Have you ever had a dream that seemed to predict the future? If you have, you’re not alone. A 2013 study of undergraduate psychology students in Argentina found that around one in five of them had had a premonitory dream of some kind. These dreams were mostly of trivial events, though some were more serious, and that they were often symbolic of the future rather than direct representations – think of a dream of an owl sitting on your grandfather’s garden gate rather than a dream of your grandfather sharing some important wisdom with you.

Of course, thinking you’ve had a premonition like this doesn’t mean you actually have predicted the future. The most obvious question we should ask is…

Person in bed stretching as they wake up — Was it just a coincidence?

Some people will brush an apparently premonitory dream off as a coincidence, and some people will view it as deeply meaningful.

Research on belief in the paranormal, including belief in premonitory dreams, shows that there are some personality characteristics that are pretty good predictors of those beliefs. People who believe in psychic ability tend to be more suggestible than others, more likely to make misjudgements about how likely events are, and more likely to find links between distantly related or unrelated things.

This kind of link-making tendency is called apophenia, and some studies (but definitely not all) have found that it is linked with schizotypy. Schizotypy is a personality trait that we all have to some extent, and is – basically – the tendency to be nonconformist in terms of perceptions, thoughts, emotions and behaviours. Memory might also play a role: humans vary in how good their minds are at putting aside information that’s no longer relevant, and if your mind struggles with this, you might see coincidences where other people don’t, eventually becoming more prone than others to believing in the paranormal.

Research on psychoactive substances also gives us an insight. There isn’t much on drug use and extrasensory perception (ESP) experiences like precognition in modern Western contexts, largely because psychoactive drugs are typically illegal in those countries. However, what there is suggests that there’s also a consistent link between recreational psychedelic drug use and belief in the paranormal. This isn’t surprising. As you will probably know if you’ve ever taken LSD or ketamine, psychoactive substances can have a huge variety of effects, including altered mental imagery, increased empathy and suggestibility, and, importantly, the sense of transcending space and time.

What do we make of this research? Well, the most common interpretation in the research I’ve read is that paranormal experiences aren’t real, but some personality traits and some neurochemical changes brought about by drugs make us more likely to believe that they are.

As I mentioned in my previous blog on ghosts, I like to keep an open mind to multiple explanations. Here, I think it’s especially important as this interpretation is at odds with anthropological reports from around the world on the use of psychoactive substances in ritual contexts, many of which discuss beliefs about such substances as offering access to ESP rather than creating the illusion of ESP.

Here’s the thing: all of the research I talked about above is also compatible with the interpretation that at least some paranormal experiences are real. If this is the case, those personality traits and neurochemical changes don’t make us more likely to be fooled into thinking we’ve experienced something paranormal. Instead, they make us make us more likely to notice when something paranormal happens. This opens up an interesting question…

Crystal ball on a beach at sunset — Does precognition actually exist?

First, let’s talk about attempts to test precognitive dreams in the laboratory. Some people who claim to be able to predict the future are definitely frauds, and so are some psychology researchers. So, it’s important that experiments on precognition attempt to prevent both participants and researchers from being able to fake results.

According to a review published in 2018, there have been four experiments on precognitive dreaming that have done a decent job of preventing research fraud. In each of these, participants were told they’d be seeing an image the next day and were asked to try and dream about what it would be. In the morning, they wrote a report about what they’d dreamed. After they’d made the report, the image was selected from a few different possibilities by a random-number generator. Finally, judges who didn’t know which target had been selected saw all the possible targets and made a judgement about which target was most similar to the dream report. Three of those four experiments had results which indicated the dreamers were able to predict the target.

However, one possible problem with this is the file-drawer effect. In psychology research, it’s generally much easier to publish an interesting finding than an uninteresting finding, so many researchers don’t bother trying to publish things that simply confirm what we already know. Instead, they simply put them in a drawer and forget about them. Though this practice is discouraged these days, there’s no real way to tell how many experiments on precognitive dreaming in which participants didn’t predict something are lying forlornly in filing cabinets.

A more common way that researchers have assessed whether people can predict the future is with experiments that look at a much shorter time-lag. Most of these require participants to look at images which are either boring or violent, or to try to predict which image they’re going to see out of a pre-selected set. In both of these cases, people have different reactions when they see a violent image compared to a boring image, or when they’re right about their guess compared to when they’re wrong. These reactions can be measured in a number of ways including heart rate, pupil dilation, and brain activity. Weirdly, if you look at what happens before the image is seen, people also appear to differ in those measures depending on what they’re about to see.

This research is pretty hotly debated, and again there are some obvious explanations that are not ‘people are psychic’. For example:

It’s just a coincidence (we’ve seen this one before!)
There might be very subtle differences in noise or delay as a computer pulls up one image compared to another (but this doesn’t fit with how participants behave in the experiments)
Researchers are persistently committing fraud or engaging in unethical research practices like running multiple analyses on the same data until they get a result they like (though this would require hundreds of people to be complicit, given the number of studies this effect has shown up in)

But… okay, what if people are psychic? What would that mean for psychology research?

Frankly, it would be kind of a disaster. Scientific experiments, including psychology experiments, rely on controlling for things that could unduly influence your experiments. This might mean not telling your participant what an experiment is about till it’s over so they don’t behave in a way they think you want them to, or asking them to go into a magnetically shielded room if you’re measuring their brain’s magnetic fields (so the Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t interfere), or asking them not to drink caffeine for 12 hours beforehand if you’re measuring how alert people are in different situations. But if people are psychic, there’s a direct interaction between each human mind and the rest of the world that is not bound by time or space – and that would mean there would be no way to prevent the thoughts of a participant or a researcher from interfering with the experiment.

Yikes.

Dreams that come true: coincidence or precognition?

References

Psychology's answers to everyday questions, in blog form!

Dreams that come true: coincidence or precognition?

References