Here’s one in the eye for the sceptics.  Earlier this week, a judge in a York court in the UK allowed a dream premonition to be considered as evidence in a court case involving a dispute over lottery winnings.

Here’s one in the eye for the sceptics.  Earlier this week, a judge in a York court in the UK allowed a dream premonition to be considered as evidence in a court case involving a dispute over lottery winnings.

Judge Mark Gosnell ruled that Hayati Kucukkoylu, the owner of a Turkish restaurant, should hand over half of his £1 million ($1.7 million dollars) in Euro Millions lottery winnings to one of his waiters, who claimed he’d urged his boss to enter the lottery in January 2012 because of a premonition dream he’d had the night before.

Although Kucukkoylu paid for the ticket and chose the winning numbers in January 2012, his waiter Fatih Ozcan claimed that he had pressured his boss to enter the lottery and had himself purchased the winning ticket. After dreaming that he was holding a large bundle of cash with his boss standing in front of him, Ozcan interpreted the dream to mean that his boss should enter the lottery the next day and that he needed to be the one to choose the winning numbers.

As Judge Gosnell concluded: ‘ Mr. Ozcan is a strong believer in the power of dreams and interpreted this to mean that he and Mr. Kucukkoylu would win the lottery."

When Ozcan approached Kucukkoylu about his dream the following day, the owner was having none of it, so the waiter persisted over three hours in pestering his boss to enter before he finally relented. In the court case, Ozcan claimed that half of the winnings were his because he himself actually physically purchased the ticket.

Kucukkoylu went on to win his £1 million, but then refused to split it, at which point Ozcan sued and won his case this week. 

Judge Gosnell found Ozcan’s claim about his dream entirely ‘plausible’, particularly as CCTV footage backed up Ozcan’s claim that he and his boss filled out the winning ticket together. 

"I find that the effect of these conversations was that Mr. Kucukkoylu and Mr. Ozcan entered into a contract to jointly play the lottery on an equal basis," Gosnell ruled. "There should be a declaration that the prize money from this winning lottery ticket should be shared equally between Mr. Kucukkoylu and Mr. Ozcan."

Noted British skeptic Richard Wiseman was quick to dismiss Ozcan’s dream as proof of the power of premonition.  ‘There are millions of people who dream about winning the lottery, who don’t win the lottery, but they are not going to mention it because it is slightly embarrassing.  It’s just the law of large numbers.’

That’s exactly why you can’t dismiss this evidence as chance: the probability of large numbers. The odds of winning the lottery are 16 million to one.  And the odds of having a premonition dream that your boss needs to buy the ticket for both of you to win the lottery and the following day he does and you do win it are possibly gazillions to one that it will occur by chance alone.

It’s also why you can’t dismiss the work of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, led by dean of engineering Robert Jahn.  Jahn and his partner, psychologist Brenda Dunne.  The PEAR lab set up a series of remote viewing studies with volunteers set us as partners. One would stay in the lab and the other would be given a sealed envelope and told to travel to the destination written inside. 

The remote viewers remaining behind in the PEAR lab were asked to name their traveling partner’s destinations not only before the actually got there, but also many hours or days before they even knew where they were going.  The remove viewers would also have to record and draw his or her impression of the traveler’s destination, from half an hour tofive days before the traveler arrived. 

Of PEAR’s 336 formal trials involving remote viewing, the majority were set up as ‘precognitive’ remote perception and were even more successful than those set up in ‘real time.’ Nearly two-thirds were more accurate than could be accounted for by chance.  The overall odds against chance in the PEAR’S complete remote viewing database was one billion to one.  

These are the inconvenient figures that won’t go away – the numbers that show us that human beings have capacities far more complex than chemical reactions and electrical signaling, and that 2 + 2 often add up to more than 4.