Just curious what people think about this. Please don’t let your personal agendas (religious or non-religious) get too much in the way of a rational opinion.
I’m a skeptic, but I’m always open to new data.
The thing you call a “psychic phenomenon” is the friend of the mother accidentally stumbling over the girl’s location? Is that what we’re to have opinions about?
She had a dream about finding her in a “wooded area”? And she was found in a “wooded area”? In Washington state? What are the odds?
“Psychics” are notorious for the vagueness of their “clues.” Like saying that a body will be found “near water.” What does that mean? The ocean? A river? A puddle of piss from a passing rabbit? How near is “near”? On the banks of the river? Within a mile of the town water tower?
Good for her for finding the girl, but it’s a coincidence, not psychic power.
I’m not talking about the dream, but the fact she knew where to stop and climb down the embankment. No need to ridicule.
Stop ruining my attempt to play devil’s advocate. :wally
She didn’t. She guessed. Many, many of the 200 people helping in the search the previous day probably had hunches, but theirs didn’t pan out so we don’t hear about them. If this one hadn’t, we wouldn’t have heard a word about it either.
Not enough data unfortunately. All we have is the woman’s account about how she found this girl after all. For all I know, she saw some skid marks (it was a crash after all), and maybe some disturbed brush or whatever and just followed a hunch…and found the car. It could be a lot of subconscious indicators that led her to a leap of intuition…the car MIGHT be here!
I’m happy that the girl was found and hope she pulls through. I’m skeptical that it was some psychic phenomena in the traditional sense, or that ‘God’ intervened or something like that.
-XT
That was my reasoning, as well. Regarding her statement about one spot not being the one, she might have even subconsciously noted things like intact brush/weeds, which led to a feeling of “not here.”
If that had been the spot and later the girl’s corpse and car were found, the search would never have been reported, or it would have been spun into a tragic “so close and yet so far” story.
Not surprising that she would dream about a wooded area, either, since for a couple of days 200 people had been searching wooded areas looking for her. It was probably on the news - maybe she even took part.
There’s nothing even remotely requiring psychic phenomenon here.
It’s important to remember that national media acts as a great filter for the mundane, and a promoter of the weird and exceptional. How many other people have died in their cars because searchers who had hunches that never panned out? Those NEVER make the media. So out of the thousands of people who have had dreams like this, if by chance one of them happens to get lucky, we hear only that, and it sounds shocking.
It’s like when you dream about a grandmother, and then you get a call the next day saying Grandma died. Sure, it’s a coincidence, but you have to remember that you’ve probably dreamed about Grandma many times, but because the dreams never wound up meaning anything you forget you even had them. The ‘hits’ are reinforced, and the ‘misses’ forgotten.
If she searched/dreamt about a wooded area it was because that’s where people had previously searched. It’s also a fair bet that if the teenager was missing/lost/dead that it would be in a wooded area. People don’t tend to get lost/lie dead and unnoticed in open areas. And Washington State isn’t short of trees either.
The story indicates that 100s of other embankments had been climbed down by 100s of other people, most of whom, we can assume, probably had some personal relationship to the girl. We also don’t know how many emankments the woman had already climbed down herself. So there is no suggestion that the woman ‘knew’ anything more than all the other people.
So, to cut to the facts; A couple of hundred people spend the day searching or worrying. It occupies the thoughts of many of them that night. The next day, after futher exhaustive efforts, one of them finds who they were looking for.
Nope, nothing psychic here. It doesn’t even qualify as a coincidence. Just a touch of good fortune.
Its likely there were subtle clues when they searched the previous day. The woman incorporated those clues into her dream. After all, isn’t that part of the reason we dream, to sort out the day, so to speak?
from the article
Along the way, Nohr said, she prayed: “I just thought, ‘Let her speak out to us.’” She barely managed to discern the wrecked car in some trees after climbing over a concrete barrier and down an embankment.
She spotted the car wreck. She happend to be in the right place when the sunlight probably glinted off the metal of the car. Now you may say that Providence guided her to be there but the fact is that she spotted the car wreck in real life. Her ‘dream’ was only of a wooded area. Did she see the wrecked car in the dream? No.
My explaination. Luck.
I was reading an article a few weeks ago (I think it was in The Economst) about the statistics of very large numbers. It turns out that million to one chances come true roughly 29 times a month in the USA.
It’s similar to two people sharing a birthday in class of 30. It’s over 50%
Um, you are ignoring the fact that she “barely” spotted the wreck AFTER climbing over a concrete barrier and down an embankment. She didn’t see it before.
Interesting theory. I kinda like this answer. 
But she doesn’t say the barrier and embankment appeared in her dream. She wandered around in some woods, decided to climb the wall and go down the embankment, and saw the car. At most, we can say she decided to go look in the woods because of her dream. The rest was a result of conscious choices.
On the morning my father went under the knife for a fairly routine surgery, I was awakened while having a terrible dream where he died. In the dream, I was with him before he passed away, and he talked to me to keep me from worrying and to help my mother as much as possible. She was there as well and was just devastated. It was a horrible, horrible, dream. Awake, I saw the time for the surgery had passed and called the hospital with a tremendous, overwhelming feeling of doom in my gut.
My mom answered the phone. “Oh yeah, he’s fine. In and out with no problems. He’s groggy but he’d love to talk to you.”
And that was that. Happy ending. He came through without a hitch. All that worry for nothing. That was about four years ago and he’s still going strong.
The thing is, I made it a point to write remember this event… And to remember when similar dreams occurred. It turns out I have often have dreams and nightmares about my family. Not surprising since they’re very important to me. But I used to forget them, just like with your point about the Grandma dream. I’d never known this about myself if I hadn’t made the effort to keep track of it. I imagine it’s the same with most people out there.
I think it’s completely reasonable that since this was a volunteer search where the police weren’t involved that many of the searchers had dreams about the missing girl and forgot. But just one of them found her.
I think this would qualify as a true psychic event if ALL of the searchers had the same dream, and by correlating the details they discovered her location. As it happens, you have a single person remembering a dream after the fact, and that’s just not very reliable.
But whatever the case, I’m glad they found her alive, and amazed that she had a sense of humor about it. (“I think I missed my curfew!”)
EZ
You’re on the money on this one. Unusual events are common; particular unusual events are particularly unusual. If we consider how many people aren’t found, aren’t saved, or aren’t rescued, it would take some hefty explanation to tell us why all those poor slobs died when such powerful psychic phenomena are out there.
We all have dreams and feelings that could be interpreted as prescient after the fact. Here a very common occurance coincided with a big stroke of fortune. The situation, then, is indistinguishable from chance and Occam’s Razor does the rest.
To show us a psychic phenemona, we need something we can distinguish from chance, and isolated, unlikely events don’t fit the bill.
The girl is in the hospital, in bad shape.
She went missing on the 2nd, and the dream came on the night of the 10/11th. This isn’t the best working of a psychic event.
This woman clearly cared and hunted persistently, and covered this place that had been supposedly been covered before, but wasn’t that easy to see into. It’s not unlike finding your car keys the third time you go around the house looking for them–just a lot higher stakes.
Exactly and her dream, or at least the newspaper story, did not specify this particular woods. There are a great number of ‘wooded areas’ around Seattle. Did the dream tell her that her friend was in a car wreck and was still alive.
Oh and the ‘barely’ in the story is there to make the story more dramatic. She saw ‘something’. Looking closer she saw the car wreck.
There may be other details the the newspaper story is leaving out. Like maybe the friend saw skid marks on the road that went over the embankment and that’s why she stopped there. The newspaper story is not written from a skeptical point of view. The writer decided to present it as a case of psychic phenomenon and there is no looking at anything that may point to something else.