21. On Dreaming the Lottery Numbers.

Dearly Beloved,

At one time I agreed with Ecclesiastes “Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore fear God” (5.7.) I also sympathised with the view that one should not do the National Lottery because it was a government tax one did not have to pay.

But, once upon I time I dreamed a dream in which I was told the lottery numbers. One night in 2009, I dreamed that I was sleeping in the attic bedroom in the house where I lived as a child in Somerset. A small boy, very pale, stood behind a luminous screen like an illuminated muslin curtain but close to my bed. He told me the winning lottery numbers. Of course the problem was that I only had a hazy recollection of them the next morning.

I thought the last number was 44 and the rest were between 11 and 19, certainly 19 but definitely not 16. As this was a wonderful and rare opportunity to carry out an empirical test on the prognostic value of dreams (and perhaps to win the lottery). I purchased nine tickets @ £1 each. Four of those yielded £10 each (3 correct numbers) each and a fifth £35 (four correct numbers) for a net profit of £66. All tickets had the number 19 and 44 but 44 turned out to be incorrect. There were two missing numbers which I had not recollected and so were not included on my tickets, one of which was 4 and the other 1.

Well, for each six numbers chosen, the chances of getting four correct numbers from an initial choice of 50 numbers is one in 1,032 (0.000696 decimal probability) and of three numbers 0.0177 (one chance in 56.6). Because I had purchased nine tickets the odds would have have been further reduced. Or perhaps the total odds were greater because I had predicted at least three correct numbers on five out the nine tickets, but I'm not a good enough mathematician or logician to be certain what the final odds would be. My best calculation was a decimal probability 5.9704E-010 (in colloquial numbers that is 0.00000000059704). If any mathematician reader knows the correct answer I would be grateful to hear their solution.

So why should I have had such a dream? Should this event have totally revised my perception of the world which I had, up to that time, believed was based on hard observation and harder thought and which certainly excluded any idea that we can predict random elements in the future?

Was it perhaps a prod in the direction of Hamlet's response to seeing his father's ghost “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. -Hamlet (1.5.167-9). Yet as a theist, as a believer in God, why do I even have to ask such a question? Is not God a God of infinite possibility and will there not be occasions when these possibilities break through the norms of human experience?

Furthermore, as my wife pointed out when I discussed the issue with her, the probability of life on earth and indeed the existence of human beings with all their consciousness and capacity for thought is infinitesimal for we live and thrive in a universe overflowing with potentially destructive energy. Yet here we are worshiping at St Clement's and writing the odd Dearly Beloved Letter to sustain each other in a time of pandemic.

Peace and Grace to you all,

Paul.

Completed 8 January 2022



The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius. By Carlo Crivelli,1486. Attribution: The National Gallery London. CC.





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