Can we predict the future? A journey into dream premonitions

A few weeks ago (or more) on a Thursday, a friend of mine who is also a colleague at work calls me up to hang out with him at night. Friday was going to be his last day at the firm, and as I was in Toronto, and so was he. He wanted to hang out and have a beer and talk about the good times and the not so good times. What the friend did not know was that I expected his call. The logical part of my brain knew that Friday was going to be his last day and that he would want to hang out before. But the illogical part was interpreting a dream I had the night before where I saw him talking to me about going out for a drink at night. This latter case is an example of what psychologist Carl Jung had called Synchronicity. 

At some point in his career studying and curing mental illness, Carl Jung would succumb to insanity for a period. It might have been during this period or after it that he wrote about “synchronicity an acausal connecting principle.” He starts this short volume by recalling a patient session. In it, she was telling him about a dream she had where she saw some bug (I remember it as a ladybug but could be wrong). As she was telling the story, he had looked out the window and saw a bug that is similar to the bug in the patient’s story. He understood this as a series of experiences that he and others had with what is commonly known as coincidences.

He set about trying to find a scientific explanation for these coincidences. For one thing, he tried to find statistical explanations for astrologically significant marriages. According to astrology, there are some signs which are compatible with others and make for good marriages. He took on a sample of people and tried to find whether this was significant enough to give credence to astrology. He had concluded in the end that what he terms as Synchronicity is the manifestation of collective consciousness.

From a logical and philosophical and scientific point of view, if there was a way to predict the future, then we live in a world whose unfolding is already predetermined. There is a lot of literature in the philosophical realm about how freewill does exist in the deterministic universe and that all that is going to happen will happen. The question now becomes whether there was a way for agents in this universe to know what is going to happen. The only way for them to get this knowledge without logical paradoxes is for them not to try to change these so-called premonitions. Otherwise, for instance, one could change the future and render the promotion wrong.

There are other angles to examine when it comes to these premonitions, such as whether they are foretelling of an unfolding and deterministic future, some mind reading at a distance, logical inference performed in the unconscious region of our mind, the pattern recognition part of our mind going haywire and finding spurious connections or just probable coincidences.

We have started with the first assumptions that the two dreams are predicting the future. The second explanation would apply to the second example I gave, which would be that at night my brain synchronized with my friend’s brain and a message was communicated to the effect that he plans to invite me to have a beer with him tomorrow.

The third explanation, however, would be much more rational. In this case, I knew that Friday was going to be his last day at work. I was also flying back from Toronto that day, so time was running out. I just deduced that he was going to call me tomorrow and it happened. What about Carl Jung’s patient telling him about that bug? It’s where the fourth and fifth explanation comes in. As he was hearing his patient, the pattern recognition part of his brain was going haywire, and he found a bug that looked like his patient’s bug and made an acausal connection. He got primed by the patient about what to look for, and he did.

For the modern person with atheistic tendencies and a scientific worldview, the latter three explanations make the most sense. One does not spend their time giving meaning to coincidences even though when you start looking for them, you notice that they abound in life. The scientific explanation of dreams is that they are based on the last thoughts we had before sleeping. A story tells of famous mathematicians who would try to solve a puzzle before going to bed and would solve it in their sleep. However folk thinking about the supernatural power of dreams in predicting the future abound. And some people have claimed to have successfully harnessed this power from their dreams, and wakeful states do indeed predict the future.

There have been stories of past experiments conducted during the cold war to try to find supernatural powers, and there have been books and religions who have believed in those. Currently, we don’t have scientific evidence in the form of repeatable experiments to prove man’s supernatural powers to predict the future. I don’t dismiss the supernatural explanation of these coincidences, but always take them with a grain of salt (or more like a saltshaker). The jury is still out on synchronicity. I mentioned that Jung tried to find statistical significance in astrology. He did not manage to. Also, this all was part of a period where he suffered psychosis, and so that might have had a lot to do with it.