Episode notes
This episode explores the mysterious phenomenon of precognitive dreams, where people dream about events that later seem to come true. History is filled with such accounts—from Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his own death to reports of people envisioning disasters before they occurred, like the sinking of the Titanic or the 1966 Aberfan tragedy.
Science, however, explains most of these cases through coincidence, intuition, and predictive processing. The brain constantly detects subtle patterns and makes subconscious forecasts; in dreams, these can appear as vivid predictions. Psychologists also highlight confirmation bias, where we remember the “hits” and forget the “misses.”
Still, the emotional and intuitive nature of dreams means they sometimes capture truths we sense before we consciou ...