Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (29 page)

In short, you have lots of dreams and encounter lots of events. Most of the time the dreams are unrelated to the events, and so you forget about them. However, once in a while one of the dreams will correspond to one of the events. Once this happens, it is suddenly easy to remember the dream and convince yourself that it has magically predicted the future. In reality, it is just the laws of probability at work.

This theory also helps explain a rather curious feature of precognitive dreaming. Most premonitions involve a great deal of doom and gloom, with people regularly foreseeing the assassination of world leaders, attending the funeral of close friends, seeing planes falling out of the sky, and watching as countries go to war. People rarely report getting a glimpse of the future and seeing someone deliriously happy on their wedding day or being given a promotion at work. Sleep scientists have discovered that around 80 per cent of dreams are far from sweet, and instead focus on negative events. Because of this, bad news is far more likely than good news to trigger the memory of a dream, explaining why so many precognitive dreams involve foreseeing death and disaster.

At the start of this chapter I described how psychiatrist John Barker found 60 people who appeared to have predicted the Aberfan mining disaster. Does the research into dreaming and memory alter the evidential value of these alleged premonitions? In 36 of Barker’s cases the respondents provided no evidence that they had recorded their dream prior to the disaster. These respondents may have had many other dreams before hearing about Aberfan, and then only remembered and reported the one dream that matched the tragedy. Not only that, but the lack of any record made at the time of the dream means that they could have inadvertently twisted and turned the dream to better fit the unfortunate events that transpired. Blackness may have become coal, rooms may have become classrooms, and rolling hillsides may have become a Welsh valley.
 

Of course, those who believe in paranormal matters might argue that they are convinced by instances when people tell their friends and family about a dream, or describe it in a diary, and then discover that it matches future events. Do these instances constitute a miracle of the mind? To find out, we are going to drift even deeper into the science of sleep.

Interview with Caroline Watt, from the Koester Parapsychology Unit, about sleep precognition

http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/CarolineWatt.html

 
‘Other Than That, Did You Enjoy the Play, Mrs Lincoln?’

Open almost any book on the paranormal and you will soon discover that President Abraham Lincoln once had one of the most famous precognitive dreams in history. According to the story, in early April 1865 Lincoln went to close friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and explained that he had recently had a rather unsettling dream. During the dream Lincoln had felt a ‘death-like stillness’ in his body and heard weeping from a downstairs room in the White House. After searching the building, he arrived at the East Room and came across a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. A crowd of people were gazing mournfully at the body. When Lincoln asked who had died, he was told that it was the President, and that he had been assassinated.
 

Two weeks after the dream, Lincoln and his wife went to see a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C.. A short time after the start of the play Lincoln was shot dead by Confederate spy John Wilkes Booth.
 

But the vast majority of books describing the dream aren’t giving their readers the full picture. Joe Nickell has had a long and colourful career that has seen him working as an undercover detective, riverboat manager, carnival promoter, and magician. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Inquiry, an American organization that investigates paranormal matters. In the 1990s Nickell decided to take a closer look at Lincoln’s apparent prophesy
¹¹⁴
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He tracked down Ward Hill Lamon’s account of the incident in his 1895 memoir,
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln
, and discovered that many of the second-hand accounts of the incident missed out one very important part of the episode. After being told about the dream, Lamon expressed his concern, but the President calmly replied, ‘In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on some one else.’ In other words, Lincoln did not actually think that he had seen his own death but rather that of another President.
 

Of course, believers might argue that the President did foresee his own assassination, albeit without realising it. Even assuming that, would the incident count as compelling evidence for precognition? The answer once more lies in the pioneering work of sleep science.
 

In the late 1960s dream researchers carried out a ground-breaking experiment with a group of patients who were attending therapy sessions to help them cope with the psychological effects of undergoing major surgery
¹¹⁵
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The researchers monitored the patients’ dreams over the course of several nights and discovered that when they had attended a therapy session during the day they were far more likely to dream about their medical problems. For example, one patient was having a tough time coping with the drainage tubes resulting from his surgery. After spending time at a therapy session talking about the issue, he was especially likely to have dreams that involved him continually inserting tubes into himself and others. In short, the patients’ dreams tended to reflect their anxieties. Similar studies have revealed the same effect. The content of our dreams is not only affected by events in our surroundings, but also often reflects whatever is worrying our minds.
 

Nickell noted that even the briefest of glances through the history books reveals that Lincoln would have had every reason to be anxious about the possibility of being assassinated. Just before his first inauguration, he was advised to avoid travelling through Baltimore because his aides had uncovered an assassination plot there, and during his time in office he had received several death threats: on one especially memorable occasion an incompetent would-be assassin fired a shot through his top hat. Seen in the light of these findings, Lincoln’s famous dream suddenly looks less paranormal.

The same concept may also explain one of the most striking examples of alleged precognition about the Aberfan disaster. At the start of this chapter I described how one of the young girls who would later perish in the tragedy told her parents that she had dreamed about ‘something black’ coming down over her school and the school no longer being there. For several years before the disaster the local authorities had expressed considerable concern about the wisdom of placing large amounts of mining debris on the hillside, but their worries had been ignored by those running the mine. Correspondence from the time makes the extent of these concerns clear
¹¹⁶
.
 
For example, three years before the disaster, the Borough Engineer in the area wrote to the authorities noting, ‘I regard [the situation] as extremely serious as the slurry is so fluid and the gradient so steep that it could not possibly stay in position in the winter time or during periods of heavy rain’, and later added, ‘this apprehension is also in the minds of . . . the residents in this area as they have previously experienced, during periods of heavy rain, the movement of the slurry to the danger and detriment of people and property’. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is possible that the young girl’s dream may have been reflecting these anxieties.

But what about the other 23 cases in which people produced evidence that they had described their dream before the tragedy occurred, and where the dream did not seem to reflect their anxieties and concerns. To investigate, we need to move away from the science of sleep and into the heady world of statistics. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers associated with these seemingly supernatural experiences.
 

First, let’s select a random person from Britain and call him Brian. Next, let’s make a few assumptions about Brian. Let’s assume that Brian dreams each night of his life from age 15 to 75. There are 365 days in each year, so those 60 years of dreaming will ensure that Brian experiences 21,900 nights of dreams. Let’s also assume that an event like the Aberfan disaster will only happen once in each generation, and randomly assign it to any one day. Now, let’s assume that Brian will only remember dreaming about the type of terrible events associated with such tragedy once in his entire life. The chances of Brian having his ‘disaster’ dream the night before the actual tragedy is about a massive 22,000 to 1. Little wonder that Brian would be surprised if it happened to him.
 

However, here comes the sneaky bit. When Brian is thinking about the chances of the event happening to him he is being very self-centred. In the 1960s there were around 45 million people in Britain, and this same set of events could have happened to any of them. Given that we have already calculated that the chances of any one of them having the ‘disaster’ dream one night and the tragedy happening the following day is about 22,000 to 1, we would expect 1 person in every 22,000, or roughly 2,000 people, to have this amazing experience in each generation. To say that this group’s dreams are accurate is like shooting an arrow into a field, drawing a target around it after it has landed and saying, ‘wow, what are the chances of that!’

The principle is known as the ‘Law of Large Numbers’, and states that unusual events are likely to happen when there are lots of opportunities for that event. It is exactly the same with any national lottery. The chances of any one person hitting the jackpot is millions to one, but still it happens as regular as clockwork each week because such a large number of people buy tickets.

For genuine evidence of premonitions then, the situation is even worse than we have imagined. Our example only concerned people dreaming about the Aberfan tragedy. In reality, national and international bad fortune happens on an almost daily basis. Aeroplane crashes, tsunamis, assassinations, serial killers, earthquakes, kidnappings, acts of terrorism, and so on. Given that people dream about doom and gloom more often than not, the numbers quickly stack up and acts of apparent prophesy are inevitable.
 

BOX

HOW TO CONTROL YOUR DREAMS: PART ONE

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner has come up with a simple but effective way of controlling your dreams
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As noted in chapter four, Wegner has carried out a great deal of work into the so-called ‘rebound effect’, wherein people who are asked not to think about a certain issue have a surprisingly hard time keeping it out of their mind. Wegner wondered whether the same effect could also be used to influence people’s dreams. To find out, he gathered together a group of participants, gave each of them two envelopes, and asked them to open one envelope just before they went to sleep at night and the other when they woke up in the morning.
 

The first envelope contained an unusual set of instructions. All of the participants were first asked to think of someone that they found especially attractive. Half of the participants were then instructed to spend five minutes trying
not
to think about this person, while the others were asked to think about their dream date. When everyone woke up in the morning they opened the second envelope and found another set of instructions. This time they were asked to describe any dreams that they had had during the night. Wegner discovered that participants who had tried not to think about the person they found attractive were roughly twice as likely as the others to have dreamed about that person. The message is clear – if you want to have a particular person crop up in your dreams, spend five minutes trying
not
 
to think about that person before you nod off.

END BOX

So far we have seen how the science of sleep and the study of statistics suggest that precognitive dreams are due to selective remembering, anxiety, and the law of large numbers. Of course, it could always be argued that although these explanations are true of many apparently precognitive dreams, some others are still genuinely supernatural.
 

The bad news is that although testing this this sounds simple in theory, it is tricky in practice. It is no good asking to people to get in touch
after
a national disaster or tragedy because they are likely to report just one of many dreams that they have had, or be part of the group of people who happened to get lucky via the law of large numbers. Also you can’t ask people to dream about an event that is in any way predictable. Instead, you have to record lots of people’s prophesies
before
an
unpredictable
event has happened. According to the law of large numbers you would end up with a large range of predictions, with just a small sliver of them subsequently proving correct. In contrast, those with a paranormal bent would predict that this would produce a surprisingly large number of the premonitions that point to one particular future.