Well, this is going to affect my belief system...

[Elder Iptuous]

In regards to metaphysical realities, i try to be agnostic and skeptical.  I've worked up some rudimentary beliefs that seem rational to me, and although lacking real concrete details, work reasonably well in filling the gap left by abandoning an inherited faith.

My wife never grew up without any particular structured faith, and developed her spirituality in ad hoc fashion from what she gleaned from the various people around her, with a draw towards supernatural/madjique (which she holds with some degree of secrecy and guilt rather than the frequently brash displays of the 'Pagan' crowd)

Well, although i sometimes mock what i see as unfounded belief in supernatural horsefeathers and use of horribly imprecise language to discuss abstract concepts, i give her great leeway and preferential respect in these matters because of the stories she has told me regarding her experiences of what would most often be described as spiritual or supernatural occurrences.  I believe that she perceived what she claims to have perceived, and i cannot explain some of it.  she has around a dozen life experiences that take a mundane world model that i would otherwise default to, and blow it out of the water.  Furthermore, i've been present with a few of them (although not the really dramatic ones).

Last night she had another experience.  This was more significant in its implications, to my mind, than those in her past.
A dead lady talked through her.

She got off work last night and went to a bar to grab a gin and tonic and a smoke before heading home.  There was this fellow that had crawled into a glass, miserable, and had apparently been there all day.  At some point they were talking and he was making vague comments that he was mad about an ex getting married that day.  She's a very empathetic person (a real fixer/healer), and i would assume was trying to encourage him when he said something that suggested the ex was the mother of his children, but not his wife.  At this point in the conversation, she said the bottom dropped out.

She described that the feeling of presence when you are near somebody that is sort of a connection, but also a separation, was no longer there.  she felt a unity with this guy, where some barrier fell away.  She further felt a presence trying to communicate.  she has said that she has felt this before, but hasn't ever pursued it because of some combination of fear or cynicism, but this time, she reached out and asked who this was.  what was wanted.  She says she very clearly heard the word 'Grandmother' in her head.
She told the guy his grandmother wanted to say something to him.

she says she saw very clearly in her minds eye some images.  she said she saw a bird.  and a cat.  they flashed back and forth.  (i asked whether she was actively looking, or passively seeing, and she said she felt that she could not have 'not seen' the images even if she tried)  She tells the guy that she sees a bird, and the guy shrugs saying he doesn't know what birds have to do with his grandmother.  She says it's a red bird.  he immediately gives a look of surprise and questioning understanding, and at this point she says she knew to say that the orange cat killed the red bird.  he's shocked at this point because the day before, there was a red bird on the balcony of his apartment and he didn't know what to make of it.  there is a neighbors cat that he is fond of and pets.  She felt that his grandmother wanted to say not to worry about it because the bird was an offering of friendship.  the guy's amazed.

now this is strange, right?  not a simple coincidence that one would expect in a cold reading.
I asked her whether the things she felt to say were strong intuitions.  she says she felt that they were not coming from within her but from the grandmother.  she said that this time (as opposed to some less dramatic occurrences in the past) she actually heard the grandmother speaking, too.  a distant murmur that she could make some words out of, along with the images presented to her.

She then tells the guy that the bird isn't what the grandmother needs to tell him, though.  She said she heard the grandmother speaking verbally inside her head that 'the number 7 isn't important', and that he needs to live.

The guy busts out crying and relates that the reason he's drowning himself in a bar is because of his Ex that is marrying some other guy.  She was apparently a gold digger, and they lived in their fancy ass house with fancy ass lifestyle and she was a trophy that became more.  they had kids and lived together for 7 years.  She left him a year or two ago, and through common law marriage stuff was able to milk him for all he was worth.  She milked him for, -get this-, seven hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars.  now he's a ruined man, living in a crappy apartment, giving up on actually living.  stuck in the suck.  So this little message was of immediate impact to him.

She tells the guy that she sees a bowl of lemons.  whole lemons in a bowl. a bunch of them.  he says he received a giant bowl of lemons as a gift from somebody and they are taking up a ton of space in his fridge and he doesn't know what to do with them.  She heard and relayed from the grandmother that he needs to make lemonade.  The grandmother said that she was given lemons and always made lemonade, and that's what he needs to do.

The guy then relates that his Grandmother was the saint of the family because it was an open secret that the grandfather was a philanderer and hurt her their whole life, but she kept it all together and gave the whole family the love that it needed despite this.

she says she saw images of some kids and that the grandmother was telling him that they were what was important now, and that he needs to begin living for their sake.  this also seemed to hit him like a ton of bricks.

She says that the grandmother told him that lust was standing in the way of love, and he needs to stop what he's doing.  The guy then confesses, crying, to my wife that he has been seeing a prostitute to get the affection that he needs, but it's eating him up.  well, grandma says to stop it, she says.

she says that she could SEE the grandmother in her mind's eye with decent detail.  she had short white hair with tight curls,  very vividly blue eyes, was short, wore brightly colored clothes (that were vague in detail, more swaths of light), and gaudy necklaces.  was accompanied by the smell of cooking, and a sense of structure and order.
he confirmed that these details didn't falsify anything.

she says the images she sees are set in a background of light or mist.  like clouds composed of the spectrum of light.  she called it the medium that she sees the images in, and that it is dynamic and that the images form on this backdrop as isolated stills.  like the bird was just a bird, no surface that it was on, no movement.  (incidentally she said that the detail was vivid enough that she could draw it.  it had one wing down, one lifted up, and it's tail was cocked to the side.  it seemed a strange pose initially, but became perfectly clear to her after she realized it was dead)  She said the images seemed to 'come out at her'.  like, particularly when she saw the grandmother the eyes seemed to zoom at her and fill with more detail.

She says the connection she felt was 'L-shaped'  coming from him through her, and then up through her head, and out.  she also said that it felt directional in that way.

she says he started asking for more information, but as his mind filled with questions she could feel his concentration waning and frustration growing.  she said there was a simultaneous sense of frustration and waning concentration on the part of the grandmother, and it faded away.

the ordeal lasted about an hour.

she was very freaked out.  She wanted to know my opinion on whether what she experienced seemed genuine or whether she was just filling her head with bullshit.  i indicated that it seemed to me that a mundane explanation would feel pretty hollow given the story at hand.

I could feel a peace in her that has not been there since losing several loved ones over the past year, and i'm grateful for that.

we stayed up late discussing the implications.

I'm still chewing on it and wondering what the longer term impact this experience will have on her and her beliefs, and also mine.


TL;DR - My Wife talked to a dead lady last night.  What do i do now?

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

TL;DR - My Wife talked to a dead lady last night.  What do i do now?

Take her on the road and give Sylvia Brown a run for her money.......

[BabylonHoruv]

Accept it as a powerful and, in this case, useful experience. 

Just to help confuse you here are some possible explanations.

(1)   Your wife literally channeled the man's grandmother
(2) Your wife read the man's mind without realizing it and expressed that in the way that would have the most impact on him
(3) Your wife cold read him without realizing it.  This is how people who don't believe in Tarot usually explain it when I get stuff right.  It's not how I explain it, but it is logically consistent, if you don't mind attributing some incredible abilities to cold reading.
(4) Your wife channeled something else, some spiritual entity, with an agenda of some sort and that entity read the man's mind and saw that his grandmother would be the most powerful way to express itself so as to convince him to do what it wants him to do.
(5) Your wife is lying to you.

[Cramulus]

What do you think happened, Iptuous?



I don't want to be dismissive - but I confess that if I read this story from a stranger, I'd probably brush it off. Parts of it do sound like cold reading, albeit unintentional cold reading. After I read the part about the red bird and the orange cat, three vaguely related incidents came to mind from my personal past.

she had short white hair with tight curls,  very vividly blue eyes, was short, wore brightly colored clothes (that were vague in detail, more swaths of light), and gaudy necklaces.  was accompanied by the smell of cooking, and a sense of structure and order.

my grandma colors her hair brown, but other than that, she's described my grandmother to a T.


the "life gave you lemons, make lemonade" advice is pretty vague - but when you describe it like that to somebody, as a vision about their life, the onus is on them to make it significant. A lot of that story has the same feel to me. "she says she saw images of some kids and that the grandmother was telling him that they were what was important now, and that he needs to begin living for their sake." - doesn't that sound exactly like the sort of thing you'd expect your dead grandma to say?



So all that being said ...

If it's cold reading, obviously your wife isn't intentionally cold reading. She is experiencing something, and that's worth examining.

I was talking about synesthesia the other day. It's interesting to me because it shows that some people's senses are wired completely differently. My ex-GF used to experience numbers as having a color - every time she saw the number 3, it was yellow in her mind. A receipt looked like a sea of colors. Every multi-digit number had a unique color which was a blend of all the numbers in it.

How did this happen? While she was a little kid, and her brain was still figuring out which wire cable goes into which plug, this association formed and became hard wired. Maybe if you took an infant and raised him in a really alien environment, his senses would just work differently than ours. We cannot take it for granted that we're all wired the same way.

What comes to mind about your wife is that her intuition is somehow plugged into her senses differently than it is for you or I. And her spiritual worldview makes her interpret it in a certain way.

Maybe she was able to tell that this guy needed some parental advice and, based on interacting with him, she could sense what kind of things he needed to hear. Even if there's nothing "supernatural" going on, she's definitely got a gift of some sort.

[Igor]

If you want a hard sceptical point of view...

We can divide the ordeal into your wife's subjective experiences of the event, and the objective facts that she relayed to this man.
The subjective experience, her feelings of this vision, can be dismissed as "the mind is weird, and sometimes wires get crossed". Nothing supernatural necessary here.

This leaves us with the objective facts, which seem to be:
A bird and a cat
The number seven
When life gives you lemons..
A description of a fairly generic grandmother

All of these, it has to be said, are pretty common things that anyone is going to see/hear any day of the week. This guy was in a pretty suggestible state and thus very willing to make "deep" connections with these things.

All in all, I don't think anything supernatural happened.

But I'm not sure whether this is important. If your wife wants to take meaning from this, if it makes her happier or more peaceful, it can't hurt to take that.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Another possible explanation: The guy was just humouring your wife in an attempt to get her in the sack. Personally I'd find him and beat the shit out of him.

[Payne]

I confess that if I read this story from a stranger, I'd probably brush it off.

I'm gonna start with this, but remove "from a stranger".

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Another possible explanation: The guy was just humouring your wife in an attempt to get her in the sack. Personally I'd find him and beat the shit out of him.

This is quite plausible considering how intoxicated you said he was.....

[P3nT4gR4m]

The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realm^tm" is that your brain will be more than happy to throw all sorts of random pictures and words your way. Srsly - he lost 777,000 in a divorce settlement? That'd leave him with somewhere around that as his share. Doesn't sound like grounds for rack and ruin to me.

[Elder Iptuous]

Thanks for the replies.  

I should point out that i would brush off this story from another person as well, however my skepticism is challenged by the series of past incidents that my wife has had as well.  i have little doubt that she has some type of connection that requires an extraordinary explanation.  she has had accurate precognition and remote viewing experiences in addition to her highly empathic nature.  

if it was an unintentional cold reading, i think it was a fairly impressive one given the details.  this is an open point, but the effect it had on both of them was profound, and she indicated that neither of them seemed to be actively 'reaching' or searching, but rather the event transpired passively and vividly.

She doesn't purport to understand what exactly happened or the implications of it.
She doesn't know whether to interpret the grandmother as a static impression left on the fabric of reality, a mental construct in his mind that she accessed, a surviving agency of his living grandmother, or what.

i should also clarify that the guy wasn't slobbering drunk.  he had been there all day, but he was pacing, and she said he was fully lucid.  as far as him just trying to pick her up, i wouldn't doubt that he may have started with that intent as she has a magnetic personality that draws people to her, and she is attractive.  however, i would imagine that those thoughts probably vanished as the event transpired given that he dissolved into a blubbering mess in front of his bar buddies and publicly admitted that he was seeing a hooker to get his rocks off.
Further, i have utmost trust in my wife, and don't get jealous about guys trying to pick her up, so i didn't feel anything but sympathy for the guy.  Also, she said she got the distinct impression that he was far from an innocent person himself, and mostly felt pity for him.

I'm still trying to figure out what this means to me, but the one thing i do know is that the title i gave this thread holds true...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realm^tm" is that your brain will be more than happy to throw all sorts of random pictures and words your way. Srsly - he lost 777,000 in a divorce settlement? That'd leave him with somewhere around that as his share. Doesn't sound like grounds for rack and ruin to me.

Yeah, I completely do not buy that his gold-digging common-law ex took everything and left him destitute, that's pure bullshit. Your wife's experience sounds more like a temporal lobe seizure than anything else, and the stranger was both a drunk and a liar. You can start from there.

[East Coast Hustle]

Another possible explanation: The guy was just humouring your wife in an attempt to get her in the sack.

This. No extraordinary explanation needed. And if your wife is a really empathetic person with a tendency toward unintentional cold-reading, having this guy "open up" to her and validate her experience probably created a self-reinforcing feedback loop in the reward center that pushed her to keep going and to interpret the experience more intensely.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I have on a couple of occasions behaved in a similar fashion to the drunk guy. Never to get laid, per-se but more just to fuck with someone for shits and giggles. It's easier than you might think.

[Elder Iptuous]

The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realm^tm" is that your brain will be more than happy to throw all sorts of random pictures and words your way. Srsly - he lost 777,000 in a divorce settlement? That'd leave him with somewhere around that as his share. Doesn't sound like grounds for rack and ruin to me.

Yeah, I completely do not buy that his gold-digging common-law ex took everything and left him destitute, that's pure bullshit. Your wife's experience sounds more like a temporal lobe seizure than anything else, and the stranger was both a drunk and a liar. You can start from there.

His story's not bullshit, as he is a semi-regular at the bar, and other people we know up there corroborate it.  they guy's not destitute, he just lost a bunch of his wealth, and sent himself into a downward self pity spiral.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realm^tm" is that your brain will be more than happy to throw all sorts of random pictures and words your way. Srsly - he lost 777,000 in a divorce settlement? That'd leave him with somewhere around that as his share. Doesn't sound like grounds for rack and ruin to me.

Yeah, I completely do not buy that his gold-digging common-law ex took everything and left him destitute, that's pure bullshit. Your wife's experience sounds more like a temporal lobe seizure than anything else, and the stranger was both a drunk and a liar. You can start from there.

His story's not bullshit, as he is a semi-regular at the bar, and other people we know up there corroborate it.  they guy's not destitute, he just lost a bunch of his wealth, and sent himself into a downward self pity spiral.

The destitute part is exactly what I was calling out as bullshit. And it was.