As you know, I’m quite open to speculative discussion on these matters. Having shared virtually all of my still-unrefuted woo-woo stories before this, I have another that’s equivocal at best, where what seemed very spooky suddenly seemed less so. Your illustration of “telepathy” brought it back.
I had a college dorm neighbor who was a brilliant mathematical mind with an equal interest in humanities. Rare personality. She helped me through calculus, and we became firm friends. (Though disagreeing on a few things, like whether Richard III was as bad as all that.)
One evening we decided to experiment with telepathy and whether it could be trained through feedback. We used a partial deck of regular cards, Jacks through Aces. One of us would hold up a card and look at it, the other would try to guess the value—ignoring the suit. The person holding the card would say yes if it was a hit, no if it wasn’t, and the person guessing would guess again until they guessed right. Then on to the next card.
Over time, my friend did consistently better than chance at this. I did a little worse than chance. We tried again the next night and the next for about a month, keeping careful records. We used the chi-square test of statistical significance (I no longer remember how this works, but it was out of a textbook), and my friend racked up a cumulative guessing record so clearly significant I began to get the heebie-jeebies, srsly. Whereas my worse-than-average record also became statistically significant—though not as startling as hers, something non-random was going on, with over 95% confidence. As if I had actual negative ESP!
My friend was frustrated with my failures. Then came the moment she held up a card and looked me hard in the eye, and I suddenly understood. “It’s a Queen,” I said. “When you give me that particular look, it’s a Queen.”
My interpretation:
A private nonverbal language had developed between us, unconsciously. She was better at reading my looks (or I was naturally more transparent), but she was reading me unconsciously. And/or, she was unconsciously tracking the cards we had been through in a particular “run” of 16, so that she had improved odds of guessing the later ones on the first try. For my part, I was reading her unconsciously also, perhaps with less effectiveness, but also unconsciously resisting my unconscious comprehension of her unconscious significating looks, until woops, in her frustration she got so blatant with the nonverbal messaging that it penetrated the conscious mind.
Why ESP tests need to be done with the participants in completely separate rooms. (And decks need to be truly randomized.)
Stage magicians do this kind of stuff deliberately, with the help of an assistant; who would have thought the unconscious mind all by itself was up to this job
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Here’s one for you to figure out or propose your various explanations: More than thirty years ago I worked swing shifts in a regional hospital located on the outskirts of a small Montana town. At that time, I lived about ten miles outside of town and would routinely drive a series of section (farm) roads to get to and from work. One midwinter night, driving home on a snow-packed road with snowbanks high on either side, I clearly saw, picked out in the headlights, a completely naked man come up over the snowbank on the right, run across the road, climb over the snowbank on the left and disappear. I immediately stopped, thinking that perhaps it was a college hazing prank (this was a college town), and the young man was in actual danger of his life in the subzero weather. There were no other cars anywhere, no pullouts or driveways or anywhere where a car could be parked, and no houses for miles in any direction. I climbed the snowbank, expecting to see the guy in the field, but, although I saw his tracks, he was nowhere to be seen. This was an empty field of hundreds of acres, utterly without trees, extending to the base of a nearby range of mountains. Nothing. He was simply gone. I would have thought it was a simple hallucination brought on by fatigue, except for the tracks. When I got home, I called the police and reported it. That way, if there really was some dumbass young guy running around naked, they might find him before he froze to death, and I’d feel like I’d done what I could. But no one was ever found, although they did acknowledge seeing the tracks I’d reported. As far as I know, they brushed it off as a college prank. Kind of hard to imagine that even college kids would drive that far out of town in the middle of the night to startle someone on that rarely-driven one-lane section road, though. What would be the point? How could they be sure a car would come along? Where was their car? To this day, I haven’t figured this one out. A hallucination or an honest-to-goodness apparition? You be the judge.
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Here’s my telepathic story:
On Christmas Eve, 1986, I was enjoying the sparkly festivities of the evening. At one point, while sipping champagne, I thought of a very dear friend I had not seen in about a year. I closed my eyes, pictured his smiling face, and with concentration, I sent him this thought:
Douglas, where ever you are in the world tonight, I hope you are having a wonderful time. And you better bring me some of whatever you’re having!!
I forgot about that until about the first of February, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and Doug’s fine, tall figure came striding through the door. Woah, whadda surprise! He walked right over to the coffee table, reached in his front shirt pocket, pulled out a small plastic-bagged packet and tossed it on the table. “Merry Christmas,” he said with twinkling eyes.
I reached for it. It was a gram of blond hashish, in its original-purchased package, even having the brand name of the Amsterdam bar he had been in that night I sent him the “message.” He added,”I carried that across at least three borders for you."
😃😳 How, how is this possible?! I didn’t have any idea where in the world he was that night. 🤷🏻♀️ Had still not spoken to him before or since I sent the mental message. A true mystery. He would never exactly say if he audibly got my message.🤔 But it was so exactly on the money what I pictured and was teasingly asking for. 😁 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️ An enduring mystery...😐