One day, back in high school, I was walking across a grassy field and saw a playing card lying face-down on the grass ahead of me. I said to myself, "If it's the ace of spades, I'm psychic." I approached the card and picked it up.

It was the ace of spades.

This boggled my mind. That's a 1-in-52 chance! Then I realized that this wasn't an isolated incident. I was fascinated by the paranormal. Without really realizing it, I'd made a habit of making a prediction and saying to myself, "If this comes true, I'm psychic" whenever I was doing something chance-related. One of them had to come true eventually. I continued this little habit of mine for a few years more. Never happened again.

Pity. Vegas would have been a lot of fun with that ability.

Actually, I guess my next psychic moment was kind of pivotal. I had been dating a lovely woman for a couple of weeks. I was at a movie theater without her and was walking across the parking lot, feeling lonely (she'd had other plans that day). I said to myself, "Universe! Please, I'd like to see her!" (I was kind of a pantheist at that point.) To my great shock, I looked up to see her walking across the parking lot! I'd forgotten her other plans also involved movies.

I've been careful not to ask the universe for anything since then. But then, I haven't had to. We've been married for seven years.

(She and I, I mean. Not myself and the universe.)

And yes, I should be skeptical about it, measure the odds, etc. But in this case, I think I'm OK with a little magical thinking.

I haven't yet seen solid evidence for dreaming things before they happen. Most of what I've read is anecdote, which is interesting, but doesn't necessarily lead to actual evidence.

One problem is confirmation bias. For example, last week I woke up from a nightmare about a plane crash. I checked the news sites the following morning, half-expecting to see something about a crash since it was a vivid dream. If there had been a crash that night or the following day, it would have been another "ace of spades" moment. There wasn't, and if you hadn't asked the question, I probably would have forgotten about it in a few more days. So that's confirmation bias: remembering the hits and forgetting the misses.

Another problem is that dreams are slippery. They're hard to remember, and unless they're written down in the morning, it's easy to misremember when they occurred or their exact details.

Sometimes people interpret the feeling of deja vu as having experienced the current situation before in a dream. There are (too) many explanations on what causes deja vu, but it seems clear to me that deja vu is a neurological event not caused by actual knowledge of the future.

There have been studies that claim to show some kind of precognitive dream effect. I haven't looked into them yet. Add that to my to-do list.