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 prophecy are inevitable.
HOW TO CONTROL YOUR DREAMS: PART ONE
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner has come up with a simple but effective way of controlling your dreams.7 As noted in Chapter 4, 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.
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 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 prophecies 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.
The good news is that such a study has already been carried out.8 Welcome to the curious case of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.
‘The Biggest Story Since the Resurrection’
Born in 1893, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray spent much of his life trying to unravel the mysteries of the human personality. During the late 1930s he helped develop a well-known psychological tool known as the ‘Thematic Apperception Test’, or ‘TAT’ for short. During the TAT people are shown images depicting various ambiguous scenes, such as a mysterious woman looking over a man’s shoulder, and asked to describe what they think is happening in the picture (‘What do you make of TAT?’). According to proponents of the test, highly trained therapists can use these comments to gain an important insight into people’s innermost thoughts, with, for example, remarks about killing, violence and murder all raising red flags. The TAT is not Murray’s only claim to fame. Towards the end of the Second World War the American government called on him to help compile a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. As a face-to-face consultation seemed highly unlikely, Murray was forced to rely on other sources, such as Hitler’s school record, writings, and speeches. He concluded that although the dictator appeared outgoing, he was actually quite shy and had a deep-seated need to annex the Sudeten-land. Just kidding. Actually, Murray thought that Hitler was a classic example of a ‘counteractive narcissist’, a man who held grudges, exhibited excessive demands for attention, displayed a tendency to belittle others, and couldn’t take a joke. In addition to developing the TAT and putting Hitler on the couch, Murray also conducted a unique test examining the precognitive power of dreams.
In 1927, 25-year-old American Air Mail pilot Charles Lindbergh achieved international fame by making the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Two years later Lindbergh married author Anne Spencer Morrow, and the two of them continued to attract huge amounts of publicity by setting several additional flying records, including being the first people to fly from Africa to South America, and pioneering exploration of polar air routes from North America to Asia. In 1930 the Lindberghs had their first child, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., and moved into a large secluded mansion in Hopewell, New Jersey.
On 1 March 1932 the Lindberghs’ world changed for ever. At around 10 o’clock at night, the Lindberghs’ nurse rushed to Charles Sr. and told him that Charles Jr. had been taken from his room, and that the kidnappers had left a ransom note demanding $50,000. Lindbergh quickly grabbed a gun and searched the grounds. He discovered the homemade ladder that had been used to climb into the child’s second storey room, but found no sign of his son. The police were called and Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf (father of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the coalition forces during Operation Desert Shield) took charge of the case and organized a massive search effort. The Lindberghs’ fame resulted in the case generating an
enormous amount of publicity, with one journalist referring to it as ‘the biggest story since the Resurrection’.
A few days after the news of the kidnapping broke, Murray decided to use the high profile case to study the accuracy of precognitive dreaming. He persuaded a national newspaper to ask their readers to submit any premonitions about the case that had appeared in their dreams. Word of Murray’s study spread from one newspaper to another, resulting in the psychologist eventually receiving over 1,300 responses. To properly assess the replies, Murray was forced to wait two years until the crime was solved.
Within a few days of his son’s disappearance, Lindbergh made various public appeals for the kidnapper to start negotiations. None of them elicited a response. However, when retired schoolteacher John Condon placed an article in a newspaper making it clear that he was willing to act as a go-between and add an additional $1,000 to the ransom, he received a series of notes from the alleged kidnapper. On the second of April, one note asked Condon to meet in a Bronx cemetery and to hand over $50,000 in gold certificates in exchange for information about the child’s location. Condon collected the certificates from Lindbergh, handed them over at the meeting, and was told that the child could be found on a boat that was moored along the Massachusetts coast. Lindbergh flew over the region for days but failed to find the alleged boat.
On 12 May 1932, a truck driver pulled over to the side of a road a few miles from the Lindbergh home and walked into a grove of trees to relieve himself. There he chanced upon the corpse of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., buried in a hastily prepared shallow grave. The baby’s skull was badly fractured, and his left leg and both hands were missing. A coroner’s examination later showed that the baby had been dead for about two months, and that his death was due to a blow on the head.
For over two years the police struggled to solve the crime. Then, in September 1934, a petrol station attendant became suspicious when a customer paid for five gallons of petrol with a ten dollar gold certificate. The attendant took a note of the customer’s number plate and passed it on to the authorities. The police identified the vehicle’s owner as Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an illegal German immigrant currently working as a carpenter. Police searched Hauptmann’s house, discovered $14,000 of the ransom money, and promptly arrested him. During Hauptmann’s trial the prosecution showed that his handwriting matched the ransom notes sent to Condon, and that the floorboards in his house were made of the same wood as the ladder discovered at the Lindbergh’s house. After an 11-hour deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict and Hauptmann was sentenced to death.
Case closed, Murray set to work. He examined his collection of alleged premonitions for three important pieces of information that would have helped the police investigation enormously – the fact that the baby was dead, buried in a grave, and that the grave was near some trees. Only about 5 per cent of the responses suggested that the baby was dead, and only 4 of the 1,300 responses mentioned that he was buried in a grave near some trees. In addition, none of them mentioned the ladder, extortion notes or ransom money. Exactly as predicted by the ‘dream premonitions are the work of normal, not paranormal forces’ brigade, the respondents’ premonitions were all over the place, with only a handful of them containing information that subsequently proved to be accurate. Murray was forced to conclude that his findings did ‘not support the contention that distant events and dreams are causally related’. Although people may dream about the future, those dreams do not represent a magical insight into what will be.
Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the public this. In 2009, psychologists Cary Morewedge from Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton from Harvard University carried out an experiment to discover whether the modern mind is still attracted to the notion that dreams predict the future.9 Nearly 200 commuters at a Boston railway station were asked to imagine that they had booked to be on a certain flight, but that the day before they were due to travel one of four events occurred. Either the government issued a warning of a possible terrorist attack, they thought about their plane crashing, a real plane crashed on the same route or that they dreamed about being in an airplane accident. After imagining each scenario, everyone was asked to rate the likelihood of them cancelling their flight. Amazingly, having an alleged precognitive dream came top of the pile, causing a greater sense of anxiety than a government terrorist warning or even an actual crash.
In addition to casting serious doubts on the ‘dreams as prophecy’ model of the human psyche, the science of sleep has also made considerable progress in tackling perhaps the greatest dream-based mystery of all – what are our dreams actually for?
HOW TO CONTROL YOUR DREAMS: PART TWO
The ultimate type of dream control involves lucid dreaming. This most desirable of night time activities means that you can experience the impossible, allowing you to fly, walk through walls and spend quality time with your favourite celebrity. At first, this strange phenomenon caused a great deal of debate among scientists, with some researchers arguing that perhaps those reporting these experiences weren't actually dreaming. However, the issue was resolved in the late 1970s when dream researcher Keith Hearne monitored the brain activity of those claiming to regularly experience lucid dreams.10 In perhaps his best-known study, Hearne invited his star subject to his sleep laboratory, asked him to indicate when he was having a lucid dream by moving his eyes right and left eight times, and then monitored his brain activity as he slept. Hearne discovered that the lucid dreams took place during REM sleep and were associated with the same type of brain activity as a normal dream. In short, evidence that lucid dreams are produced by the dreaming brain.
Hearne's work helped kick-start research into lucid dreaming, with scientists investigating a range of issues, including the best ways of increasing the chances of having a lucid dream. Their research suggests that the following steps will help you gain control of your dreams.11
1. Set your alarm clock to wake you up about four, six and seven hours after falling asleep. In theory, this will increase the likelihood of you being woken up during or straight after a dream.
2. If the alarm clock wakes you during a dream, spend ten minutes reading, writing down information about the dream or walking around. Then go back to bed and think about the dream that you had before waking up. Tell yourself that you are going to have the same dream again, but this time you will be aware that you are dreaming.
3. Draw a large letter 'A' (for 'awake') on one of your palms and the letter 'D' (for 'dreaming') on the other. Whenever you notice either of the letters, ask yourself whether you are awake or asleep. This helps you get used to the ritual and therefore asking the same question when you dream. Also, as you prepare to nod off each night, lie in your bed and take a minute to look at the palms of your hands and quietly tell yourself that while you dream you will look at your hands.
4. If you do manage to have a lucid dream, you will find yourself having to decide whether you are dreaming or actually in the real world. The good news is that there are various actions that will allow you to tell fiction from reality. First, try looking into a mirror - in a lucid dream your image will appear blurry. Second, feel free to bite your arm. If you are in a lucid dream you won't be able to feel a thing, whereas in the real world it will hurt like hell. Finally, try leaning against a wall. In a lucid dream you will often fall through the wall, whereas in the real world this will only happen if the building has been constructed by British engineers in the last ten years.
A Stroll Down the Royal Road to the Unconscious
There is an old joke about a woman who wakes up in the morning, turns to her husband, and says, ‘Last night I dreamed that you gave me a wonderful silver necklace for my birthday. What do you think that means?’ Her husband replies, ‘You’ll know tonight.’ That evening, the husband returns home with a small package and gives it to his wife. Delighted, she opens the package and finds a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
The joke is
fictitious, but the book is real. Sigmund Freud was fascinated by dreams and famously referred to them as ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. Freud’s basic model of the mind revolved around the notion that we all have various fears and worries, and that our conscious mind deals with them by repressing them into our unconscious. During dreaming the conscious mind takes a well-earned break, allowing our true desires and emotions to emerge. Freud therefore thought that it was possible to gain an insight into someone’s secret desires by having them describe the ‘manifest content’ (what they actually dreamed about) of a dream, and using this to determine the ‘latent content’ (the unfulfilled emotions that the dream represents). However, this was often far from straightforward because the unconscious mind isn’t big on language and instead tends towards symbolic communication. Although some of these symbols are both universal and obvious (dream ‘cigar’, think ‘penis’), others are very personal and can only be fully understood with the help of a skilled therapist (dream ‘constantly hugging a policeman’, think ‘£200 an hour’). Freud’s ideas have spawned an entire industry devoted to dream interpretation, with unrepressed salespeople across the world eager to sell manuals, training seminars, and DVDs on the subject. There is just one small problem. Many scientists now think that Freud got it badly wrong, and that these attempts at interpretation are a complete waste of time.
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