Last Thursday morning, I woke up after having a very vivid dream that Dru Sjodin’s body had been found. It was so startlingly real that I immediately wondered if I’d read about it online the night before… or if I was having one of those experiences where one’s dream foretells an event that actually happens. My son Tyson had a dream that he was in a car accident only a few minutes before the van he was in was hit head-on by a drunk driver.
Sjodin’s body was found on Saturday. I told this to my mathematician buddy Bruce Morlan, wondering whether this might make me a minor league clairvoyant. He said I’d need to know a few more details and kindly blogged the details:
– Those who dream of an event and the event happens
– Those who do not dream of an event and the event happens
– Those who dream of an event and the event does not happen
– Those who do not dream of an event and the event does not happen
He put it in terms of dreaming of tornadoes: “To scientifically determine if our dreams are predictive, we would have to deliberately collect all four of the numbers shown, particularly annoying would be finding out the true number of people who dreamt of tornadoes that did not happen, only slightly less annoying would be trying to collect the number of people who dreamt of things other than tornadoes when tornadoes did occur.”
It occurred to me that the same could be said of people who pray for future events, like the safe return of Sjodin. If she’d been found alive, there would have been a torrent of media quotes about how it was a miracle, that God answered the prayers of the millions who were praying for her safe return since the day of her dramatic abduction and the nationwide news coverage of it.
As I read some of the stories of families receiving the bodies of troops killed in Iraq, no mention is ever made of prayers or God. Yet surely most of these people prayed diligently for the safe return of their loved ones. And just as surely, many of them are now having a crisis of faith because of their lack of understanding of the differences between false prayer and true prayer.
What’s also puzzling is how supposedly enlighened members of the clergy are generally silent on these kinds of intercessionary prayers. Jesus wasn’t hesitant to criticize the way some people prayed, but it’s apparently politically incorrect to tell people that prayers for future events are not only mistaken from a statistical point of view (as goofy as believing that dreams predict the future) but potentially harmful to their relationship with their God/higher power.