Thread: Where do these images come from?

I'm inclined to think it's sort of the case of blue monkeys, where our minds can disassociate qualities from real experiences we've had and mix/match them up in new ways.

That said, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I did an experiment where I would draw a random card from a deck of cards and tape it to my windows facing outwards (all without looking at what the card was). Id then LD, fly outside of my house and to the window to see what the dream card was, then compare the results with the actual card after waking up -- I was interested in whether it was possible to see real things accurately while in a lucid dream.

I believe I did this 5 or 10 times, and got some interesting results. I don't think I got a 100% match in any of those trials, but did get several close matches, for example:

Dream: Queen of Spades, real card: Queen of Clubs
Dream: 5 of Diamonds, real: 4 of Diamonds

They were close enough, often enough, for me to legitimately suspect that there might be something to this, especially considering how unstable small details can be in dreams.

I tried to do the math on these "near misses" by looking at the odds of getting just the suit right, or just the value, or being just one-off, but it got muddy. I searched for help with the math from someone who knew how to do this right, and ultimately my overall results were something like 1 out of 100 of getting the results I did. Not mind-blowing, but still somewhat compelling.