A prophetic dream

“Tell me, Emma, have you ever had a prophetic dream?”

“Maybe I have and I don’t know that it later became reality?”

Did she think I was joking? “Well, I mean an empirically post-hoc tested prophetic dream.” I specified.

“Oh, then I think I have. It’s happened a few times, yes.” She smiled mysteriously. “Have you?”

“I was hoping you’d let me in on some intriguing dream story, Madame Printemps, and you just shoot it back at me!” I laughed out and winked at her. I wasn’t joking.

“Ok, let’s trade. A dream story for a dream story?”

“Deal!”

“On Christmas night just last year, I dreamt that I was 172cm tall. It was a very precise number and since I’ve been convinced ever since the measurements made for the public records at the age of 18 that I was only 170cm tall, I had to check if the dream was true. I asked my brothers to measure me first thing in the morning. They both did – and rounding up for the error of measurement, it turned out I was actually 171.7cm tall that day! So the dream was correct and public records were wrong. All those years I’d lived in the darkness, oblivious to the extra 1.7cm of me…”

I inhaled loudly like when you’ve just seen a ghost and gaped at her in an expression of astonishment.

“That’s a scientifically proven prophecy! Well done, Emma.”

“Thank you! It was a revelation indeed. Now your turn, doctor. Tell me a prophetic dream you’ve had.”

“I’m afraid I can’t remember any of my own. I often let them slip my mind because I don’t believe that they are prophetic. Even if my brain turns out to connect the facts to something that I later verify in our shared objective reality, I usually attribute it to simple memory consolidation processes. You know, the principle we used for creative problem solving in the dream pods? The brain connects remote facts, subtle subliminal sensorial signals, finds associations it didn’t see during wakefulness, but it is just the regular insight-producing process of synaptic network down-scaling. I never regarded such revelations as prophecies.” So that’s my problem. I shrugged.

“That’s … very self aware of you, doctor.”