Psychological factors in precognitive dream experiences: The role of paranormal belief, selective recall and propensity to find correspondences
Edinburgh Research Explorer January 1, 2014 Caroline Watt, Natalie Ashley, Jack Gillett et al. 8 citations
Two studies examined psychological mechanisms behind precognitive dream experiences. Study 1 tested selective recall: participants read a dream diary and a life-events diary; they remembered significantly more dream-event pairs where the event confirmed the dream than pairs where it disconfirmed it. Paranormal belief did not affect this recall bias. Study 2 tested whether paranormal beliefs arise from a tendency to associate unrelated events. Participants who scored higher in paranormal belief and precognitive dream belief were better at finding correspondences between randomly-paired news articles and dream reports, but no relationship was found between belief and a neutral word-association task. Together, the studies show how selective recall and associative thinking can increase perceived dream-event coincidences.