It’s Just A Jump To The Right

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

What if reality isn’t what we think?

What if we’re not even asking the right questions?

Look, I yield to no one in pointing and laughing when the left believes that their beliefs determine reality and try to do strange-ass things like levitate the mint.

There might be discontinuities (there are) and breaks in reality and times and places where the impossible happens. But whatever it is is, it’s not controlled by human brains, I’m sure of that. Because if each human brain could alter reality at will we’d live in what has been one of the consistent depictions of hell: no physical laws, no directions, everything changing moment to moment: a place where yesterday might be a color and tomorrow a musical note, and where your hunger could be a gale or–

Sure, sure, “but if we all believe” — no. However it works, it doesn’t work like that. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think human minds are in control. It could, I grant, be the sum total of every human mind that ever existed and will ever exist, but a) how would you know? b) I don’t know about you (tovarich) but I know humans. the chances of more than three of the critters agreeing on anything would be– never mind.

One of the short stories I actually liked in Asimov’s around 1994 (?) played with quantum and with the idea that for things to exist they must have an observer. So it had G-d as the universal, ever present observer, and played with the idea of “What if G-d blinks.”

Now, I don’t think that’s in Himself’s repertoire. And I’m not sure he’s at the switch of reality either. (Or at the reality switches.)

Enough people have observed something a little “off” with the nature of reality. So we get things like “We’re a computer simulation.”

I’d take that one a lot more seriously if it weren’t for the fact that every age imagines that reality/the universe is whatever new tech it is impressed with. So, you get stuff like the Elizabethans thinking that reality was clockwork. And in the industrial age, the universe was a factory. And– Never mind. Probably Grog thought the universe was made of flint that Himself chipped to shape.

Also, I’d take it a lot more seriously, if the answer weren’t “well, what difference would that make?”

Which brings us to: there are things that make differences. There are differences all of us have noted. Sure. A ton of that can be bad memory. I’m becoming intimately acquainted with the power of bad memory when combined with ill health. Yesterday for the first time since…. oh…. 2017? I emptied the bottom of the linen cabinet. And Dan said “I didn’t know we owned that vacuum.” Well, I didn’t either. It’s a yellow vacuum, bright yellow. As far as I’m concerned, the aliens dropped it in there. I mean, I might have the vaguest of memories, but it’s very faint.

Then there’s the cleaners/toothpaste/toiletries put under some cabinet and forever forgotten. I probably won’t need to buy shampoo for the rest of my life.

Note it’s particularly bad in this house, because when we moved in I had three warring illnesses/issues all of which were taking the ADD through the roof. So I got stuck in things like “Oh, I need shampoo” Buy shampoo every time I go out for two weeks. Put it under sink. Forget it because sink is too full. Buy shampoo. Put by side of tub. Use that. Forget that shampoo under sink ever existed.

So a lot of what we call the Mandella effect is that. And a lot falls under media malfeasance, such as when Dan and I compared our experience of the climate in the 70s with what the media claims now.

Note a ton of the Mandella effect are things “at the edges” like how you spell a word. Or if someone famous you’ve never actually met has died or not.

The human memory is an uncertain tool. I tend to remember the events of my life clustered around age 3, age 8 and age 14. Usually I find out that age isn’t right. Like I apparently had small pox at 2 not 3. (Almost 3, I guess.) And human attention is an uncertain tool as well. If you didn’t see it, or pay attention, to you it never happened. (Like Pratchett’s character, I can lose my keys in a completely empty room. ADHD is a superpower.)

But still. There are weird and strange and uncanny things that happen to all of us and for which there is no explanation.

Parallel worlds? Perhaps. I mean, I routinely dream I get a phone call from my 39 year old son. The one I had when Dan and I got married four years earlier than in this world. Which would be fine, if the entire family didn’t dream of him (mostly phone calls, though he visits in dreams, too) and didn’t all agree on what he looks like (like younger son, but taller and lighter skinned. And he has blue eyes, which is weird but not impossible in this family.) He’s a gym bunny, and he wears button downs and ties all the time, like older son used to. Oh, and he’s a patent lawyer, which makes perfect sense, if you realize how this family’s minds work.

Would I be very surprised if I woke up (these shifts always seem to happen in the middle of the night) and I had an oldest son who is 39? Not markedly. Startled. Briefly. Then I’d roll with it. It would be considerably worse if I woke up tomorrow and Dan and I had never had kids. That I don’t think I’d get over.

Granted that would be a pretty massive change, compared to other changes that have happened in my life/history, which are usually a little bigger than your average Mandella effect but not that bad.

Like cooking something I’ve made a dozen times, and the guys being bowled over by this new dish they’ve never had. Uh.

Stuff like that.

BTW the weird thing that would lead one to think this is a physical thing, is that abilities port. So, in this one world you learned to type? You can type in this one too, even if you’ve never done it before. I wonder how much that kind of thing is responsible for “naturals.” Anyway, so get all the knowledge and abilities you can.

More disturbing to me are the times reality blinks.

Oh, not literally.

Or perhaps literally. A couple of times. It’s happened twice now, in the presence of younger son once, and the second with someone else (and I can’t remember who.)

This is where I was sitting, and suddenly, reality winked out. For like a micro-second there was nothing. I half expected a giant 404 to show up, and even that would have been relief. There was just…. nothing.

If I hadn’t been with someone, and if we hadn’t both gone “Wow, that was–” and then figured out we’d both experienced the same, it would have been…. I’d have assumed I”d had a stroke or died for a moment or something.

That is not a parallel world thing. That is a “What the heck?” thing.

In the same scary way, and yes, we went for the tech explanation was when I was walking with someone along a downtown area, and we realized we were seeing the exact same cars and people on a repeating loop. Then the other person said “D*mn, the CGI is broken, let’s go home.” And we did.

More parallel universe are the times when things shift then shift back.

Like when I — admittedly with a fever and therefore not fully processing — suddenly found my office in the tower of a seaside Victorian we’d considered buying ten years before. Or like when I heard my family downstairs, including my voice. (I didn’t go down. Eventually it went back to normal.)

But other people experience this stuff too, like opening the door to a known place and it’s different. And then you close and open again, and it’s what you expected.

A lot of this got recorded in our myths of course. And maybe it happens mostly to a peculiar type of person, so it’s easy to classify as “so and so is just fanciful.”

But actually at least myself and some of the people I know who have this stuff happen to them, are not fanciful at all. we tend to try to be rock-hard evidence-and-reality-atuned, precisely because we’re aware of the slipperiness of the whole thing.

Maybe it’s a certain type of brain. Almost everyone who experiences these things are what I call “Gateways.” I.e. creatives who get the product — art or music or writing — whole in their heads and just have to “tune” to it and reproduce it. It’s hard to explain. I can tell when I’m getting static in a novel, and trying to fix it.

Sure, I can write novels whole cloth (A lot of the historical ones, some contemporary ones) but sometimes I think I’m doing that and am stopped with a “No, that’s not what happened. Tune better” only it’s a feeling, not words.

And some of the d*mn things — AFGM! — are dictated. At speed. Very loud and clear, and I can barely keep up.

Perhaps they are transmissions from other places/times/possibilities. Perhaps I have a defective brain not fully in contact with the rail of “reality here.”

Now, does it make any difference? I don’t know. Probably not. I mean we all live our lives forward and in the reality we’re in. I’m grateful and annoyed (Yes, both can happen at once) by my gift to get “dictation” from elsewhen and elsewhere, but really, it wouldn’t make a difference to the world at large if I didn’t.

I mean, other than my potentially ending up with an extra son (And when is he going to get married and give me grandkids? Yes, I’ve nagged in the dream-phone calls even when I’m aware it’s a dream.) And that would probably also make no difference to the world at large. (Well, he’s moving to TX so that might make a difference to some Huns out there. In that world. Not ours.)

Yeah, sometimes unreality seems to break through in a mass way.

My grandmother witnessed “the miracle of the sun” from Fatima. It echoed that far away. No, I still don’t understand what it WAS. And I’ve talked to a number of people who’d seen it, and read a lot of books (some of which led to Deep Pink.) “The sun danced in the sky” doesn’t make a lot of sense. And we know it didn’t happen literally. I mean, it couldn’t.

And I’ve got friends who’ve seen ghosts, or UFOs or whatever. They don’t talk about it much, and the core of it might be incomprehensible. (I haven’t seen ghosts. Well, not precisely. Visits by the honored dead are not ghosts.)

And there have been recorded “mass” experiences of the sort. They can’t all be hallucinations. They simply can’t. But the explanations we come up with make no sense, outside religion, whether it be Catholicism or New Age Woo Woo. And some of these things are clearly NOT religious in any way.

(Someday I’ll tell you about the lady in green, riding an impossibly green car, who knocked at my door, wanted to know if I was nursing, and wanted to see the baby. Oh, and had teeth like a rat’s. If you’re thinking “What the fairies needed a nursemaid?” that’s what I thought too. But it probably isn’t that, or not precisely. Good thing saying “No. You may not come in.” works, right?)

So what gives? I don’t know. Maybe we’re all a holographic projection from beyond the stars (stooooop. Just stop.) Or whatever.

It only makes a difference for two reasons:

What if it cracks? What if suddenly reality cracks for everyone? Because this last year that has started to become scarily plausible.

What if this is an effect/force/event out there we don’t even know exists, and we can figure it out and crack interstellar travel? Okay, I’m hopeful, but you know….

Oh, and a third reason: I’m profoundly aware I’m not in control and things are not necessarily what they seem. So, I try to stick with science fiction, versus fantasy, and keep my mind on the real side of the street.

Because there be dragons on the other side.

336 thoughts on “It’s Just A Jump To The Right”

  2. You remind me of a recent event that happened to both my son and I, and yes, we both remember it exactly the same way. He was in an accident, car was totaled and of course, calls Mom to pick him up about seventy miles away. The kid is stiff and sore and we’re driving home on the interstate at night and had even agreed to drive slower than the rest of the crazy Minnesota driver’s. We lost over thirty miles of the drive, including two towns, a major interstate crossing, and a fairly long bridge over a lake. I start wondering where the lights are for my exit and ahead are the lights for the local casino. Neither one of us could figure out how we missed that thirty mile stretch. I dismissed it due to stress, now you make me wonder…

    1. I had something similar happen to me in a car from SLC to Idaho Falls Idaho and the driver was really shook up about it. I wasn’t driving that time.

    2. The question is, how much time is missing during that missing travel part? if it still took the normal travel time, then I’d say you’ve been subjected to a loss of consciousness. Not good. If the travel experience AND the time is missing, then I’d suspect a teleport incident of some kind. Safer way to travel than the first one.

    3. The missing time part used to happen to me a lot, especially while out for a long ride on the motorcycle. Mind would start drifting toward personal problems that need to be sorted out and I’d kick into autopilot while doing the sorting….Many years ago I woke up one morning in an ugly, mean, nasty mood and first thing that came to mind was “Road Trip”. Was living in Mascoutah, Illinois at the time (assigned to Scott AFB) and by 7:30 am was headed south. Around 2:30 pm I was in Milan, Tennessee and wondering how I got there (yes there were lucid periods deciding which roads to take) and looking at what was an oncoming rain storm to avoid. Got back home about 9pm and most of the things bothering me had been compiled, stacked neatly and put on the self for examination later….Another great ride I can’t remember too much about.

    4. I’ve done this multiple times through the same stretch of roadway between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz, but that was due to an accident I’d been in there. My mind was deliberately not remembering being in that stretch, probably in order to not remember the very scary accident. It as years before I could consciously be aware that I was in that stretch of roadway.

  3. I always remember foreign film with subtitles as the actors actually speaking the English.

    1. And I remembered “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in Cabaret as having been sung in German. Because the Nazis certainly would have written that song if they’d thought of it.

    2. Husband and I have a heck of a time remembering text (even really good fanfic) vs manga vs sub vs dub unless the dub is horrible. If it’s overwhelmed by the story, we’ll “see” all of them as animated, whichever version has stuck in our head as “normal” for that show.

      1. The proverbial: “Yo spidey, you don’t gots no super powers. That’s just yer hair sparking.”
        Sub titled: “My superhero friend, your hair is on fire.”

        That whole arc was hilarious.

  5. Well, it’s not so much the part where “the sun danced,” or even “people for miles and miles and miles saw it,” because there have been some pretty spectacular rare sundogs and meteorological cloud/visual/light/ice crystal effects, and you could picture something happening of that nature, and being seen for great distances.

    It’s the bit where the ground was sopping wet, thick mud, and peoples’ clothes were equally sopping from rain, and everything was dried almost instantly. Because there’s not a lot of sudden natural meteorological heat effects, or microwave effects. (And I kinda doubt it was an angel with his laser dryer sword-gun, going pew pew pew.)

    But yeah, if you’re the Creator, I’m sure you’ve got all kinds of nifty ways to pull miracles without breaking the fabric of space/time. And I’m sure whatever He did that was beyond normal physical law was something really really elegant.

    Of course, the really important part isn’t how it was done, although that’s always cool to speculate about. It’s more like, “Please look where the sign is pointing, not at the sign itself.”

    1. The other significant evidence is that it freaked the heck out of most people, and terrified many, and made many want to repent or pray for mercy. People didn’t think of it, in that moment, as anything benign and pretty, or even neutral and interesting. Most people saw it as a warning of the wrath of God and the possible destruction of…everything. Which argues for additional spiritual content to the light/heat show.

      Because yes, the Fatima reports included calls for repentance, but usually the rubberneckers of an event are not unified in their emotional responses.

    2. Created in His image, I’m sure He has a sense of humor; “OK the banana pratfall’ losing it’s zest, but if I turn all his tee shirts in the dryer inside out…”

      1. I know He has a sense of humor. Also He’s very patient for us to get the punchline. My wife was a very big Alice in Wonderland fan (growing up in a crazy family will do that to you) to the extent that we used the white rabbit in his card suit with his bugle on our wedding invitations. Years later, after being treated with acupuncture for her fibromyalgia, she became interested in all things Chinese. Led to her understanding the Chinese zodiac being a 60-year (not 12, 12 animals combined with 5 elements) cycle. Years after that, she realized the elements each had an associated color. Now she knew that by the Chinese calendar, I was a metal rabbit. When it finally dawned on her that the color the Chinese associated with metal was white, she realized that she had married the white rabbit.

        2. “And you know you’re going to fall,
          tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
          has given you the call.
          Call Alice,
          when she was just small.”

          1. And in the early ’70s, they refused to play it in concert despite calls from the audience. (Something comparable to a peanut butter sandwich every day, said Grace.)
            The next concert, The Moody Blues were thoroughly confused by audience calls for “White Rabbit”.

            Good times.

    3. One of the really big points I’ve seen against the “I came up with a possible natural thing that can explain how this would happen, so it’s not an act of anything supernatural” is also obvious…
      “K, now explain how it happened on demand or when scheduled.”

      Because yeah, there’s known effects where wind will blow and dry a walkable path in shallow seas…but they don’t generally happen when some crazy guy shows up and says “we’re all leaving” and proceeds to be cornered between said sea and an army!

      1. Yep, the Timing Can Be The Miracle.

        Of course, if that Miracle happened as shown in the Movie, why would that army follow the “mad man” and his people? 😉

        1. Even as reported in the book– what kind of moron follows the guy who ACCURATELY identified a series of disasters, and is now being defended by a pillar of fire?

          Even if you didn’t know the whole “his staff ate the High Priests’ staves” part?

          1. Yeah, the Pharaoh (and his army) made some questionable decisions. 😉

            Note, IMO G*d could have parted the Red Sea as that movie showed but in that movie I wonder at the intelligence of Pharaoh’s army. 😈

            1. The army didn’t know what was going on. For all they know, the sea would stay parted. But what they did know was that if they didn’t follow instructions, they’d be executed. If they did follow instructions, they might be okay.

              1. I don’t know, I’ve seen that scene in the 1956 The Ten Commandments movie and I’m not sure that I’d obey the Pharoah’s orders. 😉

        2. Of course, we’re talking about folks who recorded their glorious victories getting closer and closer and closer to the capital, as if those were the only battles that happened, so “common sense” apparently wasn’t available….

  6. I never had reality blink off but I definitely have seen more things twixt heaven and earth Horace…

    I enjoy such when it happens but decided long ago t’ain’t no thang, don’t make no nevermind. As far as living goes I’ll depend on rational and reproduceability. If I drop a ball I expect it, I depend on it, falling down. If it falls up one time, I can live with that but I’d still depend on it falling down the next time and the time after.

    Parallel worlds, computer glitches, bumps in the night doers,…

    Could be the -for a torch using primitive a light switch is magic and personally I’ve seen and experienced enough strange to be a firm believer in magic. However t’ain’t no thang, don’t make no nevermind, not reproduceable, not controllable, a frightening, or enjoyable, interlude when it happens but I still expect a tree to fall down when I chainsaw it and do everything I can to assure it won’t fall on me.

  7. Well Sarah, should you wake up some day to find that you never had sons, call me immediately as I’ve met both of them. Editing reality isn’t as easy or seamless as it might seem. Everything has ripples.

    We’ve all heard of deja vu. There’s an opposite effect, called jamais vu, too, where something very familiar now seems completely novel, alien, or unknown. And presque vu, where a person is positive he knows something, but is unable to recall it. Sort of “it’s on the tip of my tongue,” but not limited to words or phrases.

  8. Sarah, the first part of your post made me think of this from the 60’s.

    Reflections

    Father, why did you leave us here–
    3 billion blind men feeling the universe?
    The I’s are windows of the soul,
    but windows have reflections too,
    so when we look for you in others,
    we often see ourselves as you.
    We see your smile when we love,
    your anger when we scowl,
    and when we hate,
    your wicked grin
    would make a dead man howl.

    1. Well that’s a poem, but WP delenda est as they say, so you have to imagine your own line breaks.

      2. If you post a comment ON the WordPress web site, using their editor, when you hit the SEND button your text shows up with no line or paragraph breaks. Reload the page and it will look normal.

  9. The weird ones that plague me are varied, as one has such things. The one that bothers me more than most are the ones where I wake up reminded by the wife I don’t have and have never met of the book or radio program or y-tube video that she wants me to read/listen to/see that I’ve never even heard of (not even in passing), because it’d be good for me. And I do, and it does. And then the suspiciousness rises, because what. The. Heck?

  10. Completely unrelated to Sarah’s post, or even this blog, other than I know some of the other folks here have gone through Gerlach, Nevada and stopped at Bruno’s, and knew at least by sight the lady who made his pies for the last…like, forever.

    Tiny, dark Italian lady, miraculously [*cough, cough*] still dark, curly hair that was all short curls, lots of smile lines, very very VERY Italian. She “retired” from working there to “just” doing baking in about ’04 or so, which meant six or so hours a day instead of 12. I think because it was the only way to get enough people that would “Mangia! Mangia!” to satisfy her…. anyways.

    She passed away yesterday, would have been 102 next month.

    Followed a son, and a grand-daughter, and her husband of I think sixty-some years but it may have been seventy-some, and there was nothing horrible.

  11. IMHO there are a good number of people that don’t admit to observing these strange things at the risk of being labeled tin foil hats. The stranger the experience, the more the hesitancy, unless they are seeking $ or notoriety.
    I’ve believed for quite a while that there are other dimensions containing entities (or whatever). They vary with their intended affect on us. Some good motives, some bad. Time streams are different from ours, so knowledge of our pasts and futures could be transparent or at least translucent to these other dimension dwellers. Like different stations on the dial. Many coincidences are not really coincidental. Somebody or something knows the situation and makes something happen.

  12. Your story about Fatima reminded me of an incident many years ago on Usenet. Different context but a similar subject.

    I was challenged by a believer to tell him exactly what I would accept as “proof” of God’s existence. I explained there is no proof in the mathematical sense that I was aware of. However there is a way to provide **very** compelling evidence.

    When he finally asked, I told him it would be quite simple — for a God:

    1. God commands several of his faithful to announce well ahead of time, in no uncertain terms, that totality for the next eclipse (Dec 4, 2021 if Anyone is listening) will be delayed by 30 seconds.

    2. Make it happen.

    Anyone with even a basic understanding of celestial mechanics understands even a microsecond delay is impossible. A whole 30 seconds would be near as dammit undeniable evidence of a miraculous event. It is the prediction that makes it such a compelling test; weakenng post hoc explanations for an unexpected event.

    Of course, God, did not provide such a demonstration and I did not expect one. Admittance to the Kingdom of God is not based on fairness or justice but on grace and mercy (according to the Baltimore Catechism — your mileage may vary). Grace is God giving someone something he does not deserve. Mercy is God not giving a person what he does deserve. Christ died on the cross to forgive the past, present and future sins of everyone not just the sins of the good people.

    For those who believe the above, proof does not appear to be necessary. For those who doubt, no compelling evidence is forthcoming.

    In truth, I find that a comforting thought.

    1. Re: miracles of a divine creator

      Me, sober, 39 years.

      Me, alive, after several I-was-sure fatal events.

      (Looks at universe)

      “Stellar Nucleosynthesis”

      “DNA”

      (Convinced)

      Might not do it for others. I have no doubt.

      1. I am happy that your belief has given you the will power (won’t power?) to abstain from intoxicants.

        It is also nice you have found your level of required evidence. So have I.

    2. You know full well that folks’ response wouldn’t be “Ah, a miracle!” it would be “they found out that the calculations were wrong, and used it for a hoax. We must dump all of what we thought was true for our calculations and figure out where we did the math wrong.”

      The only folks who would be open to believing it was a miracle are the ones that wouldn’t ask that evidence take the form of violating understood rules of creation– we know this from prior events where He applied existing but not known rules, with announcement ahead of time. (*points at the Egypt thing*)

      So it wouldn’t change the minds of those who assume, as a starting point, that miracles cannot exist, and would damage the faith of those who believe Himself follows His own rules, which we can study and learn.

      1. The question I was asked was what would I accept; not what would you accept. I made that plain to to those who can read.

        1. You have a really bad habit of reading what you expect to see, not what is actually there, for someone who responds to a counter argument by declaring the other person can’t read…..

      2. Note the story of Elijiah in the Old Testament. Elijiah performed miracle after miracle in order to convince the people of Israel to turn back to God, and all he got for his troubles was increased persecution from the leaders. Then he went to the cave and got the whole, “God was not in the whirlwind, God was not in the fire, God was not in the earthquake, God was in the still small voice.”

        I’ve always interpreted this as meaning that Elijiah had been going at it the wrong way. He was trying to get people to see God in the whirlwind, rather than convincing them to listen to that still, small voice.

      3. According to many rabbinical scholars there are VERY few actual miracles, defining a miracle as an instance of the normal created laws of the universe are violated. And the plagues of Egypt do not make the cut. Nor does the parting of the Sea (actually Sea of Reeds, not Red sea). I think they list six. I can’t seem to find the reference. I know Balam’s Ass talking was one. I think the Sun standing still for Joshua was another. Even then, the rabbis do not like the idea of miracles. They say just before sundown Friday during the week of creation, God said “Even though animals don’t talk, on this occasion this animal does. On this occasion orbit mechanics work so the Sun appears to stand still…” Etcetera. So the “miracles” are actually written into the laws of the universe as exceptions.

        1. The main reason I refuse to define miracle as a violation of the normal created laws of the universe is because we don’t know them. We’ve got a lot of guesses all piled up on each other, but we don’t KNOW the rules, so we can’t say “yes, this breaks them.”

          We can say, “Hey, this isn’t what we expected.”

          Seeing as we’re talking about Himself who has a really, really strong tendency to give prophecies that are totally accurate, follow all the rules and STILL shock the heck out of folks, I think He’s much more likely to play by the rules and giggle at our assumptions that We Know Better.

          I mean, seriously, “He will be called God Walks Among You”?
          Really?
          REALLY?
          The Almighty does DAD JOKES in His prophecies?

          Or the whole thing with Jesus being on the Throne of David when Joseph was descended of Jeconiah, whose heirs could never do so… guess what, debts/curses do not pass to adopted children, but you can be an heir by adoption and, of course, there’s Mary’s line as well….

          Himself: “See! See! I followed the rules. I just didn’t do what you EXPECTED.”

            2. So now you can roll your eyes at your dad and say “I don’t blame you. It’s really God’s fault for making you this way.” 😛

          2. >> “The main reason I refuse to define miracle as a violation of the normal created laws of the universe is because we don’t know them.”

            It sounds like you’re falsely equating the ACTUAL laws of nature with what we BELIEVE the laws of nature to be. It’s no contradiction to say “miracles are violations of natural law and those laws can’t be violated, so miracles never happen” while also saying “but we’re often ignorant or mistaken about what is and is not a natural law.”

            1. It sounds like you’re falsely equating the ACTUAL laws of nature with what we BELIEVE the laws of nature to be.

              No, I am pointing out that problem in the offered definition of miracle as things which break rules.

              If you define something as being a violation of something you don’t understand and cannot measure or detect, it’s a useless definition.

              When you then take that bad definition and use it to attempt to say there are no thing-that-is-defined, in spite of it being defined via a thing you do not know, it’s a REALLY bad definition.

              Which is pretty much why anybody who says “science disproves the supernatural” needs to take a long step back and look at what they’re saying….

              1. >> “If you define something as being a violation of something you don’t understand and cannot measure or detect, it’s a useless definition.”

                A so-called miracle is a violation of something I don’t understand, yes. But it’s not undetectable. On the contrary, the “miracle” itself IS how I detect the presence of something I don’t understand. It’s the proof that reality doesn’t work the way I thought it did.

                You know how science advances when someone notices something strange and says “That’s odd?” I consider a miracle to just be a more useful and/or spectacular oddity than normal.

                >> “Which is pretty much why anybody who says “science disproves the supernatural” needs to take a long step back and look at what they’re saying….”

                You might be using a different definition of “supernatural” than I am:

                adj. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
                adj. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.

                Denying that the supernatural exists doesn’t mean claiming that ghosts/faeries/etc. are impossible. It means saying that IF such things exist, they are part of the natural order like everything else and must obey natural laws (whether we correctly understand those laws or not). And the idea that whatever does exist must follow rules of some kind is at the foundation of the concepts of proof and science.

                So you’re technically right, but not for the reason you seem to think. One does not use science to disprove the supernatural. One must start by rejecting the idea of the supernatural before one can use the processes of proof and science properly in the first place.

                1. DGM, your response had nothing to do with my statement.

                  The entire first paragraph missed the argument so solidly that it flipped it completely around backwards and sent it skidding sideways.

                  1. You said I was defining “miracle” in a particular way that rendered the term useless. I pointed out that I wasn’t defining it in the way you described. What other argument were you trying to make there?

                    2. There’s really no point in trying to talk to you when you get like this, is there? And you seem to do it fairly often.

                      Perhaps I should just stick to memes and such with you and leave you alone regarding anything more serious.

                    3. There’s really no point in trying to talk to you when you get like this, is there?

                      Spoiler:
                      I am always “like this,” where I do not let people reframe what I wrote. I check what is there, verify that I was not mis-remembering and was not unclear, and go from there.

                      Sometimes I have more time to do multiple links and direct quotes in refusing to be held to another person’s misreading of what is there in black and white.

                      Other times, I realize that they are not reading what is actually there, and decide that if they are so incredibly disrespectful of other people’s time as to repeatedly fail to look at what they are, supposedly, responding to– pouring more time and effort down the rathole will not fix it.

                      It does not matter why they are stating things that are flatly false, it does not matter why they are so attached to their belief that direct proof from inches above, which absolutely refutes their statements, is a problem with someone else.

                      That is not a problem with me. I cannot force anybody to understand.

                      I spent multiple posts pointing out, politely, that you had failed at reading comprehension, and rephrased the part that seemed to be giving you issues. Apparently, I should have been rudely direct.

                      As you then proceeded to get upset and completely ignore a really simple explanation phased in multiple manners, well– your conclusion of “there is no point in trying to talk to you when you’re like this” is accurate, but applied to the wrong person.

                    4. You’ve reframed things that I’ve written in the past as well, and brushed off all my attempts to clarify.

                      The problem isn’t that you want to clear up miscommunications. That in itself is laudable. The problem is that you won’t just say “I see what you meant” and move on, let alone consider that the mistake might be on your end. Instead you constantly hector people in a condescending tone about where you think they misspoke while IGNORING their attempts to clarify, like you’re trying to extract a confession from them.

                      You’re not just trying to clear up errors and misunderstandings. You’re trying to score points. And you’re willing to talk down to your friends and derail entire conversations to do it.

                      On a personal note: you did all this to me a couple of years back, before I realized how you operate. At the time I let it go because I thought the topic might be painful for you and I didn’t want to rub salt in any wounds. I’ve since reevaluated. The way you “debate” is often frustrating, insulting and makes it seem like there’s no point in trying to have an honest discussion with you about ANY matter of disagreement. If you think being that way is something to be proud of then you do you, but I’m not interested in banging my head against that particular wall.

                      So I’ll just leave you with the same final words you like delivering to others: “Believe what you want, I’m out.”

                    6. Yielding to bullies IS always easier…. and it’s precisely how the Left gained the dominance it holds in so MANY areas. YMMV.

                    7. IMO None Of The Regulars Here Are Bullies.

                      However, there are times when Regulars get into discussions were neither side can convince the other side.

                      In those situations, it is better to Drop The Discussion rather than get into Blue-On-Blue Fight.

                    8. >> “IMO None Of The Regulars Here Are Bullies.”

                      To be clear, I don’t suddenly think that Fox is a bad person overall. She’d have to burn a good deal more cred with me before I went there.

                      But there does seem to be a trace of “little miss can’t-be-wrong” in her debate technique, and I can only be talked down to and dismissed so much before I start to get mad about it.

                      >> “In those situations, it is better to Drop The Discussion rather than get into Blue-On-Blue Fight.”

                      True, but there’s better ways to say “let’s agree to disagree” than to assume stupidity or bad faith on your opponent’s part, play the “I don’t have time for this” card and flounce off. Any of us – myself most certainly included – can overreact from time to time, but it seems to me that she’s too quick to resort to that and gets away with it more than is fair.

                    9. But there does seem to be a trace of “little miss can’t-be-wrong” in her debate technique, and I can only be talked down to and dismissed so much before I start to get mad about it.

                      I can only have someone directly quote me saying, to a third party, “this does not work, because we do not know what X is, we only know have some guesses” with “it sounds like you are confusing what we think we know with what is” and then proceed to repeatedly argue with stances that I did not state for so long before I realize they are not reading what is there, for whatever reason.

                      The flip to personal attacks instead of arguments does you no credit.

                    10. Cool It!

                      You are making the Assumption that You are Correct and Foxfier is in the wrong.

                      Foxfier, rightly or wrongly, sees that a personal attack. You gain No Points in your post so while I think Foxfier should also Cool It, you darn well should Cool It.

                      Note, I’m not “Daddy” here so I can’t send both you and Foxfier to your own corners but it might be a Good Idea if both of you “Go To Your Corners”. [Getting Annoyed]

                    11. Thank you. You are deputized Daddy to cool hotheads for the next 3 weeks, because I’m going to be traveling between states and fixing/painting/going insane.
                      Keep these hot heads more or less alive till mid-September, Okay? thanks.

                    12. I repeat: believe what you want. You’re not going to listen to anything I say in my defense anyway.

                    13. I repeat: believe what you want. You’re not going to listen to anything I say in my defense anyway.

                      I have been listening.

                      That’s the problem.

                      Listening does not result in agreement; just as understanding does not result in supporting.

                      I have been pointing directly back to the original statement for clarification, or waiting for you to show some evidence of having looked at it.

                      You have been making accusations about my motivation, my attitude, etc; what you have not done is shown how to go directly from this statement:

                      The main reason I refuse to define miracle as a violation of the normal created laws of the universe is because we don’t know them. We’ve got a lot of guesses all piled up on each other, but we don’t KNOW the rules, so we can’t say “yes, this breaks them.”

                      We can say, “Hey, this isn’t what we expected.”

                      to this:

                      It sounds like you’re falsely equating the ACTUAL laws of nature with what we BELIEVE the laws of nature to be. It’s no contradiction to say “miracles are violations of natural law and those laws can’t be violated, so miracles never happen” while also saying “but we’re often ignorant or mistaken about what is and is not a natural law.”

                    15. What discussion?

                      A discussion is an exchange of ideas.

                      He’s been attacking arguments that were not made, made accusations against me that accurately describe what he is doing right there, and quite clearly believes that “letting it drop” means that he gets to have the last word, and then others are to be quiet.

                      I am quite annoyed because the discussion of good ways to define “miracle” was actually interesting and involves lots of good food for thought, and I rather hoped to hear more about the Jewish Rabbis’ logic for their definition. It looked like it was going to come around from the far side.

                      Instead I was “corrected,” repeatedly, in a manner that had nothing to do with the statement at hand.

                      I do tend to get annoyed when someone accuses me of bad behavior which they are openly and repeatedly demonstrating and expects that to make me agree with them.

                    16. Why in the Heck did you think I put discussion in Quotes?

                      Right Now I don’t care why the argument is continuing.

                      Just Cool It!!!!!

                    17. Fox, I don’t give a damn anymore what you think about the definition of “miracle.” I dropped that subject three days ago when you played the “I don’t have time for this” card on me yet again and made it clear you weren’t interested in hearing from me about it.

                      This is about you trying to score points and put down your debate opponents by endlessly quibbling over who-said-what-when instead of actually trying to dispel confusion and move on with the discussion. And the fact that you suddenly want to argue over who-said-what-when about miracles NOW, days after we both agreed to not discuss it with each other, isn’t going to convince me that I’m wrong.

                      Look, maybe Paul is right. Let’s just take a break, okay?

                    18. >> “He’s been attacking arguments that were not made,”

                      Fox, you apparently just spent the last three days thinking I was still trying to discuss the definition of “miracle” with you after I explicitly dropped it and have plainly been talking about the way you treat people in arguments the whole time. Consider giving the “I’m a better listener than you” schtick a rest for a while, okay?

                      >> “and quite clearly believes that “letting it drop” means that he gets to have the last word”

                      As I noted when I first said “believe what you want,” you keep dismissing others in pretty much the same manner. In fact you had just done to me, and not for the first time.

                      Did it ever occur to you that maybe I just wanted to see how you handled a taste of your own medicine?

                      >> “Instead I was “corrected,” repeatedly, in a manner that had nothing to do with the statement at hand.”

                      “Repeatedly?” No. I interjected ONCE, you immediately gave me the brush-off and not only did I agree to drop it, I offered to not try to discuss any serious matter with you ever again. If you really wanted to discuss miracles so badly without my input then all you had to do was accept the offer, forget about me and move on.

                      Instead you got distracted criticizing me for daring to notice the way you keep summarily dismissing people. YOU derailed the conversation you wanted to have because you’ve been too busy coming after me, which is exactly the kind of behavior I’ve been trying to point out.

                      Look, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be here in a week or two if you want resume then. But right now you seem to be on tilt and I really don’t want to have to kick you when you’re down, so PLEASE – for the love of that God you people keep going on about – heed Paul’s advice and TAKE A BREAK.

                    22. I’m not mad. JUST exhausted We loaded a 20 foot u-haul today and I got a script rewrite request…. late in the afternoon. I’m mostly up to answer email and do insty posting.

                    23. You FOUND the mythical 20 foot U-Haul? Way to go!

                      Be sure to pass it on to someone deserving.

                    27. Where did that expression come from? A hairy eyeball sounds much more uncomfortable for the giver than the recipient.

                    28. “Hairy eyeball” refers to a stare with the eye lids lowered (ie the eye lashes near the center of the eye).

                      While I’ve seen it mainly used as a reference to somewhat hostile look at somebody (like Sarah did), there is apparently a meaning of “looking at somebody with interest” (the example was a girl interested in a guy would give him a hairy eyeball).

                      Hey, I was curious and looked it up. 😀

                    29. The way I’ve always seen it used is “while not raising your head, look upwards towards the object of your ire through a screen of eyelashes, eyebrows and hair in any combination….. then return your attention to what you were doing.”

                    31. >> “While I’ve seen it mainly used as a reference to somewhat hostile look at somebody (like Sarah did)”

                      [sigh]

                      That wasn’t meant as a jab at Fox, but Sarah’s right; now that I think about it that WAS in poor taste after the argument we just had.

                      So… “Mom?” “Dad?” Do me a favor and back off for a minute.

                      Fox, in the interest of fairness I’m giving you one shot for free. You wanted the last word? You get it. You can say anything and everything you want, both to and about me, and while I don’t promise to agree with it I won’t talk back this time.

                      I can take it, so get it all out of your system.

        2. >> “God said “Even though animals don’t talk, on this occasion this animal does.”

          Heh. I can’t find it now, but there was a joke thread somewhere about God creating animals to populate the world and sometimes things went awry. He creates the parrot and, not thinking it through, proceeds to talk to Himself aloud right in front of it. Naturally, the parrot starts repeating things that God would rather not get around.

          God: What’s it gonna take to keep this quiet?

          Parrot: I want a long lifespan and I want to live in the tropics.

          God: Done.

        3. A miracle violates the laws of nature the way putting two pens in a drawer, and later three pens, and coming back to find four, violates the laws of arithmetic. That God put His hand in at the dawn of creation rather than at the time when they came manifest does not change the nature.

    3. And Christ Himself refused to do “signs,” on command, for people who weren’t going to be convinced by anything He did. Or worse, saw Him as a menace because He performed miracles. (You are seriously off the spiritual beam if your response to someone raising the dead is to decide the miracle-worker needs to go before he upsets your political situation…and maybe you should off the guy he brought back while you’re at it).

      1. Well, yes, there is a model of God where She/He/It is a celestial collectivist who doesn’t give a crap about any particular individual under Her/His/Its dominion. That is not what I was taught growing up but, as I grew up, I came to realize the God as Communist archetype fits the available evidence about as well as the more loving, personal God I was taught about.

        (BTW, I tried to like this comment and few others but was told each time that WordPress “Could not like this comment”. Sheesh, everybody’s a critic)

        1. Crap! Put that under the wrong comment. It was supposed to be for Chris Schwehr below.

            1. While I agree with the sentiment, that was my fault not WordPress. I generally compose relies in a text editor and then paste them into the correct place. Unfortunately something came up I had deal with right away. When I came back I did not double check the comment when I clicked “Reply”. I have been told that such lapses are a natural side effect of old age but I cannot remember where I heard it. 🙂

        2. I have had prayers answered with far more specificity, and occasional out-and-out weirdness, than an impersonal God would suggest. I have had one answered directly and verbally, which is simultaneously the best experience of my life and “Thank you, Sir, but let’s just stick to hints and inspirations now please??”. So I can’t buy the impersonal notion. 🙂

            1. Likewise.

              For my parents, too– mom’s brother (who she loved because familiy, but STILL doesn’t like) impossibly survived being blown up on a swift boat in Vietnam, woke up and was un-declared MIA presumed dead the day after she promised Himself that if he wasn’t dead, she’d go to college like Granny wanted, because none of the others were going to.
              (He was Granny’s favorite child, too.)

              The details were “if you read it in a book you’d say it was really bad writing” level stuff, like his dog tags being found in another body, but he wasn’t even scarred and I can’t even remember most of them. It was gruesome, but definitely made sure that we knew He was listening if we made a promise, and we by-Him had better keep them, too.

          2. Yeah, I’ve been slapped down hard enough to bounce, then picked up, brushed off, and sent to play with the other kids some more.

            You know that saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ There are things I do not pray for anymore.

          3. I had a message from God: “Go to a conference in Nashville”.

            My immediate response: “I don’t have $500 to fly to Nashville.” I should have said I don’t have $1,000 to fly to Nashville, I could have had a better hotel.

            I actually asked for a sign to confirm this was a God thing. After the first 2 signs, I told my wife if I didn’t agree to go, the next sign would be a billboard dropped on our front lawn flashing “Go to Nashville…Go to Nashville.”

            $500 (the exact amount I said I didn’t have), didn’t arrive until after I heard a voice, (with image of Peter and boat) say.” I’ve told you what to do. Now you have to get out of the boat.” I faxed my registration, not knowing how this was going to happen. The start of one of my strangest journeys. He can be very specific. The real question always is: “Do you trust Me?”

          4. Sometimes its not even directed as a prayer. (It’s entirely possible I have told this here before.)

            We had lost our cat of 14 years, who I had been very attached to. I was driving with my mom who was doing the “we just lost an animal, still have two and so will not get another one” routine. Knowing that this usually lasts for all of a year, I said something along the lines of, “But if we do, it should be female and young, so Dr. Seuss will be more likely to get along with it, and some white would be nice because I am tired of stepping on cats in the dark.” Note: both Dr Seuss and previous cat were, respectively, solid grey fluff and grey mottled tabby. Perfect camouflage.

            Within three months, a pure white, stray female cat shows up trying desperately to get in any open door, and thin as a rail. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feed her, but apparently there are a lot of stone hearts because she ended up living on our porch. And moving into our house. And producing eight kittens. One of which hid every time potential families showed up, so is still here 13 years later. Oh, and he too is black and white.

            And we just this year added another (fixed) female stray who moved onto our porch, estimated age according to vet 2-3, and oh yes, she has splashes of white all over her otherwise tabby self.

    4. Why would a universal God be interested in the petulant demands of any of it’s myriad parts? Is one cell of my body not believing that I exist as a whole person? Why? And do I care? Should I care? That cell is still there, performing it’s function for the benefit of the whole body (me) and I could care less if it doesn’t believe in me…I still exist. And that is a comforting thought too.

  13. I suppose you are aware of the celestial phenomenon that occurred at Nuremberg in 1561 and 1566 at Basel.

  14. I recall articles about one of the Voyager probes demonstrating an unexpected acceleration. At the time, no one had an explanation for it.
    I wondered if it had reached the edge of the holodeck in which our solar system was kept, and there was a slight glitch in translating the physical probe to a holographic representation past the wall of the holodeck. After all, they had to time the translation pretty finely, and capture and disable the real probe as soon as the projected image came on line, lest the Earthlings receive a double signal.

    1. That is what happens when you zone. I used to have that happen a lot going from Emerald Jungle into upper Guk.

        1. Um, what?

          If that’s a D&D reference, I should mention that I haven’t really touched it since 3.5. And I don’t think I ever played a monk.

          1. I think I had one monk character.
            My latest endeavor was DM for a Pathfinder (AD&D 3.75) campaign where I introduced the son of my Dwarven fighter cleric as an NPC because the party needed more healing on hand. (That’s the same campaign where I introduced Dale, the Squirrel of Cure Light Wounds.)

              2. I run a “Brotherhood of Rangers” campaign with the PCs all being gestalt rangers (fighter-ranger gestalt, cleric-ranger gestalt, wizard-ranger gestalt, etc.). Wands of Cure Light Wounds are standard party supplies and if it weren’t for that, “Dale, the Squirrel of Cure Light Wounds” would fit right in.

                Hmm, maybe “Dale, the Squirrel of Lesser Restoration.”

          2. Everquest.

            I only did very little EQ2, and spent about 30 seconds going “I KNOW THOSE PLACES. Why do I know those places?”

    2. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/318010-voyager-probes-electron-accelerating-physics-deep-space about unusual corona ejection readings.

      Voyager 1 is 43 years, 11 months, 12 days, 9 hours, and 33 minutes out according to the JPL Mission Status page. It is still responding to commands and sending back data.

      A tiny amount of payload space was reserved for some cargo, should any alien civilization ever find it. Part of that is an audio recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

      “Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans
      way back up in the woods among the evergreens
      there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
      where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode.”

      V’ger is hauling mass at 38,000 miles per hour, blazing the trail.

      2. At that velocity it will take a long time to reach another solar system. OTOH, even if mankind is wiped out by natural events or exterminates itself through some variation on Critical Stupidity Theory, Voyager will stand as evidence to some far future species that we existed and, for a brief moment, strove to reach the stars.

  15. Because there be dragons on the other side.

    There Are Beings Worse Than Dragons! 😈

      1. For we have it on good authority that they are quite tasty when cooked over low heat with a decent BBQ

        1. decent BBQ sauce.
          Damn WP posted before I was done. I swear, cursor never went near the post comment button.
          Talk about a hiccough in reality!

          1. From a list of, “things we want to see in a movie….”
            “I don’t know where those big crawdads came from, but they made d*mn fine jambalaya!”
            It would give new meaning to the term, “Cajun Navy.”

  16. Visits by the honored dead are not ghosts.

    Technically an Apparition! (I checked, that includes souls in Purgatory. Padre Pio had them, too, had no idea it was unusual.)

    1. I have had one experience with communication with the dead, and it scared the crap out of me. As a young man, a fairly new friend of mine lost his fiancee to a drunk driver. He went a little nuts with grief, and at one point insisted on a seance. Jews don’t do seances, so I watched. We got the sudden chill in the room effect you read about, and Dave, my friend, was calling out to Mary, his deceased girlfriend. All of a sudden I had a clear feminine voice. “Tell him to stop this. It’s not good for him, and it’s not good for me. So he’ll know it’s me, tell him the first time we tried to make love, he was so eager he tore the condom, and we had to wait.” The room just as suddenly warmed back up. I delivered the message. My friend went white as a sheet, got up and walked out, and never spoke of her again.

      2. I had one very weird incidence….
        I mean “perfectly explainable” but….
        Our friend — Dan’s best friend — Alan died six years ago.
        About two years later, I’m looking through my email, and there’s a newly-arrived email from Alan, reminding us it’s Becky’s (his wife’s) birthday, and do we want to go to the Chinese buffet?
        On examination, the email was ten years old, but it showed up in my email as if it were new.
        I went “Uh” and let it go. The next day I had another old email showing up as new and asking if we had decided what to do, and had we talked to Becky.
        This continued for a week.
        Dan and I did a drop in on Becky, who was apparently very depressed.
        Make of that what you will. I’ve never had that kind of glitch happen before or since.

        1. >> “I’ve never had that kind of glitch happen before or since.”

          Um, actually you have, albeit on a lesser scale.

          Earlier this year, after you asked me to do a guest post, I sent a test post to see if I could embed images on my end and save you the trouble. Over 2 months later you mentioned that the email had just arrived.

            1. Where did she say she had seen the same email before? All I noticed was “On examination, the email was ten years old.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that she’d seen it 10 years prior (though she can correct me if that IS what she meant).

              1. The part where she *didn’t* say it was a ten year old email she’d never seen, and specifically mentioned the next one as ‘another old email.’

                1. You’re putting words in her mouth. Her NOT saying “X didn’t happen” isn’t the same as her saying “X did happen.” Sarah could have established that the e-mails were originally sent 10 years ago by other means (such as remembering when that birthday party was). It’s ambiguous until she clarifies.

                  1. You’re putting words in her mouth.

                    I’m pointing out an obvious conclusion for a situation she described where you decided to read her comment, make an assumption, and then publicly correct her statement based on that assumption.

                    Even though there has been a long running series of comments on how emails show up late or not at all, and thus if it were Yet Another Instance of an email that showed up late it would not be unreasonable to expect her to mention it.

                    1. >> “I’m pointing out an obvious conclusion”

                      You didn’t just point out the possibility. You declared with certainty that it had happened with incomplete information. You may yet be right – again, that’s for her to confirm – but it’s not a certainty based on what she actually said.

                      >> “Even though there has been a long running series of comments on how emails show up late or not at all, and thus if it were Yet Another Instance of an email that showed up late it would not be unreasonable to expect her to mention it.”

                      Because we’re all perfect little machines around here and none of us would EVER accidentally misspeak, right?

                    2. You didn’t just point out the possibility. You declared with certainty that it had happened with incomplete information.

                      The irony meter has pegged.

                      Peace out, go fight someone else.

                    3. Fox, I already acknowledged that your interpretation might be the correct one. I know I jumped to a conclusion too; the only difference is that I admit the possibility of it.

                      What more do you want?

  17. There’s a ghost in my house. Or so I’m told. By my wife and all 5 children of ours who have seen it. Been living there since 1997 or so and I’ve never seen it. They all describe him the same way. Does he exist? I’m not going to say he doesn’t, I’m just going to say I haven’t seen him.

    But them, I seem immune to such things. I’m also immune to others. Like- getting a buzz. Yes I drink, yes, I’ve been drunk. I know when I’m drunk. I have no clue what this wonderful “buzz” feeling everyone describes is that apparently occurs somewhere between starting to drink and getting drunk.

    Oxycodone? Other similar drugs? Stuff I’ve been knocked out with before being operated on? They all either A. Kill the pain, or B. Don’t. There is no elated feeling associated with them. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the ghost.

    I’ve also had several people during my life tell me anyone can be hypnotized. They’ve all given up with me- though they still hold that belief.

    1. I’m currently on fentanyl. It takes my pain away. It does not get me buzzed. I do get buzzed from drinking, which I haven’t done since March when I started treatment. alcohol and narcotics don’t mix well.

      1. Dear Mr. Kamas716,

        Just so you know, and I have this on good authority from the best pharmacist I know, the body in pain responds very differently to narcotics than the body not in pain. And, as a retail pharmacy tech, I could smell the difference between an addict and a chronic pain sufferer: the addict always smelled sickly, powdery sweet to me; the chronic pain patient, who often could be taking twice or thrice the amount usually given just to be functional, never smelled like anything but, well, like pretty much anyone.

        YMMV

        Best Regards,
        Mariah Maloy
        The Crazy Cat Lady from Mars

        1. “I could smell the difference between an addict and a chronic pain sufferer”

          That… actually makes sense. The chronic pain sufferer was burning through the medication faster than it would make it through the sweat. And makes me wonder if they could train dogs to sniff out addiction.

    2. Back when I could drink, I had a few times when “buzzed” was applicable. However, opiates either kill the pain and/or put me to sleep–frequently both, largely because if I need them for the pain, the best use of my time is to sleep.

      I’ve felt weird with pre-procedure Valium, the most dramatic before an appendectomy. “I might die from this operation. That would be a bummer.” About the same level of excitement as misplacing a pencil.

      The latest pre-op medications kill your memory. I was partly down the corridor before knee surgery when my memory turned off. That was weird. I’d rather remember until the general anesthesia kicks in.

      1. Oh, my goodness, how weird. I don’t think they used that on me either time, but it’s been a few years. At least I remember being in the correct location.

        1. The person who administered the pre-op med warned me that it was going to happen, so it didn’t come as a surprise. I had a couple of retina procedures, where you are conscious (and tranqed) for the entire thing. I kind of liked that. For the knee, out cold was far preferable.

      2. I’ve never heard of that but I’ve never had any surgery beyond stitches, carpal tunnel relief, and a wisdom tooth extraction. I do remember that the “twilight” anesthesia I was given for the last made my balls itch.

        1. Yeah, major surgery. Two hours “tying mop ends together” to use the surgeon’s simile. Not something I’d care to repeat, in any joint. (The billing data shows they used an impressive list of meds during the procedure.)

    4. I lived for a year in an apartment carved out of a Victorian house in Asbury Park I’m convinced was haunted, but I never saw anything. I heard footsteps walking up the hall to the room I had as a bedroom, and they’d stop at the doorway, pause,then walk back down. Any hour of the night, sometimes several times a night. The steps would start at the end of the hall and come towards me. And the only entrance to the apartment was the door in my bedroom.
      It happened so often I got used to it.

      1. We lived in a house where a triple (unsolved. Mom and two kids) murder happened in the 50s. We didn’t know. I sort of caught a glimpse once of a little girl in a long white dress (nightgown turns out) cross in the kitchen.
        Mostly, though, it was cold spots, a feeling of oppression, a “don’t open your eyes in the night” and my kids being terrified of two normal steps in the house (where the kids were killed.)
        Our other haunted house, I saw and felt nothing, but the kids made friends with a girl ghost in the basement. The ohter day we were telling the story and younger son went “wait. Anne was dead?” Pause “well, I never understood why you made her live in the basement.”
        Old orphanage. Anne was buried on the property. I found her grave in brambles just before we moved. Others probably were too, but some past owner took off the gravestones.

        1. I’ve never seen a ghost, though I heard footsteps on the stairs at night sometimes when no living person was around, in our 100 year old house…But our then 5 year old son, staying home in bed from kindergarten with a small fever, reported that a smiling lady, in a long dress down to the floor, flowed through his closed bedroom door to look in on him, was apparently satisfied, and flowed back out…He wasn’t disturbed by it at all, but quickly learned that it wasn’t something you could talk about at school….

        2. the kids made friends with a girl ghost in the basement. The other day we were telling the story and younger son went “wait. Anne was dead?” Pause “well, I never understood why you made her live in the basement.”

          This is so hilariously your family…

      2. We had a…house ghost, I guess you’d say. Not a family ghost, but place-centered. My father had mentioned it a few times over my adolescence, but I’d thought he was talking about his childhood house and not his teenage house, where we visited my grandmother every year. Then he said something about “a couple times a year, I’d just wake up terrified and convinced that something was watching me from the foot of the bed, between me and the closet.” Which is when I asked him if it was my grandmother’s house. Because I’d been too embarassed to tell anyone when they put me down for a nap when I was five, and I woke up terrified and convinced that something was watching me from the foot of the bed, between me and the closet…

        1. Some people interpret those as aliens. In the medieval era, a demon — a succubus or incubus, which were a lot less charming in the folklore.

        2. We don’t seem to have any people ghosts (the house was built in 1890), just our cat Alice. She died at 17 last year, and since then, she occasionally walks across the bed. She’s been doing it less, so maybe she figured out we were missing her, but OK? My daughter who lives out of state with my sister has had the same experience a few times this past year, but it is more likely to have been my sister’s cat who died a few months before Alice, since Alice had never been to Ithaca.

  18. I don’t recall having anything like those skips happen. I’ve had a number of other things happen, and then there’s the twisting-gut-hair-on-neck-at-attention “Don’t do that/go there/take that route/read that/listen to that*” sense. And the deja vu (Second Sight), but that runs in the maternal line.

    *It was a modern neoPagan folk-metal group. I was listening to something else, and they popped up on U-Tube’s sidebar. I clicked, started to listen, and got very, very, VERY strong bad vibes. I bailed out. No idea why, or what was up, but I’ve steered clear of that sub-genre since then. Vibes as bad as when I started reading a guided meditation based on the Holy Grail quest, and Something warned me off, big time.

    1. I’ve had the feeling of Deja-Vu once; looked up from a desk where I worked and had the damndest sensation that I’d seen that exact scene before–would have been an interesting trick, since I had just moved to that particular desk.

      I *should* have bailed out at the first Lawn-Order / Sex Crimes show that I saw. The ending creeped me out and it took months to get that scene out of my brain.

      I’ve bailed on some internet reading. There are evil people out there, and I recoil.

      1. I was reading about the recent revelation of the University of Pittsburgh experiments and stopped at one point. If I had read more, I would feel morally obligated to act in some extreme capacity.

          1. I would guess it has to do with paying race-based bounty for the body parts of black abortion victims.

            The University of Pittsburgh has been harvesting fetal tissue from the United States Department of Health and Human Services for the last five years and has now set its racial quotas for “aborted babies whose organs it harvests for scientific research,” Life News reported.

            Life News said the Center for Medical Progress and Judicial Watch has exposed the fetal harvesting practices of the university in a 252-page document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and released this week.

            As per Life News, the Department of Health and Human Services was sued by the Center for Medical Progress and Judicial Watch when it did not provide the documents after requesting through the FOIA.

            https://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/12822/20210805/university-of-pittsburgh-sets-racial-quotas-for-body-parts-of-black-babies-killed-via-abortion.htm

            Links to Life News, CMP and JW articles at link.

            **********

            News is at least 4 days old, and I hadn’t heard anything about it, either.

            1. I saw it picked up by one of the Deplorable news sites; I saw it reposted on my Gab feed. Can’t find it readily. There’s reactions, not sure if it’s Congress types or candidates

              Reading through the article is chilling; some or all of the babies were alive at the time of organ harvesting. The Beulahland “balancing” system of justice (TNotB reference) seems highly appropriate here.

              1. Reading through the article is chilling; some or all of the babies were alive at the time of organ harvesting.

                ::sad nod::
                Yeah. A lot of organ harvesting has to be done while the human is alive.
                That’s why they keep trying to find definitions of death that aren’t actually dead.

                1. One of the several reasons I had the “organ donor” box unticked from my driver’s license years ago.

                  Apparently in some states that’s no longer an option.

    2. I have that for books. Not sure if it means “this is a Bad Book” or just “This is a Bad Book For You”, but the two times I’ve ignored that vibe, I have deeply regretted it.

        1. I’ve never seen any of those books. Not even an ad for one. Guess I’m just lucky.

          It does burn my bum, though, how the political class rake in millions for books nobody wants to read, written by some poor scrivener for a pittance.

          2. I think a lot of the big buck advances for remainder fodder is laundered money. 10% for The Big Guy has a long and sordid tradition; it just took FICUS to make it in-your-face.

            “Potoo Publishers! May I help you?”
            “Yeah, gimme Senior. Tell him he knows who’s calling.”
            “Senior here, how much and who gets it?”
            “$10,000,000, Camel Harridan. I don’t care what the title is, but publish by Halloween. Blood path magic curses preferable.”

            (Apologies to Miss Red.)

      2. I just saw the greatest quote from RazorFist. It wasn’t about book publishing, but it should have been:

        “A cow can only chew the same cud for so long.”

        TradPub has been chewing the same cud for 25 years. It’s done.

    3. When I was in Dublin, Bernadette McAliskey came to rant at the college once. I had to go by the dining hall steps where she was raving to get where I was going, and found myself curling my fingers into claws and baring my teeth (as well as discovering what hackles are). That woman is/was truly evil. A fellow chorister at the cathedral went out with a guy for a while who I had never really cared for, but one day when I looked at him, it was like looking at a comedy/tragedy mask but emotionless, with dark roiling chaos visible in the eye holes, and I knew that he would cheerfully hurt or kill anyone if he thought he could get away with it. Further experience proved me right.

      1. A very accomplished friend recommended the book, _People of the Lie_, by M. Scott Peck, to me. He described it as the most useful book he had ever read. It is a great help to know that there are people who enjoy being evil, and doing harm to others. It is not a “true crime” book, but a collection of encounters with, well, evil people. I recommend it myself; I’ve given it to friends who have had a hard time when they’ve encountered people like that.

    4. TXRed–what’s the name of the group, so I know who to avoid? (I’d probably get the same vibes, but it would be good to just avoid them altogether 🙂 )

  19. Pingback: Woo-woo expansion | Dio's Workshop

  20. Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

    — Philip K. Dick

    1. Sure, sure. Most of the time it doesn’t. And it has nothing to do with our belief. Sometimes it’s all inexplicable, whatever you believe. The mistake the left makes is thinking that what they believe is worth a tinker’s damn.
      The truth is reality is there. We just don’t understand it all.

      1. What’s that old saying about it not being what you don’t know that will screw you up, it’s what you know with all your heart and conviction that is simply NOT TRUE that will put your butt in the dunny.
        You cannot argue reality to those overcome with religious fervor, and that holds quite well for the true believers on the left. Does not help whatsoever when proven wrong (ie by 2020 all coastal cities will be inundated by the rising sea, by the start of the 21st century there will be so many people we’ll all be starving, if we believe really really hard Marxism will work this time)

    2. More like, “Reality is what bites you on the ass when you try to stop believing in it.”

  21. Several friends remember having driven I-70 many times in the last four decades and it never having tolls on it through Pennsylvania. I remember always having to pay tolls on the New Stanton to Breezewood stretch in the 23 years I have driven it.

      1. There’s an overlap of 86 miles between Breezewood and New Stanton. Allegheny Tunnel and the former Laurel Tunnel are on this section.

        1. Some friends say their 2019 Dayton to Maryland trip was the 1st time they’d hit a toll on I-70. My parents and I and Wikipedia say otherwise.

  22. I’ve had deja vu three times. It was where I dreamt something, and then it happened the next day. Too bad it wasn’t the lottery numbers. 😦

    I’ve had the “opening door and finding something unexpected” once, when I was in junior high. I opened the door to my bedroom, which was almost never shut because it got the first shot from the furnace and would be 90° in my room and 50° in the rest of the house. I opened the door to find a dining room, closed it, shook my head and reopened the door to find my bedroom. It’s never happened again.

  23. In 1976, was driving south on I-5 in Seattle and had just passed the Boeing plant when suddenly a chain reaction accident started to happen in right in front of me…at that point, everything froze and I was able to drive around the whole mess safely…When I got to an open space, reality unfroze and traffic resumed…I was able to make the first race at Longacres…Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” recounts similar events…

    1. It’s pretty common for martial artists, soldiers, etc. to experience time-slowing like that, and sometimes even performers get it.

      One theory I’ve heard is that the nervous system and brain upshifts/overclocks, and that’s why perception seems to be “slower” — you’re experiencing a quicker reaction time, and thus have “more time” to react and perceive.

      Of course, there’s a point where what people are doing would seem to be beyond human capability, however upshifted.

      1. Brains aren’t tied to the clock tick of a single timing circuit.

        I have a weirdness with my brain, the amount of light that I experience is not strictly the amount of light available. When my mindset shifts to a state that has more internal fixation, I don’t perceive the available amount of light, it ‘seems darker’. IF something shifts me out of the mindset, I perceive more light, and it seems ‘brighter’. Explanation seems to be that the internal fixation is robbing the visual processor of available brain energy, and so the visual processor is quieter when it tells me how bright things are.

        So, it seems plausible to me that part of the brain that doesn’t usually decide or take action could carry out a complicated behavior. Since it doesn’t usually do this, if the senses are still going to memory, all of sudden there are some strange memories to process. In principle, it seems like the processing could conclude that slowed time had been experienced, repackaging it as a longer term falsified memory.

        Of course, I have a bias towards seeking such explanations for such phenomena.

        Basically, I dislike talking about thought processes or experiences where I don’t understand what is going on. This would extend to not wanting to talk about emotions, if I hadn’t worked out by now that emotions are unavoidable, do not always make sense, and that their existence can be assumed into the models. Okay, I also often dislike talking about emotions, but that probably isn’t the same root discomfort. 🙂

  24. Interesting stuff… My life’s been pretty mundane by comparison, a few bits of deja vu aside. The weirdest thing I can think of at the moment was me swearing I had some kind of action figure as a kid – some kind of fire-themed supervillain, I think – but I never could find it back then. I always wondered if it was a dream that I somehow mistook for reality. I’ve had a few strong bad feelings about things that I ended up avoiding, too, and have the occasional odd coincidence, though those seem to be turning up more frequently lately. The most notable of those was when I was showing off a picture of the Balinese mix to a girl in line to clock in at work only to find out that it was the sister-in-law of a favorite server at a downtown spot. Then there was me going out of town to eat today and being seated at the exact same spot where I met one particular server, who I ended up sitting with today. Pretty tame stuff next to some of this, though, and I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that my life seems to be largely free from that kind of weirdness.

    1. A lot of this is testament to how unreliable human memory is. I recall reading about two sisters at a gathering. One sister went into this long story about something or other in her early childhood, and the other sister turned to her and said “that’s a wonderful story, except it actually happened to me.” The sisters had both heard the story from their parents so many times that each came to believe they were the subject.

      And this is without a “therapist” trying to “find” “memories” of abductions, abuse, etc.

      1. Right, and I have a horrible case of CRS (Can’t Remember S___) anyway so that’s why I tend to be dismissive of weird stuff like that in my own life. Most of the time things are so mundane that one day tends to resemble another for another thing that explains memory haze on my end. And that is indeed why crap like bad therapists are such a problem, and why gaslighting is so damn effective, whether on a small scale by a familiar abuser or a large scale like we’re seeing from the various governments and their toadies and cronies. Here’s hoping that the latter is just about played out…

      2. I kept searching for my muzzle-loading mountain rifle for several days until I remembered that I never bought it. I have the matching pistol, but only Kentucky muzzle loading rifles.

        I’ve noticed that I have a poor memory for colors (was that dress pale blue or green?), and an infuriating tendency to set something down and not be able to locate it a minute or two later. Helps if I haven’t left the area.

  25. As to the anomalies, they’re aftereffects of time travel. If you’re close enough to the locus of the time travel, you remember the different timelines. For those away from the locus, you merely inhabit the one timeline. Depending on the magnitude of the change you cause, it takes several time-shocks for the timeline to settle down like a pendulum coming slowly to rest, and you risk having mixed memories and even potential insanity. So my wife’s book explains, and that’s how a 21st century American physicist who was a refugee in China in her original timeline ends up washed ashore at China Beach in San Francisco Bay speaking only an 800-year-old Chinese dialect in 2012.

  26. Oh wow! Your last story reminded me a lot of the weirrd vibes my sister got when she was living in Portugal!

  27. Starting when I was quite young I was always very queasy walking behind someone through a doorway that had no door because I had a persistent nightmare where I would follow someone through such a doorway and out of nowhere a steam iron with no electrical cord would fall out of a black sky and hit me on the head and knock me out. I told my parents about this dream several times to explain my reluctance at doorways.

    During play practice when I was in high school the set crew had mocked up the set with the various doorways etc with no walls or doors. We were practicing entrances. I was to come in right behind another character and, sure enough, I started to feel extremely nauseated and I had to force myself forward.

    When I came to several minutes later, looking up at the blackness of a almost unlit stage, anxious faces were hovering over me and I had an incredible headache. One of my fellow actors held up a steam iron with no cord and said, “The set crew put this iron on top of the doorway to hold it because it wasn’t nailed down yet and it fell right on your head! Are you OKAY!?!”

    Other than being completely freaked out about my nightmare coming true, I was fine.

    I’ve also been able to walk through doorways without nausea ever since.

    I have this sort of thing happen from time to time and I can now tell which dreams are the weird kind that will eventually happen and which are the byproduct of sketchy Welch rarebit.

    1. I’ve had a number of precognitive dreams, all very short.

      The most verifiable was a dream where I looked down into a box with weird plastic things with flowers attached. There were a bunch of tiny daisies in the flower arrangements that I took note of in my dream, and even mentioned in passing to my mother.

      A year or two later, I look down into a box with bouquets of flowers for a friends wedding, it’s the first time in real life I had ever seen the plastic bouquet holders for bridesmaids bouquets, but I had seen them in my dream. In addition my friend disliked baby’s breath and had replaced the filler flower with tiny daisies just like in my dream.

      Why Himself or the universe thinks I need precognition of 30 seconds looking into a box of bouquets, I don’t know. Maybe just to know there is more to reality than what is obvious, or an artifact of underlying principles of the universe?

      Also, can I have parallel universe son’s number? 🤔💭🙃😉

      1. so, mine? I was doing my hair in a very weird bathroom. (My host family’s bath. Prom. Portugal ONLY has pedestal sinks. I’d never seen a VANITY)
        YEARS later, I had a few seconds dream, in which my husband and I were waiting by the backdoor, and husband yelled up the stairs at younger son “Come on. You can’t be late for your court date.”
        Well, when I had the dream, son was having issues at school, so imagine what I thought?
        The reality? Yeah. He had a court date, because the speedometer in his car was broken, and he’d been going above the speed limit. That was it.

        1. I swear that our brains are somewhat unhinged in time. I mean, I’ve always known that my dad was going to die first (ten years ago, lung cancer.) This was underscored by having dreams of encountering him in my childhood home and being surprised that he was alive—many years prior to his death.

      2. I had a very strange dream one night that I told my sister about the next day (we shared a room at the time, so we told each other about all our weird dreams). About five years later the exact scene from my dream showed up in a movie I was watching. I came to the conclusion that I was on the same mental wavelength as either the writer or the director of the movie and had been ‘listening in’ as it were to the creative process.

    2. Yes, sometimes we will have things in our future that someone wants to warn us about. I had 2 big instances.

      Without going into details, I had a dream convey to me that I would have a serious and frustrating situation in my life that I should know about, but it’s avoidance or fixing would be beyond my control.

      The second instance was also a dream that gave me insight to a problem that would present itself, and it would be up to me to do everything I could to help because no one else would.

      Both messages were symbolic and had family members making appearances. The meanings were clear. The dreams shook me to the bone, but I’m glad I had them.

    3. of course you can tell the weird ones. They’re somehow more real. Also usually make no sense whatsoever.
      And hten htey come true and you go “oh.”

    4. Do these premonitions ever actually help the people who have them? In your case it sounds like it made things worse by causing a lot of fear over something you didn’t manage to avoid anyway.

      2. If I may but in… Yes and no. I’ve had one that was immediately useful. (Phone rang. I knew who it was, that his mother had just died and that I needed to shut up and just listen. THEN I picked up.)

        But having had them prepared me for a lot of subsequent weird and contributed to me coming back from Iraq alive rather than as a statistic.

        1. Oh yeah, I used to be able to do that (know who was calling before picking up.) That particular skill has atrophied with the onset of cell phones and smart phones. 🙂

      3. I’ve had several “NOPE!” things that went bad, and the weird urge I had to go to Costco the day before a trip to my parents’…. I’ve mentioned THAT day before, it’s when the brakes went out on the minivan and they told me that it HAD to have been leaking for “months,” it’d been checked just a week or two before, and when I went to Costco the brakes were good and when I came out they were iffy at the first stop light…which was a block from Schwab’s.
        (Tire store I grew up around and knew I could walk in and get reasonable help.)

        If I hadn’t gone to Costco and the timing on how may stops it took for the brakes to stop working right held steady, I would’ve been pumping brakes that didn’t work going down the canyon towards Grand Coolie Dam.

        Think miles of often-can’t-see-the-bottom cliff.

        1. Less than a month after I’d been in an accident with a driver who blew through a stop sign, I paused at a green light from an under-freeway crossing—while a van zoomed through the red light. (I don’t know if it was my imagination, but the passenger looked terrified.)

          Thing was, you could explain that hesitation on my part due to the recent accident—but not the hesitation of the other two drivers. And there wasn’t enough line of sight for any of us to have caught that.

          1. Another story I’ve told on this blog. Something similar. But first –

            We always … ALWAYS pause when first car when a light turns green. We also take foot off accelerator when we approach the intersection, when a light has just turned green, allows a quicker stop if a vehicle pushes the yellow. The other day a freaking triple SEMI pushed the yellow. Light their way was a solid red when the driver crossed the crosswalk area let alone went into the intersection for a freaking left hand turn. Not a location where the turn is made anywhere other than dead slow. The driver (semi or not) had room to stop.

            The other thing we (used to now) was when coming to a stop put a manual gear into first to be read to proceed at the appropriate time. One morning I didn’t do this, so with appropriate delay started to make a protected left turn, and promptly killed the engine. When resetting, a car blew through the intersection. I mean blew through. No way was that car going the posted 35 MPH, or even the typical 40 – 45 MPH.

          2. Yeah, at that point folks start throwing out something like “oh, you all HEARD the car coming and it was wrong” and…doesn’t work well with other cars that do the same and doesn’t freak folks out…..

  29. “I don’t think that’s in Himself’s repertoire. And I’m not sure he’s at the switch of reality either.”

    See, as a nonbeliever, I can roll with that. There are =things= out there we don’t understand. I’ve lived in a haunted house (I became convinced it wasn’t just me, or the previous tenant who’d tried to exorcise the house, when a dog client rolled up and first words out of her mouth were, “Did you know you have a ghost in your house?”) I don’t really have a problem with a haunted reality. I’ve known Hollerers, and Nasties. One could do worse than Himself.

    “I can lose my keys in a completely empty room. ADHD is a superpower.”

    That’s because they’re in your hand. Or your pocket. Or hanging in the door. Or left in the car. Your real power is teleportation of inanimate objects, such that they’re always just out of sight.

    Last week I had a computer jump reality.

    — Start, Run, pick D:\Temp\stuff.txt to edit in notepad. Save and exit.
    — Start, Run, pick D:\Temp\dog.txt to edit. File Not Found.
    WTF?
    — Open D: in Explorer. D:\Temp is not there. It has vanished from existence literally in the two seconds between closing one file and trying to open the next.
    — Run data recovery software. No deleted files found. (It’s a data-only drive.)
    — Search entire drive for the uniquely-named dog.txt (in case it’s managed to get moved.. that fast??) Find a partial copy of D:\Temp\ in D:\storage\Z_Ramdisk_Storage\temp — note the lowercase name. This is the archive directory for the RAMdisk (since it tends to accumulate oft-referenced crap) which was made back in January. Per the directory creation date, about two months before, a partial copy of D:\Temp had replaced this \temp’s contents, but kept the old directory name. With absolutely no evidence of error or that it was ever otherwise.

    So I got back an almost-current dog.txt, but current stuff.txt is nowhere to be seen. (There are older copies on C: but last opened two years ago.)

    This is spinning rust, not SSD (and XP, not something newfangled and ill-mannered); it can’t do such things without leaving an evidence trail.

    Now I think my data drive has been having secret liaisons with another reality.

    *sigh*

    1. Working with computers most of my adult life and I’ve seen a lot of system events that I was able to explain eventually and a few that are beyond possibility.

      1. Keep in mind that random hardware glitches do happen. Voltage fluctuates a lot and sometimes what should be a 1 gets read as a 0 (or vice versa). Often the bit it happens to doesn’t matter, but sometimes it really REALLY does. Hence why you sometimes need to reboot/redownload/reinstall stuff for no apparent reason.

        That instability is why we still use binary. Trying to distinguish 3 different levels of voltage instead of 2 makes things a lot worse.

      2. I used to work at Foxwoods, which opened in 1992. One day when I was trying to print a chip fill request, the printer insisted there was a pending job and started printing, over and over, a catalog page from a company I had never heard of, for hardware we had never used, from 1980-something. This file has been apparently been wandering around the casino’s servers (since nearly a decade before the casino opened?) and IT had given up trying to find it and delete it.

  30. I’ve had deja vu that stopped me dead in my tracks several times, but the one I remember best happened In Barcelona. I’d never been there before and I came out of mass at the cathedral — really they were doing the sardana and everything — and around the corner was the church of Saint Philip Neri. The church had been damaged during the Civil War and you could see the marks of it on the walls. The girl I was with said I turned white as a ghost and ran away. I remember quite distinctly, feeling I’d been there and could hear the bombs going off.

    Told my mother this months later and she said “oh, your Uncle John was there when they bombed it.” It was what he saw in Barcelona that turned him against communism.

    I don’t really believe in woo, but this was all very freaky.

  32. If reality is a simulation then I have some choice words for the devs. Not only is the setting really boring and unimaginative (no dinosaurs or faster-than-light starships, really?) but it’s also running malware. Deeply unimpressed.

        1. On the plus side, the resolution and framerate are amazing.

          I hear the color depth is better than normal, too.

  33. May God bless us so that we do not put our effort to hold on to material, honor, status, or people in order to gain something and be exalted in this world, but all of us hold on to Jesus, the source of salvation!

  34. Is it safe to invite a fairy into the house?
    Ordinarily, I’d say not. But what if we invoked the sacred customs of host and guest? Are fairy-kind bound by those rules?

    2. The question is “Do the Fairie understand the sacred customs of host and guest in the same way that you do”?

      Based on many of the stories about them, I’d say that they don’t.

      Of course, even those customs acknowledge the importance of the host not insulting the guest and the Faire might “take insult” in cases where a human guest would not.

      And once the Fairie “take insult”, then they’d be free to take action against the host (or other guests of the host).

        1. I wonder why that rule about not eating anything from Fairyland doesn’t seem to work the other way.

            1. 😐

              [slow claps]

              Thank you for that perfect Mathematician’s Answer. Bravo, Mary, bravo.

              [continues slow clapping]

                1. In an effort to appease my subconscious self-loathing and desire for punishment, I’m going to take the bait.

                  What is the ontologist’s answer?

                  1. Worse.

                    Actually saying it will attract the green penguins. Do you remember the green penguins?

                    Neither does anyone else. Except the aardvark, of course.

  35. I’ve had a few weird moments. For instance, I have a very clear memory of watching a driver’s ed video that used Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” to introduce the part about speed limits. Except one problem: I took driver ed in 1982, and every source I’ve ever found says that “I Can’t Drive 55” was released in 1984, two years too late. Alternate world where he released it two years earlier?

    Also, when I started jr. high, the first time I walked into the girls’ locker room, I had an intense sense of having been in there before. However, my mother always swore I’d never been in that locker room before that point.

    More close to the present, I’ve woken up several times in our bedroom with a definite sense of four little cat feet pressing down on my back — but the doors were closed and the cat was not in the room, leaving me wondering if it was the ghost or spirit or something of a cat we used to have, who’s buried out in the back yard.

    1. I saw the Moody Blues in college around 1973. Some electronics company was doing a demo of their quadraphonic system using the Seventh Sojourn album. The concert was a week or so later, but for reasons I never understood, they didn’t play a single song from that album.

      FWIW, the Wiki article (Sammy Hagar interview) says the incident that triggered the song happened about February, 1983.

    2. I had a very vivid dream in the 1990s, vivid enough I still remember it. I was in the cafeteria in a place I’d never worked, eating lunch from a lunchbox I’d never owned, and the TV on the wall bracket was playing some kind of moldy-oldie music video channel. Elvis Presley came up, doing his cover of Three Dog Night’s “Never Been to Spain” from his 1984 “Return” tour. I’d always liked that one…

      It turned out Elvis actually did do a cover of that song before he died, but he butchered it. The 1984 cut was his early mellifluous voice, not the smoker’s rasp he had by 1977.

      “Well I never been to Spain
      but I kinda like the music.
      They say the ladies are insane there
      and they sure know how to use it…”

      I *still* like the 1984 version better, even if nobody else ever got to hear it…

    3. Our most recent feline loss visits us occasionally on the bed. I find it quite comforting.

      We’ve been in this house over a decade now, and about 5 years back I went down to the basement to check the bubble on the boiler and as I rounded the corner I did my automatic check of the fill bubble thingy on the oil tank.

      It wasn’t there.

      This kind of freaked me, because the authorized house critters don’t go down there, we hadn’t had the rat and squirrel infestation yet, and I had no idea what could have damaged my oil tank.

      When I went all the way over to the tank, I found the bubble thingy over right next to the infill pipe, where I can’t see it from across the room, nearly two feet from where it was before. I assume that I’ve switched to a slightly parallel universe, though I’m still in that (or a similar) timeline, because the bubble thingy has never moved back.

    4. My really fun one was when I was working a photography shoot at a high school built in the early 1960s. Their theater was enormous, and we were going up to the spotlight BALCONY to photograph the senior class on the stage. I climb up the ladder, and set out across the plywood walkway (with single railing) laid over the insulation to get over to the balcony. “Oh hey,” I said, pleased, ” I dreamed this.” (Right down to the angle of the view down to the stage, though brains being what they are, my dream had it as my college stage, which was not nearly as large or elaborate.)

      My coworkers looked at me a bit funny…

  36. I suppose I’m too grounded. I’ve never been aware of anything like what’s described here. I’ve been at a dinner where others were talking about instances where they’d been around or seen (at a distance) ghosts. And while they chatted, I kept my mouth shut and merely listened as I had nothing constructive to add. On the other hand, I’m also of the opinion that it’s wise to be careful about discussion of such things. You never know who or what might have their attention drawn that way.

    There’s a game in the Star Ocean franchise (a popular Japanese RPG video game franchise) in which it turns out that the video game world is a computer simulation. And the people who run the simulation are preparing to shut it down. For obvious reasons, the late stages of the game involve trying to keep this from happening. The chatter lately about reality being a computer simulation has reminded me of that. Sadly, I never finished that particular game.

    Faith can allow us to do amazing things. Peter walked on water, after all. But I’m of the opinion that Our Father has more “faith” than the entirety of humanity put together, and so His “faith” overrides our own unless He permits it. Plus, we “know” how reality is supposed to work (even if only at an unconscious level). And it’s quite difficult for us to override our “knowledge” of how it works.

    In the novel I wrote, that last bit is even a plot point during the climax.

    And finally, speaking of cracks in reality…

    13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
    14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; …
    “The Revelation of St John the Divine 6:13-14”

    1. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time was the game in question and I did finish it. That decision definitely split the fandom and I don’t remember the details of the ending too well sadly, though of course everything did work out in the end. I still enjoyed the game, though, and it helped that Nel and especially Albel were two of my favorite characters from the series. His fighting style, use of katanas and claws, and warped personality were all great, especially with Crispin Freeman as his English VA. “What a happy little world you live in. Dream on, fool. Dream on.”

    2. The game “No Mans Sky” makes it clear that you are just an iteration in a simulated universe. Makes for a huge fun sandbox, but the main story line and background really need some decent writers.

      1. I really enjoy No Man’s Sky. I find the “is life worth living if you’re just an instance in a simulation” thing to be amusing, and it makes you decide that fairly early on in the first expansion, before revealing your own circumstances, when dealing with Artemis.

        I still go back to that game periodically and make further progress towards the core of the first universe. Decided to do it that way rather than take the short cut in the main storyline.

  37. I’ve had prescient dreams. Nothing big, but just the ones that make you go, wait. I know how the next 30 seconds are going to go. I have gotten feelings that I should or shouldn’t do something, and gotten strong indications that something would work out. My husband is one of the most practical, grounded people I know. But, his mother gets “feelings” and she’s never been wrong in his experience, so he’s very respectful of those instincts or feelings or whatever you want to call them.

    1. Me too.
      Dreams set in a place I had never been with people I had not yet met that months later happened as I had dreamed them.
      Only happened a couple times but even once is pretty convincing evidence that our universe contains things science can’t explain. And I’m OK with that.

    2. “And when the fog is like a million miles of cotton, as we say, I stay put until it goes away.”

  39. Some years ago, on a very cold icy morning, I slipped and severely injured myself walking down the driveway of our apartment complex. As I lay stunned in the middle of the street, a person stopped, covered me with a blanket, contacted my daughter in our apartment – remember I was essentially unconcious- summoned an ambulance and called my wife at work. Asked the person for their name. “Don’t ask my name.”
    Later investigation lead me to the conclusion there was no such person. Too complex to explain, but there Was No Such Person. I thought could be an angel, but what have I done to deserve an angel. I told this to friend, who slapped me across the back of the. “You haven’t done squat to deserve an angel, but Michele has, and for some strange reason she loves you.” So my life was saved by a benign being from elsewhere, who appeared, did what needed doing and went away again without leaving any other tracks in reality. So I have become comfortable the physical reality I see is only the most obvious layer of reality.

    1. Have experienced the precognition type of dream. G’ma also seemed to have the touch. Most amazing thing that ever happened was with my entire nuclear family.

      Son was almost two, daughter was two months. Wife and I back together after a painful separation. She had been studying the bible and was pregnant with our daughter, the changes I sensed in her caused me to take up the gauntlet and work to reunite my family. daughter born and I am studying We had pulled into our apartment lot and unloaded the kids. I was carrying son and was ten feet in front of wife who had our miracle girl in her arms. Something told me to turn around. It was 10degrees below zero, ice and snow deep at the curb, very treacherous. I watched in slow motion as my wife slipped and fell with our daughters head directly in line with the curb where she would be crushed. My wife was nearly horizontal with a look of terror on her face and then appeared to be pushed upright. Suddenly she was standing straight up five feet from where she started with a look of amazement on her face. She said something pushed her upright. I know that I was supposed to witness that Our daughter is an amazing faithful woman who lights up any room she walks into, she is full of grace and wisdom way beyond her years at 26. That event quite literally changed the course of my families lives.

      I do come across numerous things that leave me shaking my head. Often in things that I read that dont seem correct. Also have experienced the glitches when traveling especially.

    2. I got lost in a *bad* part of Atlanta many years back, and talked hard to Himself about it while making very, very sure that I kept moving. I saw a brightly lit gas station (BP, to be precise; I remember the logo) ahead with two cops parked to the side, doing that head-to-tail thing where you pull up so the driver’s windows are close together. So I swerved in for directions. Got ’em, quite clearly.

      The street I was on had a fence running down the middle, so I had to turn right and make a U-turn about a block and a half down. When I passed the station on my way out, the lights were out and the windows were boarded.

        1. I, um, went to a Catholic things emporium to get a larger St. Michael medallion. I came out with St. Walburga (yes, of Walpurgisnacht). Mooooommmmm, Michael is laughing at me, make him stop!

      2. They around whether we see them or not. Just sometimes they make themselves known.

        I have often wondered if they keep themselves hidden to avoid scaring people to death in large numbers… or perhaps to keep their opposite numbers obscured. (I have no answers on that one. I just know both sides are pretty much always around in some number.)

    4. The Mysterious Stranger also made one appearance in my life, but not so consequentially….I now suspect it’s one of our Guides in this life…

      1. I’ve related the story here before. When I suddenly screamed at my husband to “get over” (to right lane, as that was the only other lane). He jerked the truck over to that lane because I startled him. Proceeded to start yelling at me for startling him “what if there had been a vehicle in that lane”. Started, because he didn’t get to continue his rant … instead he ended with “**** *****” … wrong way driver in our left lane. I do not know what clued me in. I also do not want to know, ever, what happens when a 2010 4×4 xcab Chevy meets a smallish sports sedan, head on, at 60+ MPH, each …

        1. Similar experiments recently have been performed a few times on the mostly 2-lane highways down here. We avoid US 97 whenever possible, though SR 58 and SR 140 have their moments (two trips to Bend were scary enough to keep us from that Costco). I’m sure the cannabis crowd would never notice a correlation between accident rates and the amount of more-or-less legal weed being sold. Inconceivable!

          (I’m less bothered when it’s car vs tree, but I can recall 3 head-ons in the past few months.)

  40. Sometime around 1975 or 1976, Gene Roddenberry made an appearance at Florida State University. Which was fine, but I and my friends were at the University of Florida. A small bunch of us piled into a car and went up to Tallahassee the day of the event, arriving several hours early to get a good place in line.
    I was firmly convinced I was going to meet Gene Roddenberry. I was so convinced I brought my copy of, “The Making of Star Trek,” for him to autograph. Well, the hours went by and my bladder filled up, so I wandered off to find a bathroom.
    My memory says campus was empty, which is weird given Roddenberry’s appearance. After much wandering and worrying, I found an open building with an open bathroom and solved that problem. As I was starting to go back, a car pulled up to the curb and several people emerged including….yep, Gene Roddenberry. I rushed up, undoubtedly becoming the fan who comes out of the woodwork on an otherwise empty street, and did the, “I’m a big fan, sir, could you autograph my book?”
    God rest his soul, we found out later he’d cancelled most of his schedule because his back was killing him, but he got a vaguely bemused look and gave me his autograph. So I was able to come back to my friends, hold up the book, and casually (ha!) say, “Guess who I ran into?”
    I knew I was going to meet him, and I did.

  41. Talking about odd traffic instances . . . A few years back we were heading to our local amusement park, and were in a one-way dedicated turn-around lane (I’ll attach a map if it’ll let me). Suddenly a car was coming at us from the other direction. It sure never felt like there was enough room between the wall of the underpass and the concrete barriers separating us from the road for two cars, but somehow we didn’t hit, and the cars coming behind us also didn’t hit. I have no idea how we missed it, the other car coming out at us suddenly from behind a curve, with little to no time to react. I can only think that Someone was looking out for us that day. (Or looking out for someone else, and we were just the beneficiaries of that.)

  42. I found the motorcycle key I lost at work 3 or 4 months ago. It was in one of those plastic letter bins at the front desk, under a piece of paper.

    I KNOW I searched that bin. The day I lost the key, and several times after. Thursday I was looking for my paycheck, and there was the key, but no paycheck. The payroll company swore they were delivered Wednesday, but they are nowhere to be found.

    So, one mystery solved, and another one takes its place.

    It’s just one damn thing after another.
    ———————————
    Cast Away: Only Tom Hanks could make two hours of talking to a volleyball great.

  43. We are sure time is one dimensional, like an ant on a string. We can only move one “direction”. What if for God, time is 3 (or more) “directions”? I know for God space is at least 4 or 5 dimensions. This explains Jesus walking thru walls. I think we are seeing going sideways in time. This would seem to be proved by quantum calculations that require the sum of all possible paths.

    Have had multiple inexplicable encounters with the divine. One simple example:
    I would walk half a mile to our local cemetery to read the Bible and pray. One morning I was praying, and realized that it now looked like it might rain. I concluded my prayer with “It would be nice if you held off the rain, I forgot to bring an umbrella.”
    A practical prayer.

    I then heard a voice ask me a question: “Are you following me because I made the rain stop? What will you do when I allow it to rain?” Later the full impact of that question hit hard. Within a month my beloved younger brother was diagnosed with terminal malignant melanoma that killed him within a year, leaving 3 children under 10 with no father. That was no academic question.

    I write poetry. Again a gift from God. When listening to sermons I will turn the sermon into a poem. The weirdness comes during the “praise” time songs prior to the sermon. I will hear a poem, and write it down during the praise time, it will turn out to reflect a sermon that I have not heard yet. My pastor does not read his sermons, he never knows what he is going to say. So we both just hear the same voice.

    God is fond of reminding me: “Don’t be impressed I speak to you. I speak to all, only a few listen.”

    1. We do a “children’s sermon,” when we’re home involving a dragon. Usually we come up with the message over the breakfast table Sunday morning, run through it once or twice (improv is a wonderful thing) and go to church. And often the idea we sketched out at 9 a.m. Sunday morning meshes with the main sermon. No contact with the preacher beforehand.
      We just shake our heads and marvel.

      1. The priest a few incumbents ago at the last church I attended somehow always addressed any serious issues congregants were dealing with in his sermons. No one had ever talked to him about these issues during the previous week, he just somehow knew what he needed to talk to us about that week. And it could be several people with seemingly wildly different problems, but he always touched all of them.

  44. When I reorganized my office, I put one of my short bookshelves at the back of the desk. That is where I now keep all of my shampoo, razors, floss picks, vitamins, lotion, glass wipes, normal OTC drugs, etc.

    Even though it is now all visible, I’m not going to say that I’ll not buy something that I don’t need. There will be a day when I am in the store, and have an alternate reality where I’m out of, say, razors. (When I brought them all together, I realized that even at one a day, I have a three year supply. When you consider that I’m cheap as hell and use the same one for at least two weeks – the kids will inherit…)

    1. Oh, and on that same bookshelf is a souvenir ashtray from the ’84 Olympics, where I always put my keys and wallet when they aren’t in my pockets. Except when I don’t.

      Sigh. At least it’s not old age, I’ve been this way since I had anything of my own to keep track of.

  45. In the late 1980s, I had to do clean-up work for the insulation company I worked for, at a man’s trailer house in LaPorte, just north of Fort Collins, Colorado.
    We got to talking about strange experiences, and he told me of his:
    He used to drive an 18-wheel Big Rig. One night he was driving, and his partner was in the sleeper (back of the cab).
    He said, “Have you ever had that highway hypnosis, where you get a little zoned out, and then come to, miles down the road?”
    He said it happened to them. He came to, it was 3 hours later… and they were **eight hundred miles** down the road!
    I said, “That must’ve made a hell of a schedule!”
    He said No: it put them **back** on schedule!
    I have long figured that there are things that happen to the truck drivers on America’s roads at night, that they never talk about… because nobody would belive them….

  46. Dear Mrs. Hoyt,

    Thank you, for all of this! I’ve wondered if I was the only one, and being surrounded by well-grounded people, never had the nerve to ask any of my friends and family.

    To summon Gordan Sumner, “Seems I’m not alone…A hundred million castaways…”

    Best Regards,
    Mariah Maloy
    The Crazy Cat Lady from Mars

  47. Many of you hold far more religious faith than I do. I was raised in a mainstream Christian denomination, but I also grew up fascinated by science, and I have real trouble with the idea of “miracles” that violate the laws of physics. (Yes, I know, “that’s why they’re miracles,” but … physics …) It seems ludicrous to me to pray for a Mercedes-Benz, or a stack of gold bars. Conservation of mass forbids such things. And yet–

    Who knows where thoughts come from? Whence skill, inspiration, courage, wisdom? These are intangibles, to which physics does not apply, but they matter (!) nonetheless. One of my relatives came back from an irreversible coma because an intern just happened to recall an obscure article in an obscure journal about a vaguely similar case, and got permission to try the same ridiculously unlikely treatment–and it worked. Another is alive today because a surgeon’s blade didn’t slip even once as he unwrapped a tumor from around a major artery. Both of those relatives had hundreds of believers, people far more devout than I, praying for their health. Did it make a difference? Who can say? Not I, and … not physics either.

    Which is why, even lacking in faith as I am, I can and do pray quite sincerely for skill and inspiration among the medical staff treating someone, or courage for those who face the Black Dog or other trials, or wisdom for, well, those who need it. None of that violates any science I know of. Does it make any difference? I don’t know. Certainly can’t prove it. But it doesn’t hurt to try.

    1. Oh lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
      My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
      Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends.
      So oh lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

      [I hate that song…]

      1. “Lord won’t you kick me through the goalpost of life” 😛

        I always thought of it has a condemnation of those that ask for luck instead of making their luck.

    2. My acceptance of the truth of Christianity came in part as a result of making some rather surprising “scientific” discoveries–nothing that has turned to to be of practical benefit so far, just things that demonstrate that “scientifically impossible” is an oxymoron. Data is data, and if a “‘law” conflicts with the data that doesn’t make the data go away.

      Of course, I have also spent an awful lot of time trying to squeeze data out of people who insisted on describing events by starting with their *conclusions* about the event. I am very familiar with the unreliable witness effect, and some ways of dealing with it. I suspect there is some of that going on in the Gospels, but that just reinforces the idea that something extraordinary happened.

      Regarding prayer, personally I do not think that God is a wish-dispensing vending machine. “Thy will be done” is the most important part of the Lord’s Prayer, but in the same prayer, He taught us that we can pray for those things which will allow us to thrive (our “daily bread”, which is an iffy translation of the original Greek).

      1. I accidentally read a screed late 19th century on why there would never be air transportation. We’d have to make engines lighter than air, and that was impossible.
        I have a feeling that interstellar will turn out like that. I feel like the universe is a puzzle box designed for our species. Not being possible would not be fair.

        1. I don’t have line-of-sight to interstellar travel, but Lord willing and the creek don’t rise we’re going to turn the Solar sytem into our playground…

    3. Well, praying for a fancy car or a stack of gold isn’t a matter of Physics but a matter of “why should G*d give you those”. 😉

      1. Heh. Funny story:

        A man wishes he could meet God and ask him some questions, and God decides to grant his wish. He appears before the man and asks what he wishes to know.

        After overcoming the shock the man thinks a moment and asks, “Lord, what is time like for You?” And The Lord replies, “To Me, the passage of a million years seems but a second.”

        Thinking some more, the man asks, “Lord, what does money seem like to you?” And The Creator tells him, “To Me, a trillion dollars seems but a penny.”

        And then, having an idea, the man asks, “Oh Lord, would you be so generous as to give me a penny?”

        And God answers, “Sure. Just give Me a second.”

        😉

  48. In my college literature book (still in a box around here somewhere), the only story that wasn’t boring was about a fellow who “dreamed himself a man” — went on for some time about how he details his miniature man’s life and environment. Just as his dreaming achieves perfection, everything starts fading around him, then he starts fading… and he realizes that someone is dreaming *him*.

    Maybe it’s dreamers all the way down.

    1. If it’s dreams all the way down, then: Whoever had the cold pizza at 0230 and is dreaming politics? Wake the heck up already!!!

    2. Jorge Luis Borges. I believe the title is Circular Ruins.
      Like Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges writes what should be incredibly boring (he has almost no action or dialogue) but it isn’t. Then the imitators effe it up.

      1. Yes! I’ve only seen snippets of Borges, but, as you say, Bradbury was anything but conventional. Beautiful and unique, and the ordinary rules didn’t apply. So unique that he only made his first professional sale after a pro-writer added a few cliched tropes to his story, so the blinkered editors would buy it.

  49. It’s not surprising that the Simulation Hypothesis (which I honestly think is crap) has become so widespread. We live in a world where the government and media (assuming they aren’t now one and the same) are constantly lying to us and activists are telling us things that are completely contrary to common sense and reality. Everything feels fake now.

    2. It’s you put your left foot in, you put your left foot out. You put your left foot in and you shake it all about!

      That’s what it’s all about.

  51. Recently, I fell into some kind of light trance while frying a burger, and suddenly I could see the infrared radiation radiating from the pan, as a circle of dark reddish light…this actually has happened twice…The mind is an amazing thing!

    1. Back when I was heating with coal, I got to where I could tell the stovetop temperature by looking at it. It still looked the same dusty black as always, but something in my brain saw more than my eyes. Might be we all see a wee bit into the infrared, and for a moment your eye-brain interface neglected to filter it down to just the “visible”.

      The evolution of vision has included the gradual loss of ability to see various chunks of the spectrum (another of the reasons I refer to herbivores as genetic dead ends). But the ancestral brain wiring meant to interpret that lost spectrum may still be present, and sometimes show itself.

      1. My wife was a tetra-chrome who could see into the ultraviolet as she discovered one day while tuning her laser.

      2. > Might be we all see a wee bit into the infrared

        I just saw an article on that a few days ago. Apparently lots of people *do* see below “normal” wavelengths. But few of them notice. Some of the researchers figure it was because they had no word for it, like the “did the ancients see blue” thing.

        1. My husband has a bit of this. When we were in a colder climate, he could tell when people were warm or cold by looking at their faces in cold weather. (He also is somewhat cued into pheromones, which is one reason he didn’t like going to parties.)

    2. I actually demonstrated this in a bio lab with a light that produced different frequencies for poking at photosynthesis. So yes, seeing very slightly into the infrared can be a thing.

    3. In a dark room, I can see the dull red glow of a soldering iron. It should be infrared.

      Under most conditions, we don’t see infrared because it’s swamped out by visible light.

  52. A lot of this is like the multiplex man from James P Hogan. In that universe there’s people who constantly shift from universe to universe and still have memories of them, but most of them burn out that ability from the incongruity of it and needing to figure out where their home is in this universe. The book tells the story of someone who ended up working around that, by writing notes to himself, keeping his address in his pocket constantly, so ends up just breaking the universe around him with his constant shifting because he worked around the problems of the ability.

    1. Oops, I completely dredged the wrong book out of my memory. After looking it up, the one I’m thinking of is Resonance by Chris Dolley.

  53. Forerunners/precog:

    I hit the brakes, hard stop, and then see the vehicle that ran the light. Many times.

    Most recent one, the couple behind me at the light followed me to my nearby stop. They wanted to comment on my unbelievable fast reaction to the light-runner. View was blocked by a semi to my right. No idea how I do it, again.

  57. Came in late to the party, but wanted to say that this is a fascinating thread and a great pleasure to read. Recently (since the stolen election) I’ve had a feeling like I could all see where this was going. Like all the political and historical events I can remember we’re all part of a pattern that I could almost grasp. It’s hard to describe because it’s a feeling, but the closest I can come to summarizing it is a scene in V for Vendetta (movie not comic book) where the police inspector has sort of a vision of the past and uses it and his knowledge of human nature to pretty accurately predict the future. It helps me not to be afraid because I realized God has a plan, and I don’t know it in detail, but I can kinda see it’s outline, if I squint.

  58. “What if reality isn’t what we think?”

    What if reality *IS* what we think? That’s sort of a scientist’s, and an engineer’s nightmare. Lord Kelvins clockwork universe winding down – nothing new to see here, nothing new to discover – only some marginalia to fill in on the final edition of “stuff worth knowing”.

    There’s a certain sort of personality that seems to revel in the idea: That they have the final answers, and are just about to tidy up the “theory of everything”, at which point all you lab-rats can pack up and go home. A short while later the engineers will hit a wall, then civilization, and a finite amount of time later the only thing to do with all that infinity is to repeat what’s been done.

    The stuff Lovecraft wrote is less creepy.

    1. I wonder if they long for a “theory of everything,” because then everything will be completely predictable and nothing can ever surprise them. Then they’ll be safe, when every day is like every other day, everything has a “rational,” explanation and all they have to do is follow the rules. (I have a horrible suspicion I have a touch of that, and don’t want it).
      For some reason a quote from F.M. Busby’s “The Long View,” popped into my mind:
      “Who are you?”
      “I’m (name). In this place I speak for the Committee.”
      “There is no Committee. Who are you?”
      “I – there’ll be someone I can speak for, won’t there?”
      “No. Not until you learn to speak for yourself.”

      1. That whole series was pretty much a downer, but considering how the Fed seems to be bent on duplicating Busby’s dystopia, it might be worth reading it again.

    2. The notion of strict determinism flew out the window when quantum mechanics turned up. In any interaction between particles and/or forces in which there is more than one possible end state, the end state of any specific interaction can never be predicted. At best, you can say “75% probability it will be A, 12% chance of B, 8% for C, 4% D and 1% E.” The universe is constantly rolling dice, and you can’t always see the numbers.

      Some folks still haven’t come to terms with that after more than a hundred years. They believe absolute top-down centralized authoritarian control can work on PEOPLE for Finagle’s sake! Bullshit like ‘the Arrow of History’. I got news for ’em. The ‘Arrow of History’ is spinning around in a tornado pointing more-or-less equally in EVERY direction. Ignore the damn thing and try to improve people’s lives.
      ———————————
      Jordan Peterson: “If I told you to cook in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen, that would be a new idea. Doesn’t make it a good one.”

  59. So, I am convinced that I have an… abnormal personal electro-magnetic field. All human beings are surrounded by an electro-magnetic field, the alive ones, anyway. Mine likes to interfere with light sensor switches, like the ones that control parking lot lights. For a party trick, when I went to visit one of my college friends in her dorm, I’d stand in a spot I’d found in the lobby and just by leaning back and forth I could make the parking lot light outside the window flicker on and off. Some folks thought it was the spot I was standing on, that there was some sort of short in the line just under the floor, but none of them could ever replicate it. When I was walking down the sidewalk one night with my braintwin, she watched as the lights went out ahead of us and turned back on behind us as we passed. I’m not sure she’d believed me before that this was actually a thing that happened to me. It only happened with things triggered by light level sensors that I’m aware of, and the newer tech being used these days is less susceptible, but it happened and I have witnesses.

      1. So far it’s just street lights and much older computers (we’re talking late 90s computers here). And as previously mentioned the newer tech with the digital components are much less susceptible than the older analog stuff. If I could charge batteries I’d save a fortune.

    3. lol, I remember that night!!

      It is indeed very strange, and it definitely occurs with unnatural regularity whenever she is around street lamps in particular…

    5. FWIW, mine isn’t even nearly that dependable, but street lights do go out when I approach them often enough to be annoying, and for folks I’ve walked with to notice.

      I didn’t know it was unusual until someone else mentioned it, I figured I had really bad luck on timing. (Like folks who always seem to get to the light just after it goes amber with time to stop safely.)

      1. I kill watches. So does my father. Drain the batteries dead in a far, FAR shorter time than they are supposed to drain. (Dad actually kills them within a few days)

  60. Baby brother definitely has what in the olden days might have been called The Sight. Not for premonitions, or anything, but he DOES see things that some might call ghosts (as Sarah said, NOT the honored dead) as well as the honored dead of our relatives who drop by from time to time. The not-honored-dead ones he has told to get lost. Grandpa may have been much the same–but if he ever experienced anything beyond my brother that died shortly after birth paying him a visit, he never spoke of it.

    Best I get is occasional flashes of…bizarrely accurate intuition about other people. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

      1. Heh. Probably ‘cos you’re the only one receptive enough to see them. Still, it’s got to be alarming when you’ve never even met them!

  61. It’s called “crazy”….or “touched”, to be polite. This coming from someone who can recite the dialog from every Star Trek episode. If we’re all crazy, then no one is.

  62. Oh cool, didn’t see that other comment. Yeah I’ve been blowing out street lights since I was a kid. My wife didn’t believe me until we started driving around together when we were young and she saw it happen with her own eyes. I’m not sure what I may do that I’ve never noticed….hmmmmmmm……

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