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Claimed dreams that foretold disaster
The claimed predictions
Middleton dreamed often about things she had no connection to. In the 1960s she claimed that one of her dreams predicted the landslide in South Wales about an hour before it killed 144 people, and she supposedly foretold Robert Kennedy's assassination in a dream as well.
Ordinary explanations
Ordinary explanations are available. Dreams are ambiguous, so a dreamer can look back after an event and decide that is what the dream meant. The brain naturally looks for patterns and can join together things that aren't connected, and selective memory and coincidence also play a part. Between 17 and 38 percent of people report at least one precognitive dream in their lifetime.
The quantum idea
Some quantum theories, quantum gravity among them, allow for it. If past, present, and future coexist instead of running in a line, the dreaming state could reach future events the way a waking mind reaches past ones.
How did the Welsh landslide happen?
The South Wales landslide that killed 144 people matches the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which 116 of the dead were children. A tip of coal waste on the hillside above the village slid down after heavy rain and reached Pantglas Junior School, where classes had just begun. The tip had been built over natural springs, and the rain soaked it before it gave way.
Why do coincidence dreams feel prophetic?
Mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller wrote in 1989 that with enough people and enough events, remarkable coincidences are bound to occur, a principle they called the law of truly large numbers. Billions of people dream every night, so some dream will match an event by chance. People tend to remember and retell the matches and forget the far more numerous dreams that matched nothing. Dream imagery is also loose enough that many later events can be read as fitting.
Why do physicists question time flowing?
Einstein's relativity treats time as a dimension woven together with space, and in the block universe view that follows, past, present, and future are all equally real. In 1955 Einstein wrote to the family of his friend Michele Besso that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Some approaches to quantum gravity, built around the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, produce a description of the universe with no time variable in it. Physicists call this the problem of time.
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