For three days in a row he had dreams that, upon waking, were verified by the news. He dreamed that a famous actress was robbing a bank and woke to find that a famous actor had stolen a car. He dreamed that a new species of bird had been discovered and woke to find that an old species of bird had been declared extinct. He dreamed that four people fell through the observation pane of a glass-bottomed boat in Jamaica and woke to find that three people had been struck by falling debris on a glass-bottomed observation deck in Boston. His wife turned white as a sheet. “You’re psychic,” she said. “I knew it. I know I should have made you invest in the market.” An ex-girlfriend had a different take. “We read so much news now, coming in from all directions, that nearly any dream can be mirrored by some report or other, if you’re on the lookout for correlations of that nature. This is less a psychic phenomena than confirmation bias.” As his ex-girlfriend was now the president of the United States, he valued her opinion highly, though he probably would have anyway. “Gotta go,” she said. “North Korea.” He presented the confirmation-bias case to his wife, who was only half-listening, still fretting about the market.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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