Overdose said:
But really it would be pointless, the majority of accurate predictions would be deemed too vauge, and direct hit predictions would be deemed coincidences.
This means that you are admitting the non-verifiability of the statement you want to make. Saying that it is "pointless to try to prove, because you won't believe me anyway" can be applied to any wrong or true statement and doesn't add anything to an argument pro or contra.
To the essential discussion here:
first of all, it is of course possible to predict (correctly) some aspects of the future. That's what science is all about: making predictions of the outcomes of experiments. So there is nothing unnatural in making predictions.
If I connect a 12 V battery to a 1 ohm resistor, I predict that I will measure a current of 12 A when I put also an ampmeter in series. Next, I actually DO this, and lo and behold: I read 12 A ! I have predicted the future !
But I guess that's too boring to be the subject of discussion here .
You want mystic stuff to talk about. New Age things. Pyramids and voodoo.
So what you are talking about, which I will call premonitory dreaming, is: being told about future events which, by no means at our current disposition of science, or of past experience, could have given the suspicion that those events would take place.
So in order to demonstrate the existence of such a phenomenon, you'd have to carefully eliminate 1) those that don't count according to that definition, meaning, everything that could lead to a rational prediction of the event and 2) that the cases which remain are statistically relevant.
Let's go back to the lady that had a dream that her husband would die, after he had a few heart attacks. Admittedly, after having had a few heart attacks, you can rationally predict that the chance of dying soon is pretty high. Also, in those cases that a relative dreamt that the person would die, and in the end he didn't die, are not reported usually. So there is statistical biasing here.
On the other hand, if, say, 50 times in a row, you can dream up a number between 2 and 12 and you communicate that publicly, and the next day, I throw dice and it is each time equal to that number, I grant that premonitory dreaming in the voodoo sense exists. 1) is satisfied because the throwing of dice is random, and the public communication is sure and 2) is satisfied because of the 50 times in a row. It would convince everybody.
However, if you say of premonitory dreaming in the voodoo sense, sometimes it happens, sometimes not, in such a way that it is statistically not tractable, it should convince people that it doesn't exist and is just statistics.
cheers,
Patrick.