Many years ago I awoke in the dead of night in a cold sweat, with the certain knowledge that a close relative had suddenly died. […] In fact, the relative is alive and well […]. However, suppose the relative had in fact died that night. You would have had a difficult time convincing me that it was merely coincidence. But it is easy to calculate that if each American has such a premonitory experience a few times in his lifetime, the actuarial statistics alone will produce a few apparent precognitive events somewhere in America each year. We can calculate that this must occur fairly frequently, but to the rare person who dreams of disaster, followed rapidly by its realization, it is uncanny and awesome. Such a coincidence must happen to someone every few months, but those who experience a correct precognition understandably resist its explanation by coincidence.

After my experience I did not write a letter to an institute of parapsychology relating a compelling predictive dream which was not borne out by reality. That is not a memorable letter. But had the death I dreamt actually occurred, such a letter would have been marked down as evidence for precognition. The hits are recorded, the misses are not.

Thus Carl Sagan in his 1979 book Broca’s Brain. Continue reading →