I had a really vivid dream last week and the next day something similar to what I dreamed happened. It's never happened to me before, and I got scared. Was it just a coincidence or can dreams actually predict things?
I've had something similar happen to me and in the end it really was just a coincidence - we dream about so many things every day that some are bound to match up with reality just by chance, like winning the lottery.
Science hasn't found evidence that dreams predict the future, but that doesn't mean your experience wasn't meaningful - it's just that our brain is really good at recognizing patterns and sometimes connects dots that aren't actually connected.
We dream quite a bit during the night - it's estimated that most people have several dreams per night - so when you mentally register a vivid dream and then something similar happens, your brain tends to connect the dots and ignore the thousands of dreams that led nowhere. It's like flipping a coin a thousand times; some sequences are going to look like a pattern just from pure math. What really helps you understand this better is to write down your dreams for a few weeks without any expectations and see if the rate of "hits" is actually higher than chance - I'd bet you'll notice most of them don't match anything.
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