Here’s a news story that I remember. I wonder what the super cynicals here would say? I have no explanation for it exactly.
The story is a girl goes missing. They look for her, can’t find her. A mother of one of her friends, after a prayer session and dream, awakens and believes she “knows” where the missing girl is. She and her daughter drive up along a highway, stop the car and find her car below. She had accidentally driven off of the cliff and landed far below. I remember seeing it on TV at the time and a patrolman saying that he couldn’t believe they could even SEE the car from the road, let alone stop in that spot and find it. Even after it was pointed out to him, the officer couldn’t see it. It was underneath some trees. That exact same route had been searched before numerous times and no one saw anything. This mother drives right to it and finds it. Very bizarre.
Probably what you’ll say is that hundreds of mothers in similar circumstances have dreams, drive to find the missing girl, and…don’t. This one did and thus made the news.
Laura’s parents organized a volunteer search on Saturday with 200 volunteers in areas near the place where the car was found. And that night Sha Nohr, a church member and mother of a friend of Hatch’s, said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, “Keep going, keep going.”
On Sunday morning, Nohr and her daughter drove to the area where the crash occurred, praying along the way.
Nohr said something drew her to stop and clamber over a concrete barrier and more than 100 feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where she barely managed to discern the wrecked Toyota Camry in some trees.
I have had dreamlike daydreams. All of them were dreamlike, in fact. Gee, you don’t think that’s why they call them daydreams, do you?
And you may not be able to tell the difference between good, double-blind, replicated research and poorly managed biased crap, but some of us don’t have that problem. Don’t project your ignorance and bias on others.
I’ve had a dream where the Shirt Taleswere defending a fort against Gremlins that were trying to climb over or dig under the wall and interrupt the committee meeting the Shirt Tales characters were having. Discuss. Post references. Remember, to receive full credit you must assert that the Shirt Tales are actual spirits of light, and the Gremlins are actual demons of darkness.
After this, we will discuss the time the small rich family took over Cat’s Lair, fending the inhabitants off and imprisoning them with the mighty power of their muscular whip-weilding butler.
Remember, it is not acceptable to say that the brain was pulling in images and concepts from the person’s sleeping mind and mixing them together, possibly overlaying them into issues the person was concerned about - that is the secular explanation. To get spiritual credit, everything in the dream must be of extra-consciousness origin.
It’s nice that Professor Hyslop (a professor of Logic and Ethics in the late 1800’s, it seems) convinced himself so thoroughly of the phenomenon that he closed his mind to further debate, and I can certainly see why you might admire such a figure. However, I fail to see what value that information provides to this thread.
Sounds like a fish story to me. I wonder how many times the lady rehashed the events in her mind, remembering a larger role for the god she was grateful to and less and less looking around before finding the girl each time she repeated the story to herself, before she finally related the story to the press?
In one of the stories she said she told her daughter of the dream that morning and they went out to find her and did.
And this girl had had 200 people plus the police looking for her for days. And these people and the police looked on this road because they knew it was her most likely route but couldn’t find her.
I saw the woman on TV and she didn’t seem to be in it for the money, fame or to write a book. Seemed surprised that she had such a clear dream and found her so readily. She said she found her the morning after the dream, but I suppose she could be lying.
This is kind of like how I watched four hours of the Avatar TV show sunday afternoon, and then dreamed of Avatar that night, isn’t it? Or at least I’d say it’s equally unsurprising that she was dreaming about looking for her daughter in the woods.
Right, you said she was difficult to see. Which would easily explain why the first people to look there didn’t catch sight of her. (Did all 200 of those people each check this road? I presume they did, because you mentioned that number as if it was relevent.)
What can be objectively known is, the girl was found in the last place she was looked for by her mother. We don’t really know where else she looked or how many times or how many other places she checked before thinking she saw something out of place down in that ravine (and possiblt not consciously registering what the out-of-place detail was).
Oh, I didn’t mean to say that she was deliberately lying. It’s just that people sometime convince themselves that things matched their preferred view of things a little more than they did. And if you keep thinking about it, that little more can become a lot more. Not out of a desire to lie or sell books, but out of remembering the bits you found significant more and forgetting the rest.
I fully believe the woman was looking left and right, back and forth over that road, praying all the while. The rest… well, it’s a real good-sounding story, isn’t it? Just like what you’d expect God to do if he let people get in accidents and then helped other people save them. Surely that’s what would happen.
I didn’t say anything about God, #1. Secondly it wasn’t her mother than found her, which means you didn’t even read the article.
She may have looked hither, thither and yon. But the point is, according to her, she had a dream and after the dream was over she KNEW exactly where the girl was. The route the girl took was something like 20 miles long. She drove up to the spot, got out, couldn’t see it, went over the enge down the cliff for some reason and found it.
So either there’s something really interesting about this or she’s lying. There’s no two ways about it. If she had been over 20 mikles of road (kind of hard to do on foot) and searched every nook and crannie (after having had the dream the night before, doesn’t leave a lot of time to search 20 miles).
And were each of the 200 people on that same road, nice snarky comment. The road had been searched repeatedly by the police and by many other people who didn’t see a damn thing. Read the story. The woman (not her mother) who found her didn’t see anything AT FIRST either, which makes it even more interesting that she bothered to go off the road and climb down the cliff to get a better view. But who knows, maybe she repeated this for the ENTIRE 20 miles of the trip. Jesus.
Yes, the 200 people weren’t necessarily looking at this exact stretch of road. Not all 200 of them. Thus the number is irrelevent. Brilliant.
I skimmed it, but certainly didn’t invest many brain cells in it.
Excluded middle. There’s a difference between being a piss-poor witness and lying.
Regardless, True Believer, you were curious about a skeptic’s reaction, and you’ve got it. People are unreliable witnesses, even of their own prior behavior and motivations. And as data, any one loosely-documented anecdote doesn’t rise to the level of “really interesting”. Page me when you can do it on cue.
You’d “skim it”. Strawman it “It wouldn’t make sense for God to do that”, like I said there was a God.
“I had a dream about an avatar after looking at them 4 hours, hardly surprising”. Like I said it was surprising that she had a dream about it. Completely missing the point.
“She was found in the last place looked, hardly surprising”. Great strawman.
Insist that she’s forgetting something when she’s quoted at the scene as saying she had a dream which drew her to that spot and went straight there. A spot where it wouldn’t have made sense to stop as there was nothing visible there. It’s easy to embellish details especially much later, but this is a simple, direct statement taken at the time.
Ridicule those with an open mind as a “True Believer”. And just in general be willfully obtuse.
On the other hand…I think we have a lot of extreme skeptics here. I have dreamed of people I have later met as well as places that have turned out to be really important to me…and I had no previous connection to those people or places. I think that a lot of what the brain processes during dreams is really strange…but every so often there’s some damn weird stuff out there that happens to totally land on the mark.
Our brains are powerful yes…but they can only understand a very small percentage of whatever’s out there…Science does not have all the answers…those of you who think science understands everything don’t understand that science is very prone to discarding data and stuff that doesn’t fit their hypothesis.
What would be incredible is if none of your dreams ever came true.
Can you point to a poster on this board that claims anything close to “science understands everything”?
In other words, you didn’t really read what I said or try to understand my points - you just picked through it looking for things to portray as bad.
Mote, beam, eye, etc.
There’s little point to saying this again, but us “extreme” skeptics disagree with you about science discarding data. What we think is happening is that alternate explanations for the data have been found which have explained it adequately - for example, it is well-known from legal work that people will tend to misrember and misreport things. It is also well-known that humans have a tendency to make connections and discern patterns a mite too hastily. We just see these human tendencies as sufficient explanation for the reports of ‘damn weird stuff’.
To us, what non-skeptics are doing is discarding stuff that doesn’t fit their hypothesis. Specifically, the fact that human reports, memory, and conclusions are unreliable. (So unreliable in fact that science was invented specifically to counter that unreliabity.) Only when you reject the boring scientific explanations do the spiritual explanations seem to be the best or only explanation.
I didn’t read what you wrote? You wrote you didn’t read the article, you “skimmed it”. Did I miss that?
Then you started in about how it wouldn’t make sense that God would give her a dream if he allowed her daughter (not her daughter but you couldn’t be bothered with that) to get in an accident in the first place.
I didn’t say anything about God. That’s called a strawman argument. You say “see this fool believes God did it, ha ha ha” and you win the argument. I didn’t say anything about God. You need to look up strawman argument, not me.
There are no scientific explanations for this. You’re not even vaguely familiar with the case but you profer a “scientific” explanation that her memory is bad. I’d say you’re the “True Believer” otherwise known as an ass. No matter what the case is just say “it can’t be other than a rational scientific explanation…in fact I won’t even bother reading it”. Brilliant! That’s science?
What YOU are doing is rejecting evidence that doesn’t fit your pre-conceived explanation. I have no preconceived explanations at all.
A woman has a dream and a few hours later finds a girl missing in a place previously looked (but had it been looked at by all 200 people? As if that’s relevent) at by many people along a circuitous 20 miles route. The car couldn’t even be seen from the road. She had to get out (why there?) and climb down a cliff and find it. Other people who climbed down the cliff had a hard time seeing it from there even when it was pointed out.
But she had been looking for weeks! No, she hadn’t. It can hardly be surprising that she was found in the last place looked! I didn’t say it was. Forest, trees, etc.
I would say you a True Believer and like all True Believers are immune to any other viewpoint or evidence than their own. You are a fundamentalist Talibanesque sort of person, can’t even be bothered to read something and still like to give lectures about it anyway. Laughable.
As for the rest: yawn. Regardless of your apparent inclination to fight, this anecdote is not an issue that is worth the effort of fighting violently over - or even the effort reading an entire uninteresting article. So feel free to get all agitated but you’ll be doing it by your lone self.