Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 7/17/2010

Question
"Hi,

I am an atheist and I have no faith in any supernatural and non-materialistic forces or anything related to that. I only believe in things that are scientific and rational.
However, in last few days I found that the dream I saw while sleeping, actually came true in reality and that too on the same day. This has happened to me 2 times. These incidences have shaken the very foundation of the atheism in me and I am afraid that I may again start believing things, which I never want to.

Please help me by finding a rational solution to my problem."

Answer
Introduction:
I believe that I can answer this question just by introducing you to general tools of skepticism. I will explain some plausible rational explanations for what I think happened but if you still find yourself puzzled, be sure to follow-up with something I can address more specifically.

So there are basically two possibilities: 1) The chance of reality matching a dream is not actually unlikely but there is an illusion that makes it appear more unlikely than it is or 2) that it is simply unlikely and we are lacking in an explanation.


Faulty memory and Post-diction:
One big question in my mind is at what point did you decide that you knew the contents of your dream. This may strike you as an odd question, but let me explain what could happen. If you wake up with some fuzzy events in your head that you really didn't think about and then you see something in life and suddenly remember it from your dream, than that is actually quite a common experience. People have many more dreams that than they usually remember but seeing something can jog their memory. So if you remember the dream after the event occurs than you don't just have to consider the probability of the one thing a night happening but the probability of one of hundreds of things a night happening. More still your brain could have mis-dated the dream and was actually drawing from a dream much earlier than that. Dreams in particular are vague (which means a large number of other events will also be considered a match) and powerful (so your brain thinks anything tangentially related to them is significant) so they are particularly likely to be recalled only after the real life experience. This is called confirmation bias, a well-documented psychological effect[1], and in essence you remember the hits and forget the misses.

In addition to the large number of buried dreams your memory could draw from you can also be drawing from things that never happened. There is something called confabulation (which doesn't mean lying) which means the psychological phenomenon of creating false memories[2][3]. The way the brain remembers things is not like a photograph but rather by reconstructing a detailed picture based off of a couple of memorable clues. Details that are plausible are filled in and create memories that are intense (such as dreams, even boring dreams) have a stronger pressure to recall details that are or are not there. The research showing the commonplace nature of inaccurate memory has been so persuasive that  modern courts are putting less and less emphasis on eyewitness testimony despite the fact that in ancient times it was considered the golden standard. So as I mentioned before if you recalled your dream or the vast majority of your dream after the real life experience than I don't think there is any unlikely occurrence to be explained.

If you aren't sure at what time the full details of the dream came to you, whether or not the details changed, or whether you really had a dream that was much more vague (included a much larger set of experiences) than reality, than one thing you can do is keep a dream journal. After-all if there is some sort of supernatural force at work here than we might expect it to happen again (and if it doesn't, well who cares what really happened). To keep a dream journal, whenever you wake up write down everything you can remember about all the dreams that you had that night. If you think of a dream later, you can go back and write it down, but the rule you would have to keep is that you can only claim you predicted something that you first wrote down. This way you are certain you didn't chance the memory to fit the reality and you didn't fit something vague into something specific.


The Law of Truly Large Numbers:
If it wasn't an illusion that made it seem more unlikely than it is, than it is possible that an unlikely event really did happen. Unlikely things can happen naturally. The Law of Truly Large Numbers[4][5][6] and Littlewood's Law of Miracles[7] explain this paradox. If something is truly a 1-in-a-million event, that we would expect it to happen on an average once in every millions events (that is it could be the first event and not come again for a million, or wait two million and then happen twice etc), but if we count all the different events that we are aware of over the course of the day than we would expect one-in-a-million events to be quite common. An event could be anything you notice, anything that has the possibility of being regarded as extraordinary if it doesn't happen like you expect. You could just consider thousands of dreams you've had in your lifetime, or you could consider things like thinking about a friend when the phone rings and it is him or predicting the next song on the radio. If we consider the probability that a one-in-a-million event will occur over several months and it could happen to you, or anyone you know close enough to trust, than the probability of you getting exposed to a one-in-a-million-event becomes so high that we would sooner expect it than not.


Skepticism means "don't pretend to know something you don't":
Even if this dream experience was an unlikely event, all you really know is that an unlikely thing happened. Maybe you have psychic powers that predicted it, maybe you have psychic powers that made it happen, maybe it is God, maybe it is spirits, maybe it is aliens, maybe the entire universe had a brief jitter and time came in the wrong order. I don't think we can embrace any of these explanations without ruling out all the other ones and I don't think you would have any good way to chose between them. If you were to prefer one of these arbitrarily (like believing in psychic powers that predict), than you would come to a strange conclusion that isn't warranted and this is called the psi-assumption[8].  If you tried to take your dream experience in any one direction, like going to religion or fortune-tellers, than your experience is too mysterious and unlikely to support the conclusions these people are claiming. If you don't know what happened, all you can really say for sure is you don't know what happened, and when you embrace a paranormal explanation you are pretending to know something you don't. Coming to the conclusion that sometimes things happen that you don't understand does not mean throwing out what you know about the things that you do understand. I don't know if you have ever seen a magician's act, but they will tell you up front that they are tricking you and then they will do something in front of you that seems impossible. You think that you can explain it but you end up ruling out every explanation you would come up with. (I actually have a similar experiences when troubleshooting computers!) If I understand correctly, there are con-men in India who do simple sleights of hands and Western parlor tricks but are able to convince people that they have powers. The Indian Rationalist Association[9] does a good job explaining to people who have been tricked, but the people who were tricked should have known it was not supernatural before they understood the natural explanation.


Related to predicting the future:
While I am on the topic of predicting the future and skepticism I answered a previous AllExperts question in which I use skepticism to examine claims about professional psychics predicting the future and someone claiming to speak to the dead[10]. While both of these examples involve someone who is tricking you, the point is if you understand how other people can trick you than you can understand how you can trick yourself. The likelihood of finding something that matches you dream may be more likely than you think.


Links:
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
[2]http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
[3]http://www.skepdic.com/falsememory.html
[4]http://www.skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html
[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers
[6]http://wikidoc.org/index.php/Law_of_Truly_Large_Numbers
[7]http://www.skepdic.com/littlewood.html
[8]http://www.skepdic.com/psiassumption.html
[9]http://www.indianrationalists.blogspot.com/
[10]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/7/intuition-predictions-1.htm