And sometimes it’s just a coincidence
I woke up a few minutes after 6 this morning because I was having a dream that was interrupted by a strong, physical sense that the earth beneath me had swayed a few feet. It was a distinct enough sensation that I woke wondering if it had had a physical cause, the way sometimes you’ll incorporate the sound of a car passing by as the gurgle of digestive juices as you’re trapped in your mother’s lower intestinal tract. (You’ve all had that dream, right?)
I got up, checked the computer and found out that just a few minutes before, there had been a force 8 earthquake in Japan.
Back in the day, when I was teaching logic or philosophy of science I’d take my students through an exercise. How many times in your life have you had a dream involving a plane crash? Take that as a percentage of the number of dreams in a single night within the population of the US above the age of 5. On any day in which a plane is reported to have crashed, that’s how many Americans will be tempted to believe that they foresaw it in their dreams.
Ah, coincidence. What can’t it do?!
This example illustrates how the wealth of readily available data on the web leads to a growing, and often false sense of the relationship between various events. If David hadn’t been able to check the web immediately, he may not have remembered to check the paper later, or may have missed an article about the Japanese earthquake.
It’s a great time to be a consiracy theorist!
We’re all radios, picking up waves of all sorts.
Science just hasn’t identified all the receptors yet.
We don’t have enough information to declare your dream coincidence.
I’ve NEVER dreamed of a plane crash, ergo IT’S ALL TRUE! (Did I do that right?)