you’ll note that this is not a conscious act. Nobody walks around saying "I’m gonna predict the future soon, you just wait and see"–instead something always seems to trigger it and it just comes upon you.
that’s exactly what is meant by confirmation bias. All those times when the things you didn’t dream about happen, you don’t think, gosh, I never dreamed this. Likewise, all the times when things you dreamed don’t happen, you don’t wonder when they’re going to. It’s only when the two coincide that it suddenly seems quite astonishing, but with enough events, they ought to coincide not uncommonly, given that your dream world is largely made of the same people and things as your waking world…
Anyway, I happened across a quite terrible little book in my grandfather’s house on this topic, called "an experiment with time" by jw dunne, which makes the claim that dreams are extradimensional travels of some kind which allow us to travel up to two weeks into the future, or something like that. Due to anecdotal evidence, such as this thread, he set up a study, but it wasn’t done scientifically, and about 3/4 of the participants got lazy and stopped keeping their journals [read: they weren't getting any interesting results], and then he backed up his claims based on the 1/4 left who had enough coincidences to seem intriguing, so it was pretty weak. but kinda fun in that way that sci-fi /pseudo sci from early 20th c. can be.
re: deja vu, I am always shocked when people say that the real explanation re: deja vu kills the magic. I think it’s so much more exciting that our brains can skip ahead a beat than to imagine some vague platitude about past lives.
Go to Source
