Alternative hypothesis: you don’t faithfully remember your dreams from six months ago, and when something happened to you that had a few similarities to a partially remembered 6-month-old dream, you filled in the gaps in your memory with details drawn from a present experience. The dream you remember is “close enough” because the memory is built from pieces of the experience it ostensibly predicted.
This kind of false memory happens all the time, it is well documented and studied, it’s been manipulated in laboratory settings, it’s the most mundane phenomenon in the world. And it well explains your subjective experience.
It doesn’t have to affect everyone. It needs to be: concrete (i.e., the criteria for a successful prediction are clearly articulated before their occurence), public (i.e. it’s not enough to have had them in your head and then say “I totally knew that would happen”; writing them down privately in a form that establishes when they were made would count), and risky (i.e. the prediction should ideally be so unlikely that the only explanation is clairvoyance; a prediction of something ordinary, or a prediction that is satisfied by too many outcomes, will be expected to come true just by chance).
The claim your making doesn’t satisfy these. You have private experiences that aren’t recorded and aren’t shared until one of any number of “close enough” outcomes indicates that they were in fact predictions and not just passing thoughts of no consequence.
You’re right, false memories do happen. However I remember this dream. It does bug me that it was not exact, but I don’t think people who are more psychic than me get it exactly, either. Getting it precisely could alter the course of fate, which I personally don’t think is meant to be changed.
There’s a thing in Buddhism called supramundane powers.
I can reduce rationality and logic to mere guessing, nothing more special than truth simply assumed. Doesn’t feel good does it to be dimissed so casually?
There is no such thing as coincidence.
Forget Buddhists and their secretive practices for a moment, my brain left my apartment and ended up in another state when I smoked Salvia Divinorium. The mind can do other things besides compute a frail truth table.
Guesswork requires confirmation, judgment. Judgment requires rationality. It is not only about guessing, but also about proof and evidence, methods to reproduce what theses predict.
Conjecture and “I had a dream once” do not verify anything real or substantial, no matter how coincidental they are.
Birds, rabbits, wolves, can sense a storm coming. Does that mean they’re “psychic”? Not necessarily. At least, not by the mystical connotations purported here.
Though I suspect that, reward or not, if someone was indeed able to demonstrate a psychic ability, it would be all over the news. And not just the local news.
Why?
Because it is so clearly linked to what is often called “supernatural” or “paranormal” powers.
And how far can that be from God?
Besides, if you can predict the future, that means the future already exists to be predicted. And if the future already exists that shifts the discussion immediately to the extent to which human autonomy itself exists.
It seems a lot of people do, if their frequency in the UK is “internationally recognized”.
In any case, there was plenty of opportunity for something that happens regularly near you to seed a dream that came true when that regularly-occurring thing occur again. The mundane explanations still seems like the best one for what you experienced.
Mundane explanation: you had an elaborate and realistic hallucination while under the influence of a potent hallucinogen.
If I predict, “I feel like I should stop here because something will happen here in the near future”, that’s not what I would call a “risky prediction”, it’s frequently true that something will happen in a given location in an unspecified amount of time. This becomes more true if “something happens” includes both something happening at the spot where you altered your day, or at any spot where something happens differently because you’re 30 seconds behind where you were. If so broad a set of things counts to satisfy “something happened”, it is virtually guaranteed at the time of prediction that the prediction will turn out true, and so it doesn’t require any exotic mental abilities to explain it: mundane explanations suffice.
I had no intention of stopping at any bus stop - I just wanted to go, but I was compelled to stay put for a short while.
I had no intention of wanting to go home early that day - I got excited about the endless possibilities of what I could do with those extra hours: shopping, a cheeky drink, visiting someone, but I was compelled to go straight home.
I have never stopped at a bus stop unintentionally, or felt the need to get up and go straight home, since. You?
Hey! if it’s good enough for Royals and Aristos, it’s good enough for me
So the claim is that you felt a strong desire to do something that you don’t usually do, and then some event followed that you interpreted as somehow causally related to your strong desire. Am I understanding that right?
If so, I don’t see anything requiring more than a mundane explanation: the causal relationship is spurious. You stopped for any one of a hundred reasons that people get feelings every day; some network in your brain was triggered by any of a hundred local stimuli of which you were not consciously aware. Later, you experienced something you felt was meaningful, tied it to the earlier feeling, and remembered it because it confirmed your beliefs.
You are likely to have had similar strong feelings that made you do unusual things that were not followed by noteworthy events, and you forgot them as people frequently ignore disconfirming evidence. People are fallible, and that’s why science demands rigor.
If I gave the impression that I can sit down and see what I fortell, I can’t. My predictions, about ten of them, haven’t been risky. Innocent predictions. Maybe ability is the wrong word. Psychic occurrences.
The million dollar challenge was never legit for there were qualifying requirements that most people would never be able to meet. Also, most “real” psychics guard their abilities to protect themselves like the little old lady who approached me with some precautionary questions before she rattled off many relative aspects of my then current life. When they come up to you out of the blue, they aren’t playing. Shit’s for real.
It doesn’t happen regularly. I had never heard of any tornado happening in England before, so there was nothing to seed it. They may well happen, but they are so small that nobody notices.
Hypotheticals basically disprove mystical experience and it’s easy to understand why. Imagine a car wreck that occurs just in front of you. You can think “I’m lucky that I forgot my car keys this morning, which delayed me, because if I didn’t forget my car keys happened then I would have been in that car wreck”.
But that’s not luck. That’s just coincidence. Nothing mystical about it.
You can go further. You had a dream about your dead grandmother. And you believe that dream made you forget your car keys. Then you get these irrationalizations such that “My dead grandmother made me forget my car keys, therefore I was late, therefore I was saved from a car wreck.” Again, none of this means anything. But that’s how some people (ir)rationalize events.
Also some people cling to Mysticism so strongly, that there “must be a mystery to everything”, or certain situations “cannot be explained rationally”, similar to Christian belief/faith in god. These people cannot be reasoned with. Because you can explain everything to them, show them every nuance and cause, and they will still reject it all for the supernatural. People who believe in the supernatural, are unreasonable in their faith. This is because they prefer fantasy to reality, and will never let go of fantasy. Fantasy is easy, requires no effort, no thought, no reasoning. Children cling to fantasy, because it requires little to no responsibility. Believing in fantasy absolves people of responsibility, of bad thought, of irrationality, of being forced to pay the costs of bad thinking.
Adults cannot afford to pay such prices. Fantasy is not worth the cost, when you could have known the truth, but chose to ignore it. In the real world, fantasy has a steep cost.
Eventually people quit paying the price. Yet there are those who the price is paid on their behalf. So fantasy is a luxury that not everybody can afford.
There is no such thing as coincidence. Your example, using the car crash, assuming I would attribute it forgetting keys and feeling lucky, falls short. I would say that all things led to avoiding the car crash. There are no isolated incidents, nothing to tape off like a crime scene. The 43rd sea creature that slimed it’s way on to land is just as responsible for me forgetting my keys.
You say some people can’t be reasoned with, like that is the ultimate flaw. Do you know what a person who can only be reasoned with sounds like. Like they are rigid, and lack flexibility. Like they miss any hint of magic in life, because they refuse, or simply cannot bare, to look for it. Or admit they look for it, too.
Some people who can only be reasoned with are more afraid of being seen as wrong and vunerable than wanting to be right.
And if it’s any consolation, I can afford fantasy. And yet, I am prepared to reject video games and VR life built from code logic. Can you say the same about yourself?
