Psychic experiences

[scilosopher]

I've had a few experiences which are difficult to explain w/o saying there was some kind of telepathy. I'm curious if others have had similar experiences.

I have never had control over the experience unfortunately, but it does provide a certain proof of principal, that makes me believe that psychic phenomena are real.
The first dramatic instance was driving through upstate NY to see a Madesky, Martin and Wood concert with my room mate at that time, Dan. At that point we had lived together for 2.5 years or so. During the drive we lapsed into silence while driving through an expanse of fields. We passed one road forking off with a curve that was quite suggestive of an off ramp.

The dramatic part is that we both had an almost identical image of NYC off ramps connecting multiple tiers of roads together to decongest traffic. Dan was the one who started to tell me about it. He basically said the part about multi-level on ramps and then I went on to describe some of the details of what I had seen. The topology of the connections was maintained in both of our mental pictures.

Then last night a person I have been friends with since kindergarten told me he was in a car accident yesterday. Only having said what road he was on, I immediately had a vivid picture of the actual location on the road where the accident had happened. The amazing part is that although I have driven on that road many times in my life, I pictured it with a gaurd rail that had not been added since the last time I've driven on it. Otherwise the fact that I pictured that section of the road is less dramatic, because it is on a very steep S curve and by far the most likely place to have an accident on that road.

It's interesting to note that both people are ones that I have spent an amazing amount of time with over my life, and it's possible to imagine some kind of mental link forming. It's not uncommon with close friends to be able to understand what they're saying even when they are describing something complicated that isn't necessarily obvious from the exact words they say. Typically it's possible to explain the experience simply through a body of shared experience, but the details in these instances make it difficult.

I was just wondering how many people have had similar experiences ...

 

[Pollux V]

I can't ever seem to form a link with anyone, I always buckle under the pressure. When around my friends I've never been able to see the numbers in their heads.

However, I've developed a test that I use all the time just for fun to reassure my skeptical conscious that I have at least a minute psychic ability. I take a quarter, put it in my pocket, and every so often I'll pick it out and say to myself in my head: Heads, or tails. Needless to say I haven't gotten wrong with that yet.

I also dream, scilosopher. I can remember two dreams that have sort-of come true. The first time I dreampt about this girl who never, ever came on my school bus. That morning the girl (you guessed it) did come on the school bus the first time ever. Then a few months later I dreampt about a good friend of mine, and the following morning I heard that he was moving away. I haven't seen him since.

I've also had one Out of body experience, or OBE. It happened when I was very little, probably around three or four, but I was taking a nap on my bunk bed in Brooklyn, NYC, and I suddenly saw my body through the rooftop of the apartment building (we were on the top floor). I was relatively twenty feet away, lets say three or four doors piled on top of each other. I suddenly zoomed away and flew about Manhattan and had a few wild adventures with crocodiles until I finally saw myself sleeping through the rooftop again and fell very quickly back into my body. I woke up at that instant and jumped, nearly flying off of the bunkbed. Needless to say I thought it was just a 'cool dream,' but I have learned better. I can say truthfully that I do not doubt the existence of the afterlife.

 

[scilosopher]

I used to lucid dream a lot when I was little. This is a litle scary, but I would imagine myself in cartoons and that would seed my dreams. I could control everything and would remember it all when I woke up.

Every once in a while I would have a really realistic dream involving people from my daily life that was equally vivid which I couldn't control. A couple times what I dreamed actually happened. Some of them never did though.

I stopped remembering my dreams sometime in high school. When I got to college though and saw my dorm, I suddenly remembered a dream I had had a couple months prior about it that involved people I met later that day.

I wish I remembered my dreams more often. Both for a world to control and unwind and for any potential insight into the future. Oh well ...

 

[orthogonal]

I have similar coincidences occur from time to time.

While out walking a few weeks ago, for no apparent reason I began thinking about the violinist, Isaac Stern. I hadn't thought of him in quite some time, probably since I'd last heard him perform. On this walk I thought about how he looked, how he spoke, and of course how he played. When I returned home that evening I heard that he had died that day.

I remember reading an account by a nurse who worked in London during the Blitz. For months she had walked daily to her shift at the hospital via the same route. One day she had an inexplicable inclination to alter her normal route. Her detour led her to walk on a street parallel, but two blocks removed from her usual route. While walking, a nearby explosion startled her. As you might have already guessed, the explosion (made by a V1 Buzzbomb) destroyed a section of street, at the very time and place she would normally have been walking. She took this event as proof of a caring god, and has since lived as a devout Christian.

I've no reason to believe her story might be false. However, had she simply walked along her usual route that day, she would have accounted for yet one more casualty among the estimated 35 to 60 million, mostly civilian deaths resulting from the Second World War. Unfortunately, these millions of actual victims were not so fortunate as to have a god whisper a warning in their ear so that they might evade the bomb or the bullet that killed them.

In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins speaks to the question posed by scilosopher in the chapter titled, Origins & Miracles. He suggests that it would be very strange if the six billion inhabitants of this planet, while going about their daily business, did not have bizarre occurances happen to at least a few of them. The mass media gleans daily through billions upon billions of normal human experiences to bring us news of the handful of "unexplained" occurrences (The face of Jesus in a tortilla, for example). Those who wish to believe the world is inhabited by supernatural forces turn aside mountains of "boring" data to seize upon these few anomalies as their proof. The rest of us draw our conclusions from the mountains of boring data rather than from the spine tingling (though typically erroneous) outlying data.

Scilosopher, I expect you do communicate non-verbally with your friends. My primary question concerns the possible complexity of the messages we communicate non-verbally. In his book, The User Illusion, Tor Norretranders discusses unconscious communication. It appears that our senses dump roughly 11 million bits of data per second into our brains, while our conscious-self processes only 16 bits per second. Norretranders speculates that the human body does not go to the trouble to produce so much data just so that it may throw away a million bits for each bit it saves. The unconscious-self appears to utilize the vast proportion of the data that the senses transmit to our brains. The interface between the world and our conscious-self passes through our unconscious-self. Two persons are most likely not even aware of the extent of the communication that takes place between them. The conscious-self most often receives messages of fuzzy, or questionable content. If someone were to run up to you with a chair raised over their head, your response would be nearly reflexive. If you place a hand on a hot stovetop, you don't consciously ask, "Could someone have left the stove on?" In both cases, you act and ask questions later. The content of these messages is not questionable. The conscious-self is thus not called upon to decide upon the response.

My wife claims to be accomplished at reading the non-verbal messages present in my face and body. Though her "ability" to non-verbally ascertain my state of mind has led to occasional misunderstandings, I have to admit that she gets it right more often than not. Though not a scientific observation, I've noticed that older married couples tend to speak less to each other than do younger couples. Is the fact that older couples know each other so well that their expressions and physical postures do their talking for them? Or have they perhaps long ago, said everything they had to say to each other?

Norretranders has a funny story about a German horse trainer who traveled around Europe many years ago exhibiting an especially "talented" horse. During these exhibitions the audience would call out simple mathematical problems, or even questions from everyday life that could be answered with a "true or false". The horse invariably stamped out the correct answer with his hoof. Finally, a skeptic figured out that the trainer was able to pass messages to the horse via a nearly imperceptible movement of his head. One day the skeptic appeared at an exhibition determined to expose the fraud. When the trainer was asked if he was in fact passing messages through tiny movements of his head; Nonplussed, the trainer merely posed the question to the horse: "Are you able to discern messages from my head movements?" The horse stamped out the answer on the ground: "No".

Michael

 

[orthogonal]

Once while dreaming a ridiculous dream, I also became aware that I had some control over the course of my dream. Upon discovering my new power, I immediately set about to try and steer the dream in the direction of a sexual encounter with a beautiful woman. Alas, I woke up right away.

As I lay awake feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me that I was actually lucky that I couldn't control my dream to that extent. More than luck, there might even be an element of survival involved in not being able to choreograph our dreams to such a degree.

Think of it. If I could dream any dream I wished to dream, why would I ever want to wake up?

Michael