As a few people have pointed out, you tend to be a lot less sceptical about things you've experienced yourself.
Luckily there is one experiment that almost anyone can do that should convince you of the reality of at least one psychical phenomenon - dream precognition.
The key to documenting it is the traditional dream diary. Keep a notebook and pen by the bed. As soon as you wake up, scribble down as much detail as you can remember from your dreams. Sketch anything that seemed visually interesting.
I tried it for a while. I soon got good at picking up what was a rehashed memory of the events of the preceding days. But another thing that soon becomes obvious is that some of the details are 'memories' of things that are going to happen over the next few days. It's all very trivial stuff, exactly as distorted and fragmentary as the past memories are, but after a few dozen hits you soon become convinced that it's really happening.
Don't expect to dream the names of winning horses or the lottery numbers! You're more likely to get a particular streetscape that you're about to visit, or an unusual piece of furniture in a house you haven't visited before, or maybe sentences from a conversation.
But yes, to answer the original question - is there anything I'm less sceptical of? Definitely. Dream precognition.
You'll only convince yourself if you try it.
Sorry Salmonellus - but precognitive dreaming (most apparent cases of it anyway) is just another item which has entered the rogues gallery of things which I have grown sceptical of. (I have tried to explain my reasons why before on some other thread - so apologies to anyone who feels a sense of dejavu on reading this, my second attempt).
Dreams can be pretty whacky, right? Let's imagine that one night you had a dream that you were competing in a sausage eating contest with Gyles Brandreth in a Romanian castle. Well, that's a silly and trivial kind of dream - and you most likely would have forgotten it completely the next day, as you do most of your dreams.
But on this next day you are leafing through `Hello` magazine and you learn that Gyles Brandreth, with his lovely wife, is holidaying in Romania this year. Later you catch a TV news story about a suasage eating contest that is occuring somewhere in Romanaia also this year. And you go `Whoa!` - I dreamt about that!!
In your surprised state a few salient facts will get waylaid, viz: (a) Romania is a very populatr holiday destination and many British people go there every year, (b) Indeed, Gyles Brandreth and his lovely wife go there every year. (c) Neither of them attended the sausage eating competition. (d) Sausage eating competitions are staged all over the world, and (d) the Romainian castle detail does not feature at all in any of this.
You will also have quite forgotten the dream that you had the night before this dream, which involved being in gladiatorial combat with Bruce Forsyth in ancient Rome - as, since it didn't seem to resonate with anything, you clean forget it.
To summarise my position:
* We dream pretty much every night - and our dreams are often high;ly inventive and full of detail. (The subconscios mind is like Chat GPT on speed).
*Most of these dreams get forgotten - or are at best only partially recalled.
*Most of them don't resonate with anything in `the real world`.
*However, lots of stuff happens in the `real world` - and so, inevitably, some things which happen in our dreams may tally sometimes with things which happen in `objective reality`. (Particularly so as our minds are designed to find patterns in things.)
* We tend to cherry pick the bits of the dream that fit `real` events and ignore - or just plain forget- those which do not.
I would be impressed with dreams that sre striking enough, and significant enough, to make us change our behavious in a way that is to our advantage - e.g. someone deciding not to take a train to work for once - becuase they dreamt of a train crash - and later
there was (at a time reasobnably close to the dream). Maybe there are documented cases like this, but nine times out of ten, when people talk about `precognitive dreams` they are just fitting a dream together with some random event that later took place
after the event.
