Since I was just discussing these examples of wackiness that appear in
the supermarket tabloids and since I just described the strange object I
saw in the sky I thought I would share another strange experience of
mine. The gullible would have called it a premonition of my own death.
?Back in 1992 I was experiencing a bout of depression. I am about to
describe something that was very visual for me, so let me point out that
this was about four years after I became blind. I was sitting on a couch
and in a fit of despair I said to myself, how long is it going to be
before I die; when will this finally be over with? Suddenly a picture
appeared before me. It was not like a daydream. It was as if I was
actually looking at a very clear scene with perfectly functioning eyes.
I saw myself lying on a floor covered with green carpeting. I was face
up with open unblinking eyes that gave the appearance of death. My arms
were extended away from my sides at an angle and I was wearing my
long-sleeve blue shirt. To the left of my body and above it was a closed
door and there was a planter with some decorative plant growing in it
beside the door. To the right of the body and toward the bottom was the
lower part of a wooden staircase. It actually looked like a living room
in a house, but that was the extent of what I could see of the room. I
will add that it looked like no room that I could identify from my
memory. Then for numerals appeared over the scene. They were 1996. The
digits had the appearance of the style one would expect to see on a
wanted poster in an old western movie. I immediately asked, when in
1996. The rest was not visual, but a strong feeling hit me that it was
in the late summer. I remember thinking that, darn, I won't get to see
the outcome of the 1996 election. Then the vision was gone. As real as
the experience seemed, I was not the superstitious type back then any
more than I am now. If I had been superstitious and gullible I suppose I
would have been convinced that I had had a premonition of my own death.
As it was, I just dismissed it as my imagination and was over it by the
next day. I never even mentioned it to anyone until the year of 1996 had
passed and then I only mentioned it as a funny story and used it to
illustrate exactly what I am using it for right now. One might say that
it was a genuine premonition and I just got the date wrong. Well, if so
I got the shirt wrong too because I don't have that shirt anymore. It
wore out and I tossed it. This vision was obviously my own imagination.
I did not consciously decide to imagine it. From my point of view it
just came unbidden right after I had asked myself a question. But it
still had to be my imagination. It certainly was not placed there by
some outside force and if I claimed that it was then I would be talking
about another aspect of my imagination. This is the kind of thing that
leads to claims of psychic phenomena when experienced by the gullible
though. Now that I have found out that what I thought was a list
conversation with Bonnie was actually private I don't remember what
comments from me made it to the list and which ones did not. But at some
point I was telling Bonnie about a similar psychic experience from a
really commendable purveyor of materialism, Carl Sagan. He woke up in
the middle of the night with a very strong feeling that an acquaintance
of his was in some kind of dire trouble. The feeling was so strong that
he called the person across the country to confirm that he was okay. It
turned out that he was just fine. He pointed out that these strong
feelings and visions are not that uncommon. And, of course, the vast
majority of them don't coincide with anything real at all. Those
generally go unreported. It occurs to me that one of the main reasons
that the misses go unreported is that the people who experience them are
too embarrassed to report them. But with so many would be premonitions
going on there are bound to be occasional hits too. The hits get all the
attention. Somehow it never even occurs to the gullible superstitious
types that there might be any misses at all. Then, even if it is a miss,
there are people who are so determined that psychic tabloid type claims
are true that they impose interpretations on those misses to make them
sound like hits. That imposition of interpretations is commonly
practiced in other closely related areas of superstition too. Look at
Nostrodamus. He is claimed to have predicted the entire history of the
world since the sixteenth century. If you look at what he actually
wrote, though, his words say what they say and it really takes some
imagination to make them say what they are claimed to predict. Those who
make those claims also can only point to the relevant passages after the
event has happened too. No one yet has been able to look at the writings
of Nostradamus and tell what is going to happen in the future. The same
has been done to the bible and the Quran. It was on another list that
someone was claiming that the Quran talked about the big bang cosmogenic
theory. I don't remember the exact quote, but he did quote the passage.
It said something about smoke. There was nothing there even vaguely
related to the big bang. It was an imposed interpretation. It is like
looking at Donald Trump's fire and fury statement and claiming that he
was talking about a supernova in a distance galaxy. Consider these
points the next time someone throws fits because you disagree with their
imposed interpretation on something they don't understand.
