Years ago I posted a couple of essays on my author site called "Unusual Occurrences" and "More Unusual Occurrences." They were collections of mostly trivial and anecdotal synchronicities, coincidences, and premonitions from my personal life I still keep a record of such things in a journal.
Yes, I'm aware that they can be "explained" by the ever-helpful truism, usually delivered with condescending weariness, that in a universe of infinite possibilities, even very unlikely things are bound to happen now and then. How persuasive anyone finds this mantra is a personal matter. For me, it can explain a certain amount of strangeness in the world, but not an unlimited amount.
Anyway, within the last 24 hours I had two such occurrences, both very trivial, and I figured I would mention them here. They do not prove anything, but to me they are indicative of the everyday role that psi plays in our lives — a role so clandestine and marginal that we are usually unaware of it.
Yesterday I found myself thinking of a satirical variation on the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," which would begin, "Humpty Trumpty sat on a wall…" I thought this could be a clever dig at Donald Trump, but I was unable to complete the rhyme. Later that day I flipped through a copy of a magazine called The Week and came across this cartoon:
Political cartoon by Glenn McCoy, available online here.
At a different time yesterday, I was musing on old-time special-effects master Ray Harryhausen, and specifically thinking about the death pose of his creation the Cyclops (in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), which is almost identical to the death pose of his earlier creation, the Ymir (in Twenty Million Miles to Earth). The fact that he chose almost the exact same pose for both models, which were built around the same (refused) armature, struck me as either a stylistic decision or an inside joke. Anyway, the first thing I saw on my Facebook newsfeed this morning was a post from a Harryhausen group with this photo:
That's the Ymir in its death pose.
Pure chance in both cases? Could be. I've been thinking a lot (in fact, too much) about Trump lately, and I've always been a bit Harryhausen-obsessed. But the specific parallels, right down to the fact that the Humpty Trumpty poem was unfinished in the cartoon just as I was unable to finish it in my thoughts, are suggestive to me.
As Goldfinger says in the movie named after him, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." Rightly or wrongly, when things like this happen often enough, I see a pattern.
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