A dream about losing lottery numbers
This dream is one of a couple that had me wondering if my wife was right that I was experiencing precognitive dreams. In the dream, I had ten picks for the lottery, all of which had lost, but the way I lost, and the actual results, were so statistically improbable that I didn’t see how the dream and the outcome could be chance.
From the journal, 6/20/1988:
I am looking at a sheet of paper that makes me think of a newspaper. K is with me in our darkened Manhattan studio. She holds ten losing Lotto tickets and we compare the numbers to the winning numbers on this paper we have. We notice that between the ten tickets in our hands, we had gotten four of six numbers right. This was enough to win a prize, but unfortunately the numbers weren't all on the same ticket. On the same ticket, the best we'd done was three numbers. We were talking about the numbers '6' and '4,4' (44) while looking at the list of winning numbers. While all this was going on, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn't have to lose. 'This is a dream about the future' I thought, and decided to memorize the numbers I saw on the list of winners. The losers I was happy to forget. I made a serious effort to accomplish this, but by the time I woke, possibly because I'd spent so much time on the losers, all I could remember were the couple of numbers from our tickets in the dream that had won, and I wasn't sure on a couple of them. I was sure about 6 and 44. After all the discussion, I wasn't about to forget those! The other numbers I thought of as badly remembered possibilities were: 4 (because of the '4,4' reference), 8 (4+4), 11, 23, 17, and 13.
Comment:
I was uncomfortable buying tickets based on a barely remembered dream. K wanted to do it, so I bought five games (2 picks each “game” or ticket). I didn't buy ten because I had a hard time parting with ten dollars for something I was sure was foolish. Later that day K showed up with five tickets of her own. She said that there were ten games in the dream so it would be better to have ten games. We picked both 6 and 44 on most of the tickets, but on one or two they're by themselves and on one, neither appeared. It is obvious looking at them that we were pretty confident of those numbers though. The winning numbers were: 6, 17, 23, 34, 44, 45. Four of those numbers are among the eight I considered to be strong possibilities and the two I'd selected as 'certain' were in fact winners. On one ticket we did sink three winners just as I dreamed, and all three were on my list of candidates; 6, 17, 44.
I didn't win any money, but then that wasn't what my dream predicted. My dream predicted I would have ten Lotto tickets (correct, even though I tried to thwart this by purchasing five), that I would have a ticket with three winning numbers (correct, 6,17, and 44), that 6 and 44 would definitely be winners (true), and that I had four winning numbers in my 'pool' of ten possibilities (also true; 6, 17, 23, and 44). As far as I was concerned, this dream was completely correct in every way - even the little piece of paper I had the numbers on. I wound up getting the numbers off the Lotto hotline, but I wrote them down on a little scrap of paper to take over to K where we discussed them and compared with the tickets we had.
After sharing the details of this dream with others, they often ask me to buy lottery numbers for them, or split the proceeds with them if they buy the tickets. I believe this misses the point. This dream was not designed to make me a lottery millionaire. If I had, many other dreams that later did come true, couldn’t have.
I believe the dream and the later event are related in the same way that any physical observation is related to the thing observed. For instance, if you see a deer in your yard, your observation of the deer and the deer itself are connected by the act of observation. The deer isn’t in your yard because you saw it, and you didn’t happen to look and see it because it was there. No matter what was in the yard when you looked is what you would have seen, and those would be linked.
Dreams of future events can be described as observations that happen to be displaced forward in time. However, those same observations sometimes seem to have a purpose. Sometimes, the purpose, or that there is a purpose, is obvious. For instance, when I have dreams where someone shows me the future, tells me it is the future, and to carefully examine the future event so that I may remember it when I wake.
Did this lottery dream have a purpose or not? I think it did. The reason is that I wouldn’t have bought the tickets without the dream. The same is true of K, who also had no reason to buy Lotto tickets apart from the dream. Neither one of us had ever played the lottery before, nor had we discussed it. I don’t like gambling and was not keen to start. That was true at the time, and still is, several decades later.
The dream shows me losing, but also likely contained the information needed to win. Despite that, I only remembered exactly what I needed to remember to achieve the result in the dream. This implies some level of independent control over how the dream was remembered in addition to the “message” of the dream itself, which could not have been realized unless I’d first had the dream.
Unlike later dreams where I remember someone showing me a future event, this dream contains no independent agent. An “independent agent” is a character that exists independent of the dream, much as the writer of a letter is independent of the letter he writes. If there was no independent agent, the only explanation for this is that I gave myself the impetus to gamble on the lottery with these specific numbers so that I would lose.
It makes more sense to me that there was an independent agent that I forgot about. It is easy to forget dream details, and that may have happened here. Alternatively, the dream impetus may have been independent, but the agent didn’t appear. This is similar to how someone can indirectly send a message to someone else, such as by driving a certain car past a window might remind a resident inside of the family car in childhood.
My best guess is that the dream was designed to impress upon me the possibility or the reality of precognitive dreams. Winning money in the lottery was not the subject. The critical information was that the combination of dream and outcome were statistically improbable.
New York’s lotto asks players to choose six numbers between 1 through 59. The odds of matching all six is calculated in the following way:
Number of Possible Combinations:
There are 59 possible numbers to choose from for the first number.
After the first number is chosen, there are 58 remaining numbers for the second choice.
This continues until the sixth number is chosen, with 54 numbers remaining for that choice.
To calculate the total number of possible combinations, we multiply these individual possibilities together:
59 * 58 * 57 * 56 * 55 * 54 = 45,057,474,400
2. Number of Winning Combinations:
There's only one winning combination, which is the exact set of 6 numbers drawn in the lottery.
3. Calculating the Odds:
To calculate the odds of winning, we divide the number of winning combinations by the total number of possible combinations:
1 / 45,057,474,400 ≈ 1 in 45,057,474
Therefore, the odds of achieving 6 correct lottery number guesses in this game are approximately 1 in 45,057,474. Those are very long odds. However, the outcome of my dream’s prediction is also long odds:
10 Tickets: The odds are 1/2 (50%).
3 Winning Numbers on a Single Ticket: The odds are 1 in 221.
Specific Winning Numbers: The odds are 1 in 46.
4 from 8 Possibilities: The odds are 8C4 * 55C2 / 59C6 ≈ 1 in 760.
Combined Odds:
Multiplying the individual odds, considering the dependencies:
(1/2) * (1/221) * (1/46) * (1/760) ≈ 1 in 154,754,560
Therefore, the difference between my dream and it’s outcome is about three times more statistically improbable than actually winning the grand prize in the lottery.
If I had remembered all six numbers, played them, and won, that would be less impressive as an example of precognition than the actual dream and its outcome.