Jamie_L

Confirmation bias easily explains those serendipitous events that seem too coincidental to be true (but are).

As for dreams, my particular view is that people who feel they have had experiences matching dreams are actually reconstructing memories of the dream after the fact. That is, they have vague memories of an unusual dream. Later they are in a situation that triggers that memory, but at the same time they unconsciously fill in the blanks in that memory with things they are perceiving in the present. Without realizing it, they re-shape the memory of the dream to fit the situation, and then later they are convinced that the detailed dream memory came first.

I've done some reading on memory and discovered, to my surprise, that it is very easy to reshape memories with information provided after the event, and this reshaping can go completely unnoticed to the person with the memory. It's actually startling and a bit disconcerting to realize how unreliable our memories can be.

And remember: research shows there is absolutely no correlation between how certain a person is of their recollection and how accurate that recollection is.

Jamie

Glory

Tell me about it! I can recall (ironically) several times when I clearly remembered specific events, in detail, that were so different from reality I thought I was losing my mind. I am not talking about delusions or halucinations. I am talking about remembering bringing something home only to discover that I hadn't.

I also know of several times at which I "knew" that I had seen someone wearing something blue that turned out to be red or someone who had short hair in my brain was actually very longhaired. Details get confused very easily.

How many times have you told yourself that you would be able to remember something, say, where you put your keys, only to spend an hour searching because they aren't where you thought they would be or you simply have no idea where you put them?

Memory is unreliable. Ask any attorney.

Glory

Rusting Car Bumper

Richard Feynman told a story about that. I don't remember the precise details so if I get some of the specifics wrong, don't shoot me.

Anyway, he tells a story of being in college in the house he lived in one afternoon. He is studying or whatever and then he gets a horrible feeling. Its about his grandmother. Then the phone rings. The call is for him.

Guess who or what was on the other end?

Cmon guess?

Cmon...

It was nobody. The call had nothing to do with his grandmother at all.

His point is that you remember the times where these correlations happen but you forget the innumerable times when you have a thought of a thing or a person and then there is no phone call, accident, etc. How many times a day do you think of someone else like a spouse, family member or child and then they DON'T call or nothing unusual happens?

DC

ohwilleke

I have certainly experienced deja vous on multiple occassions.

For example, I was once sitting an a high school economics class knowing everything that was going to be said 15 minutes in advance, right down to the teacher's eccentric examples and precisely wording a posture, for almost the entire class . . . something that had been an odd dream I'd had earlier (or at least think I had earlier, I didn't write it down).

Many of the experiences have been nothing important . . . being in a surreally familiar neighborhood I'd never been in before, or having a phone call with someone about something that hadn't happened yet when I had the dream.

I've never been able to react to it in anyway to respond to it. I've simply known what is going to happen next for a little while, what they guy on the other end of the phone is going to say, or whatever.

I've never had a dream like this at a time when I could place the context of the event in my life. I've never had a dream like this about anything Earth shattering, like learning of a death, in my own life.

It does feel different than a mere intutitive guess. It is a different state of mind. A bit like suddenly being awakened but not yet fully conscious. Yet, usually it happens when I'm wide awake.

Sometimes they happen in spats, at other times they are infrequent.

I can't explain it. I've never seen it as a sign of much of anything. It is pretty much without practical application.

The only plausible explanation I can think of which would be consistent with the experience without out being some form of precognition, would be "back projection", i.e. a special state of mind that creates the feeling of having dreamed something before when you didn't. But, that doesn't explain knowing what is going to happen next in exactly photographic detail before it happens.

tronvillain

echidna, you'll just have to find a way to deal with it, because I am completely unable to recall experiencing anything similar to this "feeling." *chuckle*

lisarea

Well, I've had some wacky experiences along these lines, too. Most of the time, coincidences are just that. I know that I'm a natural worrier, so every time someone near to me dies or suffers from some misfortune, I can easily dredge up some nagging worry that could be attributed to premonition if I were a little more goony, I suppose.

But there've been a few incidents that I haven't been able to attribute to coincidence or subconscious calculation or selective memory.

Once, when my son was younger, he'd gone down to the Dairy Queen a couple blocks away to get a burger. It was snowing, so he was all bundled up, and he'd been there by himself many times before.

I wasn't expecting him back for a while, but suddenly I heard his voice right behind me, saying "Mom?" in a small, shaky tone. I freaked right out and ran out of the house without a jacket and with only sandals and socks on my feet. I ran down the street in the direction of where he was supposed to be, and found him right around the corner. He'd lost his gloves and was carrying a milkshake in each hand, to surprise me. He was crying, and his fingers were swelling up and numb. The stupid kid was literally risking the use of his fingers for the sake of a couple of milkshakes.

I know it sounds completely insane, but I also know this really happened. I don't regularly run out into snowstorms like that, and I have never, before or since, had such a clear hallucination, auditory or otherwise.

But I don't think there's a supernatural explanation. Maybe I subconsciously detected something in his voice before he left and knew he was coming home with milkshakes. Maybe our sense of smell is much much greater than we know, and I was able to smell that my child was in distress over the distance of a block or two. Maybe, even, we have some sense we are not yet familiar with, something we don't know how to measure. Hell, maybe we actually time travel in little dribs and drabs, hitting little wrinkles, and retain little scribbles of memory of the not too distant future. Or maybe there are little invisible message-bringers who exist solely to seek out humans without cell phones and tell them stuff they should know. I figure each of these is a possible explanation, in roughly descending order of probability.

My point being that the fact that we don't completely understand some things doesn't mean they're supernatural, as crazy and implausible as they may seem. They're just natural phenomena we can't measure and articulate yet. We can't outright reject explanations that don't fit into our current worldview simply because we don't understand them yet.

PS: I AM NOT A CRACKPOT. THANK YOU.

Clutch

A nice discussion of confirmation bias (and related effects on everyday reasoning) is found in Thomas Gilovich's fine book, How we know what isn't so. I recommend it.

echidna

I knew you were going to say that.

galiel

WOW! And I knew you were going to say THAT!!!

There ya go. It's deja vu all over again.

[ October 28, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>

Jamie_L

Actually, I've read somewhere (sorry, no source), that deja vu is exactly that: a brain short-circuit that makes current sensory inputs feel like a memory, even though they aren't.

Maybe not. However, your only evidence that such a thing actually happened is your memory of it happening.

Jamie