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?
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 05:54:29 PM
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.......
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.
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.
Quoteshe 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.
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.
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.
Quote from: Cramulus on July 19, 2011, 06:16:56 PM
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".
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 06:41:58 PM
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.....
The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realmtm" 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.
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...
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 06:53:52 PM
The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realmtm" 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.
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 06:41:58 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: Nigel on July 19, 2011, 07:16:20 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 06:53:52 PM
The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realmtm" 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.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 08:17:02 PM
Quote from: Nigel on July 19, 2011, 07:16:20 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 06:53:52 PM
The problem with "opening yourself up to the Spirit Realmtm" 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.
oh.
well.
he never made that claim... i guess i said she 'milked him for all he was worth', and that perhaps was the wrong way to say it. he implied that she got a ton of money out of him, which she did. (according to his friends up at the bar)
i think he probably fucked up the rest to knock himself down to his current point.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 08:23:33 PM
oh.
well.
he never made that claim... i guess i said she 'milked him for all he was worth', and that perhaps was the wrong way to say it. he implied that she got a ton of money out of him, which she did. (according to his friends up at the bar)
i think he probably fucked up the rest to knock himself down to his current point.
No offence but I'm getting the impression you've already made up your mind?
Yeah. me too... nothing more to say.
no offense taken. :)
that's why i brought it up here. it's a community with healthy skepticism that isn't afraid to call bullshit.
i can't say that i've made up my mind about what happened, but i find it hard to maintain doubt that something happened beyond bullshit.
i don't mean to give the impression that i'm recalcitrant on any points though...
Any reason given as to why she got so much? Was it more than half?
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 08:28:53 PM
no offense taken. :)
that's why i brought it up here. it's a community with healthy skepticism that isn't afraid to call bullshit.
i can't say that i've made up my mind about what happened, but i find it hard to maintain doubt that something happened beyond bullshit.
i don't mean to give the impression that i'm recalcitrant on any points though...
Yeah, I'm with Nigel. Reason being that I find it really hard to carry on conversations along these lines without becoming sarcastic or insulting. I've never heard of any psychic phenomenon that doesn't have at least a dozen really straightforward alternative explanations and, having never seen any evidence myself I find it impossible to buy into any such tale. Let's agree to disagree and at least that way we wont fall out.
Quote from: Jerry_Frankster on July 19, 2011, 08:31:33 PM
Any reason given as to why she got so much? Was it more than half?
No idea.
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 08:42:16 PM
Yeah, I'm with Nigel. Reason being that I find it really hard to carry on conversations along these lines without becoming sarcastic or insulting. I've never heard of any psychic phenomenon that doesn't have at least a dozen really straightforward alternative explanations and, having never seen any evidence myself I find it impossible to buy into any such tale. Let's agree to disagree and at least that way we wont fall out.
That's cool. I can deal with sarcastic, and i don't get insulted too easily. :)
i can totally understand your hesitation to buy into anything like this. anyone that didn't hesitate would likely seem flaky.
It can certainly be explained as unintentional cold reading, but it would seem a pretty impressive example of that imo, and being unintentional, i would maintain that there are still
some interesting implications, mundane as it may be relatively.
I am fairly convinced that he was not just playing along, as the story was presented to me. i want to talk to the other people present to get their take on it.
but i'm not really trying to convince anyone here. (ive resisted listing the other incidents she has had as corroborating evidence) I was just looking for a skeptical sounding board to help anchor me, and i appreciate you guys obliging me. :)
I'm not the falling out type, and i should say that i really enjoy the flavor that you lend to this board, so it's all good, even if i do seem more gullible for the conversation...
Let's cut to the chase, the dude was drunk, he was getting attention from an attractive woman, he's going to agree to damn near anything if he thinks it is going to get him laid.
Not saying she may not have had some type of brain fart during this time, but as for it being a true psychic vision..... I'm not buying it.
I bet almost every guy here at some point in their single days would have sat and nodded along with the whole thing if they thought it meant sex was the outcome!!!
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 05:54:29 PM
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?
Yeah, cold reading is really cool like that, isn't it?
I've had some pretty intense experiences. I've seen ghosts, had apocalyptic waking visions of the future, and intense dreams the events of which later played out exactly as I described them to friends.
I also have temporal lobe epilepsy which causes hallucinations among other shifts in perception, am unwittingly a good unconscious cold reader, and am skilled at manipulating the Law of Fives.
So...
Nigel, i've always wished that i would have some intense experiences such as you describe, but never have.
ghosts. never seen them. they can be explained as hallucination, i guess.
visions, ditto.
shifts in perception, cold reading, Lo5... all amazing things, but they don't really raise a huge flag that calls into question fundamental notions of things.
but, how do you explain your precognitive dreams/visions? this is one of the things that she has had a good number of that lend credibility to her claim in my mind.
If you dream about enough things that could reasonably happen, some of those things WILL happen. This doesn't mean your dream was precognitive.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 09:48:53 PM
Nigel, i've always wished that i would have some intense experiences such as you describe, but never have.
ghosts. never seen them. they can be explained as hallucination, i guess.
visions, ditto.
shifts in perception, cold reading, Lo5... all amazing things, but they don't really raise a huge flag that calls into question fundamental notions of things.
but, how do you explain your precognitive dreams/visions? this is one of the things that she has had a good number of that lend credibility to her claim in my mind.
Cognitive bias.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 09:48:53 PM
Nigel, i've always wished that i would have some intense experiences such as you describe, but never have.
ghosts. never seen them. they can be explained as hallucination, i guess.
visions, ditto.
shifts in perception, cold reading, Lo5... all amazing things, but they don't really raise a huge flag that calls into question fundamental notions of things.
but, how do you explain your precognitive dreams/visions? this is one of the things that she has had a good number of that lend credibility to her claim in my mind.
I can't explain them beyond two possibilities: one, that time is an illusion and my particular form of brain damage means that sometimes when I'm sleeping my linear time-perception system fucks up, or two, that the Law of Fives plus the malleability of perception and memory means that if I have and remember a particularly vivid and realistic dream, and describe it to someone else, that when a similar-enough sequence of events occurs we Law of Five it into fitting my memory of the dream and their recollection of what I told them.
possibility one would be astounding and profound.
possibility two would be merely interesting. did the details leave enough room that this is the likely candidate?
My wife has, on three occasions, awoken from sleep to inform me that someone had just died. that's pretty specific and immediate. i have only been able to imagine explanations that require connections that are outside the scope of my understanding, and would have pretty broad implications...
Apart from precognition I've had some extreme "psychic" experiences including OOB, remote viewing, seeing ghosts and visionary stuff, whilst under the influence of psillocybin. I credit that compound as playing a very large role in a quantum leap of self awareness I made in my late teens. The fact that I was tripping off my tits on shrooms in no way invalidates the insights I had into the nature of mind and perception but I firmly believe that some (if not all) of those effects could have been stimulated (probably even spontaneously) without the aid of a fungal agent (temporal lobe seizure for instance). If that had been the case and I didn't have the mushies to "blame" fuck knows what I would have thought. As it was I immediately began investigating "spooky" options, although I quite quickly discounted most of these.
The details didn't seem to leave room for possibility two, but that's in retrospect, and life leaves a lot of room for illusion.
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 08:42:16 PM
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 08:28:53 PM
no offense taken. :)
that's why i brought it up here. it's a community with healthy skepticism that isn't afraid to call bullshit.
i can't say that i've made up my mind about what happened, but i find it hard to maintain doubt that something happened beyond bullshit.
i don't mean to give the impression that i'm recalcitrant on any points though...
Yeah, I'm with Nigel. Reason being that I find it really hard to carry on conversations along these lines without becoming sarcastic or insulting. I've never heard of any psychic phenomenon that doesn't have at least a dozen really straightforward alternative explanations and, having never seen any evidence myself I find it impossible to buy into any such tale. Let's agree to disagree and at least that way we wont fall out.
I think the point of this thread is that he
wants you to convince him of that [no offense, Ippy].
It's obvious Iptuous doesn't really want to believe the supernatural explanation. And given the info he got from his wife [trusting her] he has trouble reconciling it with his own rational belief system. I think he'd like to hear an explanation that could rationally explain this story, and
preferably an explanation that wouldn't somehow dismiss his wife.
Taking the story strictly at face value, both the supernatural explanation and the cold-reading explanation are possible.
If one believes these kinds of supernatural things are possible, just possible, the cold-reading explanation becomes kind of far-fetched and occam's razor suggests the supernatural option.
On the other hand, one could simply rule out the supernatural explanation, because, say, science has never been able to test these clairvoyant events in any sort of controlled manner.
The latter the position I'd prefer to take. And in that case, I'd say it's (probably unintentional) cold-reading, the fact that this was a very powerful experience for his wife, and (also very important) the fact that he got it from second hand and perhaps she left out some details she didn't get right (she probably didn't even register them, while this was going on). She probably really wanted to help this fellow, and getting this first positive signal possibly got her into a feedback loop, but I don't know, it's just guesswork.
But that's my preference. From just the story itself, I can't say, "oh that's how she did it".
I really hate these kinds of stories, though, cause they never seem to happen when I'm around. Even though I've sort of been looking for it for quite a while.
thanks, Trip. :)
I find this thread super interesting, and while I won't comment on the 'authenticity' of the event (I leave the possibility open), I do want to add this to the discussion:
Researchers find neural signature of 'mental time travel'http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-neural-signature-mental.html
QuoteAlmost everyone has experienced one memory triggering another, but explanations for that phenomenon have proved elusive. Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers have provided the first neurobiological evidence that memories formed in the same context become linked, the foundation of the theory of episodic memory.
The research was conducted by professor Michael Kahana of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and graduate student Jeremy R. Manning, of the Neuroscience Graduate Group in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. They collaborated with Gordon Baltuch and Brian Litt of the departments of Neurology and Psychology at the medical school and Sean M. Polyn of Vanderbilt University.
Their research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.physorg.com/tags/proceedings+of+the+national+academy+of+sciences/"%20rel=tag).
"Theories of episodic memory (http://www.physorg.com/tags/episodic+memory/"%20rel=tag) suggest that when I remember an event, I retrieve its earlier context and make it part of my present context," Kahana said. "When I remember my grandmother, for example, I pull back all sorts of associations of a different time and place in my life; I'm also remembering living in Detroit and her Hungarian cooking. It's like mental time travel. I jump back in time to the past, but I'm still grounded in the present."
To investigate the neurobiological evidence for this theory, the Penn team combined a centuries-old psychological research (http://www.physorg.com/tags/psychological+research/"%20rel=tag) technique — having subjects memorize and recall a list of unrelated words — with precise brain activity (http://www.physorg.com/tags/brain+activity/"%20rel=tag) data that can only be acquired via neurosurgery.
The study's participants were all epilepsy patients who had between 50 and 150 electrodes implanted throughout their brains. This was in an effort to pinpoint the region of the brain where their seizures originated. Because doctors had to wait for seizures to naturally occur in order to study them, the patients lived with the implanted electrodes for a period of weeks.
"We can do direct brain recordings in monkeys or rats, but with humans one can only obtain these recordings when neurosurgical patients, who require implanted electrodes for seizure mapping, volunteer to participate in memory experiments," Kahana said. "With these recordings, we can relate what happens in the memory experiment on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis to what's changing in the brain."
The memory experiment consisted of patients memorizing lists of 15 unrelated words. After seeing a list of the words in sequence, the subjects were distracted by doing simple arithmetic problems. They were then asked to recall as many words as they could in any order. Their implanted electrodes measured their brain activity at each step, and each subject read and recalled dozens of lists to ensure reliable data.
"By examining the patterns of brain activity recorded from the implanted electrodes," Manning said, "we can measure when the brain's activity is similar to a previously recorded pattern. When a patient recalls a word, their brain activity is similar to when they studied the same word. In addition, the patterns at recall contained traces of other words that were studied prior to the recalled word."
"What seems to be happening is that when patients recall a word, they bring back not only the thoughts associated with the word itself but also remnants of thoughts associated with other words they studied nearby in time," he said.
The findings provide a brain-based explanation of a memory phenomenon that people experience every day.
"This is why two friends you met at different points in your life can become linked in your memory (http://www.physorg.com/tags/memory/"%20rel=tag)," Kahana said. "Along your autobiographical timeline, contextual associations will exist at every time scale, from experiences that take place over the course of years to experiences that take place over the course of minutes, like studying words on a list."
If your wife's experience had been verbally mediated (by that, I mean she 'talked him through it' in order to prompt him for the visual imagery she saw), I would call her experience a very good
NLP session. If she can intuit visual imagery that another person is having (the above context-carrying memory functions) from body-language cues and cold-reading... that's pretty neat.
All I can suggest to you is, despite what anyone will tell you, or what you want to believe, the most important thing you can do is support your wife.
Quote from: Triple Zero on July 20, 2011, 01:13:40 AM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 19, 2011, 08:42:16 PM
Quote from: Iptuous on July 19, 2011, 08:28:53 PM
no offense taken. :)
that's why i brought it up here. it's a community with healthy skepticism that isn't afraid to call bullshit.
i can't say that i've made up my mind about what happened, but i find it hard to maintain doubt that something happened beyond bullshit.
i don't mean to give the impression that i'm recalcitrant on any points though...
Yeah, I'm with Nigel. Reason being that I find it really hard to carry on conversations along these lines without becoming sarcastic or insulting. I've never heard of any psychic phenomenon that doesn't have at least a dozen really straightforward alternative explanations and, having never seen any evidence myself I find it impossible to buy into any such tale. Let's agree to disagree and at least that way we wont fall out.
I think the point of this thread is that he wants you to convince him of that [no offense, Ippy].
It's obvious Iptuous doesn't really want to believe the supernatural explanation. And given the info he got from his wife [trusting her] he has trouble reconciling it with his own rational belief system. I think he'd like to hear an explanation that could rationally explain this story, and preferably an explanation that wouldn't somehow dismiss his wife.
Taking the story strictly at face value, both the supernatural explanation and the cold-reading explanation are possible.
If one believes these kinds of supernatural things are possible, just possible, the cold-reading explanation becomes kind of far-fetched and occam's razor suggests the supernatural option.
On the other hand, one could simply rule out the supernatural explanation, because, say, science has never been able to test these clairvoyant events in any sort of controlled manner.
The latter the position I'd prefer to take. And in that case, I'd say it's (probably unintentional) cold-reading, the fact that this was a very powerful experience for his wife, and (also very important) the fact that he got it from second hand and perhaps she left out some details she didn't get right (she probably didn't even register them, while this was going on). She probably really wanted to help this fellow, and getting this first positive signal possibly got her into a feedback loop, but I don't know, it's just guesswork.
But that's my preference. From just the story itself, I can't say, "oh that's how she did it".
I really hate these kinds of stories, though, cause they never seem to happen when I'm around. Even though I've sort of been looking for it for quite a while.
This is definitely the approach I'd suggest if you want to keep your worldview intact.
Quote from: Her Royal Suuness on July 20, 2011, 02:20:59 PM
All I can suggest to you is, despite what anyone will tell you, or what you want to believe, the most important thing you can do is support your wife.
Agreed. she has been struggling with the notion of our mortality for a good while, having no beliefs to assuage her. and with the recent loss of loved ones, she's been broken to an extent. this experience seems to have, if not healed her to some degree, at least stopped the bleeding. so, even if it was entirely a fiction, it was a useful one.
Babylon, i have no particular attachment to my current worldview, other than it seems to make some sense to me. it's a pretty scant framework anyways...
further, if this were to be taken as evidence that some aspect of personal agency lingers beyond our physical form, it would only modify my beliefs from 'we exist beyond death through the results of our actions and our children' to add '
some aspect of us seems to exists beyond death in a way that can influence the world'. a change to be sure, but not one that would pull the rug out from under me.
also, there are several possibilities other than that, beyond a 'simple' unintentional cold reading.
I asked her about the other people present, and she said that most left when he became scared and started crying, as it became uncomfortable. the only one who was part of the conversation from that point was Indian Bob, and he was in and out due to a conflict with his significant other. I'd like to get his take on it, but he will probably be cynical, as he thinks the guy is a sadsac creating his own hell. He's tried to help the guy for a couple years and has become frustrated with him. We'll see. perhaps it will be illuminating regarding the guys sincerity seeing whether there is any change in his behaviour from this point. (if he was sincere, i can't imagine he would continue seeing the hooker, after his dead grandmother told him she's watching... :lol:)
I don't disbelieve in spirits or psychic phenomena, but I do choose the skeptical approach for the sake of sanity. Alcohol can trigger temporal lobe seizures. Has your wife ever had a concussion? There is a strong link between temporal lobe epilepsy and concussion, especially in childhood.
I try to take the same tack, Nigel.
I would assume we've all had concussions of some degree, but i don't know of her having had a serious one at any point.
it would have to have been early in life, because one of her more significant episodes occurred when she was, like, five.
She was staying the night, along with her older brother, at her biological father's house (who, iirc, was either passed out or not present) and they were sleeping in the living room. she had a dream where an older man with his head bashed in came stumbling through the door, and started screaming bloody murder. her brother, woken by the tumult, woke her up and tried to pacify her, but she was unable to say anything, and was pointing at the front door. he opened the door, and the guy was there, head bashed in (grey matter visible), and a wire coat hanger wrapped around his wrists. he stumbles in with the help of her brother just as she dreamed and pushed his way into the bathroom. (he was embarrassed because he had crapped himself, go figure)
turns out the guy was robbed and tortured. i think she said he lived, though.
her brother, who was older at the time (i believe he was nine) agrees to the sequence of events.
-they were sleeping
-she screams in her sleep
-he wakes up
-he wakes her up
-she points to the door
-he investigates, and the event that she just dreamed occurred.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 20, 2011, 06:30:23 PM
I try to take the same tack, Nigel.
I would assume we've all had concussions of some degree, but i don't know of her having had a serious one at any point.
it would have to have been early in life, because one of her more significant episodes occurred when she was, like, five.
She was staying the night, along with her older brother, at her biological father's house (who, iirc, was either passed out or not present) and they were sleeping in the living room. she had a dream where an older man with his head bashed in came stumbling through the door, and started screaming bloody murder. her brother, woken by the tumult, woke her up and tried to pacify her, but she was unable to say anything, and was pointing at the front door. he opened the door, and the guy was there, head bashed in (grey matter visible), and a wire coat hanger wrapped around his wrists. he stumbles in with the help of her brother just as she dreamed and pushed his way into the bathroom. (he was embarrassed because he had crapped himself, go figure)
turns out the guy was robbed and tortured. i think she said he lived, though.
her brother, who was older at the time (i believe he was nine) agrees to the sequence of events.
-they were sleeping
-she screams in her sleep
-he wakes up
-he wakes her up
-she points to the door
-he investigates, and the event that she just dreamed occurred.
Well, there's a funny thing about memory. It tends to mix up the details, especially in high stress situations. And for the record, it's relatively easy to convince someone that events happened in a way slightly different than they remember.
Then there's the problem with dreams, but I don't think it's necessary to go into that.
Suffice it to say, if my bestest best mate told me this story, I'd say "What actually happened is she had a nightmare, screamed, woke her brother. Brother woke her up, she heard a sound outside the door, and still half asleep mixed dream and reality, and pointed to the door. Brother did not hear sound but went to investigate as she pointed out. The rest happens as told. The whole ordeal shocks her fully awake and pushes most of the nightmare out of her mind, and her memory fills in the details of the dream with the half-awake perception of the events that just occurred. "
Small child + vivid nightmare + vivid nightmare-like experience = unreliable details.
Or, she got up and answered the door while still in a semi-sleeping state, then screamed and ran back to bed. And, again, sleepwalking or partial-sleep is related to temporal lobe epilepsy.
I hate to keep bringing it back to that, but it's a thing I know about that happens to match some of the circumstances rather well.
Or, it is also readily explained by just being a sleepy, irrational 5-year-old who just opened the door and saw something utterly terrifying.
That's what i've always operated under the assumption with.
that's the reason eye witness testimony should be held with much more suspicion than it is...
of course, it is my understanding that the man also said that her brother is the one that opened the door, so it would have to be the case of her convincing her brother of the sequence of events. (which is entirely possible, from the way she's told it, i guess)
The man's brains were dashed in. What are the odds that he remembers everything accurately?
Her brother would have been woken up by her screaming if she ran back into the bedroom, so that's where his recollection would begin.
Like I said, I don't disbelieve in psychic phenomena, it's just that one is way too easy to pick apart and find a mundane and wholly rational explanation for.
Also, five-year-olds. I mean, just. They are not entirely lucid.
Yeah. With her being five years old, and having been asleep very shortly before seeing a traumatic event and it violating how we currently understand the Universe and its workings...I would tend to her perhaps having some kind of bad dream, maybe, getting up, opening the door, seeing the guy and confusing the memories when thinking back, the exact sequence of events.
It may be difficult to convince her of that though, especially if she is already inclined to believe in psychic phenomena, precognition etc If so, you may want to pose the question of how many times she has failed to predict something happening, or has predicted something which has not come true. Get her to consider the "hidden data".
agreed. that is the sensible conclusion, and the one which i had assumed for a number of years. but, that was just the earliest story she has (given to show that if her tendency toward these things is due to a concussion, then it must have happened in early childhood).
since i have been with her, there has been multiple instances where she has woken up and informed me that someone had just died. and she was correct. (she has had one false positive on this particular track record, but she wasn't as sure that time.)
Those examples i was present and sober for, and they totally violate the rules as i understand them. so, when i consider the stories she has that i wasn't present for, i'm no longer dismissing the possibility.
i just don't know.
i got a witchy woman.