h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It was after watching Pan's Labyrinth at the cinema that I remembered this dream. It was the first nightmare I can ever remember having, and the worst. I must have been about three at the time. I'm standing with a lot of other children on a flat muddy plain. There is no vegetation, just a hill in the distance. Then a miner appears: his face is dirty, but he turns to us and points up at the sky before, suddenly, a huge tidal wave of mud appears and engulfs us all.

At this point I woke up, apparently screaming and took ages to be consoled. I still remember the feeling of encroaching and bottomless dread as the dream developed. It wasn't until I got into double figures that I deduced the meaning. It was about the Aberfan disaster. The dream would have occurred at about the same time as the disaster. Was I, a three year old, able to process the media information that was available at that time to the extent that it planted the seed of a nightmare in my mind? Unlikely, seeing as how I was only three and remembered the dream vividly and not the news. We didn't have a television then, anyway, and my parents wouldn't have said anything about it to me.

The more I re-examine it, and the more I read accounts by people who had almost identical dreams (even down to the miner) around that time I'm pretty sure that I had a premonition of some kind. I had a second such premonition when I was 14, of a woman being burned to death in a laboratory fire at the local University. I've had other weird and conventionally-inexplicable things happen to me since. And this is why I don't believe in rubbish like crystal therapy: the explanation should come *after* the mysical phenomenon. You don't come up with some cod spiritual theory and then claim spurious powers that arise from it.

I just hope to God it never happens again.

I am not a personal fan of any of the spiritual theories that support psi phenomena, they are simply not good science. Abduction, or Inference to the Best Explanation, does not settle on their explanations as yet.

Sometimes science works best not by theory first then experiment (as say General relativity) but as experiment then theory (as for Photo-electric effect). Einstein got his Nobel prize for the later not the former.

That said...

I think parapaychology has a case to be made, though as a fringe area that is not mainstream it comes in for a lot of stick. Big claims need big evidence. That's not unreasonable.

But the impact of proving some of these claims true would be a major paradigm shift. So much so that academic careers, reputations, research grants, etc., etc., would be made and broken. "Incommensurability" as the Philosopher of Science Historicism Thomas Kuhn would say. There's a good entry on that here; A1049915

That said. Its a crying shame in my book that the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) research facility that has been coming up with statistically significant (though controversial) findings that support that small, but real, paranormal effect exist, was shut down end of Feb becuase of funding probs.

Anamolies are not to be ignored and ridiculed. They are the jewels and gold-dust of better understanding of this universe of ours.

PS: my wife once had a dream before we had kids that had two little trees growing on one side of a pond and one on an island in the middle of it. She asked he mum what it meant, she said you will have three children one here and one on a island. We had two kids in Korea and one in Singapore. It does not prove anything I admit, yet... it's an example something that C G Jung called synchronicity.

Sorry error in the text, the dream interpretation was "2 here and 1 on an island elsewhere"

I'm not a great fan of psi, either. But I'm also a believer of Sherlock Holmes' dictum that 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth'. Hence the reason I also believe in things like cold fusion, despite my scientific training, because I can't come up with a plausible alternative explanation.

Good quote from Sherlock Holmes.

As for cold fusion maybe something is going on other than fusion to give an exothermic reaction, it's in need of thorough examination.

What is frustrating is when people say something cant possibly happen. You can get quotes by the dozen of establishment scientists down the ages who would have squished research into much of what we take for granted today.

Look up 'Clarke's Three Laws'.