Was this a coincidence?

[Gbob]

A few weeks ago, I think around either end of December or January, I had a very vivid dream of a dominant asian man (obviously a leader of some sort) making a fervent speech on the top of a double decker bus. I was the onlooker in this dream and whilst I was watching, moments later the whole bus exploded and everyone that was on the bus was completely blown to pieces. I remember it being quite graphic and I also remember being very emotional, to the point that I was actually crying within the dream. I wasn't physically (as in dream-physically) crying though but I felt that on the inside tears were welling up due to the circumstance. Briefly after this, I woke up.

The strange part was that the next day whilst I was at work - and I work at a newsagent's - at some point I suddenly remembered the details of the dream and so I wandered over to the newspaper stand out of curiosity. To my surprise, the headlines to all the major newspapers were all to do with a bombing that had happened. In fact, at the time, it almost seemed as if the word 'bombing' was particularly accentuated in my eyes and I just felt it was such a coincidence that I had a dream about a major bombing the night before. For some reason I had thought that the bombing in my dream was based in Hong Kong so when I got home I asked my mum whether there was a bombing there. It turns out there wasn't; the bombing was on a plane elsewhere (I think). But anyways, my point is that I had a very vivid dream about a situation that was quite close to reality, and possibly even on the day that it happened.

Do you think it was a coincidence or do you think it was sort of a 'psychic dream'? From the dreams that I recall, I have never had any dream similar to this and I just thought it was quite bizarre. I have read somewhere though that places where there have been disasters or killings, they carry a lot of emotional 'baggage' (for lack of a better term) so perhaps in my dream I somehow accessed this emotional tragedy, but also with some dream distortions...?

Omg sorry if I'm not making any sense, it's night time and I can't seem to form proper sentences...or ones that make sense. Anyways I hope you understand some of it.

[kurtykurt42]

I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago. 

[frozenlime]

Well, think of it. A dream about someone blowing up a plane/boat/train/bus/whatever or something going bad amongst a crowd is not that uncommon to dream of I think. And if 6 billion-ish people dream every night, it's not surprising that some of them will dream a dream very close to such an occurence. You could possibly just have dreamt such a dream that exact night. Anyway, let's say you were indeed not dreaming that by coincidence. Why should you be alerted of that specific thing happening, and not something more close to "your environments"?

I've experienced something similar. When I was about 13 years old, we were going to a vaction in another country. The day before we traveled, I had a dream where I saw a fire alarm going off. When I woke up, later that day I asked my mother "when are we going to buy a burglary alarm?" because I got reminded of it from my dream. Guess what happened when we came home. Yes, someone had broke in and ruined a lot of value things in our house, nothing stolen, but a lot of damage for high amounts. The police never figured out who did it.
It might have been random, for some reason it just seems too valid not to be. But, I still think there's a very slight chance it could have been random, the subconciousness does indeed have a lot of excessive random things being "sorted", we dream tons of dreams every night over a long time. Sometimes something just has to match between something happening randomly in the dream world and in real life.

Not a sceptic, just trying to find logical explanations.

[Gbob]

Well, think of it. A dream about someone blowing up a plane/boat/train/bus/whatever or something going bad amongst a crowd is not that uncommon to dream of I think. And if 6 billion-ish people dream every night, it's not surprising that some of them will dream a dream very close to such an occurence. You could possibly just have dreamt such a dream that exact night.

It may not be uncommon for other people but for me, that was certainly the first time (that I recall) I have ever dreamt of some sort of disaster/tragedy...and it seemed to be quite prophetic. Normally my dreams ever only involve me wandering around my house or seeing friends in silly scenarios. I guess by logic you could just dismiss this as a random occurence; all I need now is to  have another dream that 'randomly' collides with reality just for confirmation...

[Stookie]

I had something similar like that happen September 2007, and it's not common for me either:

On Friday night I had a vivid dream:

I was with my family on a long trip. I knew we were out of state, but don't know where. I saw a news report in a hotel room about a plane crash. Then the dream changes, and we're in the car, traveling on the interstate, and I see the burning plane off in the distance. Another quick jump, and we're driving right by it - it's on the other side of the interstate, and we're driving by real slow like when there is a car accident. On the tail of the plane I see a letter that I can't remember followed by the numbers "408".

I immediately remembered it when I woke up, and while making my morning coffee realized that I just saw the movie "1408" and figured that's where the numbers "408" came from. Once my coffee was ready, I got on the internet to read the news and one of the first things I saw was that there was a plane crash in Florida on I-95 the previous evening. As far as I remember, I wasn't around any news or media from the time it happened until Saturday morning. I'm not saying I'm psychic, but it was a weird coincidence...

I have yet to hear what the tail numbers on the plane were.

Don't have an explanation and I'm still not psychic.