Why doesn't it add credibility to the idea that some people imagine the same things, rather than those things being real?
I think it does that too, especially with these things having the media and internet exposure they do now.
What occurs to me is that it’s extremely unusual content for a dream for me to have had as a small child. Never mind anyone else! This was the late 70s in the UK, well away from any major city where there might have been even a smidgeon of culture, sophistication, or healthy curiosity about anything (watch British sitcoms from the 70s and you’ll have a good idea of what I mean – and they tend to be set in big cities).
If the ideas came from a media source I could have shared with someone else, I don’t know what that source was. The only thing I can think of would be that it might have been around the time of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which featured spaceships covered in lights, but there are reasons why I think that’s unlikely, including that I don’t think I’d have had any exposure to it. I was very excited by the Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica movies, but the spaceships in those were completely different (which – hmmmm – is an interesting pattern – why are UFO reports usually ofsimple, smooth, almost low-tech looking craft, rather than the hi-tech, complex designs, that usually feature in science fiction. What an interesting pattern which I believe is on topic for this thread – I’ll immediately post that in another panel – however I digress), and those spaceships had very little in common with the dream.
One possibility is that it was some sort of psychologically symbolic dream shared by lots of other people. I think that’s possible, but the idea of latent-and-very-specific archetypal spaceships seems to raise a lot of questions in itself for any good skeptic. It occurs to me that the symbolism in dreams is in the narratives rather than the objects and characters, which are idiosyncratic and only have symbolic value in the context of what they mean to the dreamer. It seems strange enough that my mind would have thought of such spaceships at all, and a remarkable coincidence that they have so much in common with UFO reports, including and especially that intense feeling of exhileration. I can remember a couple of other childhood dreams because they featured weird and memorable things, and in each of those cases I can relate the imagery to aspects of my life at the time, whereas with the UFO dream I can’t.
Sorry for my ramble of an answer and long paragraphs (I’m enjoying this). I hope it makes sense. In summary, I certainly do think that other people could/would/can/do imagine the same things, but where these things are specific and don’t seem to share a common source or reason a pattern worthy of study emerges.
The crucial difference is that, with dreams and accounts, there's no way to properly verify that the things represented are real in and of themselves (beyond the reality of the *experience* of those things in a dream, or beyond merely the interpretation of an experience as a real abduction, etc).
1. A zoologist walks in a forest and sees a new species. He then reports it. Let´s say the zoologist is a very good scientist in his genre and he knows all the species that live in forest. He can certainly tell that the species he saw was NOT a bear. It was not a lion. It was not a snake etc. 
