Do Dreams Predict the Future? A test! [Archive]

rsaavedra

7th October 2007, 03:04 PM

If I hit a deer in the next 24 hours, it will be strong evidence that dreams predict the future.

If I don't hit a deer in the next 24 hours, it will be evidence that dreams do not predict the future.
Very arbitrary to choose 24 hours. Who says an effectively predicting dream would have a specific time frame for the prediction?

A possibly hidden assumption of yours seems to be that *all* dreams necessarily predict the future. Maybe not all dreams fall under that category. Tricky thing would be to properly classify a dream as predicting vs. non-predicting, before checking whether the predicting outcome checks out.

One other thing: hitting a deer in the next 24 hours, or in the next 30 days, or whatever timeframe you choose, wouldn´t really be "strong" evidence that dreams predict the future. It will be just an increment of one in the counter A = "Successful predicting dreams". You should keep track of another counter B = "Failed predicting dreams." (But after what timeframe would you consider a dream failed if the outcome doesn´t check out? What if it checks out the day after your limiting time frame expires?)

After keeping track of many many people, and many many of their (predicting) dreams, then if the ratio of A / B is somehow significantly large (how large?), then *that* might represent strong evidence that dreams classified as "predicting ones" do predict the future.

JoeTheJuggler

7th October 2007, 03:48 PM

I just woke up from a vivid dream that I hit a deer with my car at night. In 24 hours I will report in this thread if this dream came true.

If I hit a deer in the next 24 hours, it will be strong evidence that dreams predict the future.

If I don't hit a deer in the next 24 hours, it will be evidence that dreams do not predict the future.

Near misses or odd occurrences, like hitting a person, will be counted as inconclusive.

The point of this is to demonstrate how I think metaphysical predictions should be tested.

Discuss...
First, I think you're on the right track in one way: reporting or writing down possibly precognitive dreams at least eliminates faulty memory, which I think is behind many instances of people claiming to have psychic dreams.

On the other hand, I don't think what you've described is a good way to test claims of metaphysical predictions. Whether or not you hit a deer or a person in the next 24 hours is not evidence of anything. An event like that could happen purely by chance, and right now there's no way to distinguish whether the dream was simply a coincidence or it was a glimpse at the future.

I think you'd first need to clarify what is being claimed. (Is it claimed that the dream will come true in 24 hours? If not, why that time limit?--as rsaavedra pointed out.)

Counting odd occurrences like hitting a person as a "hit" (i.e. prediction fulfilled) doesn't make any sense whatsoever--unless the claim is that the dream somehow means "an odd occurrence" will happen in the next 24 hours.

Once you've got the claim worked out, then you can begin to set up a test that should be able to provide evidence for or against the claim.

One of the biggest problems is sorting out what is merely a coincidence from what can't properly be explained that way. To do that, you'd ideally need to know what the probabilities of these predicted events are. (And a sample size of 1 isn't going to allow you to rule out coincidence with any level of confidence.) Just a little bit of shoehorning can make a seeming low probability event into a very high probability one.

For example, you might be able to calculate the probability of hitting a deer. If you include hitting a person, or hitting a dog, or hitting a squirrel or any other animal, or running into a billboard that has a picture of a deer on it, or hitting something that is "dear" to someone, or hitting a John Deere tractor, or nearly hitting a deer, or nearly hitting a person, etc. you will end up with a much higher probability. And "any odd occurrence" isn't as far-fetched as it might sound. I'm sure there are believers who could retrospectively interpret a dream of hitting a deer to fit whatever happens the next day: you accidentally caused the failure of a project at work, you got stuck in traffic because of someone else's accident; etc.

If the claimed ability isn't something that's repeatable (just a once-in-a-lifetime event), I'd discount it. By definition an event that isn't repeatable isn't testable.

As an aside, I hope you're not motivated to make this prediction come true since you're in a position to make it happen!

Madalch

7th October 2007, 04:05 PM

The idea that dreams (as opposed to daydreams) has always struck me as ridiculous.

I remember when I was about three or four, I woke up crying from a dream I had in which a skeleton was strangling Bruno Gerussi (from the Canadian show The Beachcombers). It never came true, and Bruno himself lived another twenty years after that.

When I was twelve, I dreamed that my sister and I both turned into some weird human-dimerotron(? the pre-dinosaur reptile with the huge sail thing on their backs) hybrid. That never came true.

In high school, I dreamed I had mucles like Conan (the Barbarian, not O'Brian), but instead of a sword, I had a magic tree branch which burned with a golden flame, but was never consumed. Never came true.

In college, I dreamed that my grandfather had come back (two months after his funeral), and that I was the only one who found this strange. He's still dead.

In university, I dreamed that I went to Germany to find my "real" grandfather's grave, accompanied by my then-girlfriend,who had somehow changed from Czech to Chinese. Helena never changed her ethnicity, and I never learned that my grandfather was anyone other than who I thought he was, and the closest he had ever been to Germany was riding in a bomber.

The other night, I dreamed I had an argument with my wife, threw a pot of tea at her, and walked alone on the streets of Amsterdam. I haven't fought with my wife lately, and Amsterdam's a long walk from here.

LostAngeles

7th October 2007, 06:36 PM

So, I'm the only person who voted yes on the second option. Guess I should explain why.

I dream in two categories: Freaking Surreal and Entirely Plausible. While the Entirely Plausible are the more annoying (since I have to take a moment to realize that none of that did happen), the Freaking Surreal ones that I remember often have an element affected by some concern I've had. This is either annoying or beneficial. Occasionally it helps me in sorting some stuff out, be it a homework problem or some cock up in the rest of my life. Sometimes just being able to pick out something that's been bugging me because it occurred in a dream is helpful.

And that's how my dreams are, "predictive.":p

karmicserenade

7th October 2007, 06:48 PM

all righty, I have a few dreams that have come true, one was just something that had occurred, I dreamt about the event, not knowing it had happened to a friend, it was exactly the way it had occurred too! Another was the rain, it was just raining in my dream and the next day it rained haha...that might not prove anything to the rest of you, but to me, it seems interesting to say the least.

Gord_in_Toronto

7th October 2007, 08:12 PM

Graham Ross

7th October 2007, 10:03 PM

If my dreams came true my waking life would be a lot more interesting.

Unalienable

8th October 2007, 03:18 AM

I have precognative dreams. Wait, let me restate that: I've had dreams before, which in retrospect, seemed to be strikingly precognative.

When I was much younger I started to pay careful attention to them. I realize that might be superstition, or complete folly, but it's a harmless superstition in the worst case, so why not? One might think of it as an ongoing paranormal experiment.

Over the years I've taken notes about these dreams and have worked out the mechanics of what seems to be happening--the "rules of the game" if you will. Here are my observations:

The Primary Effect - I have a "special dream" which is extremely vivid. When I wake up, I know for sure that it's one of "those" dreams. Not all vivid dreams are precognative, but when I have one of these special dreams I just "know it". I make a mental note of it.

Frequency - A long time ago (when I was about 20) to have about a dozen precognative dreams a year. Lately I haven't been getting them very much at all--maybe only 1 or 2 in the last year. I did in fact have one about two weeks ago (in it, I saw my finger cut severely, and it was dangling by a single bloody red tendon or vein.) Mind you, I have hundreds of dreams each year, as I assume everybody does, but only a few of these special dreams that I watch out for.

Time Between Dream & Manifestation - Usually, between a day to a few months after the dream, it comes true. In one case it took about a year, but that's exceptional. I know at all times which dreams I have 'pending' and I scratch them off my mental list as they manifest themselves.

The Big Twist - There almost always seems to be a critical difference between reality and the dream. It's as if an important detail becomes twisted on purpose. For instance, regarding my finger-cut dream, it might manifest itself with a horrible accident to a toe instead. Or it might be deep gash but not nearly as bad as in the dream. Or it might even happen to somebody I'm with, and not me at all. Usually what really happens is something that I never even thought of when trying to predict what's really going to happen. But once it manifests itself, I think "oh, of course, like in my dream!"

The Unavoidable Destiny - Attempts to escape the fate of the dream never work. E.g., I certainly don't want to lose a finger--I make my living with my hands. So if I take very good care of my hands, wear gloves, avoid machinery that could possibly harm me, then maybe some crazy dog will come up and bite off my toe. Only then will I learn the twist: that the 'finger' really meant 'toe', but otherwise the dream was dead on. And so I've concluded, there's just no escaping the fate of a precognative dream. It never happens exactly like the dream, but it always happens.

How Often Do They Come True? - So far, every single one. However I must stress two points: First, some of them (most of them even) are so mundane that it would be surprising if they didn't come true; second, when it comes true it always requires some mental stretch to make the facts fit the prediction, due to "the twist". Yeah I know, that's a loophole you can drive a truck through.

Metaphors - Sometimes the dreams speak metaphorically of the future. For example, I had a dream where I was fighting a person at the top of a tall building, and we were in a death struggle trying to push each other over the ledge. I ended in up great conflict with the antagonist in my dream, but there was never any fight on a high ledge.

Mundane Dreams - You would think that this mystical power would only be used to convey matters of great importance to me. Apparently it doesn't work that way. Most of my precognitive dreams are very mundane, of no interest to anybody (sometimes not even me), and most all of them were "easy guesses" that can be dismissed as coincidences. They are not guesses though, at least not conscious guesses--I have no control over what predictions my dreamscape comes up with.

If all of my precognative dreams were limited to the mundane variety, I would not even bother mentioning this. It's those few exceptional dreams that are so specific, so unlikely; when they finally happen they positively floor me and make me continue to play this mental game with myself.

My Current Prediction - My current prediction based on my recent precognative dream is this: The image of a severed finger will play a role in my life in the fairly near future.

I am giving plenty of allowances for the "twist"--it might not really be a finger, or it might not be my finger, or it might be a giant metaphor for something that will only make sense to me when it finally happens.

Just of the sake of example, I would consider any of these highly positive manifestations of the dream:

- I lose a toe, or a finger, or have a toe/finger reattached surgically
- I find myself at the emergency room due to some finger-related injury
- My wife or a close friend loses a finger or toe, or comes close
- I catch my finger in a car door and hurt it very badly

Just to show I'm not a total loon who is ready to grab at straws to satisfy the prophecy, here's a list of example of things I would not consider to be manifestations:

- I bang my finger on a table by accident and it stings for a minute
- My cat dies (the cat is a metaphor for a finger, you see)
- I cut my hand with a knife by accident (blood in the dream, blood in real life)
- Somebody gives me a gift: a red ring (sort of makes it look like my finger is bleeding)

I know, some of you may say "if you allow yourself so many variations, then it must come true, because you'll find something, or appeal to this vague concept of 'metaphor' if nothing else arrives." A legitimate criticism, but I argue that it's not entirely true. Nothing that I can recall happening in the last 10 years of my life would qualify as a manifestation of this dream. So if something in the next few weeks does, that's pretty interesting. Doesn't prove a damn thing, but it's interesting.

Anyhow, I'll keep you posted.

Disclaimer

I am well aware of rational explanations for everything I've described. I know you all can post list of rational arguments of why this is entirely bunk, and I could too, but I'd just be preaching to the choir.

Regardless of what happens it's a fun game that I am playing on my own anyhow, so I figure I might as well document it. Let's hope I type my follow-up soon, with all ten fingers operational.

Mr. Scott

8th October 2007, 03:53 AM

I have precognative dreams. Wait, let me restate that: I've had dreams before, which in retrospect, seemed to be strikingly precognative.

One problem with that is, if dreams only seem precognitive after the fact, then the aren't really precognitive. I think this is called a "postdiction" instead of a "prediction," whence prediction is not noticed or reported or interpreted until after the event. It makes the prediction rather useless, which is one of my working definitions of not-real.

What's interesting about the current dream is:

1) It was isolated. The entire contents of the dream consisted of driving my car at night and striking a deer. It lasted just two seconds.

2) Immediately awakening after the dream and having an ominous feeling like this was about to happen.

Instead of publicizing the prediction after the event it predicted occurred, I announcing it before the predicted event. This will eliminate the post-diction fallacy.

Why the 24 hour limit? Well, there has to be some limit after which we need to say the prophesy failed to come true. Otherwise, we stack the deck in favor of some random future event will give the illusion of fulfilling the prophesy. I pick 24 hours because I will certainly fall asleep and dream again, and I don't see any reason a prophetic dream should stay valid through the next sleep cycle. I drive through deer-infested areas almost every day. At least once a week I see a deer beside the road just aching to run in front of my vehicle. If there's no time limit, then just by a flip of a coin a deer hit may come. This fear of hitting one is on my mind a lot, so why wouldn't it appear in a normal non-paranormal dream?

Well, there's about 10 hours to go. No deer encounter yet.

Unalienable

8th October 2007, 07:55 AM

One problem with that is, if dreams only seem precognitive after the fact, then the aren't really precognitive.

I think you misunderstood me. Postdiction, if I understand correctly, is taking credit for precognition after an event has taken place, with no proof that the prediction was ever previously made. Like if you're watching a baseball game and you say "I just KNEW he was going to hit a home run!" but you didn't tell anybody until the ball was out of the park.

I admit, I have not always told other people about my precognative dreams, mostly because they are very boring material and nothing that would make a good story. But on other occasions I have, and those are always the more interesting occasions anyhow, when my dream is something that seems unlikely.

But this time I most certainly announced it in advance, and thanks to the technology of the internet, I've done so in a way that's basically incontrovertible.

What's interesting about the current dream is:

1) It was isolated. The entire contents of the dream consisted of driving my car at night and striking a deer. It lasted just two seconds.

Time passes strangely in dreams, but I'd say "two seconds" is a good estimate for my dream length as well. Just a single, sharp, clear vision of a dangling finger, combined with an emotion of horror.

2) Immediately awakening after the dream and having an ominous feeling like this was about to happen.

Oh, absolutely. I always know when a dream is one of the 'special' ones, it's unmistakable. When I awoke, the first thing I did was checked my hands (how can you not?) then realizing it was just a dream, I took note that I just had another precognative dream. I'm not in the habit of writing down my dreams, but I told my wife.

Instead of publicizing the prediction after the event it predicted occurred, I announcing it before the predicted event. This will eliminate the post-diction fallacy.

Isn't that what I've done too? I'm sorry if I have sort of hijacked your thread, but I figure if we're going to do one precognative dream experiment surely we have room to squeeze in a second one.

So as far as I can tell I'm playing the exact same game you are, with two important distinctions: #1) I am not limiting myself to a 24-hour time window, and #2) I am allowing leeway for possible ways that the dream can manifest in a way not literally exactly like the vision I saw.

You say that hitting something other than a deer (say, an elk) would be a failure, or at least inconclusive. I would not label that as "inconclusive", I'd call that a "hit". In my experience, that's about as good as it gets.

I don't see any reason a prophetic dream should stay valid through the next sleep cycle.

Frankly I don't see any reason why prophetic dreams should exist at all. But IF there really is such a thing as a precognative dream (and of course that's one mighty big "if") then who are we to dictate the laws they must obey?

If we want to be scientific about this, the best idea is to collect all possible data, and then we'll see if there is a pattern that can be demonstrated. Obviously if we make our testing windows too large we will dilute the confidence that we are witnessing a real phenomenon--but that doesn't mean we should just arbitrarily pick some exact number of hours and minutes to represent our cutoff time. We'll end up with statistics like these:

* % of precognative dreams that are fulfilled
* average/median of time between dream and fulfillment of dream
* "closeness of match", i.e. how faitfully the dream describes the fulfillment
* probability that the dream would be fulfilled anyhow

Depending on what the final numbers look like, we might have reason to believe there is a real phenomenon, or we might not.

Anyhow, good luck to both of us. Let's hope neither dream comes true.

ImaginalDisc

8th October 2007, 07:59 AM

I had a dream that hindsight and confirmation baises cause us to think dreams predict the future, but it hasn't come true.

:(

tkingdoll

8th October 2007, 08:13 AM

Starrman

8th October 2007, 08:25 AM

The good news for believers is they can have it both ways.

If you don't hit a deer, the prophetic dream made you more cautious in your driving, which saved both you and the deer from a great deal of grief.

Bri

8th October 2007, 08:30 AM

I think you misunderstood me. Postdiction, if I understand correctly, is taking credit for precognition after an event has taken place, with no proof that the prediction was ever previously made. Like if you're watching a baseball game and you say "I just KNEW he was going to hit a home run!" but you didn't tell anybody until the ball was out of the park.

I admit, I have not always told other people about my precognative dreams, mostly because they are very boring material and nothing that would make a good story. But on other occasions I have, and those are always the more interesting occasions anyhow, when my dream is something that seems unlikely.

But this time I most certainly announced it in advance, and thanks to the technology of the internet, I've done so in a way that's basically incontrovertible.

You're right, what you described would not technically be postdiction. It would be retrofitting.

-Bri

strathmeyer

8th October 2007, 09:00 AM

sophia8

8th October 2007, 09:16 AM

I had a vivid dream this morning that I beat somebody to death. (This is true, I really did have this dream - it was some unknown guy who was bugging me). So if I don't beat some man to death within 24 hours will this prove that dreams do not foretell the future?

JoeTheJuggler

8th October 2007, 09:49 AM

I think you misunderstood me. Postdiction, if I understand correctly, is taking credit for precognition after an event has taken place, with no proof that the prediction was ever previously made.
Yes, and this is precisely what you describe in the first few paragraphs of your first post. You admit that it's only in retrospect that the dream is a prediction. Ahead of time you only made a mental note of the dream because it was vivid. You could very easily be misremembering the dream after the fact.

Try writing them down. Then you can get an idea of the numbers, and the details won't be as likely to change.

Check out this essay on coincidence (http://skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html). Coincidentally, one of the examples he uses is precognitive dreams.

You say that hitting something other than a deer (say, an elk) would be a failure, or at least inconclusive. I would not label that as "inconclusive", I'd call that a "hit". In my experience, that's about as good as it gets.

If you allow hitting an elk to count, what about hitting a dog? What about almost hitting a deer? Almost hitting a dog? What about a friend or relative hitting a deer? How about a friend of a relative hitting a deer?

This is called shoehorning. If you allow this to go on, then, as I said above, even low probability events become high probability. The net you cast can get really wide in a hurry. Before long, you've got a so-called prediction that is almost impossible NOT to score a hit.

<derail>Check your spelling of precognitive.</derail>

Spektator

8th October 2007, 11:59 AM

One of my friends says he had a vivid dream once in which he saw himself as a wealthy, successful novelist. He practices "visualization" and "affirmation" in which he deliberately conjures up visions of himself as a wealthy, successful novelist.

He is fifty. He has been doing this, he tells me, for thirty years now.

He has never written a novel. He is neither wealthy nor successful.

Unalienable

8th October 2007, 01:03 PM

This is called shoehorning. If you allow this to go on, then, as I said above, even low probability events become high probability.
I understand what you're saying but I believe that a great deal of leeway can be allowed, as long as you're willing to do the math behind it.

For example, suppose I have a dream that an Boeing 747 falls out of the sky and hits my house. I write my dream down in as much detail as possible, I post it right here timestamped on the JREF forum, etc.

Then, shortly thereafter, not a Boeing 747 but a meteor hits my house instead.

This is a startling coincidence. True, there are easily thousands of scenarios where I would claim a "hit": a military plane might have hit my house; a helicopter hitting my house; an airplane hitting my neighbor's house, etc. Maybe it happens on the first day after the dream, or the second day, or a week later.

But all of these events can fit neatly under a single umbrella of "large object from the sky falling on a house in my neighborhood within a month." Even though that umbrella contains millions of possible events, each event is so mind-bogglingly unlikely, that their totality is still highly unprobable.

I'm sure you'd agree that the likelihood of any large object from the heavens falling anywhere within a 10 mile radius of my house in any 30-day period are very small. (If anybody doesn't agree, contact me and we can arrange for a private wager.) Large objects falling from the sky happen rarely, and there are a lot of 10-mile radii in the world, so just do the math. Agreed, probabilities like these are hard to estimate, but they can be estimated. Actuaries do this kind of work all the time.

My point is, splitting hairs over what kind of large object it is that hits my house, or even which house, is going way overboard. If precognition was actually a real phenomenon, but subject to the kinds of variances that I've suggested, your methodology would easily conclude that it doesn't exist. That's just as irresponsible as creative-retrofitting.

Believe me, I'm not trying to distort the facts so that no matter what happens we all jump up and down and declare that a miracle has taken place. I'm approaching it from the totally open minded point of view that "I don't know if this phenomenon is real or not" and then trying to figure out the truth by examining the evidence. The best way to do that, which I have figured out, is this:

- For each dream, carefully define the umbrella of events that would be considered a "hit"
- Estimate the probability (p) of any event within that umbrella occuring on any 1 day
- Wait to see if the event happens, within a certain timeframe.
----> If it does occur, record the number of days that it took (d)
----> If it doesn't occur within the timeframe, let d be undefined (n/a)

Then you can make a table which looks sort of like this:

DREAM# p d
-------- ----------- ------
1 0.002 15
2 0.08 n/a
3 0.000017 47
4 0.15 12
5 0.000237 n/a
etc.

The key here is that the umbrella is carefully defined before the dream manifests itself. Otherwise, the experimenter would be in a position where no matter what happens, he just expands the umbrella to contain that event.

With enough data, we can determine whether what we are witnessing represents a statistically significant phenomenon. If it doesn't show any statistical significance, then maybe we're wasting our time. But if it does, the work still isn't done--an outrageous claim like this will require much more evidence to establish it. We get other people to do similar studies, and so forth, until finally it becomes so reproducible and confirmed that it's accepted as scientific fact.

Sadly, my method comes at a price: for starters, the "umbrella" is not always easy to figure out. Next, computing estimates for the probability of these events will often require a lot of effort--and if we set them too low, we will end up with false positive results. Finally, what do we make of situations where only one person (e.g. the dreamer) is witness to the dream's ultimate fulfillment? We want cold hard facts, not bigfoot sightings.

The superiority of this method over yours is that using my method we can detect even small effects with enough work. Your method would quickly detect the most grossly obvious effects, but would be utterly blind to small effects, regardless of how much work you spent on the study. I prefer to make no assumptions as to the size of the effect, the timeframe that it operates on, its accuracy rate, etc. I just want to know if the phenomenon exists whatsoever.

Alice Shortcake

8th October 2007, 01:17 PM

Madalch

8th October 2007, 02:29 PM

Bloody hell! Why can't my dreams be as interesting as yours?!
I'm sure if you paid enough attention to them to remember them, you'd find some gems.

These are just the more memorable examples (out of how many tens of thousands of dreams?)- I usually forget my dreams in the first few minutes of being awake. I'll be standing in the shower, thinking, "That was such a weird dream I had last night", and then realize that I have no memory of what it was.

They're also the ones that could be posted without violating rule 10. In high school, we were supposed to keep a "dream log" for psychology class, but I simply told the class that I had no dreams that week, since all the dreams I had were either profane, perverse, or would have gotten me beaten up.

And none of those dreams came true, either.

Mr. Scott

8th October 2007, 02:33 PM

Mr. Scott

8th October 2007, 02:35 PM

TX50

8th October 2007, 02:47 PM

I have never seen any evidence (personally - thus anecdotal) that dreams
have any precognitive function at all.

The only thing I do find intriguing about dreams is trying to work out where
some of the dream imagery comes from, and how my brain takes the merest
hints of ideas from the "waking world" and conflates them into a
dream "narrative". Some dream things I can spot the provenance of (eg.
seeing a friend in a dream wearing a dark blue coat with gold buttons. That
may come from reading a picture book about the 17th century Royal Navy)
and some I just can't place (eg. me dodging mountains made out of
marshmallow falling from the sky; waking up on being hit and crushed by
one. Where that idea comes from I have no idea).

Mr. Scott

8th October 2007, 02:56 PM

I would want to know the probability of you hitting a deer before I comment. Do you live or regularly drive in an area populated by deer? Have you ever hit a deer before? Are deer accidents commonplace, rare, or unheard of in your area? Are you about to drive somewhere where you normally don't go but deer do?

Etc. See, this affects not only why you would dream such a thing in the first place, but its likelihood of coming true.

I've hit deer at least twice (once causing significant damage to my car) but not recently. Neither time was it preceded by any metaphysical foretelling.

I regularly drive in an area and at a time in which I see deer eager to get hit. This, I believe, is what instigated the dream -- my daily fear of an accident.

The 24 hours is up. I haven't hit a deer, haven't had a close call, don't know of anyone who hit one or had a close call with a deer or anything else, and didn't even see a dead deer by the road. Nothing to shoehorn, nothing to retrofit.

Tonight, I will be driving through the highest risk deer accident zone at the worst time since the dream, and I don't mind extending the deadline until after that, but this is the kind of wiggle room that the Randi Challenge would never permit.

In the meantime I offer this YouTube entertainment: a near miss that resembles those I see often:

A6VS6qsLJeY

JoeTheJuggler

8th October 2007, 04:54 PM

I understand what you're saying but I believe that a great deal of leeway can be allowed, as long as you're willing to do the math behind it.

Why?

Also, how do you limit how much leeway? Seriously, there are countless scenarios that are almost the same as what was predicted.

My point is, splitting hairs over what kind of large object it is that hits my house, or even which house, is going way overboard. If precognition was actually a real phenomenon, but subject to the kinds of variances that I've suggested, your methodology would easily conclude that it doesn't exist. That's just as irresponsible as creative-retrofitting.

That'd be perfectly fine if the prediction was "a large object will hit my house", but that wasn't it, was it?

Believe me, I'm not trying to distort the facts so that no matter what happens we all jump up and down and declare that a miracle has taken place. I'm approaching it from the totally open minded point of view that "I don't know if this phenomenon is real or not" and then trying to figure out the truth by examining the evidence.
I'm a strong advocate of the maxim, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." For precognition of any kind to be real would be an amazing thing--and it would require some serious rethinking (if the future is predetermined, then there is no free will, for one thing). It's really an extraordinary claim. It's way outside of known science, so there's no reason to make the rules laxer.

Also, the history of paranormal investigation is full of examples of exactly what you say you're not advocating.

For example, would you read "I don't walk alone" as the same thing as "I was confined to a wheelchair for the last few years of my life" for example? That's just the way researcher Gary Schwartz interpreted an Allison Dubois pronouncement as related here (http://skepdic.com/essays/gsandsv.html).

Again, allowing even a little shoehorning (http://skepdic.com/shoehorning.html) really distorts the whole thing. What you're left with is similar to the generalities you see in daily horoscopes. "Expect a change in your home life." "An important person is about to enter your life."

JoeTheJuggler

8th October 2007, 04:56 PM

I'm saying it will be evidence that dreams don't fortell the future, not proof.

It's still not evidence either way. With a sample size of one, you can't say anything about it at all. (It's actually just an anecdote, even though you at least ruled out issues of faulty memory by stating the prediction ahead of time.)

You could say it proves that not ALL vivid dreams will come true within 24 hours, but then you'd be making a straw-man fallacy since I don't think anyone holds that position.

Also, the 24 hour time limit was completely arbitrary, wasn't it? (Or was that in the dream somehow?)

Fnord

8th October 2007, 10:29 PM

I just woke up from a vivid dream that I hit a deer with my car at night.

Dreams are not precognitive. Many are expressions of supressed or unrequitted desires. Many are also expressions of unacknowledge desires.

Here are my guesses, for entertainment purposes only:

1) You fear that you will accidentally hurt someone very "dear" to you, while doing something completely normal.

2) You want to hurt someone who may be very "dear" to someone else, while are safe and protected in your powered armor.

3) You have a general animosity towards women.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and I have no training as a psychologist or psychiatrist. Therefore, I haven't a clue.

Unalienable

9th October 2007, 01:44 AM

Ia great deal of leeway can be allowed, as long as you're willing to do the math behind it.
Why?
Because the math will end up measuring exactly what we are trying to measure, regardless of the amount of leeway that we allow.

Maybe that is a little opaque, let me try to explain.

First, ask yourself this: what exactly are you trying to measure? It seems to me, the measurement in this case is "How lucky are the test subjects at predicting the future based on precognitive dreams?" If it's true that the subjects have a "normal level of luck" then we've basically come up empty for evidence for precognitive dreams, at least with the test subjects we've selected.

If we do happen to find ourselves with a lucky subject, then we have to ask ourselves "Is it really just luck, or is something going on here?" That's why more testing is required. And if more testing bears out the original finding, we test some more. Still not satisfied? Then we test some more. Maybe we get it to the point where the only way that you can explain the data with pure luck is 1 in a billion, but that's still not good enough for you. No sweat, we collect even more data, until it's 1 in a trillion. And on and on it goes, until even the most hardened skeptic in the world has to confess "something weird is going on here."

Also, how do you limit how much leeway? Seriously, there are countless scenarios that are almost the same as what was predicted.

By "leeway" I mean two different things: #1, how wide we stretch the umbrella (e.g. if you dream you hit a deer, does hitting an elk count?), #2, what time period we allow for the fulfillment of the dream (e.g., if you dreamt it today, would an event fulfilling the dream 200 days from now be considered as data?).

Keep in mind that both of these decisions must be made after the dream is recorded and before the dream's fulfillment. As just about everybody in this thread has said at least once, it is folly to wait to see what happens and then, only as an afterthought, make these decisions.

By my methodology, you can stretch either #1 or #2 as much as you want. If you make the error of stretching #1 too far, you can obliterate the possibility of getting a positive result. You will not create false positives by stretching the umbrella -- if anything, you'll create false negatives.

Likewise, #2 (the number of days you allow) can be as long as you have patience/funding for. It really doesn't matter. If you can afford to do a 20 year study, more power to you.

That'd be perfectly fine if the prediction was "a large object will hit my house", but that wasn't it, was it?

I can't help but to think you still don't "get it" ... it just doesn't matter. You might dream something as commonplace as "It will rain", and allow yourself 365 to see the dream come to a conclusion. And even with parameters like that you can still try to measure the phenomenon using the scientific method.

Of course I'm not saying "therefore if it rains in the next year, this guy can see the future with his dreams." But you can make a table like the sample one I provided above, with all the p's and all the d's, and figure out the odds that the test subject could come up with these predictions through pure chance.

If he's dreaming commonplace things like "It will rain" or "I will meet somebody named John or Johnson or mabe Jack", then the statistical signficance of these events could not only be small, but actually downright negative.

In my sample table above, I was of course just making up numbers for the sake of example, but if you look at my "Dream #4" there is an intentional example of exactly that situation: the probability of the event happening in one day (p) was estimated at 0.15--that's very high, akin to "It will rain". And d=12 there, so we know it took 12 days to happen. Well that's not really a "hit" ... that's a failure! Even though the person's dream did indeed come true, it provides evidence that the dreamer is worse than to be expected at predicting the future, at least in that case. Just because we allowed him 12 days instead of 1 doesn't invalidate the study. Allowing a large number of days for the dream to be fulfilled would only invalidate the study if we were so braindead as to think that it represents evidence for precognitive dreaming. If you are wise enough to recognize that this is evidence against precognitive dreaming, then go ahead and let d=1000 if you like.

I'm a strong advocate of the maxim, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I think most people at this forum are as well. And yes, dreams (or anything else) that can predict the future are quite extraordinary.

It's way outside of known science, so there's no reason to make the rules laxer.

Nobody is suggesting making the rules of science laxer. Allowing 365 days instead of 1 day, or expanding the envelope to include elk as well as deer, is not making anything laxer. If we are seeking a 90% confidence level, or a 99% confidence level, or higher, we can do it.

To summarize this longwinded post in sentence: If the phenomenon does in fact exist (which I doubt) my methodology would prove its existence, within any required confidence level, regardless of how much leeway you allow.

Maybe that sounds contradictory. If we relax the constraints of what constitutes a successful dream fulfillment then surely we are slanting the test in the direction of finding a positive result, right? WRONG! Not if we also do the accompanying mathematics to figure our a proper value of p for the new definition.

Also, the history of paranormal investigation is full of examples of exactly what you say you're not advocating.

I know that, and thank you for saying.

Unalienable

9th October 2007, 02:14 AM

By the way, this is only a little off-topic, but I have a pet theory for why procognitive dreams seem to exists so strongly, for some.

My theory is that it's a protection mechanism developed over countless years of evolution. Our minds, while we sleep, try to create likely scenarios which would either cause us harm, or be advantageous. This is information which needs to be sent to the conscious brain in order to help the individual. Therefore the dream comes along with some message that punctuates its importance, as if to say "Watch out for this! It will be relevant in your life very soon!"

That's why most precognitive dreamers say exactly what Mr. Scott and myself said: that there was something weirdly important about a certain dream that normally does not apply to the typical dreams. We wake up thinking "Gosh--that felt so real, like it was a warning!" It's not really a crystal ball into the future, but just a guess based on logic that you worked out in your sleep.

For instance, Mr. Scott dreamed that he would hit a deer in his car, and he lives in deer country. This is his brains way of telling him "This is a danger, avoid it." Now that he has this image of hitting a deer firmly in his mind, the likelihood of him actually hitting a deer should only go down (not up!) because he is watching out for it. Whether he does or not hit a deer is up to chance as usual, but now it's slanted in his favor (and the deer's favor as well!) because he'll be on his guard for it.

Likewise, if I have a dream that I find some money on the sidewalk, that's my brain's way of telling me "This is a plausible way to improve your condition, be on the lookout." And without even realizing it, my eyes scan the ground for lost money with more frequency than otherwise. In this case, the odds of me actually finding lost money go up, which is what my brain interprets as a net benefit to my well-being.

The above is purely speculative but I think it's highly plausible. Precognitive dreams can actually help the individual in real ways, sometimes by "coming true" but other times by failing to come true. So why shouldn't evolution have forged a mechanism of that kind, to help with our survival and reproduction?

Mr. Scott

9th October 2007, 04:12 AM

Tonight, I will be driving through the highest risk deer accident zone at the worst time since the dream, and I don't mind extending the deadline until after that, but this is the kind of wiggle room that the Randi Challenge would never permit.

Didn't see a deer, didn't have a close call with anything.

To those who claim that dreams are precognitive, may I ask that you propose a mechanism which would make this work?

For example:

- Have future events already happened in the future, and the information of their occurence has traveled backwards in time to us?

- Has some intelligence of the universe planned to make the event happen and the dream is a warning we can use to circumvent the event?

- If precognitive dreams never let us prepare for them, why then do they happen? Why such a complex, useless mechanism?

- Why the variable time delay of hours or months? Where is the information stored in this time? How is it determined the length of time it's stored?

- What is the intelligence that converts the actual event into symbolic or imprecise information (like a toe becoming a finger, or a deer becoming someone dear to us)?

I personally don't believe dreams are metaphysically precognitive, but do believe they represent recent experiences or hopes and dreams -- a kind of noise in the brain during "system update." There's some good science behind this but I haven't time to look it up right now.

sophia8

9th October 2007, 04:36 AM

EHLO

9th October 2007, 07:17 PM

Years ago, I read one of those "interpret my dream for me" magazine columns. One of the readers sent in an account of a recurring dream in which he was trapped in a blazing house. At the end, he added that he was a fireman. The columnist - a remarkably sensible woman - replied that had he been in any other profession, she would have been worried by his dream. But since being trapped in an inferno was a likely hazard for a fireman, his recurring dream was a way for his subconscious to get him thoroughly accustomed to the scenario; then, if he really was trapped in a fire, he wouldn't be frozen by panic.

Ha, a sensible dream interpreter indeed, the only people of that ilk that I have come across would almost certainly have concluded that the dream was a precognition or the re-living of a past life experience...

I had a semi lucid dream this morning that I was Matthew Broderick flying over the north Australian outback, which for some reason was full of wind farms. I'd like to get an analysis of that!

JoeTheJuggler

9th October 2007, 07:38 PM

Because the math will end up measuring exactly what we are trying to measure, regardless of the amount of leeway that we allow.

Maybe that is a little opaque, let me try to explain.

You're wrong.

It's not the least bit opaque, it just isn't a proper way to run an experiment.

Have you heard of the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy?

If I shoot a slug into a wall from some distance, then after the fact walk up to where it hit and draw a tiny little circle around the slug in the wall, what are the odds of hitting that exact spot?

By allowing "leeway" what you're opening the door to is not stating a hypothesis until after you look at the results. That's what's going on with the sharpshooter's fallacy too. It doesn't even matter how many times you do this (how big your sample size is) if you allow this. I can always hit the wall and then draw a tiny circle around the slug and claim extraordinary shooting abilities.

It really doesn't matter at all that you can calculate the odds of hitting that little target if the target didn't exist before running the test.

I understand that you said you can somehow allow lots of leeway but define what counts ahead of time, but you really can't.

If you allow hitting an elk to count, would you allow hitting a dog? Would you count almost hitting a deer? Would you count a close friend actually hitting a deer to count? There are an infinity of these, and you cannot anticipate them all.

Further, there's no reason whatsoever to allow any near misses to count as a hit. (Why would you count hitting an elk but not count hitting a dog? Why would you count someone else's hitting a deer? Or why not, considering that you would count hitting an elk?)

Again, it is an extraordinary claim. As such, methodology should be even tighter than circumstances where the hypothesis isn't so unparsimonious--not more lax.

JoeTheJuggler

9th October 2007, 07:49 PM

To continue more to the point you've been making that the probability of each scenario would make up for the fact that leeway is being offered.

That's no so. At best you're making a whole plethora of hypotheses to test against one trial, and you'll toss out any that don't fit. In the current example, you'd like to allow hitting an elk to count (even though the precognitive dream was of a deer). Doesn't that mean you have two hypotheses? Or is it now just one broader one (I will hit a deer or an elk-- or even broader, hitting any animal)? I suspect if the dreamer did hit the deer, you'd want to use the full very long odds against hitting a deer and not the much lower one of hitting any animal.

Let's take a simpler example (where all the possibilities are known, unlike these dreams): predicting the roll of a die. Let's say you pick the number 4, but state ahead of time that you'll allow leeway, so 3 and 5 will also count. What if the 4 comes up? Do you say the prediction was of a 1:6 probability event? In fact, it was a 1:2 probability event given that definition.

With precognitive dreams, the odds of the event as dreamt are probably very long, but when you start allowing shoehorning, they drop dramatically. Especially if such leeway is poorly defined, as I contend it must be since you can't possibly anticipate all possible near miss events.

Also, again, the history of people doing this sort of research is to do precisely that. Since this is known, the only way to tighten the methodology is. . . . to tighten it.

Bri

9th October 2007, 09:16 PM

Additionally, Unalienable doesn't specify a specific time frame other than "if something in the next few weeks does [happen], that's pretty interesting." Of course, if nothing happens within "a few" weeks, he'll just extend the time limit.

Just of the sake of example, I would consider any of these highly positive manifestations of the dream:

- I lose a toe, or a finger, or have a toe/finger reattached surgically
- I find myself at the emergency room due to some finger-related injury
- My wife or a close friend loses a finger or toe, or comes close
- I catch my finger in a car door and hurt it very badly

So if he or anyone he knows gashes a thumb or a finger at any time from this point forward, he'll claim a hit. Such an event wouldn't be rare at all -- there's a very good chance that someone you know will at some point cut their finger or thumb or catch a finger or thumb in a door, and possibly even have to go to the emergency room. I've done it a couple of times myself. It would probably be rarer if nobody he knows has something happen that would qualify as a hit based on his shoehorning examples above.

-Bri

Beth

9th October 2007, 09:27 PM

If I shoot a slug into a wall from some distance, then after the fact walk up to where it hit and draw a tiny little circle around the slug in the wall, what are the odds of hitting that exact spot?

I think, Unalienable can correct me if I'm wrong, that he is trying to describe a process more like drawing a circle that includes the bullet that encompasses 1/4 of the wall and then concluding that there was a .25 probability of hitting in that quarter.

Done properly, it doesn't seem an unreasonable approach to me. Hard to do properly though.

JoeTheJuggler

9th October 2007, 10:17 PM

Yes, I recognize that he's trying to account for this leeway in interpreting hits ahead of time, so it's not really the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy in theory.

It still makes no sense. Why would you allow events that weren't predicted to be considered hits in a test of precognition?

Why would you allow some unpredicted events to count but not others?

If you say ahead of time that you'll count hitting an elk, and then the person hits a cow (not something anticipated), how can you defend not including that as a hit? What about watching a movie (or reading a book or magazine article) that involves someone hitting a deer?

There's no way you can anticipate all of the possible near misses, and there's no way you could defend only the ones you anticipated when a great many more make just as much sense.

Also, doing it the way Unalienable suggests would punish an actual, legitimate, dead-on hit because you'd have to include the probability of all the other things you "leewayed" in to the prediction. In other words, it would devalue a real hit.

Bri

10th October 2007, 06:44 AM

I think, Unalienable can correct me if I'm wrong, that he is trying to describe a process more like drawing a circle that includes the bullet that encompasses 1/4 of the wall and then concluding that there was a .25 probability of hitting in that quarter.

Done properly, it doesn't seem an unreasonable approach to me. Hard to do properly though.

Except he's not doing that. He's not listing all of the possible hits ahead of time. He's retrofitting an event into a hit after the fact. Unless I misread, Unalienable said that there was no way he could anticipate all events that would constitute a hit ahead of time, which means that there is no way to calculate the probability of a hit ahead of time.

So to be fair, he's drawing several circles on the wall beforehand, then firing, and upon missing any of the circles he drew, he draws a circle around the bullet hole. He then calculates the probability of hitting all of the circles ignoring the fact that there are a million other events that he would have considered a hit. If his bullet had hit a different spot that didn't contain a circle, he still would have called it a hit with exactly the same probability.

-Bri

Dan O.

10th October 2007, 08:12 AM

If you wanted to pursue this direction of measuring predictions, you should turn it into a wager. One party believes they have inside information that some event will occur, the other party believes that the events will occur at their normal frequency. If the two parties can agree on specific events and time frames that will constitute a hit and the payment that will be made should there be a hit or no hit then the wager can be made.

After a sufficient number of such wagers we can evaluate wether the dreams have been financially beneficial.

Bri

10th October 2007, 08:39 AM

That's a good suggestion. I would never take such a bet unless Unalienable were to list the specific events that would constitute a hit beforehand, unless the probability of one of the events occurring by chance was below 50%, and unless a reasonable time frame was specified.

However, I'd be perfectly willing to wager on my own prediction (even though I would be making it up without any precognition at all) based on the same rules that Unalienable sets for himself (no time frame, no predetermined list of what constitutes a hit, allowing myself to determine whether an event constitutes a "hit" after the fact, etc.). Care to wager, Unalienable?

-Bri

Beth

10th October 2007, 08:48 AM

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 10:03 AM

Unless I misread, Unalienable said that there was no way he could anticipate all events that would constitute a hit ahead of time, which means that there is no way to calculate the probability of a hit ahead of time.

I think he's saying that he can anticipate all the possible near-misses-that-would-count-as-hits ahead of time and calculate the probability of treating all of them as a single prediction. (Great big circle covering most of the wall.)

I'm arguing 1) that's not possible and 2) there's no reason whatsoever to treat misses as hits.

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 10:12 AM

To continue with analogy of circles and bullet holes, think of it as a typical target with a series of nested concentric circles. The bullseye is the actual prediction. The closer to the bullseye, the lower the chance that it is simply a random coincidence. The farther away, the greater the probability of a coincidence. I think Unalienable is simply trying to determine how large the circle has to be if it is made large enough to encompass the actual event. Then he computes the probability of a hit based on the size of the circle.

I think that's a pretty good analogy, but I think it's really bad experimental design. Basically, you'd score a bullseye at its full value (probability of 1:gazillion) even though you've effectively made the definition of any hit at all a much higher probability (1:10 perhaps?). If you hit the bullseye, you can't just scrap all the other "hypotheses", so you would have to treat it, in Unalienable's terms, as a single umbrella hypothesis and score it a hit with a 1:10 probability.

Either way, it's not right.

Also, hitting an elk (or a dog, or an infinity of other equally "near" misses) isn't almost hitting a deer the same way that hitting a spot near a target is almost hitting a target. In other words, with the bullseye analogy, we can measure proximity, but the only way to do that with the deer dream would be to measure how many inches you came from hitting a deer in a near miss.

Other events that can be shoehorned to fit the dream are all equally distant--since they were not hitting a deer. (Their probability is irrelevant here; we're just talking about how near they are to being a hit.)

Bri

10th October 2007, 12:10 PM

There are at least two metrics that I can think of that might be tempting to use to determine how good of a match an event might be considered in relation to a prior prediction. The first is how "close" the event is to the prediction, and the second is the probability of the event occurring by chance. How rare an event is might actually be possible to calculate, at least in theory. If it were possible to calculate how "close" an event were to the prediction, we could normalize the two values and multiply to get a "score" from 0.0 to 1.0 for an event. A score of 0.5 would represent something like a guess rather than an actual prediction -- it would not be particularly rare nor particularly close to the prediction. We might consider an event that got a higher score (i.e. that was "closer" to the prediction and rarer) to be considered a better match for a particular prediction.

This scheme would automatically regulate for "unimpressive" predictions (predictions of common events or vague predictions that could be easily matched to many events) since the maximum score would already be limited by the score of the predicted event.

In Unalienable's case, for any given prediction we could perhaps find a few events that occurred within a given timeframe (perhaps Unalienable's lifetime) that best fits his prediction, and we could calculate a score to see how well they really did. We would then choose the one that has the highest score and assume it to be the predicted event. If the score wasn't significantly above 0.5, it would likely have happened by chance or wasn't very close to the prediction. We could even determine a threshold for a "hit" (say 0.8 or 0.9).

But to see if Unalienable had any real powers, you'd have to do this on many predictions.

I think Unalienable would be surprised at how unspectacular his predictive powers are given such a measure. Most of the events (such as you or anyone you know slamming their hand in a door) wouldn't even come close because they are more likely to happen or not (their score would be well below a 0.5). But, if it happened, losing a thumb instead of a finger might be both rare enough and sufficiently close to the original prediction to receive a fairly high score if it happened and if Unalienable could show that a significant number of his predictions received similarly high scores.

BTW, according to this article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2601/is_0013/ai_2601001392):

Traumatic amputation is the accidental severing of some or all of a body part. A complete amputation totally detaches a limb or appendage from the rest of the body. In a partial amputation, some soft tissue remains attached to the site.

Description

Trauma is the second leading cause of amputation in the United States. About 30,000 traumatic amputations occur in this country every year. Four of every five traumatic amputation victims are male, and most of them are between the ages of 15-30.

Traumatic amputation most often affects limbs and appendages like the arms, ears, feet, fingers, hands, legs, and nose.

Causes & symptoms

Farm and factory workers have greater-than-average risks of suffering injuries that result in traumatic amputation. Automobile and motorcycle accidents and the use of lawnmowers, saws, and power tools are also common causes of traumatic amputation.

Presumably Unalienable would count traumatic amputation of any type to be pretty close to his prediction. Assuming Unalienable is male and American, and that there are around 150 million males in the U.S., he has a 1 in approximately 6250 chance each year of having a traumatic amputation. If he is between ages 15 and 30 the chances are higher. If he belongs to one of the risky occupations or regularly engages in one of the risky behaviors his chances increase further. While slim, Unalienable's chances of a traumatic amputation aren't as slim as one might think.

Still, if you consider that well over 50% of the population slams their hand in a door at some point in their lives, the event that Unalienable slams his hand in a door would not be close to the event predicted and would score well below 0.5. And given that even closer to 100% of the population knows someone who has slammed their hand in a door, that event would score very close to a 0.0.

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 12:37 PM

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 12:42 PM

And this umbrella method really is retrofitting. If you don't know what the "prediction" was until after the event, it is not a prediction.

Bri

10th October 2007, 01:13 PM

I contend that it's impossible to calculate the second metric, how close a near miss event is to the prediction, AND that it's impossible to anticipate all the possible "near" misses.

It's not going to be an exact science for sure, but I think it's possible to make a general guess as to how close a particular event is to a prediction. You don't have to anticipate all near misses -- this is an after-the-fact calculation. If you think a particular event that occurs is close to the predicted event, calculate the score. If you later experience another event (within the time limit), you could calculate the score for that one and see if it's a better match for the prediction. The goal is to find the event that best fits the prediction. There will always be a best fit -- the question is how good of a fit is the best fit event?

I also say they're all equally close in that they're NOT the event. Would a close call with a deer be somehow more of a hit than my brother actually hitting a deer? How could you compare the relative proximity to the prediction of hitting an elk and seeing a movie where hitting a deer is a prominent part of the plot?

They might all be about the same distance from the original prediction. Certainly closer than being anally probed by an alien, which although rare would not be even remotely close to the predicted event.

(Surely just seeing a deer on or near a roadway wouldn't count. . . . or would it?)

Any event would "count" but wouldn't yield a very high score I wouldn't imagine.

And I repeat my query--is there any valid reason to count a miss as a hit at all (i.e. to allow shoehorning or "leeway")?

Yes, because that's what the claim is. If it were accurate, a premonition such as "be careful -- something unusually bad is going to happen to you today" might be useful. Even if you were unable to change the outcome of the event (as I think Unalienable indicated) such a prediction might still be interesting.

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 02:09 PM

Any event would "count" but wouldn't yield a very high score I wouldn't imagine.

So if any event counts, then there's no chance of the "prediction" not coming true. It's a bad design.

Also, how do you say one event that wasn't predicted is somehow closer than any other event that wasn't predicted? You said you could make a "general guess" but what would it be based on?

Is there any argument that any of the near misses I've suggested (hitting a dog, seeing a movie or reading an account about hitting a deer, or a relative hitting a deer, etc.) are not as valid as any other near miss? Is there any reason to say that one is closer to the prediction than any other?

Yes, because that's what the claim is. If it were accurate, a premonition such as "be careful -- something unusually bad is going to happen to you today" might be useful. Even if you were unable to change the outcome of the event (as I think Unalienable indicated) such a prediction might still be interesting.

I thought the claim was that some vivid dreams were precognitive. If you define that to include shoehorning, then it's not a testable claim (not even a falsifiable hypothesis).

I disagree about the utility of such dreams (which has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim, BTW). If any precognitive dream gives you no information at all until after the event, it is useless.

If a dream of hitting a deer can mean anything from actually hitting a deer to some of the near misses that I've suggested (seeing a movie or reading an account about hitting a deer or a relative hitting a deer), then you can't even generalize it to a warning to "be careful of everything".

A former girlfriend and believer in all things woo told me one morning that she'd had a vivid dream about me being in a car accident, and that I should be extra careful. Now I'm fully aware that driving a car is about the most dangerous thing any of us do, and an admonition to be careful is always a good reminder, but she thought of it as a premonition or psychic warning.

I had a lot of driving to do that day, but I wasn't in an accident or any close calls. I did get stuck in a big traffic jam that was caused by an accident (which is nearly a daily occurrence). When I told her about it, she shoehorned in the accident that caused me some relatively minor inconvenience as a "hit".

"See, my dream was right! There was an accident!"

AmyWilson

10th October 2007, 02:21 PM

Yes, dreams predict the future. :)

My father has told me of dreams of his that have come true.

It's true.

Bri

10th October 2007, 02:36 PM

So if any event counts, then there's no chance of the "prediction" not coming true. It's a bad design.

No it's not bad design. The question isn't whether a particular prediction predicts an event, but how well it predicts an event. A score can indeed be assigned to any event and any prediction, but a score of 0.5 would indicate that the prediction was no better than a random guess. A "successful" prediction would have to be higher than some threshold (say, 9.0 or greater).

Also, how do you say one event that wasn't predicted is somehow closer than any other event that wasn't predicted? You said you could make a "general guess" but what would it be based on?

Any event that was completely unrelated to the prediction would have a score of 0.0. No need to guess in that case, unless you feel that there is a very loose connection in which case you can give it a 0.1 or 0.2. Who cares? If it's less than 0.5 it's no better than chance anyway, which means a definite "miss."

Is there any argument that any of the near misses I've suggested (hitting a dog, seeing a movie or reading an account about hitting a deer, or a relative hitting a deer, etc.) are not as valid as any other near miss? Is there any reason to say that one is closer to the prediction than any other?

There might be, but I doubt it would really matter since none of those would likely be close enough and rare enough to meet the threshold.

I thought the claim was that some vivid dreams were precognitive. If you define that to include shoehorning, then it's not a testable claim (not even a falsifiable hypothesis).

It's testable, but obviously somewhat subjective. It is a pretty good tool for being more accurate and less subjective as far as how "close" an event is to the prediction. That's my point.

I disagree about the utility of such dreams (which has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim, BTW). If any precognitive dream gives you no information at all until after the event, it is useless.

I can agree with that. However, my example does give you enough information before the event to possibly avoid the event. If it were possible to reproduce such a prediction with any accuracy, it might be something worth looking at further.

If a dream of hitting a deer can mean anything from actually hitting a deer to some of the near misses that I've suggested (seeing a movie or reading an account about hitting a deer or a relative hitting a deer), then you can't even generalize it to a warning to "be careful of everything".

Yes, but again if you generalize it that way the score will be pretty close to 0.5 or a bit above (nowhere near the threshold of 9.0) since it would be neither particularly rare nor very close to the predicted event. And indeed if you predict hitting a deer and any of those events occurred, it probably would be slightly peculiar compared to chance, though nowhere near statistically interesting unless similar results could be reproduced many times, in which case it might be worth looking at further.

A former girlfriend and believer in all things woo told me one morning that she'd had a vivid dream about me being in a car accident, and that I should be extra careful. Now I'm fully aware that driving a car is about the most dangerous thing any of us do, and an admonition to be careful is always a good reminder, but she thought of it as a premonition or psychic warning.

I had a lot of driving to do that day, but I wasn't in an accident or any close calls. I did get stuck in a big traffic jam that was caused by an accident (which is nearly a daily occurrence). When I told her about it, she shoehorned in the accident that caused me some relatively minor inconvenience as a "hit".

"See, my dream was right! There was an accident!"

Using this scheme, the fact that car accidents by other people are nearly a daily occurrence places the probability very high, which would make the resulting score very low. It would be nowhere near the 9.0 threshold that would qualify as a "hit."

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 06:26 PM

I understand what you're saying, but I only see it as practical method if you arbitrarily limit the number of near miss events to just a few (to keep the probability low enough to rule out chance hits with some confidence).

I say arbitrary because I still don't see why hitting an elk is "closer" to the prediction of hitting a deer than any of the things I mentioned (a relative hitting a deer, hitting a dog, seeing a movie or item on TV about someone hitting a deer, reading an account about hitting a deer, etc.)

So this method would be OK, if you limit the number of possible near misses to just a few, but it still doesn't make sense to me as a way to test the claim of precognition.

Say you set up just a few near miss scenarios, and you end up with an umbrella probability of 1:1,000,000. (You still can't assign separate probabilities to each event and only count the best fit after the fact. That's essentially making a hypothesis after the test is run. In the sharpshooter's analogy, it'd be like drawing a several circles of various sizes on the wall, then shooting. If you hit a circle, you can't just ignore the total area of the wall that was in circles and calculate the probability of hitting just that circle that you did hit. Unalienable was right about that--you have to include the entire "umbrella".)

Let's say none of those events occurs, but one of these others that I mentioned (arbitrarily excluded to prevent the probability increasing so much as to make the test pointless) happens. Believers will surely question why you included what you did but excluded what happened. (And rightly so, IMHO.)

Unalienable

10th October 2007, 06:41 PM

Except he's not doing that. He's not listing all of the possible hits ahead of time. He's retrofitting an event into a hit after the fact. Unless I misread, Unalienable said that there was no way he could anticipate all events that would constitute a hit ahead of time, which means that there is no way to calculate the probability of a hit ahead of time.

No, I said no such thing. You absolutely must define what constitutes a "hit" in advance!!! How many times do I have to say that before people stop saying that I claim otherwise?

I think what's happening here is that two of my posts have become blurred into one.

I started this thread describing purely anecdotal observations that I made which were outside of any kind of controlled experiment. I never presented this as some sort of evidence for precognition. I just remarked at how interesting this effect appeared to be real, fully acknolwedging that if a legitimate study was done this "mysterious phenomenon" would likely vanish completely.

Then I came back and outlined a method which I believe would constitute a legitimate study, and I still stand behind my method. I think some people here read my first post, immediately recognized the possibility of retrofitting and other flaws, and then assumed that my subsequent methodology would be based on the same fallacies. But if you read carefully you'll see that I did not.

The "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" has nothing to do with my proposed methodology. I advocate drawing the circles first, then seeing if something hits them. The amount of time that you wait before something hits the circles doesn't really matter, but it should go without saying that if enough time elapses, you've lost any chance of demonstrating that the dream was precognitive and in fact start to enter into the realm where you have evidence against it, even if the dream comes true.

That might sound like a contradiction, but it's not. If I dream that it rains, and we then have a giant drought, my dream will still come true... 45 days later. So call it a "hit" if you like, but the bottom line is that the dream prediction was worse at predicting the future than what one would expect by chance. And that's what we are really trying to measure: whether or not dreams are better predictors of the future than what we would expect by chance.

Also, doing it the way Unalienable suggests would punish an actual, legitimate, dead-on hit because you'd have to include the probability of all the other things you "leewayed" in to the prediction. In other words, it would devalue a real hit.

That's absolutely right. There is always the possibility that a sound experiment will fail to demonstrate the existence of a real phenomenon because, as you don't fully understand the phenomenon, you might fail to make an experiment which will prove it. At that point, you go back to the drawing board and make another experiment: perhaps next time you make the event-sets smaller, or bigger, or you simply give up.

Unfortunately this entire study is mired in difficulties. I can name the three which I think are the biggest problems.

(1) The job of coming up with a suitable "umbrella of events" to constitute a hit is very tricky business.

(2) The math is hard. If some fool gave me a million dollars to actually pursue this research, the first thing that I would do is hire a small team of insurance actuaries. These guys are amazing, they can figure out the odds of anything. Have you ever heard of "meteor insurance"? Or "animal attack" insurance? If I wanted to, I could buy "insurance against an alligator biting off my left index finger", and these guys can actually estimate a good "p" value for that happening.

(3) Sadly, actuarial statistics is not an exact science, which makes our job even harder. We would have to witness a very large effect to be able to have faith in what we are witnessing. Critics of our experiment would always be able to say that we rigged our estimates of "p" so small that expected results seem unusual. The ideal dream would be something like "lottery numbers" where the odds are very simple to compute.

In short, I continue to maintain that my methodology is perfectly sound, but in practice would require a lot of time and money to actually do right. And no, I have no interest in actually doing it, but I find it interesting to discuss.

Unalienable

10th October 2007, 07:03 PM

Consider the problem from the point of view of someone who has dreams that seem, subjectively, to come eeriely close to later events, but it's not exactly the same. It can be difficult for the person who has experienced the premonition to simply dismiss it as coincidence. But how can you compute the probability of getting as close as you actually got after the event occurred? I think that is what he is trying to accomplish.

To continue with analogy of circles and bullet holes, think of it as a typical target with a series of nested concentric circles. The bullseye is the actual prediction. The closer to the bullseye, the lower the chance that it is simply a random coincidence. The farther away, the greater the probability of a coincidence. I think Unalienable is simply trying to determine how large the circle has to be if it is made large enough to encompass the actual event. Then he computes the probability of a hit based on the size of the circle.

I understand what you're saying Beth, and it sounds very tempting, but that's exactly the kind of nonsense that would lead us to false conclusions. After the dream is noted, my life will be filled with dozens of notable events every day, all of which can be used to compare against the original dream. Even the most dismal failure of a prediction could be placed somewhere, on some bullseye chart, if you invent the chart after the fact.

Therefore I suggest instead defining the circle in advance. True, you don't know how big to make this circle to prove the phenomenon is real, but then again, we don't really even know IF the phenomenon is real. All you can do is try.

One way to prove that something real is happening, is to go through these steps:

(1) Have the dream and record it.

(2) Create the event-umbrella based on the dream.

(3) Compute the probability of an event occuring within the umbrella during any single timeslice (e.g. 1 day).

(4) Wait for an event to fall within the event-umbrella and record the number of timeslices (days) it took to come to fruition.

Repeat those four steps many times over and you can start to get a picture of whether or not these event-umbrellas are better predictors of the future than we should expect by chance.

Consider for the sake of analogy, suppose somebody approached JREF with the claim, "If you look at a playing card from the deck, I can get a psychic sense of what card it is. I will often get the suit right, or the denomination (value) right, or sometimes I will be only one pip off (e.g. I guess a 7 when it's really an 8), and I can do this with incredible accuracy ... but in my experience, I will very rarely get the exact card right." In other words, they are an amazingly good "near guesser" but they are horrible at making direct hits. This is a testable claim and fully worthy of the million dollars. It would be trivial to design an experiment to test this claim to a 99.9% confidence, provided that you can nail them down to define exactly what it is that they claim to be able to do. The fact that the applicant does not claim to be able to predict the cards dead-on does not invalidate the paranomal claim.

Bri

10th October 2007, 08:34 PM

I understand what you're saying, but I only see it as practical method if you arbitrarily limit the number of near miss events to just a few (to keep the probability low enough to rule out chance hits with some confidence).

I think you misunderstand. There will only be one event that actually occurs that is the "closest fit" to the dream. This is the event that Unalienable would say the dream predicted. We can then calculate a score that essentially tells us how close the event was to the dream that supposedly predicted it. My guess is that the vast majority would be way beneath the threshold of 9.0 (or whatever you use as the threshold) which means that the prediction would not be particularly impressive.

So this method would be OK, if you limit the number of possible near misses to just a few, but it still doesn't make sense to me as a way to test the claim of precognition.

The number is limited to only one in most cases, unless more than one "near miss" occurred (which would be highly unlikely). In that case, calculate the scores for both and use the highest.

-Bri

Bri

10th October 2007, 08:57 PM

No, I said no such thing. You absolutely must define what constitutes a "hit" in advance!!! How many times do I have to say that before people stop saying that I claim otherwise?

For the dream you posted about severing a finger, you posted four possible "hit" scenarios, but you also said that any similar scenario would also be a hit. Where did you define a precise list of scenarios that constitute a hit in advance, and say that no other scenarios would count as a hit?

I think what's happening here is that two of my posts have become blurred into one.

That's possible. Perhaps I missed the list.

The "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" has nothing to do with my proposed methodology. I advocate drawing the circles first, then seeing if something hits them.

OK, so where did you define the "circles" in any precise way that wouldn't allow for retrofitting?

The amount of time that you wait before something hits the circles doesn't really matter, but it should go without saying that if enough time elapses, you've lost any chance of demonstrating that the dream was precognitive and in fact start to enter into the realm where you have evidence against it, even if the dream comes true.

The time element can also be included as a third metric by calculating the likelihood of the event occurring at a particular time.

In short, I continue to maintain that my methodology is perfectly sound, but in practice would require a lot of time and money to actually do right. And no, I have no interest in actually doing it, but I find it interesting to discuss.

I think it is a useful exercise to discuss the values you would place on the metrics. I think they would be rather enlightening. We can pretty well estimate the probability of an event occurring by chance (even taking into account the time factor), but the more difficult metric is determining how "close" the event is to the event in your dream.

For example, you said that you would consider slamming your hand in a door to be a "hit." We can estimate that it's not unlikely that you will slam your hand in a door at some point during the remainder of your lifetime (the longer the time limit, the more likely you are to slam your hand in a door during that time). But estimating exactly how "close" that is to your original dream is difficult.

Still, given the fact that slamming your hand in a door during your lifetime isn't a rare event, even if we deemed it to be extremely "close" to the event described in your dream (which it isn't) the event would still score a relatively small amount -- over 0.5 probably, but definitely well below any reasonable threshold that would point to the premonition being real. Let's say that 1 out of every 4 people your age will slam their hand in a door during the remainder of their life (using your expected lifespan). I think that's being generous since it would likely be more than that, but let's just say it's 25%. That would mean that the "probability" metric would be 0.75. That number would then be multiplied by the "closeness" metric, so 0.75 would be the highest score you could get, even if you were to deem the event to be "dead on" with the event in the dream (which it clearly isn't). So even if you did happen to slam your hand in a door, I'd say that your score would end up around 0.55 or so, which isn't very impressive compared to a threshold of 0.9. In other words, your dream didn't really predict that event much better than a random guess would have.

-Bri

Mr. Scott

10th October 2007, 09:35 PM

The job of coming up with a suitable "umbrella of events" to constitute a hit is very tricky business.

Unalienable, I'm trying to divine what your position on this issue is and I'd like to know why you voted in this survey that you believed such dreams literally came true, but now are talking about a "suitable umbrella of events." It reads like backpedaling to me.

I personally do not believe dreams metaphysically predict the future in any way shape or form, because:

A) I know how the mind plays tricks on us with habits like shoehorning and retrofitting. (Not to mention people who lie for attention.)

B) There is absolutely no hypothesis one can come up with for a physical mechanism which would account for it.

Bri

10th October 2007, 09:36 PM

One way to prove that something real is happening, is to go through these steps:

(1) Have the dream and record it.

(2) Create the event-umbrella based on the dream.

(3) Compute the probability of an event occuring within the umbrella during any single timeslice (e.g. 1 day).

(4) Wait for an event to fall within the event-umbrella and record the number of timeslices (days) it took to come to fruition.

I think this is very close to what I'm talking about. The threshold score I mentioned is simply the size of the circle, and the metrics are simply a way of determining whether a particular event falls within the circle or not. However, I completely disagree as to the size of your circles and/or your criteria to determine whether a particular event falls within the circles if you claim that a dream about severing a finger could reasonably be considered a prediction of slamming your hand in a door. I think the threshold score (the "size" of the circle) needs to be up around 0.9 rather than around 0.55 (which is where I estimate slamming your hand in a door to be in relation to your dream). Remember, that 0.5 would be the average score given to some random event if the "dream" were simply made up and were not a premonition at all.

The reason I think the metrics are useful is because they make you look at the size of your circle more realistically compared to chance. At first you might think that slamming your hand in a door is reasonably "close" to the event in the dream, but considering how often people slam their hands in doors, that event occurring at some point in your life would not be at all unusual regardless of the dream.

To even qualify for a threshold of 0.9, an event would have to have a 1 in 10 or less probability of occurring within the given time frame. If only 1 in 10, the dream would have to be spot on to score above the threshold, if a bit less than 1 in 10 it could vary slightly from the event and score above the threshold, and if much less than 1 in 10 it could vary more from the event and score above the threshold.

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 10:24 PM

I think you misunderstand. There will only be one event that actually occurs that is the "closest fit" to the dream. This is the event that Unalienable would say the dream predicted. We can then calculate a score that essentially tells us how close the event was to the dream that supposedly predicted it. My guess is that the vast majority would be way beneath the threshold of 9.0 (or whatever you use as the threshold) which means that the prediction would not be particularly impressive.

That doesn't sound quite like what Unalienable is proposing, but the problem with this one is that it's still a fishing trip. If you don't state a clear hypothesis before you start, it's not kosher.

You're saying whatever event happens that is "closest" to the prediction (and I still don't get how you make that assessment) becomes the hypothesis, and all that's left is to calculate the odds of it happening times the "closeness to prediction" quotient. It's still an after-the-fact calculation, and you're still ignoring the probabilities of all the other possible events that didn't happen that could have also counted--in fact, there's an infinity of them since there's no such thing as a miss in this set up.

I suppose I could be persuaded to this if you could tell me how to assess closeness to the prediction (of events not predicted) and how you could calculate those ahead of time (which is what Unalienable is suggesting).

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 10:30 PM

I understand what you're saying Beth, and it sounds very tempting, but that's exactly the kind of nonsense that would lead us to false conclusions. After the dream is noted, my life will be filled with dozens of notable events every day, all of which can be used to compare against the original dream. Even the most dismal failure of a prediction could be placed somewhere, on some bullseye chart, if you invent the chart after the fact.

Therefore I suggest instead defining the circle in advance. True, you don't know how big to make this circle to prove the phenomenon is real, but then again, we don't really even know IF the phenomenon is real. All you can do is try.

One way to prove that something real is happening, is to go through these steps:

(1) Have the dream and record it.

(2) Create the event-umbrella based on the dream.

(3) Compute the probability of an event occuring within the umbrella during any single timeslice (e.g. 1 day).

(4) Wait for an event to fall within the event-umbrella and record the number of timeslices (days) it took to come to fruition.

Repeat those four steps many times over and you can start to get a picture of whether or not these event-umbrellas are better predictors of the future than we should expect by chance.

Consider for the sake of analogy, suppose somebody approached JREF with the claim, "If you look at a playing card from the deck, I can get a psychic sense of what card it is. I will often get the suit right, or the denomination (value) right, or sometimes I will be only one pip off (e.g. I guess a 7 when it's really an 8), and I can do this with incredible accuracy ... but in my experience, I will very rarely get the exact card right." In other words, they are an amazingly good "near guesser" but they are horrible at making direct hits. This is a testable claim and fully worthy of the million dollars. It would be trivial to design an experiment to test this claim to a 99.9% confidence, provided that you can nail them down to define exactly what it is that they claim to be able to do. The fact that the applicant does not claim to be able to predict the cards dead-on does not invalidate the paranomal claim.

I think the only quibble I have with your set up now is step number 2. (Aside from the issue that shoehorning is to be allowed at all when the claim is for a precognitive dream. If you don't know what the dream means ahead of time, it's simply not precognitive.)

You can do this with picking a playing card, but I don't think anyone does anything like that with precognitive dreams. With dreams, my problem is the same as before: how can you identify all the possible near misses? and, what constitutes nearness (i.e. how do you measure "nearness" of events that weren't actually predicted)?

JoeTheJuggler

10th October 2007, 10:47 PM

(1) The job of coming up with a suitable "umbrella of events" to constitute a hit is very tricky business.

(2) The math is hard. If some fool gave me a million dollars to actually pursue this research, the first thing that I would do is hire a small team of insurance actuaries. These guys are amazing, they can figure out the odds of anything. Have you ever heard of "meteor insurance"? Or "animal attack" insurance? If I wanted to, I could buy "insurance against an alligator biting off my left index finger", and these guys can actually estimate a good "p" value for that happening.

(3) Sadly, actuarial statistics is not an exact science, which makes our job even harder. We would have to witness a very large effect to be able to have faith in what we are witnessing. Critics of our experiment would always be able to say that we rigged our estimates of "p" so small that expected results seem unusual. The ideal dream would be something like "lottery numbers" where the odds are very simple to compute.

In short, I continue to maintain that my methodology is perfectly sound, but in practice would require a lot of time and money to actually do right. And no, I have no interest in actually doing it, but I find it interesting to discuss.

I'd be willing to cede that 2 and 3 are just really difficult, but I still say difficulty number 1 is impossible.

I don't think anyone can anticipate all the possible near misses that would go into the umbrella. If the umbrella fails to include all possible near misses (which I think are equally legitimate--or rather equally not), then it's just an arbitrary selection.

The classic example of shoehorning, for me, is when Gary Schwartz took Allison Dubois' message from a departed friend, "I don't walk alone" to mean that his friend was confined to a wheelchair in her later years. You could probably ask 100 people to write down what they thought "I don't walk alone" would mean in this context, and I doubt that a single person would write down that it means "I used a wheelchair before I died".

We brainstormed a little in this thread on what other interpretations you could give to a dream about hitting a deer while driving your car, but I'm sure there are MANY more possibilities.

And I still say a precognitive dream ought to give you foreknowledge of future events. If it only seems to match an event after the fact, it's not really foreknowledge.

But I do get what you're saying, Unalienable, that blurry impressions or approximations might be what the claim is.

In that case, I simply don't give it any merit. If the claimed paranormal ability boils down to saying "something important might happen soon but I won't know what it will be until after it happens", it's pretty much a waste of time.

Bri

11th October 2007, 06:53 AM

That doesn't sound quite like what Unalienable is proposing, but the problem with this one is that it's still a fishing trip. If you don't state a clear hypothesis before you start, it's not kosher.

The hypothesis is that using the metrics, a "predictive" dream will score above a 0.9 compared to the "best fit" event that occurs within the given time frame. Pretty simple, really. The metrics are subjective, of course, similar to the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation), and are useful only in helping to determine how impressive the prediction is compared to the predicted event when the two aren't identical. I think that I'd actually add a third metric for specificity to prevent a very vague prediction from achieving a high score:

S, specificity of the prediction (0=vague, 1=specific)
P, probability of the actual event occurring by chance within the time limit (0=high, 1=low)
C, closeness of the actual event to the predicted event (0=distant, 1=close)

score = S * P * C

You're saying whatever event happens that is "closest" to the prediction (and I still don't get how you make that assessment) becomes the hypothesis, and all that's left is to calculate the odds of it happening times the "closeness to prediction" quotient. It's still an after-the-fact calculation, and you're still ignoring the probabilities of all the other possible events that didn't happen that could have also counted--in fact, there's an infinity of them since there's no such thing as a miss in this set up.

Note that the first two metrics can be calculated ahead of time, and will limit the highest score possible. So most of the time we don't even have to wait for the event to occur before we can show that the person was "hedging" the prediction (not necessarily consciously) by either making it vague or making it fit events that are likely to occur anyway. So, it's a useful exercise just for that reason.

And after the event has occurred, we don't care about what could have happened -- we only care about what did happen. At that point, we want to know why the person thinks the prediction was successful, whether it really was successful, and if so how successful it was.

I don't know of anyone who has had difficulty identifying the event that was predicted by their premonition. In fact, I think Unalienable said that he "just knows" when the event occurs that was predicted by the dream. But even if he didn't, if the dream was even in the least bit predictive, it should be relatively easy to pinpoint a single event that it predicted (otherwise the score will be too low from the first two metrics to matter anyway). If there happens to be more than one event predicted by the premonition (I've never heard of a psychic saying that two different events were equally predicted by the same premonition, but I suppose it could happen) then you would calculate both and use the highest score.

The idea here is that when someone says "See, my dream came true!" you can break it down and see just how predictive the dream was compared to the actual event that came true. The closer the score to 0.5, the more likely that the dream couldn't have predicted the event at all -- 0.5 means that the event could just as easily have been "predicted" by a random guess. A score of 0.9 would be pretty impressive -- it would be an event that was not only very close to the dream, but that also wasn't likely to have occurred by chance.

I suppose I could be persuaded to this if you could tell me how to assess closeness to the prediction (of events not predicted) and how you could calculate those ahead of time (which is what Unalienable is suggesting).

I'm not sure that you can calculate "closeness" with any accuracy since it's entirely subjective, but the exercise is still useful. In reality, it's usually the other factors (vagueness and probability of the event occurring) that are being used to consciously or subconsciously "hedge" a prediction most of the time anyway, since those are the two that can be assessed before the event occurs. I'm not sure that Unalienable was even aware that he was using those two factors to essentially guarantee that his prediction would come true when saying that slamming his hand in a door would count as a hit. Just by calculating the odds of Unalienable (or someone close to him) slamming his hand in the door and comparing it to even a vague notion of "closeness" to the original dream, one can see that the dream could not very well predict that event much better than any random guess might no matter how "close" one decided the event is to the dream.

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

11th October 2007, 09:49 AM

The metrics are subjective, of course, similar to the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation), and are useful only in helping to determine how impressive the prediction is compared to the predicted event when the two aren't identical.

I don't think ANY of the factors of the Drake Equation are subjective--just unknown. There's a big difference. How you estimate an unknown quantity is subjective, but the things they're measuring is not. We just don't have the information.

Note that the first two metrics can be calculated ahead of time, and will limit the highest score possible.
So you think every possible near-miss can be known ahead of time? I don't think it's possible. And if you don't have all of them, then the definition and probabilities are arbitrary.

And after the event has occurred, we don't care about what could have happened -- we only care about what did happen. At that point, we want to know why the person thinks the prediction was successful, whether it really was successful, and if so how successful it was.

Again, if you don't count the probabilities of all the other events that you might have counted as hits (if they'd happened), you're basically creating a whole bunch of hypotheses and then choosing only the best one to test after the fact.

That's what I call a "fishing trip". It's also called data dredging. If you don't state the hypothesis you will test before the test, you can sift through data to find "evidence" of almost anything. I understand you're not purely doing that (by tying all the various near misses to a single prediction), but it's the same in practice. You still don't know which probability you're testing until after the fact. So this method depends entirely on the validity of the "closeness" measure.

I don't know of anyone who has had difficulty identifying the event that was predicted by their premonition. In fact, I think Unalienable said that he "just knows" when the event occurs that was predicted by the dream.

Again, if he "just knows" AFTER the event occurs, then the dream was not a prediction.

I'm not sure that you can calculate "closeness" with any accuracy since it's entirely subjective, but the exercise is still useful.

I disagree. I don't think it's just a matter of subjectivity. The problem I see is that we're trying to compare misses. In only a few circumstances does comparing misses makes sense. (Submit several guesses of my height, and if they're both wrong, we can compare which is closer.) Comparing the miss, "I hit an elk," and the miss, "My brother hit a deer," doesn't make any sense. Neither one is "I hit a deer", and one is not "closer" than the other. I say neither one is the fulfillment of the prediction "I will hit a deer". Knowing the prediction "I will hit a deer" doesn't favor one or the other the way it favors what it really predicts, "I hit a deer." Ahead of time, the prediction doesn't give you any idea which of these two would be more likely (because of the prediction, not because of real probabilities--I'm still talking about your "C" factor--I'm willing to accept the "P" factor as something difficult but knowable to some range of confidence).

Bri

11th October 2007, 03:00 PM

So you think every possible near-miss can be known ahead of time? I don't think it's possible. And if you don't have all of them, then the definition and probabilities are arbitrary.

You don't have to know every possible near-miss. You only have to know the single event that the person who had the premonition claims is the event being predicted. You can then calculate how "impressive" it would be that the premonition predicted that particular event by looking at how rare the event is and also how close the event is to the prediction.

Again, if you don't count the probabilities of all the other events that you might have counted as hits (if they'd happened), you're basically creating a whole bunch of hypotheses and then choosing only the best one to test after the fact.

I'm not sure what the probabilities of other events that didn't happen have anything to do with it. For any prediction, there are going to be lots of possible events that could have happened, but didn't. Some will be rare and some will be likely to occur (even though they didn't). Some will be closer to the actual prediction and others will not be. I don't think events that don't happen tell you anything at all about the premonition. The only event that tells you if the premonition is interesting is the event that actually occurred that is claimed to have been predicted by the premonition.

That's what I call a "fishing trip". It's also called data dredging. If you don't state the hypothesis you will test before the test, you can sift through data to find "evidence" of almost anything.

The hypothesis is that using the metrics, a "predictive" dream will score above a 0.9 compared to the "best fit" event that occurs within the given time frame. If the event isn't rare enough or the event isn't close enough to the prediction, the score will be below 9.0. If it's close to 0.5 the relationship between the prediction and the event it predicted was no better than chance.

I understand you're not purely doing that (by tying all the various near misses to a single prediction), but it's the same in practice. You still don't know which probability you're testing until after the fact. So this method depends entirely on the validity of the "closeness" measure.

No it doesn't. It depends both on how likely the event is to occur (how rare it is) and also on how close it is to the prediction. Only if the event is rare and closely matched to the prediction can we consider the prediction even remotely interesting. In most cases we won't care about how close it is because the fact that the event wasn't particularly rare will make the matter of how close it was entirely moot. For example, if the prediction is about hitting a deer but the person lived in an area where they hit deer every other day, it wouldn't be all that impressive.

But if someone has a very specific prediction, and then an event occurred that was extremely rare and the person claimed a match, then we would discuss how "close" it really was to the actual prediction. If the prediction was about hitting a deer and the rare event was that the person was probed by aliens, I would say that's probably not a hit. If the prediction is about the person hitting a deer and the person hit an elk, but happened to live in an area where elk and deer are extremely rare, then I'd say it might be interesting if there were similar results for a large number of other predictions.

Again, if he "just knows" AFTER the event occurs, then the dream was not a prediction.

Ummm...how would you expect this to work otherwise? Do you think that a valid prediction must have a time stamp which tells the person exactly when to expect the event to occur before the event occurs? Of course not. After the event occurs, the person generally says "Hey, that happened just like in my dream!" And if they're right, and if it happened like that a number of times for rare events, it would be worth investigating. The problem is that it never happens that way. The event that occurs is usually either not terribly close to the predicted event, or is so common that it was likely to happen regardless of the prediction.

I disagree. I don't think it's just a matter of subjectivity. The problem I see is that we're trying to compare misses. In only a few circumstances does comparing misses makes sense. (Submit several guesses of my height, and if they're both wrong, we can compare which is closer.) Comparing the miss, "I hit an elk," and the miss, "My brother hit a deer," doesn't make any sense.

I'm not comparing misses at all. I'm comparing the supposed "hit" with the chances that the same event would have matched a completely random guess rather than an actual prediction.

Neither one is "I hit a deer", and one is not "closer" than the other.

I agree, but both are closer than "I was probed by an alien." But that's not the point. The point is that neither one would really score that high compared to a random guess. In fact, even if the person actually hit a deer it wouldn't necessarily score that high if the person hits deer every other day.

I say neither one is the fulfillment of the prediction "I will hit a deer". Knowing the prediction "I will hit a deer" doesn't favor one or the other the way it favors what it really predicts, "I hit a deer." Ahead of time, the prediction doesn't give you any idea which of these two would be more likely (because of the prediction, not because of real probabilities--I'm still talking about your "C" factor--I'm willing to accept the "P" factor as something difficult but knowable to some range of confidence).

I understand what you're saying, but the claim here is not that the premonition will be exact, but that the premonition will be "off" from the actual event it predicts. Does this make the premonition useless? Maybe. Does it mean that the premonition is necessarily not paranormal? Nope. As an example, let's say that Unalienable has dreams in which an event happens to someone he knows. But in reality, the event always happens to him, but is otherwise exactly spot-on. In that case, I would say that there might be something paranormal going on.

-Bri

Unalienable

11th October 2007, 03:34 PM

Unalienable, I'm trying to divine what your position on this issue is and I'd like to know why you voted in this survey that you believed such dreams literally came true

Boy, now I have egg on my face. To tell the truth I had no idea that my personal vote was visible to other members--if it was, I would have voted differently. I voted that just to be a sort of a wise-guy and also to seed the discussion with the "Devil's Advocate" position. I figured enough people would vote for choice #3 without me, so that was sort of my way off "throwing my vote away." I know how that feels, I vote Libertarian.

but now are talking about a "suitable umbrella of events." It reads like backpedaling to me.

I brought up the "event umbrella" because I cannot imagine any other way to actually test for this phenomenon, unless you actually believe that dreams literally come true, spot-on, every time. And I don't think anybody believes that, even myself (who seems to be the biggest apologist for dream-seers here).

The job of coming up with the 'event-umbrella' is a very inexact process subject to all sorts of possible mishaps. But these mishaps can only work against proving that the dreams predict the future, not work in its favor. It reminds me a little bit of the typical conversation that Randi has with applicants:

Applicant: I have magic water that makes people healthier.

Randi: We'll give 10 people your magic water, 10 people normal water, and if you can tell which people are which, we'll give you a million bucks.

Applicant: I might have to do a PET scan on them to know if they took the magic water.

Ranid: Fine, as long as you pay for it.

Applicant: I might also need a stethescope to listen to their hearts.

Randi: Look, I don't care if you rub their foreheads with annoited oil, or perform ancient Indian rituals, if you can tell the difference you win the money.

Just like the applicant can use any method his heart desires to determine which patients drank the "magic water", the dream-seer should be able to use any technique they come up with to design the event-umbrella. If they suck at making event umbrellas, then there is a chance that we'll fail to recognize a real phenomenon. But if they do come up with impressive event umbrellas, we prove the phenomenon. We still might not understand how they came up with these incredibly predictive event umbrellas, but we can say with much certainty that they were indeed predictive.

I can't wait to discuss this some more but I have to run out for some time.

Mr. Scott

11th October 2007, 04:35 PM

I understand what you're saying, but the claim here is not that the premonition will be exact, but that the premonition will be "off" from the actual event it predicts. Does this make the premonition useless? Maybe.

I submit that if a there is no way to tell what a "premonition" is predicting until after the purported predicted event has occurred, then it is not a premonition.

Mr. Scott

11th October 2007, 04:49 PM

I had no idea that my personal vote was visible to other members--if it was, I would have voted differently.

The survey text did have a warning that votes would be visible, but you must have missed it. I picked that option because I knew that people tried to sabotaged surveys by not voting their true opinions. You can just click on the vote count to see who voted for what. Being the creator of the survey does not allow me to vote, but I would have voted that metaphysically prophetic dreams were nonsense.

A clarification about why I chose the "arbitrary" 24 hour time limit: I felt that the dream believers somewhat arbitrarily choose the rest of their lives as the time limit, so I'm stacking the deck in the other direction to even things out. (I did extend it to 32 hours, BTW).

Yesterday, I passed a dead deer on the highway. Does that fall under anyone's umbrella?

Carry on!

solas

11th October 2007, 07:57 PM

I used dream very vividly and couple of years ago remember discussing events on a regular basis at a forum closer to home. One dream I remember well and posted about here (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=3192279&postcount=9)
While to people looking in it may not appear to give much information but because of the kind of dream, I knew there was more to it and stated as much at the time, only initially I thought the natural disaster was an earthquake. Try to remember I'm not in the states and the initials FEMA were foreign to me at the time. These messages were posted almost two weeks before events occurred.

whole thread (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=284185)

I understand people will want to claim shoehorning but the shoe fit well enough for me to feel comfortable suggesting an event at the time. Katrina didn't come into existence until 23rd August and didn't hit until the first of sept. and quite honestly, as an Irish citizen I never followed or had any interest in American hurricane seasons prior to it. As for F.E.M.A., I had to look the meaning up the following day.

JoeTheJuggler

11th October 2007, 09:58 PM

I submit that if a there is no way to tell what a "premonition" is predicting until after the purported predicted event has occurred, then it is not a premonition.

Amen!

Also the utility (or lack thereof) is beside the point. We're trying to test whether dreams can predict the future.

If you can't say what event is being predicted ahead of time, it simply is not a prediction.

JoeTheJuggler

11th October 2007, 10:09 PM

You don't have to know every possible near-miss.

You do if you are willing to count them as hits. Otherwise it's a post-hoc hypothesis.

I'm not sure what the probabilities of other events that didn't happen have anything to do with it.
Back to the sharpshooter analogy: those other events (that you're willing to count as hits even though they aren't) represent an area of the wall that you'd count as a hit. You can't ignore them just because they didn't hit.

If the prediction was about hitting a deer and the rare event was that the person was probed by aliens, I would say that's probably not a hit.

Why not? If a plethora of other interpretations (other than the person who had the dream actually hitting a deer) can be allowed, why not an alien encounter? It could well be argued that the dream meant "Caution, you will have an encounter with another species."

Again, if he "just knows" AFTER the event occurs, then the dream was not a prediction.
Ummm...how would you expect this to work otherwise? Do you think that a valid prediction must have a time stamp which tells the person exactly when to expect the event to occur before the event occurs? Of course not. After the event occurs, the person generally says "Hey, that happened just like in my dream!"
I expect a prediction to be saying ahead of time that a certain future event will happen. If you can't say what the prediction was until after, it is simply retrofitting.

I'm not comparing misses at all. I'm comparing the supposed "hit" with the chances that the same event would have matched a completely random guess rather than an actual prediction.
So are all the near misses that you'd like to count of equal closeness to the prediction? I assume not, which means you have to compare the relative closeness of all these possible events. Again, you absolutely have to consider these other near misses (what Unalienable calls the "umbrella"), or you'll seriously skew the probabilities. You must count in the probability EVERYTHING that you would be willing to count as a hit.

JoeTheJuggler

11th October 2007, 10:27 PM

If the predicted event were merely the outcome of the toss a hypothetical one-million-sided die, I'd accept Unalienable's method, but not Bri's.

For Unalienable's method, you'd say at the outset how close the value has to be to be considered an acceptable hit. Our psychic predicts a single number, but admits he could be off by say 50 either way. (Let's assume he doesn't choose a number lower than 50 so he can keep his entire 100 number range--or "umbrella" prediction.)

Before the die is cast, we know the odds of getting a direct hit are 1:1,000,000. But that's NOT the hypothesis. It is about the odds of hitting in that range of 100 numbers, so the probability is really 100:1,000,000 or 1:10,000. We call it a 1:10,000 hit if the number comes up anywhere in that range--even if it ends up spot on the predicted number (the middle of the range. OK, I just realized my math is a tad off because the range is really 101 and not 100.)

In Bri's scheme, the psychic chooses a number, but we don't calculate any odds or discuss what will count as a hit at the outset.

After it's rolled, we take the number that comes up, and multiply its probability (which will always be 1:1,000,000) times its closeness factor.

Presumably that closeness factor is something like 1.0 minus (the distance from the number to the predicted value divided by a 999,999). In other words, a direct hit will give you a closeness factor of 1.0, while the worst case number (off by 999,999--like if you guessed 1 and the number 1,000,000 came up) would result in a closeness factor of zero. In this set up, getting a dead on hit counts as a 1:1,000,000 hit, as if the hypothesis was exactly that one value and no other.

--------
With dream predictions, I don't think either one will work because 1) all the near-misses that might count as hits aren't knowable ahead of time, and 2) Bri's closeness factor is impossible to calculate for most real-world predictions.

Both also fail to define a prediction as saying ahead of time what future event will happen. They both depend on hindsight.

It's very much like the old Greek oracles who made their predictions in such a way that they were only decipherable after the event happens (and often completely misleading).

Pup

12th October 2007, 06:45 AM

Both also fail to define a prediction as saying ahead of time what future event will happen. They both depend on hindsight.

It's very much like the old Greek oracles who made their predictions in such a way that they were only decipherable after the event happens (and often completely misleading).

And I think that's why some people can convince themselves that dreams predict the future. Psychologically, if you do it the way it's being described, it feels like the future is being predicted, in the same way that dousing rods feel like they're being moved by something else, or we can see recognizable images in random shapes.

For some reason, human minds are programmed to work that way, and if someone has a need to believe, they fall for it, using all the justifications we've seen in this thread.

Bri

12th October 2007, 06:54 AM

I submit that if a there is no way to tell what a "premonition" is predicting until after the purported predicted event has occurred, then it is not a premonition.

What if your premonition was simply that something extremely unusual was going to happen within the next 5 minutes? What if you had such a premonition fairly often, and they were always correct (something extremely rare happened within 5 minutes each time)? I would say that would be an accurate premonition and quite interesting even though you can't tell exactly what the premonition is predicting until after the event occurs.

So I guess I have to disagree with you.

-Bri

Bri

12th October 2007, 06:57 AM

Yesterday, I passed a dead deer on the highway. Does that fall under anyone's umbrella?

No. There is nearly a 100% probability that you will pass a dead deer on the highway at some point in your lifetime. Even without knowing how "close" that event is to the prediction, it would never score high enough to count as anything interesting.

-Bri

Bri

12th October 2007, 07:48 AM

You do if you are willing to count them as hits. Otherwise it's a post-hoc hypothesis.

I understand what you're saying, which is why I felt compelled to add "specificity" (S) to the formula. I think that essentially defines how large the circle drawn on the wall is (how many events would count as a hit).

I was probably initially making some assumptions based on Unalienable's example, assuming that the prediction was very specific, but that there might be a limited number of variations that would be acceptable as "hits" (in the deer example, the animal hit might vary, or the person hitting the animal might vary). That's how Unalienable described his dreams "worked" but I see now that these variations have to be defined since there are an infinite number of them (the distance of the car to the animal might vary allowing for "near misses," passing a dead deer on the highway, etc.).

There are also some variations that I would consider rather far-fetched, such as interpreting the dream figuratively (encounter with another species) which I assumed Unalienable wouldn't allow. But if you define the variations that are allowed beforehand in some way, there is no reason they shouldn't be allowed.

I still think we can break up the analysis in such a way that it will take into account how "rare" the acceptable events are (the probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance). Perhaps "P" should actually be probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance within the time limit (0=high, 1=low) That would preclude the need for "S" (which is essentially the same thing). So it would look like this:

P, probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance within the time limit (0=high, 1=low)
C, closeness of the actual event to the predicted event (0=distant, 1=close)

score = P * C

So this formula allows you to draw a circle on the wall of any size you want, but the possible score will be inversely proportional to the size of the circle. The score will also be proportional to how close to the bullseye (the center of the circle) you hit.

Would that take care of your concern? I'm not sure.

As far as I can tell, this is essentially the same as Unalienable's method.
One question that remains is whether only the first acceptable event that occurs within the time limit is considered, or whether multiple acceptable events occurring within the time limit are considered.

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

12th October 2007, 08:50 AM

And I think that's why some people can convince themselves that dreams predict the future. Psychologically, if you do it the way it's being described, it feels like the future is being predicted, in the same way that dousing rods feel like they're being moved by something else, or we can see recognizable images in random shapes.

For some reason, human minds are programmed to work that way, and if someone has a need to believe, they fall for it, using all the justifications we've seen in this thread.

I hadn't thought of that before--that the same thing that causes pareidoilia, our tendency to look for patterns, is what might cause the delusion that one can predict the future. I'd buy that.

JoeTheJuggler

12th October 2007, 09:01 AM

I understand what you're saying, which is why I felt compelled to add "specificity" (S) to the formula. I think that essentially defines how large the circle drawn on the wall is (how many events would count as a hit).

I was probably initially making some assumptions based on Unalienable's example, assuming that the prediction was very specific, but that there might be a limited number of variations that would be acceptable as "hits" (in the deer example, the animal hit might vary, or the person hitting the animal might vary). That's how Unalienable described his dreams "worked" but I see now that these variations have to be defined since there are an infinite number of them (the distance of the car to the animal might vary allowing for "near misses," passing a dead deer on the highway, etc.).

There are also some variations that I would consider rather far-fetched, such as interpreting the dream figuratively (encounter with another species) which I assumed Unalienable wouldn't allow. But if you define the variations that are allowed beforehand in some way, there is no reason they shouldn't be allowed.

I still think we can break up the analysis in such a way that it will take into account how "rare" the acceptable events are (the probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance). Perhaps "P" should actually be probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance within the time limit (0=high, 1=low) That would preclude the need for "S" (which is essentially the same thing). So it would look like this:

P, probability of an acceptable event occurring by chance within the time limit (0=high, 1=low)
C, closeness of the actual event to the predicted event (0=distant, 1=close)

score = P * C

So this formula allows you to draw a circle on the wall of any size you want, but the possible score will be inversely proportional to the size of the circle. The score will also be proportional to how close to the bullseye (the center of the circle) you hit.

Would that take care of your concern? I'm not sure.

As far as I can tell, this is essentially the same as Unalienable's method.
One question that remains is whether only the first acceptable event that occurs within the time limit is considered, or whether multiple acceptable events occurring within the time limit are considered.

Yes, this sounds like pretty much the same thing as Unalienable's method.

The only thing I'm not sure you're doing is including the "umbrella" prediction in your probability calculation. If you'd accept some number of near misses as hits, and one of those (or even the spot-on real prediction) occurs, the probability must be calculated based on the entire umbrella. Otherwise, it's cheating.

My problems with the design are still 1) that you can't define the allowable near misses without arbitrarily excluding some (I contend that you can't even possibly anticipate all of them), and 2) you still can't say exactly what the prediction is before the event, so it's not really a prediction.

As you pointed out, it becomes especially tricky when you allow for figurative interpretations, and, in fact, that's probably the more common way psychic dreams are done.

Recall, for example, the story of Joseph's interpreting the pharoah's dream. 7 fat cows represents 7 years of prosperity which are followed by 7 skinny cows representing 7 years of famine. Now if the interpretation happens before the event, that'd be fine--it would actually define the prediction for you. The Joseph & the pharoah story is, of course, pure fiction, and written long after the events supposedly took place.

If someone had the vivid dream of hitting a deer and went to a psychic who interpreted that as meaning the imminent death of a loved one, I'd accept that as a solid prediction. You'd have to operationally define "imminent" and "loved one" --but I'd guess you could work that out with the claimant before conducting a test.

Bri

12th October 2007, 09:53 AM

The only thing I'm not sure you're doing is including the "umbrella" prediction in your probability calculation. If you'd accept some number of near misses as hits, and one of those (or even the spot-on real prediction) occurs, the probability must be calculated based on the entire umbrella. Otherwise, it's cheating.

Yes, I agree. "P" must measure the probability of any acceptable event occurring.

My problems with the design are still 1) that you can't define the allowable near misses without arbitrarily excluding some (I contend that you can't even possibly anticipate all of them), and 2) you still can't say exactly what the prediction is before the event, so it's not really a prediction.

I think (1) is more of a problem than (2). It's true that you can't anticipate all of the possible scenarios, but you could perhaps give a general description of what you think would count as a hit, as Unalienable attempted to do. I think that as you begin to revise the description, the value for "P" becomes quite enlightening, and there is usually no need to continue with the exercise. That in and of itself makes the process worth looking at, even if inexact.

As for (2) would you consider it a "prediction" if someone claims that something really unusual is going to happen in the next 5 minutes? Whether or not you consider this a "prediction" if indeed something extremely rare were to happen within the next 5 minutes (an airplane were to fall out of the sky, for example), it would be interesting. If a similar "prediction" could be made repeatedly, and each time something extremely rare were to occur, I think that might indicate a possible paranormal ability whether or not you want to call it a "prediction."

As you pointed out, it becomes especially tricky when you allow for figurative interpretations, and, in fact, that's probably the more common way psychic dreams are done.

If in fact the person with the dream doesn't realize that's what they're doing, the exercise would be useful for them as a learning experience. If they claim that figurative interpretations are allowed, then you can show that "P" would become prohibitively low to yield an even mildly interesting score.

Recall, for example, the story of Joseph's interpreting the pharoah's dream. 7 fat cows represents 7 years of prosperity which are followed by 7 skinny cows representing 7 years of famine. Now if the interpretation happens before the event, that'd be fine--it would actually define the prediction for you.

In the story, Joseph made the interpretation of the dream before the event occurred, and the interpretation was not vague or figurative in any way, even if the dream was. Therefore, the "umbrella" of acceptable events is fairly specific. If, in fact, events unfolded as they did in the story, it would probably be considered an "interesting" prediction, particularly if Joseph was able to make similar predictions repeatedly.

If someone had the vivid dream of hitting a deer and went to a psychic who interpreted that as meaning the imminent death of a loved one, I'd accept that as a solid prediction. You'd have to operationally define "imminent" and "loved one" --but I'd guess you could work that out with the claimant before conducting a test.

Yes, exactly. In that case, the probability of the acceptable range of events could be calculated, at least crudely, and would be pretty low I would imagine, yielding a fairly high score if it an acceptable event actually occurred.

-Bri

Trantor

12th October 2007, 01:36 PM

Reading this post reminds me of a dream that had about ten years ago. I usually don't play the lottery, except on very rare occasions for fun. I remember one night when I had this very vivid dream of me holding a lottery ticket in my hands, while watching the lottery balls fall into place to determine the winning numbers. In the dream, the ticket in my hands matched the winning numbers. I remember being very excited about my big win.

I woke up in the middle of the night, right after the dream. I thought to myself - I know it's crazy, but this dream means something! I quickly wrote the numbers down on a piece of paper, knowing that I just had to play those lucky numbers.

The next day, I purchased a single ticket with my "lucky" numbers for the next lotto drawing. Well, I guess my lucky numbers weren't all that lucky because not one number matched the six winning numbers. I purchased an additional ticket with the same numbers for the next drawing and amazingly, not one number matched that drawing either!

Well, so much for those vivid prophetic dreams...

Dan O.

12th October 2007, 06:35 PM

JoeTheJuggler

12th October 2007, 08:52 PM

I think (1) is more of a problem than (2). It's true that you can't anticipate all of the possible scenarios, but you could perhaps give a general description of what you think would count as a hit, as Unalienable attempted to do. I think that as you begin to revise the description, the value for "P" becomes quite enlightening, and there is usually no need to continue with the exercise. That in and of itself makes the process worth looking at, even if inexact.

Good point. If you have no interest in testing whether dreams can predict the future, the exercise could be educational. I think just brainstorming as many possible near-misses-that-could-count-as-hits is an enlightening exercise too.

As for (2) would you consider it a "prediction" if someone claims that something really unusual is going to happen in the next 5 minutes? Whether or not you consider this a "prediction" if indeed something extremely rare were to happen within the next 5 minutes (an airplane were to fall out of the sky, for example), it would be interesting. If a similar "prediction" could be made repeatedly, and each time something extremely rare were to occur, I think that might indicate a possible paranormal ability whether or not you want to call it a "prediction."

I don't know that I've ever heard anyone making such a "prediction". I'd be inclined to say that it's not a prediction because there is no statement of what will happen. Something really unusual is a really broad net, though "in the next 5 minutes" is an extremely narrow one. It sounds to me like someone making a bet when there's little cost for losing but a potential bonanza for a long-odds win.

If in fact the person with the dream doesn't realize that's what they're doing, the exercise would be useful for them as a learning experience. If they claim that figurative interpretations are allowed, then you can show that "P" would become prohibitively low to yield an even mildly interesting score.

I agree, but again the exercise that's needed to get at that point might just be brainstorming near misses that anyone would be willing to shoehorn to the prediction--but doing that before the event.

It's very much like playing the game of how many 9/11 related things can be manipulated to result in the number 11. On another thread, I showed that you can pick any other target number and find as many 9/11 related things that yield that number. The problem is that the rules you're allowed to use are completely arbitrary, so you just massage the data until it hits your target. In the case of a prediction that can be taken loosely or metaphorically, you do the same thing. The data are just the events that happen, after which you arbitrarily construe them to fit the prediction.

Beth

12th October 2007, 09:04 PM

Just curious, if you could feel confident in the probability computation, how low would the probability need to be before you considered it possible that some unseen connection was responsible? How many events of what probability in what length of time would cause you to reconsider the possibility of something paranormal?

JoeTheJuggler

12th October 2007, 09:06 PM

There are lots of lotteries and lots and lots of drawings. In all those drawing, is there any statistical difference between the probability of picking the winning combination and the actual outcomes? If there is any ability to predict the future, why doesn't it show up in the winnings?

In fact, the solvency of lotteries pretty much depends on people not being able to beat the system by using paranormal means.

The same thing is true of the flourishing casino industry. If clairvoyance or telekinesis were a real phenomenon in the population, you'd expect their ability to calculate payouts to suffer.

On the other hand, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I think the argument that lotteries and casinos would fail if these claims were real is a pretty flimsy one.

It's better to keep the burden of proof on the extraordinary claim anyhow.

Rodney

13th October 2007, 05:02 PM

Unalienable

13th October 2007, 05:38 PM

Just curious, if you could feel confident in the probability computation, how low would the probability need to be before you considered it possible that some unseen connection was responsible?

I would want to see a positively enormous confidence to believe what I was seeing. Something on the order of a 99.9% confidence, and then another 99.9% confidence, preferably conducted by completely different people.

Even having that, I still wouldn't be completely satisfied. I see at least three places where human bias could influence the results:

(1) The computation of p is not an exact science. And if we set it too low, we detect a phenomenon where none actually exists. It's hard to answer questions like "what are the odds that I hit a large animal with my car?" and the best you can do is come up with a gross estimate.

(2) The dreamer may be in a position to make the dream come true, either subconsciously or intentionally. E.g., a guy says "I dreamt that I will break up with my girlfriend." And then, exactly as predicted, he does. This is not paranormal predictive powers, as this is something that people are expected to predict. Even for some ghastly dream like cutting your finger or driving into a deer, if one was sufficiently derranged they could engineer that scenario on purpose.

(3) The interpretation of which events fall within the umbrella. An event that sounds very clear-cut, like "hitting a large animal with my automobile", reminds me a little bit of baseball rules. The car has to make contact with the beast, either head-on collision, or graze it from the side, or something. But if it misses by a quarter of an inch, it doesn't count. Baseball needs referees, but where is our referee here? And who's going to believe a scientific study with referees (judges) involved anyhow?

The more I think about my method, the more I hate this entire approach. I still think it's a reasonable approach, the best I can imagine, but I just can't think of any good way to eliminate the possibility of human bias.

How many events of what probability in what length of time would cause you to reconsider the possibility of something paranormal?

There's a wide set of possible ways it could play out. Even dreaming of mundane and predictable things like "The Yankees will win a game in extra innings" could be highly impressive if it was done with incredible precision, but if they are dreaming of outrageous things like "a meteor hits my house" then they could be dead wrong 99% of the time and be equally as impressive.

If you are curious how the math actually works, you are asking "how often would somebody be 'this lucky' through chance?" And how do you define the phrase 'this lucky'? One method is to view it as a gambling simulation, where each day the person bets $1 that his or her prediction will come true that day, and they get paid off at fair odds when they are right. We give them an arbitrary amount of time, e.g. 365 days, to be right or wrong. Therefore a set of good dream predictions would end this game with some large score, which would be used as the benchmark. We want to know, what are the chances that you are as successful as this benchmark by chance? You can compute this by computer simulation, or the old fashoined way, with chalk & blackboard.

Just for fun, I took the numbers that I plucked out of thin air on my previous post and analyzed them by this criteria. I picked the numbers intentionally to look like there is probably a real phenomenon happening, even making one of the successful hits a p value of 0.000017 (that's 58,824 to 1 against!) and having it come true on the 47th day. However, after doing the math, I found my hypothetical data would only represent a 360:1 confidence. That's pretty good, but less than 99.9%, and also less than one might believe by a visual inspection of the data.

Dan O.

13th October 2007, 11:47 PM

Based on the results of the PEAR and Ganzfeld experiments, only a relatively minor difference between the probability of picking the winning combinations and the actual outcomes would be expected. Do you have evidence that is not occurring?

You call "a successful hit rate of 38% when 25% was expected by chance" a minor difference? Granted, Randi would have to be in a very generous mood to accept this expected rate for an MDC challenge given the time it would take to complete the required number of trials. But if you applied this kind of success rate to all the people picking balls for the lotteries, the payoffs would far exceed expectations and investigations for cheating would be called for.

JoeTheJuggler

14th October 2007, 04:04 PM

(3) The interpretation of which events fall within the umbrella. An event that sounds very clear-cut, like "hitting a large animal with my automobile", reminds me a little bit of baseball rules. The car has to make contact with the beast, either head-on collision, or graze it from the side, or something. But if it misses by a quarter of an inch, it doesn't count. Baseball needs referees, but where is our referee here? And who's going to believe a scientific study with referees (judges) involved anyhow?

It sounds like now you're talking about only allowing the events that were actually predicted into the umbrella. If the prediction is "hitting a large animal with my automobile" for instance, you wouldn't count near misses (slam on the brakes, but don't hit it), or the event happening to another person (not "me" and not "my" car), and not metaphorical interpretations, then I'd accept the methodology.

Once you start allowing things that were NOT predicted (that are contrary to the prediction as stated), then my earlier objections hold.

So what this means is even if the magic happens in a non-verbal or even semi-verbal way, it's up to the claimant to verbalize the prediction in a real statement or description. I do believe this should be required--it can't be a series of vague impressions or images like they do in these remote viewing things because then we're back a "prediction" that is only a prediction in hindsight.

The difficulty in calculating probabilities is another issue, but I think a far less important one. This issue hinges, I think, on what the claim is.

We recently had ferj claiming 90-95% success rate, and Aeia claiming 100% success rate with psychic predictions (not the dream variety, though). If the person is a believer, they're most likely suffering from extreme confirmation bias, and they'll claim a high enough success rate that even predicting relatively high-probability events (like baseball scores) would be astonishing at those rates. The most knowledgeable baseball fan couldn't come near that kind of accuracy.

For real world events (hitting a deer with your car within some time frame, for example), the probabilities are so low, that I'd just call them 1 in a million events and go from there.

If the claim doesn't include repeatability, then it's not testable at all. With 6.7 billion people on the planet, even 1 in a million events happen in large numbers every day. So a one-time-only hit means nothing at all.

Unalienable

14th October 2007, 04:13 PM

You call "a successful hit rate of 38% when 25% was expected by chance" a minor difference?
Depends. Out of 20 trials, it's meaningless. Out of 100 trials, it's a head-turner. Out of 3,145 tests it's incredible.

I just read up on the Ganzfeld experiments (having not known much about it) and I read the one meta-study showed that between 1974 and 2004, 88 ganzfeld experiments were done, reporting 1,008 hits in 3,145 tests. Wow! I did the math, and that's positively incredible.

I use "incredible" in the literal sense here. It's not credible. Even though that's only 32% compared to 25%, out of 3000+ experiments it's almost impossible to attribute that to chance.

Critics of the Ganzfeld experiment point to some real flaws. Some of these experiments apparently were not double-blind. The randomization process was fishy. Sometimes it was possible to hear between the two rooms. There were even accusations of throwing out some trials (based on some flimsy reasoning, no doubt), and wouldn't you know it, they only threw out trials which would counter their thesis.

So if somebody is to take this stuff seriously, redesign the protocol so it's watertight and give it another run. By my figuring, the correct figure would be 40 right out of 100 to achieve 99.9% confidence. But if the phenomenon is more elusive than that (and even its proponents say that it is) then they could try to demonstrate 157 right out of 500 (that's 31.4%). If the phenomenon is weaker than that, then I'd accept 295 out of 1000 (29.5%).

I'm not plucking those figures out of thin air, that's what a 99.9% confidence really looks like.

JoeTheJuggler

14th October 2007, 04:35 PM

Depends. Out of 20 trials, it's meaningless. Out of 100 trials, it's a head-turner. Out of 3,145 tests it's incredible.
It was a meta-analysis of plenty enough trials, but. . . .

As mentioned above, there were problems with the original ganzfeld experiments involving sensory leakage and randomization procedures. There were other problems, as well. Only fifteen of the studies appeared in refereed journals; twenty were abstracts of papers delivered at meetings of the Parapsychological Association; 5 were published monographs; and two were undergraduate honors theses in biology. In 1981 or 1982, Honorton sent all the reported studies to Hyman who proceeded to do a meta-analysis of them. Hyman concluded that the data did not warrant belief in psi, primarily because of many flaws he found in the experiments themselves. He found three types of flaws: (1) security flaws (sensory leakage; information could have been transferred by experimenters to receivers by talking in the hallway or inadvertently communicating information during the judging phase); (2) statistical flaws; and (3) procedural flaws (randomization problems; documentation problems). He rejected twenty studies as being fatally flawed. That amounted to about half the database.
From Skeptic's Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html)

PEAR had its own problems, and I don't think they ever claimed differences more than a little under 51% when 50% is expected by chance. (Skeptic's Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/pear.html) again.)

Bri

14th October 2007, 06:33 PM

I don't know that I've ever heard anyone making such a "prediction". I'd be inclined to say that it's not a prediction because there is no statement of what will happen.

I've never heard of anyone making such a prediction either, but it goes towards your point about whether a vague prediction is still a prediction. In this case, it is a statement of what will happen, but without any specifics.

Something really unusual is a really broad net, though "in the next 5 minutes" is an extremely narrow one. It sounds to me like someone making a bet when there's little cost for losing but a potential bonanza for a long-odds win.

How about "something really REALLY unusual, so unusual that the chances of it happening are one in a million or less?" The point is that if the odds are low enough then it becomes an extremely narrow net. Plus, a short time frame would narrow the net further. My hypothetical also had the person making such statements repeatedly, and an extremely unusual event occurring each time within the given timeframe. My point is that even if you don't call it a "prediction" because you can't tell exactly what the event will be, it might still be extremely interesting.

I agree, but again the exercise that's needed to get at that point might just be brainstorming near misses that anyone would be willing to shoehorn to the prediction--but doing that before the event.

The score might be particularly useful for an events that has already occurred that is claimed to be a "hit" to a prior prediction. You could then show that it scored low because the interpretation of the prediction was such that it could include nearly any event that followed, or that the event itself wasn't particularly rare and would likely have occurred anyway within the given time frame.

-Bri

Bri

14th October 2007, 06:37 PM

Just curious, if you could feel confident in the probability computation, how low would the probability need to be before you considered it possible that some unseen connection was responsible? How many events of what probability in what length of time would cause you to reconsider the possibility of something paranormal?

Regardless of the probabilities and number of events, there would still be the possibility of something paranormal.

Using the formula one would expect a 0.5 for a completely random guess of a random event. I would consider a score of 9.0 or higher to be interesting, but only if the results could be repeated many times and keeping in mind the subjective nature of the "closeness" (C) variable and the difficulty calculating the "probability" (P) variable.

-Bri

Dan O.

14th October 2007, 08:14 PM

There is an easy way to negate the subjectiveness of the measurements. If the person measuring the occurrences of the events is unaware of the predictions, there cannot be a bias with regard to the prediction of the event. To run a study this way would require a large list of possible events and a very long run time. However, it would be easy to include many subjects making predictions.

Bri

14th October 2007, 08:31 PM

arthwollipot

15th October 2007, 12:59 AM

Yes, dreams predict the future. :)

My father has told me of dreams of his that have come true.

It's true.

Well, I'm convinced!

:rolleyes:

Beth

15th October 2007, 07:26 AM

Regardless of the probabilities and number of events, there would still be the possibility of something paranormal.

Using the formula one would expect a 0.5 for a completely random guess of a random event. I would consider a score of 9.0 or higher to be interesting, but only if the results could be repeated many times and keeping in mind the subjective nature of the "closeness" (C) variable and the difficulty calculating the "probability" (P) variable.

-Bri

Yes, I understand that the possibility always exists. I'm sorry, I've apparently phrased my question clumsily as no one has answered the question I was trying to ask.

A lot of what people term paranormal experiences are simply not repeatable. They are odd things that occur, like dreaming of hitting a deer and then having that event occur a few days later. It's relatively easy to dismiss a single occurrance as coincidence. You could make a rough estimate of the probability of such a dream coming true by considering how often you dream of such things and what the probability of hitting a deer it and computing the probability that both things occurred in a relatively short time period in the correct order. Regardless of what the probability is, any single event can be assumed to be simply coincidence. A pattern requires multiple similar events.

Now, let me try to rephrase my question. How many such experiences would it take before you re-evaluated your current assessment of the probability (or possibility) of something paranormal having occurred? How low does the probability of your own experiences have to go before you are willing to reassess the probability of something paranormal having occurred.

NobbyNobbs

15th October 2007, 07:56 AM

Mr. Scott

15th October 2007, 11:39 AM

How many such experiences would it take before you re-evaluated your current assessment of the probability (or possibility) of something paranormal having occurred? How low does the probability of your own experiences have to go before you are willing to reassess the probability of something paranormal having occurred.

This parses as a rhetorical question, which may be why no one has jumped to answer it.

A re-evaluation of this sort is necessarily emotional -- a "gut" thing. This is where so many people go wrong. One time a dream of a deer is followed by a near-miss in the next month would make a staunch believer of the average person. Intuition leads us astray.

That being said, it might take about three times where a prophetic dream literally but uselessly came true in a short time before I became a believer. If it came true usefully it might take two times, depending on the circumstances.

It's important to me that a supernatural effect be useful to be believed, because usefulness is, in my opinion, a significant clue of something's reality. A phenomenon that has no use but to give us the willies is not likely to be real. I know there are skeptics who disagree with me on this, but it's been a valuable skeptical tool for me. For example, bending metal with your mind would obviously be a useful ability. To date, it's never been used for anything but to con people into believing that people can bend metal with their mind.

UPDATE:

It's been a week and a day, and not even a close encounter. No live deer has been spotted. A question for you, Beth, along similar lines. How long will you wait until you chucked a dream as non-prophetic?

Beth

15th October 2007, 11:51 AM

It's been a week and a day, and not even a close encounter. No live deer has been spotted. A question for you, Beth, along similar lines. How long will you wait until you chucked a dream as non-prophetic?

Depends on the dream. For example, a dream that involved a particular car you owned would have to be discarded when you no longer own that car.

JoeTheJuggler

15th October 2007, 11:56 AM

A lot of what people term paranormal experiences are simply not repeatable. They are odd things that occur, like dreaming of hitting a deer and then having that event occur a few days later. It's relatively easy to dismiss a single occurrance as coincidence. You could make a rough estimate of the probability of such a dream coming true by considering how often you dream of such things and what the probability of hitting a deer it and computing the probability that both things occurred in a relatively short time period in the correct order. Regardless of what the probability is, any single event can be assumed to be simply coincidence. A pattern requires multiple similar events.

Well said. Especially the part I bolded.

Now, let me try to rephrase my question. How many such experiences would it take before you re-evaluated your current assessment of the probability (or possibility) of something paranormal having occurred? How low does the probability of your own experiences have to go before you are willing to reassess the probability of something paranormal having occurred.
I'm a materialist myself, so I never make a paranormal assumption to begin with. In other words, in deciding whether a phenomenon exists (leaving aside the "paranormal" explanation), the burden of proof is proving the phenomenon. The default position is that there's nothing there.

In the context of trying to determine whether a phenomenon exists (because I am open to the possibility of precognitive dreams, though if they exist, I'd assume a natural explanation as opposed to a supernatural one), for long odds predictions of real world events, I would dismiss any one-for-one as a coincidence, but a two for two by the same person would make me sit up and take notice.

(Again, I am not allowing retrofitting and shoehorning of near misses--but a prediction where you really can identify the event before the event happens, and then it happens.)

When I say a "two for two" though, I'm counting on some way of reporting any other predictions the individual has made that didn't hit. In other words, someone who makes and reliably records a bazillion predictions can't just pick out the two hits and say he was two for two.

It seems obvious, but plenty of people do just that. There's some preacher who claims he predicted 9/11 in one of his sermons. If you watch the video (and I'm assuming it can be verified to have been made pre-9/11), it does sound like he's predicting a large terrorist strike on U.S. soil sometime soon. On the other hand, he probably has been saying something similar for many years. I'd take that as a "one for a bazillion" track record, but believers will just look at the one video clip and claim an amazing hit.

Mr. Scott

15th October 2007, 12:27 PM

Depends on the dream. For example, a dream that involved a particular car you owned would have to be discarded when you no longer own that car.

Then, you basically give infinite leeway of time frame. If I own and use the car forever then the prophesy stays valid forever?

Beth

15th October 2007, 01:14 PM

Then, you basically give infinite leeway of time frame. If I own and use the car forever then the prophesy stays valid forever?

Cars don't last forever, so neither would the premonition. Cars wear out or break down and get traded in for another, they get totaled in an accident, etc. As I said, depends on the details of the dream. For some dreams, I suppose the event might occur at any point in the future but that would be a very vague dream without much in the way of specific details. Most will have some details that can be used to specify a time frame within which the dream might occur.

Bri

15th October 2007, 01:30 PM

Depends on the dream. For example, a dream that involved a particular car you owned would have to be discarded when you no longer own that car.

Then you are of the belief that a dream must come to fruition in exactly the way way you saw it before you would count it as paranormal? Otherwise, why would it have to be the same car?

-Bri

Spektator

15th October 2007, 01:39 PM

I do not believe in precognitive dreams, but here's a chance to test one of mine:

Last night I dreamed very vividly that my clock radio came on (as it does every weekday morning) at seven a.m. and I heard the announcer say, "It's Friday, October 19, and this is Morning Edition. This is Steve Inskeep reporting. Late last night tragedy took the life of a leading contender for the Presidency. We'll have details later."

It made me so angry that NPR was pulling the "Film at 11" trick that I woke up, only to find that the time was 6:40, the radio had not yet come on, and I have a whole week of work ahead of me until Friday and the weekend.

We shall see. My personal prediciton: No loss of a potential Presidential candidate late Thursday night.

Beth

15th October 2007, 02:56 PM

Then you are of the belief that a dream must come to fruition in exactly the way way you saw it before you would count it as paranormal? Otherwise, why would it have to be the same car?

-Bri Short answer: Yes

However, not all details are clear in a dream, many things may be hazy. If the car you are in is not clearly detailed, then I think which car it is wouldn't matter. But if it is a known car, then yes, I think it does.

Bri

15th October 2007, 03:06 PM

Beth

15th October 2007, 03:28 PM

Then if you had a dream that you hit a deer, hitting an elk wouldn't count as far as you're concerned? Nor would nearly missing a deer, correct? Nor would someone else close to you hitting the deer? Those would all be complete misses?

And if there is no detail that would impose a time limit, you would still count it a hit even if you hit a deer 20 years later?

-Bri

I wouldn't be able to tell a deer from an elk unless they were appropriately labeled in the zoo, so yes, since I couldn't tell them apart I would count either of them as a hit. As far as the time limit goes, there are always limitations of some kind or another. If nothing else, there are limits to the ability to recall the dream. After 20 years, I doubt I would still remember that I'd ever had such a dream, much less recall if it matched in detail.

Mr. Scott

15th October 2007, 05:59 PM

Cars don't last forever, so neither would the premonition. Cars wear out or break down and get traded in for another, they get totaled in an accident, etc. As I said, depends on the details of the dream. For some dreams, I suppose the event might occur at any point in the future but that would be a very vague dream without much in the way of specific details. Most will have some details that can be used to specify a time frame within which the dream might occur.

Beth, I was asking about time, not about details like which car. You're saying that prophetic dreams will come true. Period. Even if it takes a million years. This makes the probabilty of fulfilment approach one even without metaphysics. Why would you believe such a thing? How are all these billions ofdreams organized, sorted, and queued up for fulfillment? You are hypothesizing an infinitely complex mechanism, you realize? And therefore one wth infinitesimal probability. Isn't delusion more probable?

Bri

15th October 2007, 06:00 PM

Beth,

You didn't exactly answer the questions, did you?

The question wasn't whether you know the difference between a deer and an elk, but if you dreamed that you hit a deer, and then later hit an elk if you would count it as a hit.

The question wasn't whether you'd remember the dream in 20 years, it was whether you would consider it a hit if you did remember it 20 years later.

-Bri

Dan O.

15th October 2007, 06:41 PM

Dan O.:

The question is how "close" the event that actually occurred is to the predicted event. I'm not sure there is any way to determine the value for this measurement without knowing the prediction, nor is there any way to avoid subjectiveness of that measurement. Unless maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

-Bri

You don't need to measure how close the event is to the prediction. You need a pre-defined list of all events that will be considered. The predictor picks events from that list, a geographic region from another list, the beginning and ending time for the prediction and the number of points to be wagered on that prediction. If the predictor wants to spread the prediction to similar events they can wager more points on other events in the list or different geographic regions or time frames. Each predictor would have a fixed number of points to wager during the trial.

The list of events could be compiled from prior news reports. Events could be further classified by size or severity. For each event, the probability for that event to occur in each area would need to be calculated. During the trial, the recorders would note any event from the list that occurs and record the time and location of the event.

Only after a sufficient time has elapsed where it is known that all of a days events have been recorded would a comparison be made between the predicted events and any actual events.

Beth

15th October 2007, 06:47 PM

Beth, I was asking about time, not about details like which car. You're saying that prophetic dreams will come true. Period.
No. Stop right there. Not what I said. Not what I meant. Not what I believe. Sorry if you misunderstood me.

Beth,

You didn't exactly answer the questions, did you? Sorry. I thought I had.

The question wasn't whether you know the difference between a deer and an elk, but if you dreamed that you hit a deer, and then later hit an elk if you would count it as a hit. I did answer that. I said yes, I would. If I can't tell the difference between them, how would I know that what I dreamed was a deer and not an elk?

The question wasn't whether you'd remember the dream in 20 years, it was whether you would consider it a hit if you did remember it 20 years later. As I said at the beginning, it would depend. Since I've never had a dream that I remember that came true 20 years later, I can't say with certainty how I would react. But if I had a dream when I was 25 about something that would occur on my 45th birthday, and then it did - yes, I would consider that a hit. Wouldn't you?

JoeTheJuggler

15th October 2007, 07:38 PM

No. Stop right there. Not what I said. Not what I meant. Not what I believe. Sorry if you misunderstood me.

Best I can tell, Scott, there is no one in this discussion who believes in precognitive dreams. (Which is why I find it so refreshing!) I think we're just discussing methodology of how a test could be devised.

Dan O., your idea sounds very similar to Unalienable's. The main difference is that I think you're saying it's up to the predictor to define which near misses should be counted. I have no problem with that idea. In a way, it's similar to what I said about interpreting a dream. In my mind, the definition of which events would could IS the actual prediction.

If it's not the predictor who defines the "umbrella" then the process seems arbitrary, and we'd be open to an event that wasn't in the umbrella that occurs and is just as valid a near miss as some things that were in the umbrella.

The only caveat is what Beth said a while back--the predictor should be made aware that the broader the definition of the prediction, the higher the probability of a hit will be. And again, it doesn't matter if the event that happens is the one that's really spot-on, the probability you use is the probability of anything in the entire umbrella. As Beth said, it's like drawing a circle on the wall that covers 25% of the wall's area before you shoot. (Or my refinement of that analogy: it's drawing a whole bunch of circles of various sizes that ends up covering 25% of the wall's area. Even if the shot hits a small circle, the probability is still 1:4.)

Bri

15th October 2007, 07:41 PM

I did answer that. I said yes, I would. If I can't tell the difference between them, how would I know that what I dreamed was a deer and not an elk?

I didn't ask if you could tell the difference between a deer and an elk. Let me rephrase: Someone who knows the difference between a deer and an elk dreams that they hit a deer with his car. Later that day, he hits an elk with his car. Do you consider the dream to be predictive of the event?

As I said at the beginning, it would depend. Since I've never had a dream that I remember that came true 20 years later, I can't say with certainty how I would react. But if I had a dream when I was 25 about something that would occur on my 45th birthday, and then it did - yes, I would consider that a hit. Wouldn't you?

Again, not my question. Let me rephrase: Someone dreams that he will hit a deer with his car. 20 years later, he hits a deer with his car. Did the dream predict the event?

-Bri

JoeTheJuggler

15th October 2007, 07:45 PM

But if I had a dream when I was 25 about something that would occur on my 45th birthday, and then it did - yes, I would consider that a hit. Wouldn't you?

I have two observations on the time frame:

1) The longer the allowed time frame (which really must be defined at the time of prediction) the higher the probability of the event. In a hypothetical infinity of time, all events will happen. So with no defined end-point, the exercise is pointless because the event can be considered certain. (At the opposite extreme is a prediction like the one Spektator just gave. If the event happens but on any date other than this Friday, it's a miss. If it happens this Friday, it's an extremely low probability hit.)

2) If we're still talking about a test, we'd need some realistic time frame. I don't think you could keep people interested in the study if there's nothing happening but you have to wait 10 years to know that the prediction is a miss.

I wonder how many believers are still as ardent in their beliefs for 10 years. . . .

Beth

15th October 2007, 07:55 PM

I didn't ask if you could tell the difference between a deer and an elk. Let me rephrase: Someone who knows the difference between a deer and an elk dreams that they hit a deer with his car. Later that day, he hits an elk with his car. Do you consider the dream to be predictive of the event?

Again, not my question. Let me rephrase: Someone dreams that he will hit a deer with his car. 20 years later, he hits a deer with his car. Did the dream predict the event?

-Bri

In both cases - in depends. I can imagine scenarios in which it could go either way.

Bri

15th October 2007, 08:06 PM

Beth, you said:

Depends on the dream. For example, a dream that involved a particular car you owned would have to be discarded when you no longer own that car.

I replied:

Then you are of the belief that a dream must come to fruition in exactly the way way you saw it before you would count it as paranormal? Otherwise, why would it have to be the same car?

You replied:

Short answer: Yes

However, not all details are clear in a dream, many things may be hazy. If the car you are in is not clearly detailed, then I think which car it is wouldn't matter. But if it is a known car, then yes, I think it does.

Now, you're saying:

In both cases - in depends. I can imagine scenarios in which it could go either way.

So, my question is why would the precise car matter when there are scenarios where the animal hit doesn't matter?

It seems as though the dream doesn't have to come into fruition the same way you saw it in the dream before you would count it as paranormal.

-Bri

solas

15th October 2007, 08:16 PM

Have you ever read a book thats not especially intriguing only to flip forward to near the end just to see how things have progressed? All you got to see are a few lines of a scenario, a description of a situation that bares no resemblance to anything you have knowledge of so far and because you haven't read all the way through to that point, have no way of knowing how the story developed. All you get is a peek of scene and a few lines of dialog. I would describe "Prophetic" dreams to be of a similar substance.
You might know one or two of the characters and place names from the beginning but you just don't know how the story unfolded.

if its interesting enough it might inspire you to return to the point you left and read through to see how it all ends.

In all areas concerning testing intelligent processes in nature, including those which relate to the human condition and the living relationship to it's surrounding environment, it is necessary to adjust scientific measurement according to the nature of the subject.
A linear model just cannot be applied to a subject that is nonlinear.

articulett

15th October 2007, 10:09 PM

Every 437nth dream will predict the future. But we never know when it has done so and we seldom remember it.

So say I.

Prove me wrong.

(Just practicing my woo speak...)

Carry on.

arthwollipot

15th October 2007, 11:43 PM

I had a dream that involved myself, Buddy Hackett, one other adult, and eight kids aged 12-14 working a complicated con to heist a brand-new canary yellow Hummer from two middle-aged women who were out tilling the field in their backyard.

I very much doubt it is a portend of the future.

I have had several dreams recently where I was being chased by a military organisation. Apparently I was some kind of resistance fighter - which is odd because I'm incredibly lazy and am not likely to make such an effort to annoy an invading army.

I very much doubt this is a portent of the future too.

Dan O.

15th October 2007, 11:56 PM

The only caveat is what Beth said a while back--the predictor should be made aware that the broader the definition of the prediction, the higher the probability of a hit will be. And again, it doesn't matter if the event that happens is the one that's really spot-on, the probability you use is the probability of anything in the entire umbrella. As Beth said, it's like drawing a circle on the wall that covers 25% of the wall's area before you shoot. (Or my refinement of that analogy: it's drawing a whole bunch of circles of various sizes that ends up covering 25% of the wall's area. Even if the shot hits a small circle, the probability is still 1:4.)

I would look at it more like placing chips on a roulette table. Each bet has a payoff based in it's probability. You can put all you chips on one number (a specific event, time and place) or spread them around. You only get paid on the numbers that actually hit and all the other bets are lost. If you have powers of prediction, you will end up with a higher payback than your total wager. On average over a sufficiently long trial, the total payback will equal the total wagers if there are no psychic predictions.

Beth

16th October 2007, 06:58 AM

Beth, you said:

I replied:

You replied:

Now, you're saying:

So, my question is why would the precise car matter when there are scenarios where the animal hit doesn't matter? Because dreams and dreamers differ in what details are remembered clearly and what is hazy. The precise car might matter while the animal does not in a dream I might have had because I would be able to distinguish between the cars but not between an Elk and a deer.

It seems as though the dream doesn't have to come into fruition the same way you saw it in the dream before you would count it as paranormal. As I've said repeatedly - it depends . By the way, I've been discussing counting the dream as coming true (a hit) versus not (a miss). I haven't said anything about whether I consider dreams that come true paranormal.

JoeTheJuggler

16th October 2007, 08:01 AM

I would look at it more like placing chips on a roulette table. Each bet has a payoff based in it's probability. You can put all you chips on one number (a specific event, time and place) or spread them around. You only get paid on the numbers that actually hit and all the other bets are lost. If you have powers of prediction, you will end up with a higher payback than your total wager. On average over a sufficiently long trial, the total payback will equal the total wagers if there are no psychic predictions.

Then I disagree with this method. The predictor isn't risking anything by making a great many bets. In roulette, for example, you're almost certain of a win if you put chips on all 36 numbers. People don't do that, because the odds are set up so that the house would come out ahead due to the certainty that you will lose on 35 of your bets. (This is ignoring the red and black stuff.)

If a predictor defines the dream as being the same as many different events, and one such event does hit, you can't "pay off" that hit at the odds of just predicting and getting that single event. The other events must have a "cost" associated with them. That's why Unalienable's idea of lumping all the things you'd accept as a hit, and calculating one probability is more right. (Read my post about the 1 million-sided die earlier in this thread.)

-------------

I still object to any set up that doesn't define a prediction or that allows multiple exclusively different predictions ahead of time. Again, if you don't know what event is supposed to happen until after it happens, it simply is not a prediction. If the claim is a blurry sort of glimpse into the future, then they should change their language and spell out exactly what they're claiming.

Can you imagine if scientific predictions were allowed this latitude? It's essentially saying we won't know which hypothesis we're testing until after the trial, which is very bad methodology.

solas

16th October 2007, 08:20 AM

Can you imagine if scientific predictions were allowed this latitude? It's essentially saying we won't know which hypothesis we're testing until after the trial, which is very bad methodology.
It's a process called M.P.C. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control) and its used to define parameters relating to nonlinear systems. Event horizons are effectively adjusted/manipulated to calculate other variables.

JoeTheJuggler

16th October 2007, 08:39 AM

It's a process called M.P.C. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control) and its used to define parameters relating to nonlinear systems. Event horizons are effectively adjusted/manipulated to calculate other variables.

Maybe I wasn't clear. By "scientific predictions" I mean hypothesis testing. MPC is a system of process control (like in chemical plants).

I do realize that a hypothesis can say this "or" that will happen, but that's not the same as saying mix chemical A and chemical B at such and such proportions and temperature and you'll either get chemical C or a horse. Events that are shoehorned to psychic prediction are of this nature. (The words can be taken figuratively, extremely literally, or even as "similar" classes to the things predicted.)

solas

16th October 2007, 08:50 AM

Maybe I wasn't clear. By "scientific predictions" I mean hypothesis testing. MPC is a system of process control (like in chemical plants).

I do realize that a hypothesis can say this "or" that will happen, but that's not the same as saying mix chemical A and chemical B at such and such proportions and temperature and you'll either get chemical C or a horse. Events that are shoehorned to psychic prediction are of this nature. (The words can be taken figuratively, extremely literally, or even as "similar" classes to the things predicted.)
I work in a chemical plant and we use nonlinear mpc on a daily basis. It is as you describe nothing more than 'hypothesis testing'. You may know the variables of A and C but you can only hypothesize as to what B is and you use that hypothesis to predict an outcome.

(I should really stress, the hypothesis is used as a formula in production management and not as formula for chemical processing :) )

JoeTheJuggler

16th October 2007, 09:19 AM

I think you're using "hypothesis testing" in a different way. You're in a plant, right, not a research facility? You make stuff. You don't get an end product of a journal article. That's what I mean by scientific hypothesis testing.

I'm pretty sure MPC is not a way of advancing science, but a way of controlling a production process. (I'm not up on nonlinear MPC, but isn't it an industrial-scale analog of a cook tasting what's in the pot and adding a bit more of this or adjusting the heat--as opposed to a cook that strictly follows a recipe? Or mixing paint to achieve a color match?)

solas

16th October 2007, 09:26 AM

The plant houses both the research facility and the production site. Yes we make stuff and yes we do get an end product but thats neither here nor there.

I might have come in a little late on my last post but I thought it was necessary to add that the hypothesis is used in production management and not in the actual process of mixing chemicals, thats a clinical process, linear system if you will..being precise is the name of the game so to speak.
In production management you're dealing with nonlinear variables, staff for example are not as reliable as chemical formulas, machinery can have unexpected downtime, variables such as product recall, market up or downturns can all affect production costs and quality and making concrete predictions based on these factors is not possible, so you have to hypothesize.

solas

16th October 2007, 09:45 AM

anyway, side from the technical jargon the point I am making is that given certain systems, parameters have to be adjustable to account for nonlinear dynamics at play, and that includes scientific fields of measurement.

Dan O.

16th October 2007, 10:07 AM

Then I disagree with this method. The predictor isn't risking anything by making a great many bets. In roulette, for example, you're almost certain of a win if you put chips on all 36 numbers. People don't do that, because the odds are set up so that the house would come out ahead due to the certainty that you will lose on 35 of your bets. (This is ignoring the red and black stuff.)

In roulette, the house advantage comes from the "0" and "00". If we eliminate those, every bet is fair. If you place the same bet on every number then you will win back 36 x your bet but will have placed 36 bets so you come out even every time.

In the prediction game, if we know the event is likely to occur 10 times over the entire trial period we would credit 0.1 times the wager each time the event occurs for a prediction that covers the whole trial time period. If however, the prediction is for one specific hour in a 2 year trial we would credit 1752 times the wager if the event occurred in that hour.

If everyone started out with an initial stake of 100 credits, they would have to earn 100,000 credits through prediction wagers (equivalent to 1000:1 odds) to pass the preliminary round and advance to the money round.

Beth

16th October 2007, 11:50 AM

So, my question is why would the precise car matter when there are scenarios where the animal hit doesn't matter? Because there are scenarios where the car would be clearly discernable and known to the dreamer, but the animal is not. There are also scenarios where the opposite is true, the animal is clearly discernable and identifiable, but the automobile is not. In that case, a 'hit' would have to include the correct animal while the car would not necessarily need to be the same.

It seems as though the dream doesn't have to come into fruition the same way you saw it in the dream before you would count it as paranormal. I was talking about the dream counting as a 'hit', not about whether such hits can be considered paranormal. That's another discussion entirely.

Bri

16th October 2007, 12:03 PM

Beth

16th October 2007, 12:14 PM

Beth,

OK then we can assume that your example where there was an implied time limit to the prediction because people don't keep their cars forever comes with the caveat that the car was actually discernible in the dream. Otherwise, there might be no time limit whatsoever, right?

-Bri

Yes, it was an example of an implied time limit due to a particular feature of the dream known to the dreamer. Yes, there might be no time limit beyond the memory capability of the dreamer. Of course, the longer the time period in which a hit might of occur the greater the probability that something will match sufficiently closely to be termed a hit.

JoeTheJuggler

16th October 2007, 12:40 PM

In the prediction game, if we know the event is likely to occur 10 times over the entire trial period we would credit 0.1 times the wager each time the event occurs for a prediction that covers the whole trial time period. If however, the prediction is for one specific hour in a 2 year trial we would credit 1752 times the wager if the event occurred in that hour.

If everyone started out with an initial stake of 100 credits, they would have to earn 100,000 credits through prediction wagers (equivalent to 1000:1 odds) to pass the preliminary round and advance to the money round.

OK--I totally misunderstood your roulette analogy. You're using it as an analogy to how we'd calculate probability based on the size of the time range.

I thought you were considering an umbrella thing again. (Like you dream of an event, and one hit is that it happens within a 1 day time range, another is that it will happen in a one week time range, etc. Then after the event occurs, you choose which "hypothesis" or prediction came closest and calculate the odds based on that one alone. So there's no "cost" to all the others that didn't happen.)

Dan O.

16th October 2007, 09:34 PM

JoeTheJuggler

16th October 2007, 10:55 PM

I think you are getting it. The predictor can still create an umbrella to cover a wider range. For instance, Placing one half the wager on a specific day and one forth of the wager on the days to either side. It all adds up to 1 wager but the payoff will vary based on which day the event hits.

So are you saying they should actually use the chips/wagering scheme instead of just calculating the probabilities? (I thought this was all just an analogy to help visualize that calculation). At least you make the misses cost something.

The main problem I have is that if the claim is a prediction and the prediction carries with it a time (like ferj's example of predicting that Saddam Hussein would be captured on a specific day), then other dates are actually misses. My endless litany: if you don't know what the prediction was until after the fact, then it's not a prediction. I realize with some predictions the date or time range is NOT necessarily part of the prediction, but for many it is.

<derail>I was recently debating with an member of a cult that had predicted a nuclear war by a certain date. When it didn't happen, he said the prophecy is still good, they were just a little off on the dates. I pointed out, in this case, the date is the prophecy. Otherwise you're just saying that a nuclear war could happen sometime.</derail>

If you count the different dates as alternate predictions (Unalienable's "umbrella"), then you have to lump them all together and calculate the probability of a hit anywhere in the range of dates given. Then, even if he was captured on the exact date predicted, the probability has to reflect the entire range that would have been considered a hit. (Or in your terms, he'd have had to put chips on all the dates he would consider a hit.)

Dan O.

16th October 2007, 11:41 PM

Sometimes the time span of the prediction has to be distributed in non-contigious ways. Say a dream involves an airline disaster at 11:59 on Sunday in December. You might cover this by betting from 11:57 to 12:01, both AM and PM, for both the local time of the event and the viewers time Each Sunday in the month. This is still only a 1 hour total time window so the multiplier of about 8760 (hours per year) would be applied the odds of an airline disaster during the year.

arthwollipot

16th October 2007, 11:53 PM

I would say that if the dream specifies something as precisely as 11:59, that suggests that the event should occur at 11:59, not at 11:57, or 11:58, or 12:01. However, the dream did not specify the date as precisely - only as "Sunday in December". That would mean that an event which occurred at 11:59 on Sunday 2nd December, or at 11:59 on Sunday 9th December, or at 11:59 on Sunday 16th December.

I agree with Beth here - if the dream makes a precise determination, about the time, or about the species of animal, or about the model of the vehicle - which can only be made if the dreamer has the knowledge to make such a prediction - then any event that does not fit the precise date/species/vehicle does not count as a hit.

Beth's dream might involve only a "deer-like animal" and a "silver 1994 Ford Fairmont". Any deer-like animal would count as a hit (no pun intended), but some other model of car would count as a miss.

My dream might involve a "3-year old pretty-faced wallaby" and a "blue sedan". Any model of blue sedan would count as a hit, but a 5-year old northern nail-tail wallaby would count as a miss.

Dan O.

17th October 2007, 02:16 AM

Only you would know how your own dreams should be interpreted. But an exact time reference in a dream could be derived from what your own clock says at the time you witness or feel the event or it could come from the time reported in the press after the event. Not everybody keeps their clocks synchronized so there could be some variation. It's up to the predictor to account for such variations.

arthwollipot

17th October 2007, 02:23 AM

I normally find that my dreams are so completely random that my conscious mind just can't process the memory. Occasionally they get periods of rationality, but I can never relate them to my waking life.

latent aaaack

17th October 2007, 06:11 AM

New test: a couple months ago I dreamt that McCain will win the Republican nomination. I consider that very unlikely given current polls but it'll only be a few months before that may be settled. Also the democratic nominee was Obama which also seems unlikely against the chances of Clinton winning it.

Bri

17th October 2007, 06:13 AM

Of course, the longer the time period in which a hit might of occur the greater the probability that something will match sufficiently closely to be termed a hit.

Yes, I think that was Mr. Scott's point when he wrote:

A question for you, Beth, along similar lines. How long will you wait until you chucked a dream as non-prophetic?

Any dream with no time limit practically guarantees a "hit."

-Bri

Rodney

17th October 2007, 06:31 AM

The main problem I have is that if the claim is a prediction and the prediction carries with it a time (like ferj's example of predicting that Saddam Hussein would be captured on a specific day) . . .

Speaking of which: "At a party Saturday night in Washington, NBC Meet the Press host Tim Russert bumped into an unusually upbeat George Tenet. He told the CIA director that he had dreamt that Saddam Hussein had been captured."

"'Have a nice holiday,' Tenet said, knowing then what the country would learn in nine hours: The Iraqi dictator had been caught."
See http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+TV+networks+move+quickly+on+Saddam+news&expire=&urlID=8532095&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fworld%2 Firaq%2F2003-12-14-saddam-tv-coverage_x.htm&partnerID=1660

JoeTheJuggler

17th October 2007, 10:03 AM

Only you would know how your own dreams should be interpreted.

Yes. I think the thing that should be tested is what the person claims is the prediction rather than the dream itself. If they can't say what it means until after the fact, then it's not a prediction, or--to use the thread title's wording--then the dream did not predict the future.

You calculate the probability of the event, taking into account the time frame. (Discontinuous is fine--you still have to count it all in figuring the probability.) I'd throw out any prediction that doesn't have a time frame as being meaningless.

Then, in order to get any confidence in your results, you do need more than one prediction to test. That is, you really can't say anything about the results if the sample size is one.

At extremely long odds (if someone had predicted O.J. Simpson would be arrested on the date he was arrested in Las Vegas for 11 felony counts including armed robbery and kidnapping, for example), 2 hits out of 2 attempts would convince me that it wasn't a coincidence.

Dan O.

17th October 2007, 10:38 AM

I would follow the JREF model. You need to hit 1000:1 to get past the preliminary. If you do it with everything in a single wager on long shot with 1000:1 odds that's fine. You could also reach that threshold with a series of 10 consecutive 2:1 wagers or a scattering of 100 different wagers at 100,000:1 odds.

The preliminary is just to weed out the riffraff so we can concentrate on the potential candidates. 1 in a thousand applicants should be able to pass the preliminary on chance alone. Any true psychic would be able to just waltz through. Once through the preliminary, the real test begins with probably much longer odds like a million to 1. Again, this would be no sweat for a real psychic.

Unalienable

17th October 2007, 02:00 PM

So are you saying they should actually use the chips/wagering scheme instead of just calculating the probabilities? (I thought this was all just an analogy to help visualize that calculation).
There are several methods to figure out the odds of something happening and the "casino simulation" is one of them. If you do it right, the method of achieving the answer doesn't matter, you get the same answer either way.

Spektator

19th October 2007, 07:51 AM

Mr. Scott

19th October 2007, 01:16 PM

My vivid dream earlier in the week of waking up this morning to hear news of a tragedy that took the life of a Presidential contender did not come true. On the other hand, I didn't think it would, so maybe I foresaw the non-event in the future. That would make me, what, a negapsychic?

You will find woos who interpret a hit rate significantly worse then chance as evidence ESP though working in reverse in that individual at that moment (another manifestation of rubber duck syndrome). It's true! :)

Spektator

19th October 2007, 01:33 PM

You will find woos who interpret a hit rate significantly worse then chance as evidence ESP though working in reverse in that individual at that moment (another manifestation of rubber duck syndrome). It's true! :)

Yes, I know of the phenomenon, but I haven't heard of "rubber duck syndrome". Pray elucidate--sounds intriguing!

Mr. Scott

19th October 2007, 01:54 PM

Yes, I know of the phenomenon, but I haven't heard of "rubber duck syndrome". Pray elucidate--sounds intriguing!

It's someting I think Randi coined, in which woos or their beliefs keep popping up to the surface no matter how hard soundly they have been sunk.

Unalienable

19th October 2007, 01:57 PM

Yes, I know of the phenomenon, but I haven't heard of "rubber duck syndrome". Pray elucidate--sounds intriguing!

I think this is what he was referring to.

From The Skeptic Volume 18 #2:

The unsinkable-rubber-duck syndrome:

After more than two decades of investigation by skeptical inquirers, we are continually astonished by the fact that no matter how often we criticize paranormal belief claims, they still persist. Indeed, even if they are thoroughly examined and refuted in one age, they seem to re-emerge within the next and people will continue to believe them in spite of evidence to the contrary. This is what I have called the unsinkable rubber duck syndrome. No doubt many are familiar with a carnival shooting gallery, where customers are induced to shoot down moving ducks. Here, even if the ducks are successfully knocked down, they pop right back up again.
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/1998/2.pdf

ronananderson

29th February 2008, 07:02 AM

Hi folks, im new to the jref, but am glad to have found the one topic that has brought me here , unfortunately it appears i will find no answers here soon.two cases spring to my mind that would be worth investigating further.The Aberfan mining disaster in wales was apparently preceded by hundreds of premonitive(is that a word) dreams.it could of course be mass 'shoehorning' and selective memory, but is worth reading into.Then there is one case i heard about many years ago, about a man writing a best selling book in the year 1910.it was based on a dream of his, wherein the worlds largest ship, crashes on her maiden voyage into an iceberg.the ships name is the 'Titan'.Im sorry i cant be specific about the title at the moment, but will look into it, so please don't barrage me with criticism just yet, i have come here for answers not to disseminate flim-flam.

Bri

29th February 2008, 07:12 AM

Welcome to JREF, ronananderson!

Is there any actual concrete evidence that even one person had a dream about a mining disaster before it occurred? Did someone write it down or post it somewhere before the event occurred?

-Bri

latent aaaack

29th February 2008, 07:21 AM

Rodney

29th February 2008, 09:12 AM

Is there any actual concrete evidence that even one person had a dream about a mining disaster before it occurred?
Here are four dreams regarding the October 21, 1966 Aberfan, Wales coal mining waste collapse, three of which were said to have been reported before it occurred:

(1) "In early October 1966, a ten-year-old Welsh schoolgirl named Eryl Mai Jones had something important to tell her mother.

"Mummy," she said, "I'm not afraid to die."

"You're too young to be talking about dying," her mother said. "Do you want a lollipop?"

On October 20, Eryl Mai woke up after having a memorable dream.

"Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night," she said.

"Darling, I've no time now. Tell me again later."

"No, Mummy, you must listen," she said. "I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.,,

"Her mother thought nothing more about the dream. After all, they lived in Aberfan, Wales, a poor coal-mining town. Perched high on a hill overlooking Aberfan was a coal tip, where waste from the mining process was dumped. The Aberfan coal tip caused many residents of the town to worry for their safety. So when Eryl Mai's mother heard her dream, she may have concluded that her fear of the ever-present coal tip had provoked it.

"Eryl Mai went off to Pantglas Junior School that day as usual. Nothing unusual happened. The next day, Friday, October 21, she did the same. But at 9:15 that morning, the coal tip gave way, sending tons of coal sludge, water, and boulders to the village below. The avalanche mowed down everything in its path, including stone houses and trees, and swept toward the Pantglas School, where it crushed the back of the school.

"In all, 144 people were killed, most of them children at the school. Eryl Mai Jones was one of the victims." See http://www.jamesmdeem.com/timestory1.htm

(2) "One woman, Carolyn Miller, had a vision of the disaster on the evening of October 20. In her mind she saw an old school house nestling in a valley, then a Welsh miner, then an avalanche of coal hurtling down a Mountainside. At the bottom of this mountain of hurtling coal was a little boy with a long fringe looking absolutely terrified to death. Then for a while I "saw" rescue operations taking place. I had an impression that the little boy was left behind and saved. He looked so grief-stricken. I could never forget him, and also with him was one of the rescue workers wearing an unusual peaked cap."

"She met with some women from her church that night and shared her vision with them. She also told a neighbor the next morning at 8:30 what she had seen. She was stunned to hear about the disaster, but even stranger is what she saw while watching television two days later. That night she was watching a program about the Aberfan tragedy when she saw both the terrified boy from her vision and the rescuer." See again http://www.jamesmdeem.com/timestory1.htm

(3) "Another precognitive experience related to Aberfan was related by Mary Hennessy. She wrote [psychiatrist] Dr. [John] Barker to say that she had dreamed about Aberfan the night before the tragedy. In her dream, there were a lot of children in two rooms. Eventually, they moved to a larger room, where they seemed to be playing in small groups.

"At the end of the room there were long pieces of wood or wooden bars. The children were trying somehow to get over the top or through the bars. I tried to warn someone by calling out, but before I could do so one little child just slipped out of sight. I myself was ... watching from the corridor. The next thing in my dream was hundreds of people all running to the same place. The look on people's faces were terrible. Some were crying and others holding handkerchiefs to their faces. It frightened me so much that it woke me up.

"The dream was so vivid and terrifying she was worried that it meant harm would come to her two young grandchildren. Early the next morning, she called her son and daughter-in-law at 8:45 and explained her dream.

"I am very worried because the dream was about children. It makes me think about the girls," she said, referring to her granddaughters. "I know I dreamed about schoolchildren, but just take special care of them, please?" See again http://www.jamesmdeem.com/timestory1.htm

(4) "When I was 8 years old I awoke in the middle of the night screaming. My father came and got me and attempted to calm me down. I yelled that I was being buried alive. I remember seeing up through the dirt and seeing parallel lines coming through the dirt. Pop got me up and walked me around the house. I was terrified and sweating. I tried to show him the huge piles of dirt in the living room but he showed me they were just pieces of furniture. After awhile I calmed down and he took me back to bed. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the only time in my life that I felt pure panic. It was 1966.

"Fast-forward 40 years or so…I was watching a documentary on the History Channel which covered the Aberfan school mudslide disaster in Wales of 1966. At 9:15 in the morning of a Friday an enormous heap of coal mine slag (dirt, shale, rubble) broke free and slid down a steep hillside, burying houses and an elementary school. 144 people were killed including 116 children, most between the ages of 7 and 10 years old. As I watched I got chills. Then a picture was shown of the aftermath at the school, buried, and with many telephone poles sticking down through the pile, roughly parallel to each other. I remember thinking ‘oh my God…that’s what the dream was’ . . .

"Note: (9:15am Wales time would have been the middle of the night where I grew up in Illinois, USA)." See http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t67474.html

Did someone write it down or post it somewhere before the event occurred?-Bri
I don't know, but let's suppose Carolyn Miller, Mary Hennessy, or someone else produces a diary dated October 21, 1966 with the dream of the disaster recorded there. Would you accept that as proof? If not, what would you accept as proof?

Showmeproof

29th February 2008, 09:42 AM

Dreams are just a manifestation of any problem a person is trying to work out in his waking life. That is all!

Almo

29th February 2008, 09:46 AM

I'm surprised so many people voted to say dreams have predictive capabilities.

Mr. Scott

29th February 2008, 01:20 PM

I don't know, but let's suppose Carolyn Miller, Mary Hennessy, or someone else produces a diary dated October 21, 1966 with the dream of the disaster recorded there. Would you accept that as proof? If not, what would you accept as proof?

Proof would be documented evidence that non-shoehornable dreams preceeded the event. You can't, in principle, disprove it, for reasons covered in this forum ad nauseum. (Prove there's no invisible pink unicorn in my garage) The burden of proof is on the people making the claim that dreams can be precognitive.

The dreams in this incident, out of context, sound like standard dreams with standard children's fears and phobias. If they did happen right before the event, they could easily have been shoehorned onto the event. Even so, when we demand evidence the drams really preceded the event, it's frequently unavailable. Do we have a count of all the dreams like that were not followed by a disaster we could shoehorn them into?

To me, one of the most interesting characteristics of purported precognitive dreams is they never seem to describe the event except in retrospect, and they never give anyone information that's useful to prevent or avoid the disaster.

I once had a rash of dreams that we were at nuclear war and I saw mushroom clouds rising only a few miles from my home. No real nuclear war followed. However, I was going through a messy divorce at the time, and the dreams of the world being nuked obviously echoed my feeling that my life was being nuked. This is what dreams really are: echoes of what's happening NOW in our own minds, hearts, and lives.

This reminds me of a story I read about a major power outage in New York. Thousands of people must have been switching on (or off) electrical equipment at the exact moment the power went down. How many of them believed that THEY caused to disaster? Try and convince the welder who switched on his torch the moment the power was lost that HE didn't cause the outage.

Try and convince these kids that dreamed about smothering black death that they didn't foresee the catastrophe.

When you have no mechanism to explain a phenomenon, no hard evidence for it, no verified case that the effect was ever useful, and you have only feelings as evidence, then all you really have is another example of how easily our brains can delude us into this world of superstitious nonsense.

BTW: I haven’t hit any deer like, as prophesied in the dream that I launched this thread about five months ago.

Mr. Scott

29th February 2008, 01:22 PM

I'm surprised so many people voted to say dreams have predictive capabilities.

Um, 6 voted dreams had predictive capabilities, 42 voted they didn't.

Lilith

29th February 2008, 02:02 PM

Um, 6 voted dreams had predictive capabilities, 42 voted they didn't.

Um, what's your point? :)

I am also surprised that, on this web site, even 6 people voted such. Guess I have a lot to learn about the posters here.

Then again - this thread has probably attracted lots of people who actually DO believe in dreams having predictive abilities, so the poll may be skewed. It's not a fair sample. If we asked EVERY member on the board, and all responded, I would think the percentage would be even lower.

Mr. Scott

29th February 2008, 03:26 PM

I am also surprised that, on this web site, even 6 people voted such. Guess I have a lot to learn about the posters here.

I was surprised you thought 6 was "so many" compared to 42. Perhaps a lot of skeptics here decided the poll was not interesting enough to bother voting.

Yes, for some reason lots of people who believe in supernatural nonsense come here to argue with skeptics. They often don't say why. I think it's hubris. One guy said it's like when he was a kid and enjoyed disturbing hornet nests. A few, like Beth, are engaged in a sincere search for evidence supporting their supernatural beliefs, and apparently feel the skeptical and scientific approach will yield confirmation.

Rodney

29th February 2008, 05:10 PM

Proof would be documented evidence that non-shoehornable dreams preceeded the event.
Please supply an example of what you have in mind.

Mr. Scott

1st March 2008, 06:19 PM

Proof would be documented evidence that non-shoehornable dreams preceeded the event.
Please supply an example of what you have in mind.

Oh, it turns out I expressed that rather poorly. I meant to say dreams not needing to be shoehorned.

I don't like the word "proof" because it implies something that's in principle impossible -- absolute, irrefutable determination of truth or falsity.

But I'll stick my neck out and state that proof for the prophetic power of dreams would be demonstration of their usefullness. For example, if many people dream their town will be crushed by a landslide of coal, and leave town only minutes or hours before the town is crushed, that would come damn close to qualifying as "proof."

I also feel that a prediction that isn't clear about what its predicting until after the event it purportedly predicted is not really a prediction.

Rodney

1st March 2008, 07:28 PM

Oh, it turns out I expressed that rather poorly. I meant to say dreams not needing to be shoehorned.

I don't like the word "proof" because it implies something that's in principle impossible -- absolute, irrefutable determination of truth or falsity.

But I'll stick my neck out and state that proof for the prophetic power of dreams would be demonstration of their usefullness. For example, if many people dream their town will be crushed by a landslide of coal, and leave town only minutes or hours before the town is crushed, that would come damn close to qualifying as "proof."

How many is "many"? Would three be sufficient?

I also feel that a prediction that isn't clear about what its predicting until after the event it purportedly predicted is not really a prediction.
Could not certain dreams be considered prophetic after the fact, even if some details were unclear? For example, let's suppose on the morning of September 11, 2001 (say 12:45 A.M. GMT -- about 12 hours before the terrorist attacks began), someone who works in one of the two Petronas office towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia had a vivid dream about two hijacked commercial jetliners hitting different office towers. That person might have frantically called the Petronas towers building managers to convey his/her fear that those towers were going to be struck that morning by terrorists. That person's dream would not have saved any lives on 9-11 and -- had it been taken seriously and the Petronas towers been evacuated and closed for the day -- would have even caused an unnecessary disruption. Still, wouldn't you consider that a generally prophetic dream?

Mr. Scott

1st March 2008, 07:58 PM

How many is "many"? Would three be sufficient?

Could not certain dreams be considered prophetic after the fact, even if some details were unclear? For example, let's suppose on the morning of September 11, 2001 (say 12:45 A.M. GMT -- about 12 hours before the terrorist attacks began), someone who works in one of the two Petronas office towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia had a vivid dream about two hijacked commercial jetliners hitting different office towers. That person might have frantically called the Petronas towers building managers to convey his/her fear that those towers were going to be struck that morning by terrorists. That person's dream would not have saved any lives on 9-11 and -- had it been taken seriously and the Petronas towers been evacuated and closed for the day -- would have even caused an unnecessary disruption. Still, wouldn't you consider that a generally prophetic dream?

I think that kind of conjecture isn't productive. How we delude ourselves into thinking dreams are prophetic is well established -- "proven" if you like, and the mechanisms are well understood. The mechanism responsible for the scenario in your hypothetical example requires the assumption that there is a vast computer of some sort invisible to us but for its mysterious subtle manifestations.

We know exactly how we delude ourselves into believing that prophetic dreams exist.

Where is this mechanism that somehow knows what's going to happen in the future and injects this information imperfectly into our brains during sleep, and how does it work?

Rodney

1st March 2008, 08:16 PM

I think that kind of conjecture isn't productive.
I'm simply trying to pin down what you would consider to be a prophetic dream.

How we delude ourselves into thinking dreams are prophetic is well established -- "proven" if you like, and the mechanisms are well understood. The mechanism responsible for the scenario in your hypothetical example requires the assumption that there is a vast computer of some sort invisible to us but for its mysterious subtle manifestations.

We know exactly how we delude ourselves into believing that prophetic dreams exist.
And that would be . . .

Where is this mechanism that somehow knows what's going to happen in the future and injects this information imperfectly into our brains during sleep, and how does it work?
Who knows? Explain to me what consciousness is, and I might be able to tell you.

Mr. Scott

2nd March 2008, 04:18 AM

I'm simply trying to pin down what you would consider to be a prophetic dream.

I think I made that clear in the OP. If not, what about that needs further pinning down? I'm afraid it may never be completely "pinned down" because some woo will always be able to shoe horn any scary dream to any scary event that comes any time after the dream.

Explain to me what consciousness is, and I might be able to tell you [what the mechanism of prophetic dreams is].

What does consciousness have to do with prophetic dreams? Consciousness is an emergent property of the electrical and chemical processes of the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses in the brain organized by DNA after millions of years of evolution.

Does that help you explain the mechanism of prophetic dreams?

hecaterin

2nd March 2008, 04:30 AM

I totally had a predictive dream. Last night I dreamed that I was writing a blog post titled "Saturday flu", and that I went to the beach.

And guess what! This morning I wrote a blog post titled "Saturday flu", and I'm going to the beach on Friday. woo, spooky.

* cue eerie music: doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo

Umm, hi. There's a prompt telling newbies to make a post, so I did.

Mr. Scott

2nd March 2008, 04:47 AM

arthwollipot

2nd March 2008, 05:52 AM

One of the best first posts I've seen since FSM.

Rodney

2nd March 2008, 08:15 AM

I think I made that clear in the OP. If not, what about that needs further pinning down? I'm afraid it may never be completely "pinned down" because some woo will always be able to shoe horn any scary dream to any scary event that comes any time after the dream.
Does a dream have to foretell the future with 100% accuracy for it to be prophetic?

What does consciousness have to do with prophetic dreams? Consciousness is an emergent property of the electrical and chemical processes of the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses in the brain organized by DNA after millions of years of evolution.

Does that help you explain the mechanism of prophetic dreams?
No, because it's just speculation.

Mr. Scott

2nd March 2008, 06:17 PM

Does a dream have to foretell the future with 100% accuracy for it to be prophetic?

No, but I'd think it should be useful and not easily refuted by chance.

No, because it's just speculation.

Unless we're writing fiction, what's the point in speculating on something that's almost certainly delusional?

I'll stand by the point of my OP. I had a vivid dream that I hit a deer with my car -- a dream believers in prohpetic dreams recognized as exactly the type to take note of. I have not hit a deer or even had a close call. A prophesy either comes true or it doesn't. If it only comes true by shoe horning a future event to the dream, it's indistinguishable from delusion, and that settles it for me. Speculating on the mechanism for a phenomenon that can't be distinguished from a delusion is a waste. There's a real world that deserves our attention.

Rodney

2nd March 2008, 06:32 PM

No, but I'd think it should be useful and not easily refuted by chance.
Good, we agree on something. ;)

Unless we're writing fiction, what's the point in speculating on something that's almost certainly delusional?

I'll stand by the point of my OP. I had a vivid dream that I hit a deer with my car -- a dream believers in prohpetic dreams recognized as exactly the type to take note of. I have not hit a deer or even had a close call. A prophesy either comes true or it doesn't. If it only comes true by shoe horning a future event to the dream, it's indistinguishable from delusion, and that settles it for me. Speculating on the mechanism for a phenomenon that can't be distinguished from a delusion is a waste. There's a real world that deserves our attention.
First, one example proves little one way or the other. Second, even those of us who are open to the possibility of prophetic dreams do not believe that all dreams are prophetic. Third, your dream could yet come true -- your deadline of 24 hours was arbitrary. So, I would suggest recording all of your dreams in a diary and analyzing them. You can report in here periodically if you like. After many years of doing that, if you conclude that none of your dreams were truly prophetic, that would support your a priori position.

Mr. Scott

2nd March 2008, 07:28 PM

First, one example proves little one way or the other. Second, even those of us who are open to the possibility of prophetic dreams do not believe that all dreams are prophetic. Third, your dream could yet come true -- your deadline of 24 hours was arbitrary. So, I would suggest recording all of your dreams in a diary and analyzing them. You can report in here periodically if you like. After many years of doing that, if you conclude that none of your dreams were truly prophetic, that would support your a priori position.

I'm dedicating my time to projects that have a promise of an actual yield. My only interest in prophetic dreams and this thread is to make the point that it's a stupid delusion. I would never waste my time recording them in diaries and analyzing them over many years.

The closest I got to that was pasting up on the wall next to my calendar every report of predictions by psychics of what would happen in the next year, and I kept track of their hits and misses. Aside from no-brainers like "there will continue to be strife in the middle east" almost all the predictions were wrong.

Believe me, there is no yield to be expected from studying the predictive power dreams.

arthwollipot

2nd March 2008, 07:50 PM

Does a dream have to foretell the future with 100% accuracy for it to be prophetic?Wasn't this already discussed, earlier in the thread? I have a memory of blue cars and wallabies.

Rodney

2nd March 2008, 08:05 PM

I'm dedicating my time to projects that have a promise of an actual yield. My only interest in prophetic dreams and this thread is to make the point that it's a stupid delusion. I would never waste my time recording them in diaries and analyzing them over many years.

The closest I got to that was pasting up on the wall next to my calendar every report of predictions by psychics of what would happen in the next year, and I kept track of their hits and misses. Aside from no-brainers like "there will continue to be strife in the middle east" almost all the predictions were wrong.

Believe me, there is no yield to be expected from studying the predictive power dreams.
Respectively, you haven't given me any reason to believe you. You acknowledge: "My only interest in prophetic dreams and this thread is to make the point that it's a stupid delusion. I would never waste my time recording them in diaries and analyzing them over many years." So all you have is one anecdote of a dream that so far has not come true, and you plan no systematic study of your dreams that might either support or contradict your a priori belief.

Mr. Scott

3rd March 2008, 12:00 AM

So all you have is one anecdote of a dream that so far has not come true, and you plan no systematic study of your dreams that might either support or contradict your a priori belief.

That statement is so typical of deluded superstitious people. My first title here one the JREF was "Ex Woo." I really did believe in the possibility of psychic stuff, but I tested it carefully for yield and there wasn't any. Ever. I even graduated from a class in psychic skills. (Funny how they warned us to never put our powers to a test.)

If I'd hit a deer the same day I'd dreamed it, would it prove prophetic dreams were real? No, because that could have happened by chance. How long do I have to wait before the prophetic hypothesis of that dream is dismissed? A month? A year? A Lifetime? If my grandchild hits a deer is the prophesy fulfilled?

Think about it -- there's never been any yield to the hypothesis of prophetic dreams, and the whole concept is indistinguishable from an ordinary delusion.

Here's a question for you, Rodney: Why do you want prophetic dreams to be real?

hecaterin

3rd March 2008, 12:15 AM

I have a slightly unusual format of deja vu - instead of feeling certain that I've seen something before, I feel briefly certain that I dreamed about it before. I wonder if people who think they have predictive dreams get the same thing.

The main reason that I default to disbelieving is that there is no clear evidence that prophetic dreams actually exist. I went back and looked earlier in the thread and all that Aberfan stuff is well post facto. Those claims about dreams weren't made at the time; it's all much later. My relatives lived down the road, and I'm sure would have been spruiking the tales immediately, had the stories been in circulation. These sorts of stories pop up all the time after a disaster - Snopes is good at debunking some of the sillier ones.

In addition, no known mechanism can account for prophetic dreams. No good evidence that they exist, no mechanism, sounds like all the rest of the wacko stuff... I'll feel free ignore it unless someone actually *does* come up with evidence.

(And thanks for the welcome.)

arthwollipot

3rd March 2008, 12:23 AM

If I'd hit a deer the same day I'd dreamed it, would it prove prophetic dreams were real? No, because that could have happened by chance. How long do I have to wait before the prophetic hypothesis of that dream is dismissed? A month? A year? A Lifetime? If my grandchild hits a deer is the prophesy fulfilled?*yawn*. This has all been hashed over before, either in this thread or in some other.

I dream that I hit a deer while driving a blue car through the woods.

If I hit a deer while driving a green car through the woods, is the prophecy fulfilled? If I hit a deer while driving a blue car through a field, is the prophecy fulfilled? If I hit a rabbit while driving a blue car through the woods, is the prophecy fulfilled?

The possible fulfilments of prophecy multiply as the entities we encounter vary. If I hit a rabbit while driving a green car through a field, is the prophecy fulfilled? What about a bear? What about a beach? What about a truck?

In order to be a valid prophecy, it must be specific.

Mr. Scott

3rd March 2008, 01:37 AM

Mr. Scott said:
What does consciousness have to do with prophetic dreams? Consciousness is an emergent property of the electrical and chemical processes of the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses in the brain organized by DNA after millions of years of evolution.

Does that help you explain the mechanism of prophetic dreams?

No, because it's just speculation.

What's just speculation? Could you communicate complete thoughts instead of cryptic quips? Why do you think my description of consciousness is "just speculation?" What description of consciousness do you have that suggests a mechanism behind prophetic dreams? Provide evidence if you would be so kind.

AmyWilson

3rd March 2008, 12:39 PM

I love how people voted no, even though a lot of people have said their dreams predicted the future before. That's a lot of people you're ignoring on purpose.

Mr. Scott

3rd March 2008, 01:54 PM

I love how people voted no, even though a lot of people have said their dreams predicted the future before. That's a lot of people you're ignoring on purpose.

Give me an example.

arthwollipot

3rd March 2008, 06:35 PM

I love how people voted no, even though a lot of people have said their dreams predicted the future before. That's a lot of people you're ignoring on purpose.The poll was about us, not about them. Whether lots of people have claimed to have had prophetic dreams is immaterial. The poll was asking us for our opinions. We have responded.

Mr. Scott

4th March 2008, 01:50 AM

The poll was about us, not about them. Whether lots of people have claimed to have had prophetic dreams is immaterial. The poll was asking us for our opinions. We have responded.

Ahh! I'd inferred she'd identified individuals who voted they didn't believe in prophetic dreams yet posted examples as if they did. The postings of believers vs. disbelievers was roughly 50/50 yet the poll was heavily against prophetic dreams. The poll and the collective dialogue are two different animals, AmyWilson.

Kahalachan

4th March 2008, 03:37 AM

Rodney

9th March 2008, 06:57 PM

Mr. Scott

10th March 2008, 06:16 AM

If I'd hit a deer the same day I'd dreamed it, would it prove prophetic dreams were real? No, because that could have happened by chance.

That's interesting because it contradicts your first post, which stated: "If I hit a deer in the next 24 hours, it will be strong evidence that dreams predict the future."

No. You're grasping at a straw. I'm making a distinction between evidence and proof. I said that if the dream came true, exactly as dreamt, less than 24 hours after the dream, then it would be strong evidence of the prophetic power of dreams. It still would not be proof because it cound have happen by chance. If I predicted I'd toss heads and I tossed heads, would that be proof I could predict or control a coin toss? Same thing.

It's not a question of wanting, it's what the evidence shows.

Evidence can be weak or strong. The evidence for prophetic dreams is very, very weak. If you have strong evidence and it will not wither under close scrutiny, then present it here. Otherwise, it's just all talk.

Rodney

10th March 2008, 07:01 PM

No. You're grasping at a straw. I'm making a distinction between evidence and proof. I said that if the dream came true, exactly as dreamt, less than 24 hours after the dream, then it would be strong evidence of the prophetic power of dreams. It still would not be proof because it cound have happen by chance. If I predicted I'd toss heads and I tossed heads, would that be proof I could predict or control a coin toss? Same thing.
What is your criterion for separating chance and non-chance events?

Evidence can be weak or strong. The evidence for prophetic dreams is very, very weak. If you have strong evidence and it will not wither under close scrutiny, then present it here. Otherwise, it's just all talk.
See, for example, http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=2404040&postcount=111

Mr. Scott

11th March 2008, 12:30 AM

What is your criterion for separating chance and non-chance events?

See, for example, http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=2404040&postcount=111

I can see this topic really interests you. Your example cites a woo-woo TV show, and such shows are notorious for distorted facts, exaggerations, and outright lies. Don't believe everything you see on TV. Add to that Wiki's source: ordinary people who can make things up, exaggerate, and misremember, and you don't have a very solid case. TV shows like that go for ratings, not accuracy. I've worked with documentary TV crews. Believe me, accuracy is not their highest priority.

People get uneasy about flying or change flights all the time. If by chance they cancel or change from a flight that crashes, the woo-woos have a field day. How similar, really, was the actual crash to the crash in the dream? How were they different? Why a three day wait after the last dream? Was it really one of the worst crashes in aviation history, or was that hyperbole?

Nobody remembers the flights that landed safely in which people felt queasy or changed or cancelled. What about all the people that got on that flight and didn't have any sense of doom or prophetic dream? And that guy who dreamed about a plane crash -- lots of people dream of plane crashes without it being a prophesy of anything.

My prediction is that if the 1979 incident was investigated properly, the prophesy aspect would be greatly diminished. But once in a while a dream of a disasaster will have to be followed by a disaster by sheer chance. That's the nature of our random world where random things happen all the time. It's also the nature of our imperfect brains to see patterns where there are no patterns.

What is my criterion for separating chance and non-chance events? Hopefully, it would be based on good scientific, mathematic, and statistical analysis of many events.

I certainly wouldn't go by the spooky feeling of an invisible dimension of reality those silly TV shows are meant to evoke. That's not my criterion. Is it yours, Rodney?

Rodney

11th March 2008, 11:38 AM

How similar, really, was the actual crash to the crash in the dream? How were they different?
Very similar, with only a few minor differences: "Not every detail of Booth's dream matched the facts -- for instance, he saw the plane bank to the right, whereas flight 191 banked to the left. But no one, not even the FAA, questions the uncanny similarity between major details of Booth's vision and the actual crash" -- see link below.

Why a three day wait after the last dream?
You misinterpreted the previous account -- Booth had the dream right up until the night before the crash, but he had called the FAA three days earlier, on May 22, 1979: "David Booth woke up crying on the night of May 24, 1979. He'd just had the same bad dream for the tenth night in a row" -- see again link below.

Was it really one of the worst crashes in aviation history, or was that hyperbole?
"American Airlines Flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft, crashed on May 25, 1979, killing all 271 on board and two on the ground. Flight 191 was the deadliest airplane accident on U.S. soil, its death toll exceeded only by the deliberate crashes of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 in the September 11, 2001 attacks."
See http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=2474332&postcount=198

Mr. Scott

12th March 2008, 07:10 AM

Rodney, I see you research events where people have ominous dreams followed by disasters, and have mentioned exactly two from the last 30-40 years. Have you collected any statistics on the ominous dreams that were not followed by disasters? Wouldn't that balance out your research and give you a more clear idea of what's really going on?

MG1962

12th March 2008, 07:21 AM

Mr. Scott

12th March 2008, 07:35 AM

MG1962

12th March 2008, 08:21 AM

Well the first dream was 23 years ago. Foggy night quiet multi lane road that ran through a series of S turns as it crossed a level crossing. I had a dream a pink Volkswagon Bug lost control coming through the level crossing, ended on the wrong side of the road resulting in a head on collision.

A week after the dream I was traveling the road, realised it was like the dream, slowed down and watched the Pink VW loose control on the road and got itself back on the right side of the road before reaching me

The other dream was Sept last year - I dreamt that due to an emergency I was acting Team Leader for my group, getting people organised, working out who was who

Two days later our team leader lost her leg in a bike accident and I was acting in her job for a week while the company got organised. The second dream is less specific because I did not know the nature of the circumstances, but knew the course of action I needed to follow

I did have a third, but am not convinced on this because I cant discount that I got the information from somewhere else. I was sitting in an office with Osama Bin landen while he bawled out an underling about why only four aircraft were successful on 911. And wanted to know what happened to the other 8 aircraft.

MoonDragn

12th March 2008, 08:32 AM

*yawn*. This has all been hashed over before, either in this thread or in some other.

I dream that I hit a deer while driving a blue car through the woods.

If I hit a deer while driving a green car through the woods, is the prophecy fulfilled? If I hit a deer while driving a blue car through a field, is the prophecy fulfilled? If I hit a rabbit while driving a blue car through the woods, is the prophecy fulfilled?

The possible fulfilments of prophecy multiply as the entities we encounter vary. If I hit a rabbit while driving a green car through a field, is the prophecy fulfilled? What about a bear? What about a beach? What about a truck?

In order to be a valid prophecy, it must be specific.

You know, I personally don't believe you can test any psychic ability to the satisfaction of a scientific community. I believe the ability works very rarely and only on probability, not stability.

What does this mean? It means you could attribute it to luck or chance.

As a little boy, I dreamed one night of someone's face I never seen before. The next day while we were moving to a new neighborhood I met my new neighbor, who just happened to look identical to the person in that dream. Pure chance.

I dreamed about the space shuttle blowing up and bursting into flames, and then a week later the Challenger exploded. Hey, I mean come on, that shuttle had to explode at least once right?

I had a recuring dream about 9 moons in the sky and the earth cracking. I posted this on a board one day, the next day, a 9.0 Tsunami wiped out a few dozen people in Asia. Heck, its just chance.

I recently met this person on IRC, someone I have never met before. I told her I sensed she had breast cancer and something was still wrong with her lymph nodes.

Hey, its pure chance right? I mean you throw something out there and its gotta come true.

Yup she had breast cancer, she had treatment, and had just taken a test the day before I talked to her to see if it came back. This week her results came back and there was some problems with her lymph nodes but it was not cancer.

All evidence is anecdotal, delusional and coincidence because thats the way it works.

You don't think we would be given a god like power do you?

The ability to alter reality changes reality. If your reality changes, where is your point of reference?

arthwollipot

12th March 2008, 07:12 PM

More like your memory of the dream is fuzzy to start with (as are all memories) and is modified by subsequent events (as are all memories), so that what you remember is much closer to the event than the actual dream was.

That and the phenomenon of deja vu, where the brain's recognition centres fire off and spontaneously create a memory of an event that never happened.

So-called "prophetic" dreams are easy to explain with a little understanding of brain physiology and the mechanisms of memory, mixed with a healthy slug of confirmation bias.

Yes, it's incredibly spooky when it happens, but there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary going on.

Rodney

12th March 2008, 07:46 PM

So-called "prophetic" dreams are easy to explain with a little understanding of brain physiology and the mechanisms of memory, mixed with a healthy slug of confirmation bias.

Yes, it's incredibly spooky when it happens, but there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary going on.
You've done a massive study of this phenomenon, I take it?

JoeTheJuggler

12th March 2008, 08:34 PM

No amount of anecdotes would constitute evidence. If you did an experiment where you had a number of people record their dreams each night for a certain period, and you were able to get conclusive predictions from that information at a level that would rule out chance with some degree of confidence (and I'm not sure how you'd do all of this), you'd be on to something.

It'd be much easier to test claims of the ability to make predictions while awake. Then you could use coin tosses or dice rolling or something like that.

Is there some reason sleep works better?

It could be that since dreams are rarely recorded and most aren't even remembered, and these apparently precognitive dreams usually aren't described until after the fact, there's really no way to distinguish a truly precognitive dream from coincidence, memory issues, and so on. In other words, it's a much more difficult claim to test, and in a state of ignorance, the claim of psychic dreams seems as reasonable as any. In fact, it's not as reasonable as mundane explanations (coincidence, faulty memory, etc.) because it raises many more questions that it purports to answer.

arthwollipot

12th March 2008, 09:31 PM

You've done a massive study of this phenomenon, I take it?No, just mixed up a bit of knowledge with a shot of common sense. Is there something specific in what I said that you take exception to?

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 12:30 AM

Is there some reason sleep works better?

It could be that since dreams are rarely recorded and most aren't even remembered, and these apparently precognitive dreams usually aren't described until after the fact, there's really no way to distinguish a truly precognitive dream from coincidence, memory issues, and so on. In other words, it's a much more difficult claim to test, and in a state of ignorance, the claim of psychic dreams seems as reasonable as any. In fact, it's not as reasonable as mundane explanations (coincidence, faulty memory, etc.) because it raises many more questions that it purports to answer.

I think there are actual physical differences between dream and sensory activity. Dreams occur only during REM sleep. There's lots of visual stimulation coming from somewhere and that somewhere I agree to be parts of information already coded in the brain. Sensory activity occurs all the time...during sleep, out of sleep, in all states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness may open and close neural pathways to discriminate between impulses and where they go. The sensory activity that occurs out of REM sleep that extend beyond what is presently infront of us, would be suspicious of extrasensory perception. During the dream state, sensory input would be mixed with visuals of normal dreams. I believe we remember the dreams that are important to our well being. The parts of dreams that are generally remembered are at the end of REM sleep, right before or perhaps during the transition into wakefulness. This could allow sensory information direct from the outer environment to enter the thalami for visual and audio processing...before being stored and if the impulses have familiar signatures already stored, the visuals would show in true form. If the signatures are foreign, I think the brain would use metaphoric reasoning and search for the closest match it has stored to complete the sensory process for expression. Like a Google search...lol.

Just a thought.

arthwollipot

13th March 2008, 12:39 AM

I believe we remember the dreams that are important to our well being.Nightmares? I personally don't experience the nightmares that others report, but I have on occasion experienced a dream that made me feel profoundly uncomfortable, to the point where it affects my mood for the whole morning. Are those dreams supposed to be good for me?

Just a thought.Perhaps a little more thought is called for.

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 12:50 AM

specific[/i].

That specification I think could be generalized and still maintain that specific degree. Rabbit or a deer, they are both animals and all animals are organisms, so there's an organism being hit by a car. Green or a blue car, they are both cars and all cars are vehicles. Now, if there's a yellow train rather than a yellow car, it is still a vehicle. The organism is being hit by a vehicle. That I would take as an 'empirical equation' so to speak.

One halluciantion I had during sleep paralysis showed a brown and tan bronco type truck coming at me head on in a left turn lane as I was waiting to make a left.

The event actually happened a few years later as I was waiting in a left turn lane, a brown and tan car was coming at me head on...he was driving the lane as a regular driving lane and did not appear to slow down (it was the same driver too). I had traffic buzzing by on both sides of me, so I had nowhere to go. Ironically, there was a red and white bronco riding along the side of this brown and tan car. This driver sped up nearly at the last moment and the guy in the brown and tan car moved over to avoid hitting into me.

Wow...I was a ball of nerves right after that!! Precognitive hallucination or not...it was scary. But I find the slight differences in the vehicles interesting. Though I was shown a brown and tan bronco, it was actually a brown and tan car, but there was a bronco involved in the event when it did happen.

arthwollipot

13th March 2008, 12:59 AM

That specification I think could be generalized and still maintain that specific degree. Rabbit or a deer, they are both animals and all animals are organisms, so there's an organism being hit by a car. Green or a blue car, they are both cars and all cars are vehicles. Now, if there's a yellow train rather than a yellow car, it is still a vehicle. The organism is being hit by a vehicle. That I would take as an 'empirical equation' so to speak.The problem with this is, where does it stop? Rabbit, deer, elephant, worm, tree? Car, truck, bicycle, aeroplane, space shuttle? Blue, green, yellow, purple, black?

So by this logic a dream of hitting a rabbit in a blue car is therefore prophetic of an orange bicycle hitting a tree! Any dream can be prophetic of just about anything!

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 01:02 AM

Nightmares? I personally don't experience the nightmares that others report, but I have on occasion experienced a dream that made me feel profoundly uncomfortable, to the point where it affects my mood for the whole morning. Are those dreams supposed to be good for me?

Perhaps a little more thought is called for.

Ah...but not all dreams are nightmares :p LOL. At least one would hope. That would suck to have every dream be a nightmare. I think I'd commit myself into a looney bin in a nice quiet far off place in the middle of nowhere land.

The feelings after a dream that tend to linger into wakefulness may indicate something important and may be as simple as the lack of a nutrient. Eat right and keep healthy and those lingering feelings may go away.

Oh, and tomatoes are good for your liver...good to eat extra of when you're on medication. It helps maintain tolerable stress on the liver. Thought I'd throw that in just for the health of it...lol...

arthwollipot

13th March 2008, 01:03 AM

The feelings after a dream that tend to linger into wakefulness may indicate something important and may be as simple as the lack of a nutrient. Eat right and keep healthy and those lingering feelings may go away.So not actually prophetic of anything at all then...

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 01:16 AM

The problem with this is, where does it stop? Rabbit, deer, elephant, worm, tree? Car, truck, bicycle, aeroplane, space shuttle? Blue, green, yellow, purple, black?

So by this logic a dream of hitting a rabbit in a blue car is therefore prophetic of an orange bicycle hitting a tree! Any dream can be prophetic of just about anything!

This is where the individual is taken into account. Remember the empirical...take that empirical and apply it as the skeleton to what is prophetic to the individual.

In my experience with the 'dreams' that come true, they're all either true form or very obvious metaphor and that obvious metaphor is restricted to my overall train of thought as an individual being with individual experiences in life...how I see things and how my conscious metaphors form.

Perhaps my SP experience with the person walking down a street with the sign alien above him is metaphor to a foreign substance in the immediate environment that I'm in as opposed to someone's alien abduction from a being from outer space denoting a possible attack from an invading substance on that person's cells simply because I'm not very impressed with aliens from outer space and take the term alien more as being from elsewhere than influenced by the aliens in sci-fi.

Personally, I like watching natural disaster movies, rather than aliens from outer space. It's more likely to happen ;)

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 01:27 AM

So not actually prophetic of anything at all then...

Feelings are weird. They are a very different sense. There are emotional feelings and then there are physical feelings, both act on physical factors whether empirical or composited. Both can be prophetic in their own expression. Sensing nervousness in dreams may be prophetic of a nutrient need. It can also indicate a sense of uneasiness from something in your immediate environment. Your brain is communicating to you in both ways.

arthwollipot

13th March 2008, 01:42 AM

In my experience with the 'dreams' that come true, they're all either true form or very obvious metaphor and that obvious metaphor is restricted to my overall train of thought as an individual being with individual experiences in life...how I see things and how my conscious metaphors form.But here we get back to my original thesis - memories of dreams are not reliable!

Memories are not set in stone. Memory is not a recording mechanism like a tape that can be reliably played back again and again. Brain imaging and psychological experimentation have shown that each time we recall something, we manufacture a new memory of it which we then experience as the memory of that event. Randi has a story about meeting someone who swore blind that he saw Randi do a particular escape (buried in a coffin I think), when Randi had actually never done that trick.

I also mentioned deja vu. There are centres of the brain that fire off when something is recognised. You can see them on an MRI - they light up when something is recognised, whether it be a face, a scene, a sound, a smell - whatever. Deja vu occurs when this recognition centre fires off for no apparent reason, creating the sensation that whatever you are experiencing now, you have experienced before. The brain manufactures a memory to account for this.

So basically what I'm saying is that you remember that you dreamed of an event when you actually didn't, or when the dream you are remembering was not as specific as you thought it was.

I have yet to encounter someone have a dream that they wrote down as soon as they woke up from it, when the memory is still at its freshest, and then found that it came true.

We also get a little of the Nostradamus Effect here. The interpretation of a prophecy to refer to a specific event can only be done after the event occurs. Vague and symbolic language is interpreted to refer to the event. No prophecy is written down in specific form. This is what I was referring to before. A deer could be a rabbit, or a tree. A green car could be an orange bicycle. It's only after the event that you "realise" that the green car actually symbolised the orange bicycle.

arthwollipot

13th March 2008, 01:49 AM

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 03:12 AM

[COLOR="Blue"]But here we get back to my original thesis - memories of dreams are not reliable!

Memories are not set in stone. Memory is not a recording mechanism like a tape that can be reliably played back again and again. Brain imaging and psychological experimentation have shown that each time we recall something, we manufacture a new memory of it which we then experience as the memory of that event. Randi has a story about meeting someone who swore blind that he saw Randi do a particular escape (buried in a coffin I think), when Randi had actually never done that trick.

First off...memory is potential recallable information stored in the cortex. The memory is composed of these potentials in action. What's actually recorded are the compositions the impulses are made of. It's up to our persistance in recall to fire these signatures as memory. If the persistance is weak, then so is the recall.

If this person has never met Randi before...though perhaps only knowing about him through media that influenced the visual of Randi, then the perceptions of Randi's face is metaphoric. There must be absolute physical contact with Randi, direct or indirect for such a vision to be even possible in having direct relations to Randi. Otherwise, Randi's appearance in this person's vision is metaphor and to understand that metaphor, we'd need to know how this person thinks of Randi...he's a magician...he debates controversial issues...maybe the metaphor is coincidental by name and actually applies to another person by the name of Randi. If that is metaphor, it is likely the rest of the vision is metaphor as well, so perhaps escaping a coffin means escaping a brush with death.

I also mentioned deja vu. There are centres of the brain that fire off when something is recognised. You can see them on an MRI - they light up when something is recognised, whether it be a face, a scene, a sound, a smell - whatever. Deja vu occurs when this recognition centre fires off for no apparent reason, creating the sensation that whatever you are experiencing now, you have experienced before. The brain manufactures a memory to account for this.

But the original memory is still recalled in order for that recoginition in the first place and all biological behavior has a reason. Something is setting it off. There's physical stimulus somewhere. We've just yet to find it.

So basically what I'm saying is that you remember that you dreamed of an event when you actually didn't, or when the dream you are remembering was not as specific as you thought it was.

The visions that do come true in true form are obvious to the visions that show these events. Misinterpretation, at least on my part, is impossible. Even when the brown and tan bronco was a brown and tan car, it was still a brown and tan vehicle in the same actions seen in the vision and it was the same driver. That really sinks in. I must have met this person or touched something he's touched prior to the vision to have such an exact imagery of him. Perhaps that is why I was able to precieve the exact color of his car.

Those are the visions I keep to when I discuss ESP like things such as seeing glimpses of the future. This way I know for sure without doubt in my own mind...but it also teaches me how to interpret the metaphors. Metaphors can be tricky. They are creative to what the brain has in store verses what is new information.

I have noticed there are characteristic differences between different types of ESP visuals. Really difficult to explain in words. OBEs feel and look different than seeing out of someone else's eyes and seeing a real event take place that person is experiencing, which feels different from telepathic type experiences, which feels and looks different from true form that looks and feels different from those using metaphor. Sometimes, they can be mixed and there seems to be characteristics unique to that. But we're far from mastering the ability to formally make these comparisons. It took a lot of trial and error on my part and it's still not perfect even after 26 years worth of SP hallucinations and I'm just one person. Need to gather a hell of a lot more case studies to make anything remotely valid on this issue.

I have yet to encounter someone have a dream that they wrote down as soon as they woke up from it, when the memory is still at its freshest, and then found that it came true.

I did. I stopped when the SP waned off. Right now I only get stray spirts of SP. I experience the bulk of them in clusters that seem to appear on and off in seven year intervals...give or take.

We also get a little of the Nostradamus Effect here. The interpretation of a prophecy to refer to a specific event can only be done after the event occurs. Vague and symbolic language is interpreted to refer to the event. No prophecy is written down in specific form. This is what I was referring to before. A deer could be a rabbit, or a tree. A green car could be an orange bicycle. It's only after the event that you "realise" that the green car actually symbolised the orange bicycle.

We only become aware of prophecies being prophetic when they do happen. How else would they be considered prophetic? That shows in how we judge what is prophetic and what is not...it must come true...unless someone has a really good history of sound cases of visions coming true to just take someone's word for it. As of the flaws to Nostradomus I have found to be in the interpretations themselves. Find a book that gives the exact word for word language interpretation of his quatrains (good luck) rather than a story book based on someone else's objectionable thoughts. It draws a different picture. In fact, he had his own pictures that went with the quatrains and they match the quatrains in context. You actually get to understand what Nostradomus meant in the words he chose both literary and pictorial.

I use to have a picture book...very nice coffee table quality book of his quatrains and some of these pictures. Each in a word for word language interpretation into English from the several languages he used and each accompanied with a specific picture...probably a replica of a painting or drawing. Lost it during a move and haven't been able to find it in any bookstore. What a bummer. It was the only Nostradomus book I actually liked that made any sense.

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 03:14 AM

Um, what?

In other words...there can be more than one significant meaning behind the perception.

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 04:20 AM

Where do dreams that seem to refer to very specific events fit into this type of speculation. I know of two examples, one whic saved my life, where events I saw in a dream unfold exactly as I dreamt them

More info. please. I'll share one of mine...

The vision showed me making a K turn using someone's driveway and the driveway stopped short and there was a 50+ foot drop and I went over.

Two weeks later, I dropped my son off at his uncle's and upon leaving, I started to pull into someone's driveway to make a K turn. I recognized the house next to the driveway from the vision and immediately stepped on the brakes. I got out and sure enough...there was that 50+ foot drop.

Creepy.

Rodney

13th March 2008, 07:04 AM

No, just mixed up a bit of knowledge with a shot of common sense. Is there something specific in what I said that you take exception to?
Yes. You contend: "So-called 'prophetic' dreams are easy to explain with a little understanding of brain physiology and the mechanisms of memory, mixed with a healthy slug of confirmation bias." However, many prophetic dreams, such as David Booth's of the AA Flight No. 191 crash and Abraham Lincoln's of his assassination, cannot be explained in this fashion. If you're really interested in examining whether there could be such a thing as prophetic dreams, you should not start with the assumption that dreams are just the product of brain physiology and the mechanisms of memory.

MoonDragn

13th March 2008, 09:00 AM

Feelings are weird. They are a very different sense. There are emotional feelings and then there are physical feelings, both act on physical factors whether empirical or composited. Both can be prophetic in their own expression. Sensing nervousness in dreams may be prophetic of a nutrient need. It can also indicate a sense of uneasiness from something in your immediate environment. Your brain is communicating to you in both ways.

I have had interesting "feeling" experiences in dreams. I dream in color, but sometimes I also smell in the dream and once I even experienced texture in a touch in the dream.

Incidentally, I rarely remember my dreams, so any dream I remember usually lingers in my mind for a few days. I wonder if it affects how you react to the world.

Once I had a dream about driving and hitting a deer, which isn't too uncommon since at the time there were plenty of deer on the way home from work.

What was strange is that a flashback of the dream occured while I was driving and I suddenly stopped.

As soon as I stopped a deer bounded out of the bushes on the side of the road and passed in front of my car. Had I not stopped I would have hit it dead on.

MG1962

13th March 2008, 09:06 AM

More info. please. I'll share one of mine...

The vision showed me making a K turn using someone's driveway and the driveway stopped short and there was a 50+ foot drop and I went over.

Two weeks later, I dropped my son off at his uncle's and upon leaving, I started to pull into someone's driveway to make a K turn. I recognized the house next to the driveway from the vision and immediately stepped on the brakes. I got out and sure enough...there was that 50+ foot drop.

Creepy.

Yeah refer post #194. The first two, I told people about the dream before the event, so I know they are not false memories. The third is vague enough there are logical explanations so I cant claim it to be definitive lol

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 02:20 PM

IAny true psychic would be able to just waltz through. Once through the preliminary, the real test begins with probably much longer odds like a million to 1. Again, this would be no sweat for a real psychic.

Then lining up people like Stephen Hawking should do just fine so long as...some type of physical contact between sender and reciever is made...it can be indrect, so subjects can be in completely different locations, even thousands of miles apart and the objects used for testing have some kind of relevance to each of the subjects individually, but the other would be entirely without clear knowledge of that relevance.

Hmmm....

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 02:55 PM

Yeah refer post #194. The first two, I told people about the dream before the event, so I know they are not false memories. The third is vague enough there are logical explanations so I cant claim it to be definitive lol

Ah...found the post. That third one...however vague...reminded me of a vision during sleep paralysis I had...a couple of them involving the war in Afghanistan. One showed low flying planes bombing a civilian villiage. The next day, on the news, there was a report of such happening in a villiage that looked exact to the one I saw during sleep paralysis.

Another during sleep paralysis showed as if I were looking out of someone else's eyes. There was excitment in the streets when masked horsemen with black and white flags with arabic writing came riding into town...the person I was looking out of crawled along a set of stores, tucking into a doorway mumbling "please don't let them know I'm Jewish" and someone in the street was beheaded...end of vision. This was a couple of days before Daniel Pearl disappeared. Not a relevant case to claim a 'psychic dream', but I got such a weird feeling when I was watching about his disappearance on the news.

I have one experience with these types of perceptions that I have a hint of proof of. I want to make it formal...as formal as it can be carried. It involves a sealed envelope with descriptions of visions during sleep paralysis and a short list of things I wanted doctors to look for in a last ditch effort to save her life. They were all at a loss of how to help her. I had a clue and the doctors agreed. Here were doctors and specialists agreeing with a high school drop out who was an unemployed housewife at the time. Imagine that!! LOL. The autopsy report seems to indicate a possible match between what I was picking up in the visions during sleep paralysis and what is described in the microscopic section of her autopsy report. When I first got it, it was like looking at something written in a different language. Since learning more details, more of the report makes sense to me. I'd like to come to a full comprehensive understanding to everything in that report.

The dates between the postmark on the envelope and the date the report became available are very close, but I think it can be verified....especially when I was nearly three thousand miles away. 'Snail' mail takes time to travel. The actual autopsy was done shortly after she died, which was two months before the autopsy report was released. The date of the envelope is something like July 7th or 9th and the date my mother mailed a copy to me was about July 29th.

To cover for the time lapse between the autopsy and the postmark on the envelope...it is impossible for me to have obtained any information direct from any of her attending physicians about her physical condition...only through family and friends and my knowledge at the time about biology was also limited to self obtained observations (I always had exotic little critters like reptiles, fish and bugs) and a high school level of education. I was nearly three thousand miles away...I was in California and she was in Jersey. In order for me to obtain any patient inforamtion from any of her doctors, hospital policy restricted that to being done in person. And her sleep doctor that I did talk to....(I asked a question about her medication he prescribed to her and that was it)...was also restricted from interfering with her care at this particular hospital. He was on another hospital's list of participating doctors and policy prohibits doctors not on their list to interfere. He's also obligated to patient confidentiality, so I doubt without any special permission direct from my grandmother, he'd be able to tell me anything...but nonetheless...he was also restricted.

Does anyone think this might have a good chance of being a valid claim, if in fact the autopsy report makes a good reflection of what I have written in this envelope?

EyeOn

13th March 2008, 03:06 PM

I have had interesting "feeling" experiences in dreams. I dream in color, but sometimes I also smell in the dream and once I even experienced texture in a touch in the dream.

Incidentally, I rarely remember my dreams, so any dream I remember usually lingers in my mind for a few days. I wonder if it affects how you react to the world.

Once I had a dream about driving and hitting a deer, which isn't too uncommon since at the time there were plenty of deer on the way home from work.

What was strange is that a flashback of the dream occured while I was driving and I suddenly stopped.

As soon as I stopped a deer bounded out of the bushes on the side of the road and passed in front of my car. Had I not stopped I would have hit it dead on.

I do believe the things we see like that are absolute to what ESP activity is. The hard part is being able to record the event as it happens to establish it to the visions, which also needs a form of verification. I like the idea of mailing descriptions of visions to myself to have the postmark serve the contents of the envelope as legal dated documentation. Snail mail I think is federally supported documentation the moment that postmark is placed. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but mail is federal property, thus why crimes involving mail are federal offenses.

Now what to do about recording the events or finding proof to back the contents of that envelope is a different matter. If you had a dashboard video camera, you would have had that proof. Something to ponder on for the next intuitive glance into the future.

Pup

15th March 2008, 09:53 AM

I like the idea of mailing descriptions of visions to myself to have the postmark serve the contents of the envelope as legal dated documentation. Snail mail I think is federally supported documentation the moment that postmark is placed. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but mail is federal property, thus why crimes involving mail are federal offenses.

I disagree that people would be gullible enough to be fooled by someone who mailed himself unsealed envelopes, then inserted descriptions of visions after events happened and sealed them.

EyeOn

15th March 2008, 11:40 AM

I disagree that people would be gullible enough to be fooled by someone who mailed himself unsealed envelopes, then inserted descriptions of visions after events happened and sealed them.

I see your point. Personally, I've never known or have ever heard of mail carriers to accept empty open envelopes or packages for mail processing. There's nothing to deliver. The problems I came across was when the envelope is sealed with my own address and they just take the piece and place it into my mailbox without processing. I've actually had to tell the mail carrier to take it for processing. Something to look into is maybe they are not supposed to take empty open packages for processing, which would make it harder to swindle postdates.

For the sake of argument...How would one be able to set proof of their perceptions? Placing a prediction on a forum board is easily manipulated. We can't wire our brains to flash the perceptions on a screen for recording. Recordings nowadays are easily tampered with...good ole Adobe. Witnesses are always discounted.

What always gets me is how critics of ESP activity make it so it is impossible to allow any means of proof...always coming up with some sort of excuse to disclaim the claim regardless how legit it may be. This is why I refuse to apply for the million, because it's BS based on BS.

ESP activity seems to work under very certain criteria in the brain and very much a physical activity of our existing senses that requires physical contact just as our existing senses. That physical contact can be indirect, but physical contact nonetheless is required. So is an X amount of physical loss in the subjects.

How in the world would something like this be provable under Randi's outline? It'd never happen, so why bother? Besides, this is more a medical issue rather than magic and Randi is a magician, nothing more.

Pup

15th March 2008, 12:32 PM

I see your point. Personally, I've never known or have ever heard of mail carriers to accept empty open envelopes or packages for mail processing. There's nothing to deliver.

Uh, the envelope still needs delivered. How do they even know it's empty? A single sheet of paper adds virtually nothing to the weight and is hardly visible inside. I've received unsealed envelopes, contents intact, a few times over the years that people just forgot to seal, but anyone could surely figure out how to lightly seal the envelope, if they were afraid the flap would flop open during processing, and reseal it later with the prophecy inside. This isn't rocket science.

Placing a prediction on a forum board is easily manipulated.

I'll let the computer experts talk about that. But let me ask: Has anyone claimed to have posted an accurate prediction here before an event, which they say was later electronically altered by someone and made to be wrong? Is manipulation on forum boards really what's keeping the psychics' accurate predictions hidden?

How in the world would something like this be provable under Randi's outline?

If you don't trust forums, publish a prediction in a major newspaper. Buy a classified ad for a few dollars if you need to. Anyone could walk into wherever archives of the newspaper are kept--a library, the newspaper office itself--look at a back copy, and see the prediction there printed on that day's date.

But that's not the hard part of proving you can predict the future. The hard part will be to make a prediction that isn't deliberately vague so it could be interpreted to fit numerous events. Nobody says "The U.S. President will be caught in an avalanche while skiing on February 10, 200x." It's always: "A violent event that will shake American will happen in the winter." Or "The president should be careful in February." Or "I'm seeing the color white, and the letter P..."

EyeOn

15th March 2008, 02:24 PM

Uh, the envelope still needs delivered. How do they even know it's empty? A single sheet of paper adds virtually nothing to the weight and is hardly visible inside. I've received unsealed envelopes, contents intact, a few times over the years that people just forgot to seal, but anyone could surely figure out how to lightly seal the envelope, if they were afraid the flap would flop open during processing, and reseal it later with the prophecy inside. This isn't rocket science.

If the envelope is OPEN then they would SEE it is EMPTY. THIS isn't rocket science either.

I'll let the computer experts talk about that. But let me ask: Has anyone claimed to have posted an accurate prediction here before an event, which they say was later electronically altered by someone and made to be wrong? Is manipulation on forum boards really what's keeping the psychics' accurate predictions hidden?

Moderators can alter posts.

If you don't trust forums, publish a prediction in a major newspaper. Buy a classified ad for a few dollars if you need to. Anyone could walk into wherever archives of the newspaper are kept--a library, the newspaper office itself--look at a back copy, and see the prediction there printed on that day's date.

There's a good idea.

But that's not the hard part of proving you can predict the future. The hard part will be to make a prediction that isn't deliberately vague so it could be interpreted to fit numerous events. Nobody says "The U.S. President will be caught in an avalanche while skiing on February 10, 200x." It's always: "A violent event that will shake American will happen in the winter." Or "The president should be careful in February." Or "I'm seeing the color white, and the letter P..."

From what I've learned, perceptions are narrow to the individual having the perception or someone or something they've been in close contact with recently and visions are precise to what they show. The descriptions of real precognitive visions will have detail rather than being vague, so this part should be quite easy.

The real challenge is ESP activity being recognized for what it really is rather than the misconceptions that fly through the scientific community.

Pup

15th March 2008, 04:14 PM

From what I've learned, perceptions are narrow to the individual having the perception or someone or something they've been in close contact with recently and visions are precise to what they show. The descriptions of real precognitive visions will have detail rather than being vague, so this part should be quite easy.

The real challenge is ESP activity being recognized for what it really is rather than the misconceptions that fly through the scientific community.

If you post a detailed, precise prediction of a future event here, before it happens, you'll have no problem getting people to sit up and take notice. The problem is, nobody has done it. Are you seriously suggesting that every time someone has, moderators have altered the post to make the prediction inaccurate?

If events are predicted that precisely, it also should be possible to document the event itself through video, witnesses, etc., if proving the event is the weaker part of the evidence. Though there's also the problem of trickery, like predicting a brush fire and then hiring someone to set one.

But if ESP is fairly common, it should be possible to get at least people on this forum to sit up and take notice through the sheer volume of predictions: a brush fire today with a link to a news story tomorrow, someone else's prediction of a car accident followed by a police report, another prediction of broken leg followed by a hospital record with a doctor's name, and so forth. Any one might be faked, but 15 or 20 predictions and events like that from different people over a year would be enough to start some serious discussion about what the heck was going on.

Problem is, nobody's done that, and the simplest assumption is that it's because nobody can. The world just doesn't work like that.

What do you consider an example of a documented pre-event prediction followed by a documented event, that the scientific community should have accepted as actual unfaked evidence for ESP, but ignored? Or an example where the prediction would have been accurate but was altered by the moderators?

EyeOn

15th March 2008, 05:42 PM

If you post a detailed, precise prediction of a future event here, before it happens, you'll have no problem getting people to sit up and take notice. The problem is, nobody has done it. Are you seriously suggesting that every time someone has, moderators have altered the post to make the prediction inaccurate?

No. What I am saying is, any post on any forum can be altered by a moderator. It's a situation that is open to alteration....not that I'm accusing this forum of anything such thing. I'm talking about any and all forums.

If events are predicted that precisely, it also should be possible to document the event itself through video, witnesses, etc., if proving the event is the weaker part of the evidence.

The only way to do that is to have a video camera rolling for each moment you are awake taken everywhere you go taping everything around you if not have someone with you 24/7 and witness accounts are discarded. They are always discarded when it comes to ESP claims. Witness testimonies hold up a lot better in court than for ESP claims.

Though there's also the problem of trickery, like predicting a brush fire and then hiring someone to set one.

You can duplicate anything through trickery, so to prove ESP activity to a magician is absurd in itself.

But if ESP is fairly common, it should be possible to get at least people on this forum to sit up and take notice through the sheer volume of predictions: a brush fire today with a link to a news story tomorrow, someone else's prediction of a car accident followed by a police report, another prediction of broken leg followed by a hospital record with a doctor's name, and so forth. Any one might be faked, but 15 or 20 predictions and events like that from different people over a year would be enough to start some serious discussion about what the heck was going on.

But now we're getting into vague descriptions again to some degree and false assumptions of how ESP activity works. It works very differently than what has been applied in the scientific community. It needs a different approach and to do that, it needs to be recognized for what it really is.

Problem is, nobody's done that, and the simplest assumption is that it's because nobody can. The world just doesn't work like that.

Because most people depend on the scientific community to define what ESP really is and they are under the same false pretenses.

What do you consider an example of a documented pre-event prediction followed by a documented event, that the scientific community should have accepted as actual unfaked evidence for ESP, but ignored? Or an example where the prediction would have been accurate but was altered by the moderators?

Well, for starters, think and ask yourself, is it really possible for billions of people for thousands of years to all be wrong? Some, yes, but ALL?

The number of accounts should be enough to keep investigations open to begin with by reputable people rather than shunned at every corner.

We all dream. Have we really proven dreams? We make that assumption because of the shifts in brain activity to the movements of our eyes during a particular phase when brain patterns are repeated for an X amount of time and visual aspects of the brain are active. It's an indirect approach, but it is the best we have. There are still aspects about simple eyesight that eludes every scientist out there and likewise, we've yet to really prove dreams for the same reasons.

There was a recent lab experiment done by researchers at Harvard University that was designed to prove Psi, which ESP is a part of. I think Psi is Hawking's brainchild. Here's a link to an abstract http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/1/182

I can't find the link to the full pdf file. Maybe I can attach it if anyone is interested.

It was published in January of this year. It failed...not surprising. I scanned briefly through their procedures and saw the same typical flaws that I've seen in other failed attempts. I know why this failed and failed because of the typical misconceptions about ESP activity, but they are on the right track.

To be very honest here...it would probably cost close to or perhaps even more than a million to prove within Randi's outline. How much does a single fMRI cost for your "everyday average run of the mill Joe"??? The playing field is very narrow to those who can afford it and those who have access to this equipment at their disposal.

arthwollipot

19th March 2008, 02:52 AM

Okay, well first, please learn how to use the quote tags. It makes it all a lot easier to follow. It's really not all that hard (http://forums.randi.org/misc.php?do=bbcode#quote).

Moving on.

arthwollipot

19th March 2008, 03:33 AM

Memories are not set in stone. Memory is not a recording mechanism like a tape that can be reliably played back again and again. Brain imaging and psychological experimentation have shown that each time we recall something, we manufacture a new memory of it which we then experience as the memory of that event. Randi has a story about meeting someone who swore blind that he saw Randi do a particular escape (buried in a coffin I think), when Randi had actually never done that trick.First off...memory is potential recallable information stored in the cortex. The memory is composed of these potentials in action. What's actually recorded are the compositions the impulses are made of. It's up to our persistance in recall to fire these signatures as memory. If the persistance is weak, then so is the recall.So if I try hard to remember something, then I'm more likely to remember it? Sorry, but that has support from neither neurological science nor direct experience.

If this person has never met Randi before...though perhaps only knowing about him through media that influenced the visual of Randi, then the perceptions of Randi's face is metaphoric. There must be absolute physical contact with Randi, direct or indirect for such a vision to be even possible in having direct relations to Randi. Otherwise, Randi's appearance in this person's vision is metaphor and to understand that metaphor, we'd need to know how this person thinks of Randi...he's a magician...he debates controversial issues...maybe the metaphor is coincidental by name and actually applies to another person by the name of Randi. If that is metaphor, it is likely the rest of the vision is metaphor as well, so perhaps escaping a coffin means escaping a brush with death.Okay, well the point of my bringing up that particular story just sailed completely over your head.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with visions. This person saw Randi do an escape, in person. Many years later he incorrectly recalled which escape he saw Randi do. For some reason the memory of the event had been completely changed so that this person vividly remembered something that never happened.

I also mentioned deja vu. There are centres of the brain that fire off when something is recognised. You can see them on an MRI - they light up when something is recognised, whether it be a face, a scene, a sound, a smell - whatever. Deja vu occurs when this recognition centre fires off for no apparent reason, creating the sensation that whatever you are experiencing now, you have experienced before. The brain manufactures a memory to account for this.But the original memory is still recalled in order for that recoginition in the first place and all biological behavior has a reason. Something is setting it off. There's physical stimulus somewhere. We've just yet to find it.No. Completely wrong. There is no original memory in cases of deja vu. The brain manufactures the memory in order to satisfy the misfiring of the recognition centres of the brain. I believe that there's been a study on this, but it's very hard because deja vu does not occur on demand. My own experience supports my conclusion, but unfortunately I have no hard data.

So basically what I'm saying is that you remember that you dreamed of an event when you actually didn't, or when the dream you are remembering was not as specific as you thought it was.The visions that do come true in true form are obvious to the visions that show these events. Misinterpretation, at least on my part, is impossible. Even when the brown and tan bronco was a brown and tan car, it was still a brown and tan vehicle in the same actions seen in the vision and it was the same driver. That really sinks in. I must have met this person or touched something he's touched prior to the vision to have such an exact imagery of him. Perhaps that is why I was able to precieve the exact color of his car.Personal anecdotes mean absolutely nothing when trying to determine the truth of an event, I'm sorry to say, for the reasons that I've been trying to get you to understand. Police officers have known for decades that eyewitness testimony is one of the least reliable forms of evidence, because people do not recall things accurately. You say "I must have met this person..." because you recognised the person. This is easily explainable under my description of deja vu. Even if you did write down this particular dream before the event occurred, I highly doubt that you wrote down a physical description of the person which would be sufficient that another person would recognise him/her from the description alone.

This way I know for sure without doubt in my own mind...Whoop whoop whoop... alarm bells ringing. When you know something for sure, without doubt is when you should be most skeptical of it. That kind of absolute certainty has no place in a scientific worldview, and thus no place in a determination of whether something is true or not. Your absolute certainty in this matter makes me more skeptical of it, not less.

I have noticed there are characteristic differences between different types of ESP visuals. Really difficult to explain in words. OBEs feel and look different than seeing out of someone else's eyes and seeing a real event take place that person is experiencing, which feels different from telepathic type experiences, which feels and looks different from true form that looks and feels different from those using metaphor. Sometimes, they can be mixed and there seems to be characteristics unique to that. But we're far from mastering the ability to formally make these comparisons. It took a lot of trial and error on my part and it's still not perfect even after 26 years worth of SP hallucinations and I'm just one person. Need to gather a hell of a lot more case studies to make anything remotely valid on this issue.Okay, well for a "study" to happen, you have to have some verifiable results, and not just anecdotes.

I have yet to encounter someone have a dream that they wrote down as soon as they woke up from it, when the memory is still at its freshest, and then found that it came true.I did. I stopped when the SP waned off. Right now I only get stray spirts of SP. I experience the bulk of them in clusters that seem to appear on and off in seven year intervals...give or take.Start again. Write down as much detail of the dream as you possibly can. Do so immediately upon waking. I predict that you'll be surprised how little detail you can remember.

arthwollipot

19th March 2008, 03:45 AM

We only become aware of prophecies being prophetic when they do happen. How else would they be considered prophetic? That shows in how we judge what is prophetic and what is not...it must come true...unless someone has a really good history of sound cases of visions coming true to just take someone's word for it. As of the flaws to Nostradomus I have found to be in the interpretations themselves. Find a book that gives the exact word for word language interpretation of his quatrains (good luck) rather than a story book based on someone else's objectionable thoughts. It draws a different picture. In fact, he had his own pictures that went with the quatrains and they match the quatrains in context. You actually get to understand what Nostradomus meant in the words he chose both literary and pictorial.I was using Nostradamus only as an example. The specifics of Nostradamus' "predictions" are unimportant to my point. Anyway, you're making a circular argument. To be prophetic it must come true, and if it comes true, then it's prophetic. No, that's not good enough. You say that you know for certain when a prophetic dream occurs, because the details are so clear. In fact, you say:

The visions that do come true in true form are obvious to the visions that show these events. Misinterpretation, at least on my part, is impossible.So you appear to be able to identify a prophetic dream before the event takes place. I wonder if you've ever counted the number of times you had such a clear dream and it didn't come true. Everyone gets clear, vivid dreams occasinally. You only need a few "hits" to make you believe that there's something to dream prophecy. This is confirmation bias. Read up on Skinner's superstitious pigeons sometime - it's very illuminating.

Mr. Scott

19th March 2008, 06:38 AM

Well, for starters, think and ask yourself, is it really possible for billions of people for thousands of years to all be wrong? Some, yes, but ALL?

Yes, it is absolutely possible for billions of people over thousands of years to be wrong, and it's easy to come up with examples. Galileo showed this but I don't think there was a billion people in the world when he dropped two objects off the leaning tower. It's one of the great achievements of science -- showing common knowledge is wrong -- and the yield of science (space travel, the Internet, etc.) is incredible, especially in comparison to the pitiful yield of the supernatural.

Hey, did anyone notice that no one announced dreaming Elliot Spitzer would be caught with prostitutes? Say, none of my friends in New York dreamed about a crane falling, either. Don't the colossal misses count?

It's been nearly six months since the OP, and I still haven't hit the dear of my dreams.

What always gets me is how critics of ESP activity make it so it is impossible to allow any means of proof...always coming up with some sort of excuse to disclaim the claim regardless how legit it may be. This is why I refuse to apply for the million, because it's BS based on BS.

The Randi Challenge, if done correctly, would award the million to someone demonstrating real ESP but not to someone who is deluded or cheating. If you can set up the protocol to accomplish that, Randi would accept it, I am sure. Why don't you get started so we can see this ESP you have, or are sure someone else has, get the million, and prove Randi wrong? Just do it!

arthwollipot

19th March 2008, 06:55 AM

What always gets me is how critics of ESP activity make it so it is impossible to allow any means of proof...always coming up with some sort of excuse to disclaim the claim regardless how legit it may be. This is why I refuse to apply for the million, because it's BS based on BS.Well, what kind of "proof" would you like to be acceptable? Anecdotes?

Let us know some way that you could demonstrate beyond all doubt that a claim is legit. If you actually read the rules of the protocol, you will discover that you set the terms of the challenge. The JREF will only modify your terms in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of cheating. You wouldn't want a cheat to win the million, would you?

EyeOn

22nd March 2008, 03:17 PM

Maybe I should be clear where I'm at presently with this and where I plan to go with these studies.

I know the kind of evidence I need to obtain. This will take a while. I'm still in the organizing and reference 'surfing' stage and I have several hypotheses about a few different things. This is just one of them and the most difficult to deal with. One of the primary necessities needed is funding and lots of it. Something I don’t have.

What I would like to ask is, just how different is my hypothesis on ESP compared to others? I’d like to find another student who have the same train of thought into this to collaborate ideas and dig for that evidence.

About memory recall...

http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/cognition/tutorials/ModelOf/index.html

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.00186?journalCode=cdir

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/148/

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/7/57

Things that grab our prime attentions will make stronger potential signals for long-term storage. Memory is important for survival and witnessed throughout the animal kingdom, especially the actions that play out between predators and prey. Memory allows us to recognize friend from foe...safe from danger...even the difference between male and female.

Sleep paralysis is so intense it has your full attention, so neurological firings of impulses will be strong and will most likely be stored in long-term memory.

That guy forgetting the magic trick Randi did at a show…maybe the guy wasn’t impressed enough to remember which act it was. He could have seen another magician somewhere else and mistaken an act of theirs for one of Randi’s acts. IMO, too many “could have” scenarios to make a good example for anything other than the guy never emphasized what he saw enough to be able to recall it later on. Also, how many years are we actually talking about as well? Some memories take time to dig out of the old closet.

I like the idea about the brain manufacturing memories, but I think that may be more applicable to what I call metaphoric reasoning rather than déjà vu. Déjà vu seems to originate from dreams long tucked away into long-term memory. Metaphoric reasoning I define as an interpretation of an impulse that the brain is without previous exposure to and using the closest ‘signature’ it has stored to what is being sensed or does have previous exposure, but stored in a different sense…smell vs. taste vs. sound…etc.

For example:

When we are consciously introduced to an orange and all of our senses are mechanically sound…we see it is orange. We can see and feel it is round and has texture. We can smell it has a distinctive odor and taste and if you have good ears…you can hear the skin tear as it’s being peeled. Each of these sensory experiences of an orange is stored in different areas of the brain. Each of these will bear the same impulse signature, but stored in the respective areas each sense governs...like copies in a different folder. If someone is blind and can’t see the orange, they can still feel it…it’s round and has texture…it has an odor, etc.…again…the same impulse signature stored in various parts of the brain according to the mechanism of the senses being expressed as an orange.

If, for example, the brain smells an odor that is familiar as an orange, an orange would most likely be the memory recalled. When it’s something else that just smells like an orange and the brain is without any previous exposure to the substance being sensed, that chemical signature becomes filed in the storage for smell associated with an orange. Once more of the substance’s identity is known and stored, then that signature would expand to other parts of the brain, including the attributes that make it different from an orange.

About eyewitness testimony vs. memory…

What do police officers know about memory recall and the brain??? You are applying an issue upon an unqualified authority figure. Sorry bud…that’s more of a WHOOP WHOOP singing in here than my “This way I know for sure without doubt in my own mind”!! :D

Please note again what I had written,

”the visions that do come true in true form are obvious to the visions that show these events”.

Nowhere in that does it say I know a prophetic dream before it happens. It becomes obvious as the foreseen event happens. When visions that come true have similar characteristics, it helps in identifying others to take notice and be aware. Also, prophetic dreams only account for a small % of ESP type experiences. There are others like OBEs, hearing 'outer' voices (other than the thoughts that run through your head), and seeing ghosts, to name a few. Ghosts are interesting. In my own conclusions I think ghosts are simply impressions of what was once there and any actions are benign to those who can sense these impressions. That's all they are. These impressions are most likely constructed of energy particles that are unique to what is being sensed...the same energy particles search and rescue dogs follow to find specific people or things.

Back on topic...

There are also visions of events that have already happened or the visions occur as the event is happening to someone else. These are the ones which events are read about in a newspaper or reported on TV newscasts.

Some visions are so sensitive in content, to even try to confirm or deny them could raise suspicions in the wrong people, such as those that may depict a crime being committed. I had one like that and it involved a little girl and a man following her. If you want those details, just ask, but to make this brief…the following day in the paper there was a small paragraph about a man in the same town shown in the vision who was arrested for attempting to molest a little girl. I don’t know enough to confirm or deny the vision went to this event and to go asking around about something as serious as this??? I left it alone.