When we close our eyes at night to sleep, we each experience a variety of dreams across periods of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep ⬈ (assuming no insomnia, or drug-addled rest). Typically we remember nothing from these periods, but what bits we do remember are usually fantastic. It sure seems that in a dream, anything is possible, and much that is impossible happens! I don't know about you, but my own dreams tend towards the absurd. Nevertheless, sometimes a detail or two pops out in a way that seems just too relevant, just too pertinant,.. it makes you wonder whether there's more to it than mere absurdity.

I present two examples for your consideration:

A friend of mine once appeared in a dream of mine, and in that dream she was pregnant. I saw her a few days later, and told her about my dream. She then shared with me that she'd actually been trying to get pregnant with her husband, and when we compared notes, we found that my dream had occurred the same night that she had last tried.
A friend of mine had a dream in which their late mother came to them, and told them a message (though he didn't tell me what the message was). He said that the following morning, his aunt called him out of the blue to tell him that she had had a dream the previous (same) night in which his mother came to her, and told her the exact same message, with instructions to share it with him. Moreover, he described the message as being exceptionally relevant to his life at that moment.

What a coincidence!! [1] I tell you, sometimes things just line up accidentally in the most convincing ways.

[1]You'll notice that the material explanations for these phenomena are usually very short and dismissive. As I've said above, the close-minded materialist often discards the puzzle pieces that just seem too incredulous to fit in the puzzle. But you, dear open-minded materialist, now see that the purpose of this excuse is to not think about it, and now you know to just keep these odd coincidences in a little pile over in the corner.

I sometimes see a "miracle" defined as a 1:1,000,000 event. By this reasoning, miracles happen all the time. Hell, with 7 Billion people experiencing a constant stream of events throughout every day, miracles must happen all the time.

Of course, it's really hard to actually figure the odds on an event that doesn't happen frequently. Take the example of my dream: what are the odds that I might dream of my friend being pregnant? Like most people, I don't remember all my dreams, but as far as I do remember, my friend's never appeared in any of them except for that one. The probability that she appears pregnant is then, in a frequentist perspective, 100%! My friend is always pregnant when she is in my dreams. All one of them! Sure makes it seem really likely.

It must be easier to figure out how often my friend tries getting pregnant. Say three nights a month for the past five months (I know she's only been trying about this long). That leaves us 15 nights of the past, umm, several years.

I'm not a statistician, so I'm no good at the math. I suspect any serious calculation would be more simplifying (and constraining) assumptions than data. Is it greater than 1:1,000,000? For that matter, if it were, would that really allow us to throw out this puzzle piece? Seems arbitrary to me.

Let's not even get started about my friend's dream. If you can figure out the odds that two people have a dream with the same person giving the same pertinant message, I'd love to see the size of the envelope on which you did your math.

If this woo is just the result of winning the coincidence lottery, I suspect someone out there might be rigging the numbers behind the scenes...

Dream Messages