eh, skallas, I don’t think confirmation bias is the right diagnosis. Comparing mine, id’s, Melinka’s, and a few other’s experiences (which are all remarkably similar) you’ll note that this is not a conscious act.
No one here has said confirmation bias is conscious – in fact learning to compensate for it is a quite unnatural thing to do (one which I’m certain I’m nowhere near mastering). And the fact that the experiences are shared could have many explanations – all it seems to suggest is that whatever causes these experiences is innate or common to many people in some way. It seems that confirmation bias has this property (though I do agree that confirmation bias by itself isn’t a complete explanation – subjectivity of memory also plays a major role, see my post earlier).
In fact, consider the population sample of metafilter. It is not very large. Further, consider the sample reading this thread. It is smaller. I think it is much less likely that this many people out of this sample share precognitive dreaming (assuming such a thing is possible), than that they share confirmation bias and subjectivity of memory.
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