Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. What about all the times you picked a book that had nothing to do with words you were just thinking about? Or all the times lil had totally meaningless, life-irrelevant dreams? If you choose enough books or dream enough dreams, eventually your brain will find a pattern. It's just random chance.
I am aware of confirmation bias. Humans tend to be meaning-making. I'm aware of neurological experiments in which areas of the brain known to cause distress were stimulated. The subject knew his brain was being stimulated, yet he provided explanations for his sudden feelings of sadness. Interesting, no? So it could be completely random that shortly after meeting a student named Shams, I have a dream about Rumi, a 13th Century Sufi poet. The main reason that I think my subconscious was trying to alert me to this connection was the powerful feeling of Yes! when I put the puzzle together. When I interpret a dream accurately, I feel a sense of unity between my subconscious and conscious, as in this story and this one. I definitely agree with briandmyers that we like patterns and explanations -- but I also think the brain has more memories than we are aware of, some of which are transformed into symbolic expression in dreams.
I once thought so; now, not so much. One man's 'pedantic and cynical' can be another man's 'liberating'. "Random and meaningless' also implies 'no hidden masters'.
I'm not a theist by any stretch of the imagination, but by the same token, I don't assume to know too much about how the world works. What I do know is that our subconscious is far more complex than the average person likes to believe. To imply (as the other user did) that one cannot make a mental connection of which one is initially (consciously) unaware is to deny fact in favor of a version of nihilism that I personally find distasteful. It's such an easy thing to say, by the same token. It's equally as unsubtle and uninteresting as saying God's plan controls all. That's what I mean by pedantic an cynical. One can believe one has providence over oneself while still permitting that the universe may be more complex than meets the eye.
Our brains, our consciousness, memory, learning, thinking - all these things are far more complex than we know. As a species, our perception of the world is limited by our senses. If we had access to more senses, our beliefs would change with our new perceptions of the world. Other species have abilities that seem magical. The Arctic Tern can travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic without a map. A Chinook salmon can return from her Pacific travels to the river where she was born. I'm pretty sure that our brains do more than we can explain. All the time.What I do know is that our subconscious is far more complex than the average person likes to believe.
briandmyers would like to believe his chess experience was more than coincidence. Of course, there's no way to prove it, yet.