price, was unmistakably identical-- even if was just going through motions trying to relive my dream, the vision-problem was the same...

And if we are only going through certain motions because we dreamed that we would, what is that, a sort of auto-determinism?
posted by hermitosis at 10:42 AM on January 5, 2007

I agree with Nanojath, game warden, et al. The dream is a coincidence, but given that the elements of the dream (eye trouble, visiting gem stores) all stem from things going on in your waking life prior to the dream, the coincidence is not that extraordinary.

As Nanojath says, just because something is statistically rare does not mean that it never happens.

Which is more likely/logical/probable -- a rare but still relatively common coincidence (in that lots people seem to have had one or two of these experiences out of the MILLIONS of dreams they've ever had), or actual precognition of the future?

Occam's razor...
posted by modernnomad at 10:44 AM on January 5, 2007

It seems to me that you
a) enjoy going into gem and rock stores and have in the past and likely will many times in the future
AND
b) were having trouble with your vision and were looking into scheduling an appointment to deal with that.

You then dreamed about those items together, which seems entirely unsurprising, and then happened to visit a rock store when your vision was messed up.

This is called a coincidence. They happen all the time. You can go online and read about much stranger things that were dreamed about and then happened, because dreams that somehow resemble future reality get a ton of publicity.

In all your dreaming history, is this the first time something like this has happened? And is it so shocking to you that your life would eventually resemble something you dreamed about?
posted by andoatnp at 10:48 AM on January 5, 2007

And also, let's not forget that not only do you have lots of dreams about things that you regularly think about or do, or plan on doing or are worried about doing, but so does everybody else

Out of 3 billion dreaming people, what are the odds that someone has an incredibly accurate dream about something they actually do the next day? I mean, it has to happen all the time to somebody, somewhere, all the time.
posted by empath at 10:52 AM on January 5, 2007

had I genuinely received an premonition of a future event in a dream, I would most likely receive an just an impression of the experience

But you can't possibly argue this is a rational conclusion. On what do you base your opinions of the likely contents of genuine premonitions?

In my memory I can recall them distinctly and individually with equal clarity

"Of all liars, the most convincing is memory." Olin Miller. You feel that way now. If someone had set you down before the real event and grilled you about your memory of the dream? Who knows. The problem with memory is that it is mostly unverifiable.

A couple of things - first off, I'm not the compleat skeptic. I've heard some first person accounts of stuff more strange and frankly disturbing than yours in the precognitive dream category. Neither am I immune to the "perception of significance." On one notable occasion in college I literally changed a course of action to superstitiously ward off the outcome of a dream which later was reenacted to some extent in my real life. And the feared outcome did not occur: this is of course the tiger repellent argument. I hold it neither significant nor insignificant. I'm the same way about religion, which frequently irritates the skeptic and the faithful alike: I have no inclination to abandon my faith merely because it is founded in subjective, non-rational experiences - many of which occurred in the context of formal indoctrination into a social phenomenon. Neither am I going to fight rationality to insist that the earth is 6,000 years old, nor rage through the world with the arrogant conviction that what I believe must be of terrible and absolute significance to anyone else.

The significance of the human experience is in humans' experience of it.
posted by nanojath at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2007

Well I wasn't having trouble with my vision. I simply needed a refill on my contacts.

Many other things like this have happened to me, but this is different because, for starters, it happened within days of the dream, instead of way after. If it had happened way after, my brain would have obviously had plenty of time to consider each new experience on the basis of prior dream experiences (resulting in a lot of my deja vu, I think), and eventually something would have come up that fit the bill. Instead this happened three days afterward, when I was in a different part of town and a different situation than I am used to. This isn't "eventuallly", this is immediately.

And I am a well-heeled coincidence noter. Suffice to say if it hadn't been a particularly strange and unfamiliar experience, I wouldn't have bothered laying it before AxeMe's tender blade :)
posted by hermitosis at 10:58 AM on January 5, 2007

The fact that you have SO many dreams, the Birthday Paradox is bound to hold. And, I also agree with the people who are saying that the unconscious part of your brain had an influence on what you did and how you remember it.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:02 AM on January 5, 2007

"Of all liars, the most convincing is memory." Olin Miller. You feel that way now.

I dunno.. I know this is purely subjective, but being someone who pays attention to and records dreams, this is something I am going to go ahead and take credit for being able to remember. The store in my dream had baskets, the one last night didn't (that I could tell). The dream-store had windows all in a line at the front, the one last night was on the corner of the building and was therefore different. Etc. Etc. But as in the example I mentioned above re: our homes, such differences are secondary to the actual experiences one has in a dream and the impressions they receive about what they're doing and who they are. So while I can't verify this, I stand by that particular assessment of the experience.

Though the rest of what you say about belief is very significant to me, particularly as someone whose beliefs are unorthodox and (to many) disreputable.
posted by hermitosis at 11:04 AM on January 5, 2007

This isn't "eventuallly", this is immediately.

To your lightning-quick unconscious, three days is an eternity.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:05 AM on January 5, 2007

It is insanely unlikely for a twelve digit number someone pulls out of the air to match one randomly selected by a computer, but people win the lottery every month.

Most lotteries I've seen don't have "big jackpot" winners every time there's a draw - that's why the jackpots keep getting bigger over time. It's not guaranteed that somebody will pick the correct numbers, but it's likely to happen periodically. It's extremely unlikely that one specific individual will win the jackpot, but it's actually very probable that somebody will win.

The same logic applies to dreams - it's not too likely that any specific dream will match closely to a future reality, but it's very likely that some dream, at some point in time, will be reflected in real life.
posted by gwenzel at 11:15 AM on January 5, 2007

I didn't state it very accurately but that's exactly my point, gwenzel. From the individual perspective it seems (and in fact, in some absolute statistical sense, is) very likely. It is the huge number of incidences that make the outcome essentially guaranteed. Somebody it going to hit the full monty powerball eventually. The rational argument is that hermitosis hit the dream-reality coincidence powerball. All the rest is just splitting hairs over how unlikely the coincidence was (I think it it totally fair to say it was pretty unlikely, despite all the many rational justifications)
posted by nanojath at 11:20 AM on January 5, 2007

seems... very unlikely, that is.
posted by nanojath at 11:29 AM on January 5, 2007

And isn't your response, hermitosis, pretty much just a summary of the human condition?

Well put. We humans are amazingly bad at dealing with anything having to do with statistics and probability, and stubbornly resistant to admitting that wild coincidences happen all the time and therefore the wild coincidence that happened to us personally is just one of those things. We, as a species, crave meaning and will do just about anything (including inventing elaborate philosophical and religious systems) to pry it out of the recalcitrant reality around us. Yes, I've had dreams that later seemed to have "predicted the future," not to mention apparent precognition (I knew they were going to play that song now!), but I just chuckled and assigned it to the coincidence bin. But in the immortal words of T.S. Eliot, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

All that said, one of the most fascinating books I've read is An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne, first published in 1927; Dunne started writing down his dreams and began to notice that some of them fit later waking life so exactly he couldn't write it off to coincidence, and he developed a whole theory (in the words of the linked Wikipedia article) "that in reality all Time is eternally present ie that past, present and future are all happening at the same time." Well worth digging up a copy if you're interested in this sort of thing, though I disavow all mystical conclusions you may reach as a result.
posted by languagehat at 11:36 AM on January 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

it's also worth considering that the brain is sometimes good at predicting the future, sometimes with eerie specificity. This might be just because it's a massively powerful computing machine, or because it's also a funky receiver that somehow, sometimes picks up possibilities over a timeline as they get closer to resolution, or for some other reason nobody's thought of yet

I'm with weston - there are a lot of things we don't understand, especially about the brain.
posted by walla at 12:52 PM on January 5, 2007

I had a dream that my husband got into a car wreck, and the next day, he did. I didn't tell him about my dream until after I got his call from the tow company.

And I think it's meaningless. How many times have you dreamed about going to work, or getting in car wrecks, or any number of things. It doesn't seem that amazing at all to me, or any sort of indication of prescience.
posted by mckenney at 1:12 PM on January 5, 2007

And the 800 times you dream about friends calling you and they don't call you, you forget about it.

If I regularly dreamed about this particular friend calling me (or, any friend really), I would have thought it useful to relate that as part of my story. I don't, however, so I didn't.

In any case, my point was not that I think it's an example of precognition. My personal theory is that memory timestamps are unverifiable. Most of the time, you can say that something happened before something else, but was suggesting that there are times when you really can't.
posted by odinsdream at 1:53 PM on January 5, 2007

To really make the case for precognitive dreams you wold have to get good at it.
posted by pointilist at 2:22 PM on January 5, 2007

Hermitosis, I dream about things I've experienced recently a lot. My dreams are often mismashes of recent events: last week I dreamt of bugs in the kitchen, all in the shape of a swastika. I'd seen a bug that day, and the swastika was a reference to the t-shirt articles I'd been reading online. My brain just put them in a funny order during sleep.

So I suspect the same thing happened to you. You like rocks, you go into stores like that often, and you knew you had an eye doctor appointment coming up. Your brain put it all together and it came true, which is not particularly surprising, considering the facts your brain knew at the time.
posted by smashingstars at 4:32 PM on January 5, 2007

smashingstars, I'm perfectly willing to entertain that theory, but why can't it be worded, "Your brain put it all together and it came true, which is not particularly surprising which is really amazing, considering how loosely the facts your brain knew at the time were associated."

If it wasn't surprising, I wouldn't have been surprised. After all, the brain and mind are complex and mysteriouseven to those who know the most about them. My diagnosis is free to change, but my amazement is not likely to waver.
posted by hermitosis at 4:47 PM on January 5, 2007

""Your brain put it all together and it came true, which is not particularly surprising which is really amazing, considering how loosely the facts your brain knew at the time were associated.""

Umm... Really surprsing != not amazing. It is amazing that our brain coordinates all the different sensory information that we process on a daily basis; it is amazing that the universe exists and has consistent rules for that existence; it is amazing the depth of philosophy possible for modern man; it is amazing that the level of technology that we have exists. It is even amazing that we exist, when you think about it. But none of it is particularly surprising, unless you're high. (Amazing also != proof of God or mysticism).
posted by klangklangston at 8:15 PM on January 5, 2007

Can I just pop in and say how thankful I am that not one thing that has happened in my dreams has ever taken place in real life.

That is all.
posted by Deathalicious at 10:13 AM on May 13, 2007