Multiple Endpoints
In the morning, a man receives a phone call from an old friend he has not heard from in years. The call reminds him that that very night he saw his friend in a dream. He is sure that it cannot be a coincidence, he is astonished, and the experience thereafter influences his views on the paranormal.
John Gilovich persuasively explains away such experiences in his book How We Know What Isn't So by using the theory of multiple endpoints. Imagine two sheets of glass across which thousands of dots have been randomly scattered. The two sheets are laid on top of one another. Perhaps one percent of the dots align, for in superimposing two sufficiently complex patterns, chance alignments are a statistical inevitability. And so on any given night, the dreaming mind generates hundreds of thoughts and images, and so on any given day, one is presented with hundreds of images and experiences. The alignment of images from the dream with images encountered the following day are as inevitable as the alignment of dots on the two sheets of glass in Gilovich's analogy. The theory of multiple endpoints explains a number of other phenomena too, such as the Barnum effect and the supposedly incredible but actually apopheniac tabulation of numerical coincidences between two historical figures—popualrly, J. F. K and Lincoln. But at least here, with a conscious effort, the creeping sense of mysterious coincidence can be overcome. We have only to acknowledge the data we are overlooking, and realize that we are paying special attention to correspondences in a much larger and random sample. With dreams it is different because the alignments are not merely more noticeable than the misalignments; the alignments themselves determine what parts of the dream we recall. That is, we see only the alignments, or hits, while the misses remain below the threshold of consciousness. To return to Gilovich's example, here our waking experiences could be represented, as before, by a sheet of glass with a scattering of random dots. But our dream must be represented by a sheet with far fewer dots, every one of which aligns perfectly with a dot on the first sheet as if created by design to be its companion piece. The problem with this otherwise highly persuasive theory is that it applies at all points only to those cases where the waking experience precedes our recollection of the dream—but cannot explain away those instances where we wake from sleep with a particular dream already in mind that is only later matched to an unforeseeable waking experience—such as (to rework my original example) a man beginning to relate a dream about a friend he has not seen in years and being interrupted by a phone call from that very friend. Of course, one day, a scientist or quantum physicist will provide us with an explanation for these experiences too. But I suspect that when it finally arrives the explanation will be even more amazing than the mystery. |