That itself is a common assertion that I'd object to. If "almost all are forgotten" where did the statistic that "millions of people dream of a plane crash" come from? You can't count forgotten/unreported experiences! It's no more than an "its probably so" assertion - albeit a popular one - with no discernible data to back it up. At least none that I'm aware of.
Good point. My specific of 'plane crashes' however was used to illustrate the probability that in a population of 7 billion, millions of dreams with some specificity occur daily which might appear to predict the events of that day. Many millions don’t. For ‘precognitive’ appearing dreams to have significance they need to occur more often than by chance over a whole population.
For one person to dream of a particular disaster and then claim ‘precognition’ doesn’t really have any statistical significance UNLESS a far greater than usual number of people had the same dream. Or the dreamer predicted several such events in sequence and they then occurred, but even the latter would only have significance if in such a large population (billions) it was unlikely to happen to
someone by chance.
The same is usually said of winning the lottery. It is incredibly common for the actual winner of the lottery to declare they dreamt of it. Google it and you'll find page after page of news stories, almost on a weekly basis. The assertion equivalent to the plane crash one is often made in retort...what about all the people who dream of winning the lottery and don't, they say. Well, my response is what people? How and when and where were failed dreams of lottery winning counted in order to make such an assertion that this vast unreported reservoir exists?
From a scientific method standpoint, this claim of 'knowing' after the fact is a post hoc hypothesis. "I won and now I recall thinking I would win". These are quite rightly damned for the most part by the scientific community with good reason. It’s otherwise known as making the facts fit the theory (and sometimes vice versa). As evidence this is flimsy at best.
Secondly, I'd suggest that an awful lot of people do the lottery because they dream of winning a big prize. They hope to win a big prize. Every night before a draw they dream and wish it was them. Amazingly, the very few who win, recall thinking 'it was going to be them'. Given that memory recall is shaped very much by the present conditions when you recall the memory, it’d be a bigger surprise if loads of winners
didn't think they were certain to win 'this time'.
In the third place, the web and the newspapers will print whatever sells the story. The headline, “Lottery winner never expected to win anything and thought it was all down to random chance.” isn't going to do it. Lotteries work by selling a dream, not the actual chance of winning. The media sells themselves by printing the story people want to hear. So, not evidence in any meaningful way.
I pay far more attention to the content of my dreams that the vast majority of people, as my contributions to these boards demonstrate. I can tell you though I've sometimes speculated that maybe this dream could be a clue to buy a lottery ticket or whatever I have never, in the hundreds and hundreds of dreams I've recorded to some degree or other over the last several years, never dreamed I won the lottery nor dreamed of a plane crash. The idea that we're all having such dreams all of the time..or sufficiently vast numbers of us are..doesn't seem to have anything much to support it.
I also recorded my dreams over a period of three months in their totality as I’ve indicated. Once I’d got to the point they became continuous narratives, I seldom came across anything that was not related to the day-to-day anxieties and social interactions at the time. Certainly nothing I would class as precognitive or predictive in any unsupported way (that is to say, that could not have been reasonably predicted with the available data). My sample size of ‘1’ has the same validity as yours I’d respectfully suggest. For me, not dreaming of a lottery win might just well indicate I'm so unlikely to do so, it's not worth the brain power. Not dreaming about plane crashes likewise might just indicate I wasn't flying anywhere at the time nor was anyone I knew.
I agree that if we don't all record our dreams then we can't say that dreams are occurring to all the people of any specific thing in what proportions in a 100% definite way.
We could say with some certainty for example that everyone dreams about sex on a regular basis, even though we haven’t noted everyones' dreams. But, out of seven billion people, it's a very reasonable bet that some of them dreamt 'tomorrow night was the night' and got lucky the next day. That's not precognition unless it happens more often that you would expect by chance. Even if it happens to one person once a week for a six months and no-one else, it might well be out of a very large population that is what you might expect, like tossing a coin once a week for six months and always getting 'heads' (Odds of 1 in 67,108,864. If a billion people were doing that, you might expect 14 odd folk to get that result).
My argument is that if only 'X' had a precognitive dream, it doesn't prove pre-cognition. To do that one would need everyone's dreams over a period and to see a 'spike' in dreams about, for example, a ‘specific disaster’ ahead of the actual ‘specific disaster’. If you want me (for example) to believe 'X' is prcognative (despite wanting to believe such ability exists), I'll need to see some proper evidence it wasn't a 'one off dream' out of billions of dreams, that was simply coincidental.
Again, I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming to "pick" lottery numbers by active prediction (except in the tabloid mag astrology column kind of way of telling you your "lucky numbers"), so the statistical outcome you describe simply doen't apply. Claims of foreseeing the lottery win tend to fall mostly into the category of dreaming of winning just before you do so. Rarely are the actual numbers said to be involved. So if precog dreams of winning the lottery exist they would by defintion only be experienced by those who do - that is, were always going to - win the lottery, so the overall number of winners would not go up at all.
Occasionally some reported stories of winners who dreamt it do involve seeing the numbers and picking them as a consequence. But it's much rarer and clearly not intentional so its hard to see how it could have any statistical effect on the overall outcome of lottery payouts.
If, in a large population, a significant number of people had the ability to pick numbers for, e.g., a lottery draw, then there would undoubtedly be more winners than we would expect by pure chance. Otherwise, it is indistinguishable from chance, and so is therefore ‘chance’.
(I'm assuming that the ability to pick lottery numbers for oneself, doesn't in some mysterious way stop anyone else from doing so, so that the overall result is statistically valid.)
If your argument is that the winners are winning entirely by chance, but the ‘lucky’ ones are getting a foreshadowing, then, as I’ve said above, due to the natural hope of winning and the likelihood winners will recall thinking
this time it would be them, forgetting all the times they threw their ticket in the bin and had another drink, then we're back to
post hoc hypothesising.