Can somebody explain to me

[panchov]

Someone from my job died this morning and I was talking to an officemate. She told me that the night her aunt died she came to her with a bright white light and said goodbye. The next morning she woke up to find she had died.

This reminded me of a similar story in my family, when my cousin was a kid he woke up screaming the name of a family friend. My aunt ran in the room to find out what was going on and glanced at the clock (3:20am). My cousin screamed and screamed the friend's name over and over before finally crying himself to sleep. The next morning they found out he'd died at 3:19am).


So how does this stuff happen (supposing it's not really ghosts). I could understand if someone dreamed someone came to them AFTER they knew they were dead and then the person believed it was real, but how does it happen when they still don't know. How do entire families come to agree that the night before somebody died, something like this happened? (i'm sure you've all heard similar stories.)

[JoeTheJuggler]

Selective memory. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic dreams. Anecdotes that get exaggerated in the retelling. Confirmation bias. (Have you looked into how many people die without a loved one having such a dream?) Coincidence (http://www.skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html).

[JoeEllison]

There are 6 billion people in the world, and 365 nights in a year. If just 1% of the world has a dream every night, that's about 22,000,000,000 dreams a year(not counting naps!). About 150,000 people die every day, which is around 55,000,000 a year. Why would it seem unreasonable that a few of those billions of dreams might include a few of the millions of people who die every year? If you accept that people will often misremember when they had a dream, and later attribute the dream to the exact day of the death instead of sometime earlier or even later, and there's no reason to assume anything even remotely supernatural.

[KateHL]

Heh. My grandparents were hit and killed by a drunk driver 12 years ago. It was my mother's birthday so my parents and I drove 5 hours to stay with my grandparents so she could celebrate with her family. My brother didn't make it as he was at school. So my grandparents got to spend one last night out at dinner with their children and all their grandchildren - almost. But my mother chooses to remember my brother as being present. I argued with her once but after a few minutes I realized she needed to remember the night as having been 100% perfect (besides the fact that her parents were horrifically killed) rather than, you know, 90% perfect.

One thing I don't get is why your aunt looked at the clock when your cousin was having a nightmare?

[-Fran-]

I would say that whenever someone tells you a story like this, first one should question if it is true at all. Most of the times, it's urban legends-types of stories and never happened at all. Sometimes there's some truth to the actual story but it was exaggerated as it was told over and over again, until it turned from something trivial to something "amazing". Sometimes it's just a lie from someone who wants attention, sometimes someone simply misremembers or misinterprets what happened. 99% of the time when it comes to stories like these, there just isn't anything to explain really, because it never happened the way it was told.

I've noticed that people in general rather seldom ask themselves first "did this actually happen at all?", but what they do, if they are mildly skeptical; is to start with asking "this sounds weird, what could be the explanation?" But there's not much use in trying to find explanations if it didn't happen the way it was told. (I do this too, from time to time, and sometimes I catch myself and reminds me to check first if it really happened that way at all :))

Having said that :) if the story is "legit" then there could of course be several natural explanations as well, and some have been mentioned here already.

[Autolite]

panchov, assuming the stories are true, JoeEllison explanation works. Coincidences are not as amazing as intuition would make you believe. Check out the "Law of Truly High Numbers"...

[Cuddles]

There was a particularly nice story someone posted somewhere on this forum a while ago. They had a dream that a close friend (or possibly family member, I can't remember) had died. Importantly for cases like this, they kept a dream diary and so had the exact date of the dream on record. The next day, the person the dream had been about did die. For years, this person told the story about how they had dreamed of the death before it happened, athough being a skeptic it was simply presented as a coincidence and not anything spooky.

The particularly nice part of this story is that a couple of decades later, they found their dream diary again and had a look through it. It turned out that the dream had actually been a few days after the death, not before it. A classic case of memory getting it wrong, even when there was written evidence available.

[Garrette]

This reminded me of a similar story in my family, when my cousin was a kid he woke up screaming the name of a family friend. My aunt ran in the room to find out what was going on and glanced at the clock (3:20am). My cousin screamed and screamed the friend's name over and over before finally crying himself to sleep. The next morning they found out he'd died at 3:19am).What others have said is correct, but there is one very large red flag in this story that I do not think has been mentioned and too often gets overlooked. That red flag is the time.

The implication is that the clock showed 3:20 because it took one minute for the kid to scream enough for the aunt to wake up and run into the room, so the kid obviously had the dream/death notification at 3:19, the exact time of death.

First, and this is not trivial, this assumes the clocks are synchronized, and this is absolute balderdash, especially for anything over a decade or so ago. Look through your own house at all the clocks and tell me they are synchronized and that none of them are five minutes or more off. Now pick the one you think is correct and look at the time on your cell phone (cell phones get their times from the synchronized times at the cell towers). Now match those times to what the time on the television news scroll bar says and then to what time is announced on your radio news.
You will find things are frequently off by several minutes.

Second, and this is an even bigger objection, how on earth was the time of death affixed at 3:19 a.m. Was the family friend at home? Then who was standing over him watching the clock to shout "Time of death is precisely 3:19?" The answer is that nobody was.

Was the family friend in the hospital and therefore being watched over by medical staff? The same objection applies. Unless there is immediate medical need, the medical staff doesn't hover over the patient waiting to shout the time at the instant of expiration. Frequently the time will be rounded to the five minutes or quarter hour anyway.

Third, the claim that they found out the very next day what the time of death was is a pure fabrication, and solid evidence to the contrary is required to demonstrate otherwise. Have you ever had a relative call to say another relative had just died? I have. Have you ever had that relative tell you the time of death? I have not. Have you ever known that relative to even know the time of death? I have not, at least not right away. Notifications do not work that way. To think that a non-relative would know that information so quickly is ludicrous.

This story is a fabrication, a very fault memory, or a combination of both. There is nothing to explain.

[fagin]

I think it's all made up. Generic anecdote.

[Big Les]

Misremembered details aside, and at the risk of overstating the case, it's like the Lottery - 14 million-to-1 odds of any of us winning it, but somebody will win it for sure. Compare this to 6 billion people, several hundred thousand of which die each day, and then many more relatives of these people, who each think about a certain number of loved ones every day. Of all these people, at least a few are going to have had some dream or thought about their particular loved one, just before they actually die.

In other words, just like the Lottery, it's unlikely that it will happen to you or I in our lifetimes, but certain that it will happen to someone, somewhere, soon. It's difficult not to imagine some special significance behind these events, but it's all down to probability, which is something that very few people (me included!) really understand.

[Normal Dude]

People exaggerate. People confabulate. We do this every day.

[amb]

Urban legends. The shock of finding out a loved one has suddenly died jars the mind into remembering past events, or a meeting with the deceased that you had probably forgotten about. It seems a lot of Catholics have these experiances. Could it be that a major portion of them believe in life after death?

[panchov]

Well I can't speak for my coworker, but in my family, while I can't say that it actually happened, I can say that all 5 members are in complete agreement that it happened that way. It's not like this happened to a friend of mine, they all say it happened and they all say they witnessed.

I think she just glanced at the clock becuase you know when you wake up on the middle of the night that's usually what you're wondering - what time it is.

I guess it could be coincidence, but it's a weird coincidence. Anyway, thanks for all the answers, at least I have some ideas now.

[panchov]

Second, and this is an even bigger objection, how on earth was the time of death affixed at 3:19 a.m. Was the family friend at home? Then who was standing over him watching the clock to shout "Time of death is precisely 3:19?" The answer is that nobody was.


That's a really good point. I can't remember if he was in a hospital, but I always thought he was home in his bed, so then how would they know? Good thinking!

[amb]

Second, and this is an even bigger objection, how on earth was the time of death affixed at 3:19 a.m. Was the family friend at home? Then who was standing over him watching the clock to shout "Time of death is precisely 3:19?" The answer is that nobody was.


That's a really good point. I can't remember if he was in a hospital, but I always thought he was home in his bed, so then how would they know? Good thinking!A huge coincidence, and a bucket full of wishful thinking. Regards~~Angelo.