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Retrieve That Dream

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Y:        You know, Don, Last night I had a dream in which a little dog hopped up on the hood of my car. And then this morning, as I was parking, a little dog jumped up on my hood! My dream foretold the future--I'm convinced. From now on I'm going to read Shirley MacLaine books instead of all this science stuff.

D:        Lots of people have had dreams that seem to foretell the future. Some psychologists attribute this to "retrieval cues."

Y:        Retrieval cues?

D:        A retrieval cue is a coincidence in the real world that triggers a dream memory which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. For example, did you know you had dreamed about a little dog before the real dog showed up?

Y:        Oh, yes! I was thinking about it all morning.

D:        (unconvinced): Really?

Y:        Well...I think so.

D:        Maybe. Or maybe the real event triggered a recollection of a dream, which now seems like it must have been in your thoughts all along. By the way, did you have any other dreams last night that didn't come true?

Y:        Hmmm...I don't remember what else I dreamed.

D:        Why not? Some studies suggest we have literally hundreds of dreams each night.

Y:        Okay, I get the point. Maybe this dreaming the future stuff is more like picking and choosing dreams when they happen to fit.

D:        Coincidences are bound to come up. And if the coincidence acts as a retrieval cue, the sense that you predicted something can be pretty convincing...even if it's just a dream.

Lots of people have had dreams that seem to foretell the future. Some psychologists attribute this to "retrieval cues." A retrieval cue is a coincidence in the real world that triggers a dream memory which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Some studies suggest we have literally hundreds of dreams each night.

So while you might feel like you had a dream that predicted something in the future that did indeed happen, the thing that happened was actually just a cue for your brain to retrieve the memory of the dream by coincidence. Coincidences are bound to come up. And if the coincidence acts as a retrieval cue, the sense that you predicted something can be pretty convincing...even if it's just a dream.

 

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Originally aired February 8, 2016. 

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