单项选择题

Passage Five

One of the most strikingly apparent instances of extrasensory perception is the precognitive experience, when a person has a compelling perception of a coming disaster, news of death of a loved one, or a communication from a long-lost friend, and the predicted event then happens. Many who have had such experiences report that the emotional intensity of the precognition and its subsequent verification provide an overpowering sense of contact with another realm of reality. I have had such an experience myself. Many years ago, I awoke in the middle of night in a cold sweat, with a certain knowledge that a close relative had suddenly died. I was so gripped with the haunting intensity of the experience that I was afraid to place a long-distance phone call, (for fear that the relative would trip over the telephone cord or something and make the experience a self-fulfilling prediction). In fact, the relative is alive and well, and whatever psychological roots the experience may have, it was not a reflection of an imminent event in the real world. However, suppose the relative had in fact died that night. You would have had a difficult time convincing me that it was merely coincidence. But it is easy to calculate that if each American has such a premonitory experience a few times in his lifetime, the actual statistics alone will produce a few apparent precognitive events somewhere in America each year. We can calculate that this must occur fairly frequently, but to the rare person who dreams of disaster, followed rapidly by its realization, it is uncanny and awesome. Such a coincidence must happen to someone every few months. But those who experience a correct precognition understandably resist its explanation by coincidence. After my experience I did not write a letter to an institute of psychology relating a compelling predictive dream that was not borne out by reality. That is not a memorable letter. But had the death I dreamt actually occurred, such a letter would have been marked down as evidence for precognition. The hits are recorded; the misses are not. Thus human nature unconsciously conspires to produce a biased reporting of the frequency of such events.

Why didn’t the author write to the institute of psychology about his dream