Michael Prescott's Blog

no one wrote,
||IMO, the filtering system that results in what we consciously perceive as “reality” has its parameters partially set by the force of the settings of others that we interact with.||
Very much!
||Some of this adjustment to consensus is based on conscious and subconscious psychological cues. However, I also firmly believe that there are non-psychological psychic forces at work as well. In a way, it is true magic.||
Yes, magic is much more operative than people think. As in, universal.
||There is a well know phenomenon amongst users of psychedelics known as a “contact high”. This is when one person(s) is “tripping” and another(s) is not, but the non-tripper(s) begin to experience an altered state of awareness from simply interacting with the tripper(s). This occurs even if the non-trippers have never experienced psychedelics and are unaware that the tripper(s) is tripping. Some non-trippers find this to be enjoyable while others are overcome with agitation and even anger. This is not finding the tripper funny or annoying because they’re acting weird. This is a true shift in perception on the part of the non-tripper. Again, a well known thing.||
I have never tripped, but I know of two similar phenomena, one of which I have experienced:
• When psychics get together, especially in person, we *really* feed each others’ abilities. The walls of reality break down and some pretty amazing things happen. At the very least, we usually see much farther than usual.
• The shared death experiences that Michael has covered on this blog.
||IMO, all of life and all of perception is energy and energy fields. What we perceive is a matter of joining our personal energy with similar energy in the external world.
This is why sometimes we experience a mystical sense of unity with all – we are realizing that what is within is also without and the fluidity of that relationship.||
Yes. Focus is easy to shift. Once you get into something new, for example, that world starts opening up and you’ll encounter all kinds of people and things related to it, seemingly without trying.
||I digress a little, but this does relate to synchronicities. When we have joined to the external world in a certain energetic manner, the external world responds back in a certain energetic manner. alignment is everything. It literally creates the world we inhabit. The world in which synchronicities happen is a slightly different world from the one in which they do not.||
Agreed. All good comments!
Bruce wrote,
||I’m so pleased that you’re all intrigued by this stuff. My book on my 25-year-long experiment with my own precognitive dreams is now up to almost 200 pages, and I’m having a hard time waiting to share it. (Hopefully by the end of this year.) But since each part of the book relies on the others for its meaning and impact, to discuss isolated aspects would be frustrating.||
I will definitely read it!

I agree that the very fascination with these events is an essential part of a life lived well. Dawkinsians might surmise that it helps intellectual achievements. In future, perhaps even today, we might come across studies telling us how it correlates with a higher IQ.
I suggest there is that, _and_ there is also the need to be fully yourself.
As for the actual, underlying causes of perceived strangeness: me being outside the “WEIRD” part of the world (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan 2009), I take a holistic view without special strain.
The most interesting ‘unusual occurrence’ I’ve recently heard of is the story of a film director who was with his crew in the countryside, shooting a documentary. The script included historical scenes. One was to involve writing with a quill. Modern countryside being what it is, an adequate feather was sought for hours, without any good results! … They were looking for a goose feather, specifically. Then, a dog approached the crew and went straight to the director, carrying in its mouth a feather, yes, a goose feather.
Soon afterwards, that film director enrolled into a college once again, this time a theological college. He is now a priest.

Ha ha Have to add this one after your post JR about the dog. This is a simple tale, but gave me a laugh at the time, as these things do,
I was about to take a photo of the house where we were living in Bangkok, and standing about three metres away. When our little shitzu dog came racing up to me. So I stopped, looked down at her and said. “Now if you want to be in the photo you will need to go and sit on top of that mound.”. There was a raised garden in front of the house.
So she promptly turned around walked over to the mound and sat there looking at me. As if to say, now take that damned photo.
Coincidence, sure, but an odd thing for her to do, as she would rather cling to me for attention, Lyn x,

Here’s how Snopes.com deals with The Coup’s album cover:
“Although the image of World Trade Center towers billowing smoke and flame were [sic] used as a backdrop for the original artwork, the New York skyline was not visible in the image, nor were any airplanes shown crashing into the towers. The artwork was merely intended to depict the destruction of a generic ‘tall building’ and thus was not a harbinger of recent events, although by coincidence it did prove to be disturbingly congruent with the horrors of 11 September 2001.”
So the cover, prepared in June 2001, “was not a harbinger” because no planes were visible, and because the NYC skyline was not in the shot? How arbitrary can these criteria be? Apparently to be more than a coincidence, the album cover would have had to depict the entire terrorist attack – not just the results.
I think it’s entirely possible that some sensitive individuals had an unconscious foreboding or premonition of the attack – especially the burning and falling towers, which were the most memorable image – and used it creatively without knowing where it came from. In fact, given the prevalence of psi at an unconscious level, I would be more surprised if this hadn’t happened.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/thecoup.asp

Thanks, Roberta!

Here’s an inconsequential, but typical (for me) synchronicity that happened last night.
I was lying in bed sipping a glass of wine and casually talking to my wife. The TV was on one of the cable news stations (can’t recall if it was Fox or CNN)at a low volume. The conversation had kind of drifted off and I was kind of spacing out and looking at one of our two cats; who in turn was looking back at me. The cat is black and has an unusual personality. It’s hard to put a finger on how, exactly, the cat is unusual, but he is. I was thinking about it. On the TV there was some talking heads going on about Donald Trump. It was just background noise and I wasn’t paying attention to it at all.
As I contemplated the cat’s personality with the two of us staring into each others’ eyes, it occurred to me that the cat has some kind of psychic link to me. I started to voice this thought to my wife, “You know sometimes I think this cat has…..”. Just then the talking head on the TV said “ESP”. The timing was perfect. It was the first word on TV in maybe 15 or 20 minutes that I had paid attention to and the timing was perfect. Not a beat was skipped between what I uttered and the TV filling in the blank.
It really struck me. So much so that I even used the re-wind function to go back to get the context of “ESP”. It had been a conversation pertaining to Trump’s ability to know what a certain demographic wants to hear and to gain its support. However, the focus was on normal political techniques and one of the commentators had just kind of interjected loudly, so as to be heard over the others (that’s why I heard it too), with the off-hand whimsical notion that it’s almost like Trump has ESP. It was a one liner, “It’s like he has ESP” from out of the blue that meshed seamlessly with what I was thinking and saying.
My wife and I tried to recall the last time we had heard the term “ESP” used on the news and we couldn’t come up with a single instance, though we watch a lot of news, wherein the word was used or even the general concept.
Weird, huh.

@ Lawrence: Excellent point on how the probability depends on shifting around likelihoods.
And as you point out it’s the universe speaking to us. I do think some people end up going overboard, trying to make every little coincidence a big deal, but there are times when the synch ties into your thoughts and events in your life that as you point out can be assigned a real probability weighting.
As Grof points out, synchs can be problematic if we assume they are telling us to do one thing rather than another…but they can be useful messages so long as we don’t assume too much.

“Although a better question is why should they any more than any other news event? The number of people having precognitive thoughts or dreams may increase because of the amount of news coverage that was to come…but there’s no obvious reason why any ‘gifted’ individual would foresee it particularly.”
I’d disagree. I think the emotional impact of an event plays a large role in premonitions and synchronicities. It may be that a certain shock factor, or at least startle factor, is necessary for the unconscious psychic impressions to break through to the level of conscious awareness.
The same shocking quality that caused people to remember 9-11 for months or years after it happened, often with some degree of PTSD, would account for it being previsioned* by sensitive persons.
*Probably not a word, but it should be. … Wait, I just looked it up. It is a word, after all. Transitive verb, meaning “to foresee”.

“I’d disagree. I think the emotional impact of an event plays a large role in premonitions and synchronicities. It may be that a certain shock factor, or at least startle factor, is necessary for the unconscious psychic impressions to break through to the level of conscious awareness”
And I’d disagree in return 🙂 But in ignorance no doubt. I’m not a psychic – assuming such “gifted” individuals exist as a separate type from the rest of us – so I don’t know if their experiences are different. And perhaps premonitions, portrayed as they are in movies as vivid visions imposing themselves upon the experiencer, are a distinct phenomenon from precognition. But whether in dreams or day dreams I certainly regularly experience precognitive thoughts and the most surprising but certain observation I’ve made about them (or MY experience of them at any rate) is that the thing foreseen is rarely ever of any great relevance at all, emotional or otherwise. The most banal passing trivia is “foreseen” and the most striking and impactful events are not. I strongly suspect that when big important news events ARE precognized its only by chance plus more attention is paid to these particular “hits” because of their obvious box office appeal, addign to the impression that warnings of plane crashes and assassinations are what precognition is all about.
Seeking a profound “why” for one’s experience of dreaming or thinking about a particular thing that later turns up in real life has proven fruitless in my experience. The only hint at a common connection between things foreseen that I have noticed in myself – and of course it doesn’t mean I should impose this on everyone else’s experiences – is that, as mentioned in my earlier post, I believe it happens when I first encounter something that unconsciously “reminds” me by association with the upcoming event. The second frequent realisation of people who pay attention to the precognitive nature of dreams in particular is that one is not foreseeing the event itself but rather one’s own experience of encountering the event: eg of seeing it on tv or reading or hearing about it. So when something like 9/11 which would receive massive and long term news coverage in the US happens, its the sheer number of people who would have an upcoming experience of seeing or hearing of the event which would lead to an increase in the number of people who will have precognized the fact, rather than its emotional significance. (obviously if you’re having visions of death and disaster however it may make you emotional!)

It’s fitting that I stumbled across this blog post. When I read it a few days ago I thought to myself I don’t remember anything like this happening to me.
Yesterday I drove through an unfamiliar part of town and noticed a restaurant with an ethnic cuisine that I’ve never tried. I wondered how it would be, but it quickly went out of my mind. A few hours later a friend posted on FB how he found a new hole in the wall restaurant and how great it was … the same restaurant I was wondering about earlier.

In terms of actual predictions, here is a Peggy Noonan column I read when it came out November 30, 1998:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122409083174236943
Quote:
||When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.
[…]
The psychic blow–and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes–will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.
Maybe, of course, I’m wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, “If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I’ll know to gather the kids and go.” I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months.||
This is not a psychic. This is a major newspaper columnist, and she is sharing her dread of the future with others, who agree with her, and then with the public. It’s not an exact prediction of 9/11, but it shows that this dread of *something very close to 9/11* was definitely in the air in the late 90s.
But doesn’t this fit the requirements of the question, “Why didn’t someone predict 9/11?” Here is someone basically providing a warning in one of the most-read papers in the United States. I’m not sure one can expect much more than that. Further, it shows that psi is shared generally by people and is not the unique province of “psychics.”

argh my last post should read “can *not* be assigned a real probability”.
the number of 9/11 synchs – or at least claimed synchs – is rather incredible. i’ve read through some of them and it does seem to suggest something is going.
however i find the idea of retrocausality – as in a backward arrow of time – really messy so not sure what to make of it.

Ok heres another story I had forgotten about. This happened years ago in Thailand, on a visit to Chiang Mai with my sister and mum. We had just had dinner then went our separate ways as I was going to buy a blanket I saw in a distant market and I brought something else I can’t remember now. Before heading off, I said how I wanted to get a key ring with fish on it, as I am a pisces .
I got the blanket and brought the other thing and she reached down in her bag and handed me a keyring with fish on it. I said no I didn’t buy that, and she said “for you”.
Meeting up with my sister and mum later I showed them the blanket. And my mum asked me “Did you get a keyring”? And I laughed and showed it to them. Yep I did. Lyn x.

I do feel though sometimes with me. The powers that be step in, and probably others as well. That was not the only odd thing that happened that trip. We went to Chiang mai on the overnight sleeper and because there were three of us and only two bunks on one side, I sat on the other side of the train, in the same cabin.
Well shortly after sitting down, a young guy turned up and sat down with us. My mum being polite, asked him if he spoke English, I kind of laughed to myself, as he looked Thai and back then very few spoke English. However he spoke back with an English accent, and said “yes” he did.
Then my mum asked him if he was on holiday or lived here and he replied he was here for a conference. What sort of conference said my mum. He paused for a bit, then said ” I’m here for a psychic festival.”
Oh says my sister “Lynn wants to see a psychic” ( something I had mentioned to them ).
“Well” he goes. slide on over here”. Then explained. “I was running late today and you-he pointed to me, are sitting in my seat”
That was a sign apparently, that he needed to speak to me.
Lyn x..

Also that Simpsons screencap is really freakin’ creepy now.

Douglas wrote, “It is impossible to replicate genuine emotional distress in the lab of course, which is why psi is so hard to nail. It’s a real world phenomenon which is probably better suited to the field work approach of social sciences rather than a lab based approach.”
I largely agree, and Stephen E. Braude has made the same point, notably in his book “The Limits of Influence.”
The decline effect in card-guessing studies is probably attributable to the gradual lessening of the test subject’s interest and emotional involvement as the novelty wears off. Results regress to the mean (chance) not because the initial better-than-chance results were wrong, but because the test subject is getting bored. (And the experimenter may be getting bored too!)
When I say that premonitions have a shock or startle factor, I don’t mean that they are all emotionally wrenching and traumatizing. But I do think they often involve something that is at least mildly startling, if only because it is unexpected and different. Often this is an image from a TV show. Watching TV is a mundane activity, but the images that pop up can be quite arresting. In a comment some time ago, Bruce suggested that TV is a frequent source of premonitions because TV presents us with things that we do not encounter in our ordinary workaday lives, and these images are more likely to make an impression on us. I think this is correct. Many of my premonitions involved shows like The Simpsons, which are likely to present unusual and memorable images.

Comic books, incidentally, have a long history of appearing to predict major news events. Which may confirm the impression that creative/visual types, deriving their material and imagery from the (collective?) unconscious, are the most prone to displaying dramatic flashes of psi.
This fake newspaper headline announcing the death of one Princess Diana went on sale 3 days before the real newspapers announced the death of the other.
https://scontent.fman1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/v/t1.0-9/1239885_10152226735853572_1473266879_n.jpg?oh=76ff025c1def4398cee47e9771890325&oe=5792F6B1

I just think that this life and the afterlife probably interact a fair bit, more than people realise. So some synchronicities are just that.
I also feel that if something dominates your thoughts, this changes the quantum particles in line with your thinking. So if you concentrate on a “thing” this increases the probability of that occurring. Cheers

I actually don’t get premonitions that much, but here’s one that played out over just a couple days. I have a favorite brew pub, Union Brew Co., in Carmel, Indiana. I forget if I was coming or going from there the other day, but the thought crosses my mind: “Why doesn’t someone do hot pepper stouts?” Beers with hot peppers in them are not unknown, but I have never seen one in a brewpub.
Lo and behold, today I go in and they have a ghost pepper stout on the board. And it was awesome, by the way!

@ Lawrence – good catch on the connection between Psi and comic books. Kripal gets into this a bit in Mutants & Mystics.
As a huge comic book nerd I’ve been surprised how synchs show up in them.

I’m the sitter from Matt’s reading he just posted, I can confirm that that part of the reading was particularly impressive, but prior to that he got several other pieces of accurate information as well!

Off topic: I discovered a boatload of free downloadable old writings and recordings about psi topics.
Perhaps this information source has already been mentioned in this blog…?
Some person or persons put in a lot of work assembling this library of free materials.
I’ve just started to wade through it.
The site is called “Survival eBooks.”
Judging by the look and style of this website, it was made quite some time ago. It’s straightforward, barebones HTML — no bells and whistles.
Much of the info is in the form of downloadable WinZip files.
(BTW, you’ll need a way to unzip the WinZip files. You can buy the WinZip software, but no need to. If your computer doesn’t readily unzip the files for you, try these approaches.)
FYI, some of the audio files won’t download for me, for whatever reason.
Here’s a link to the website:
Survival eBooks

Here’s my “fluke” story.
I have a pretty rare last name: Oeming.
Before the internet, our immediate clan knew of only a tiny handful of Oemings outside of our family. When we had a chance, we’d look through out-of-town phone books or other appropriate reference materials on the off-chance we’d find another person named Oeming. Very seldom would we find another person named Oeming. Very rare.
(Now, with the internet, it’s easy to find unknown Oemings, but that was far from the case way back when — around 1990.)
So, I was in the California DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles) in Watsonville, CA.
While in the DMV, I decided look through a massive, thick volume that listed California vanity license plates, to see if anyone had registered the name Oeming.
Nope. No one had an Oeming vanity license plate in California. No big surprise there.
However, there was a plate that came close. It was:
OEMGIN
At the time of this incident, about 1990, there were at least 20 million motor vehicles in California. (Since there are currently over 26 million vehicles in California, I think 20 million vehicles in 1990 is a fair estimate.)
OK. Duly noted. There was a license plate emblazoned “OEMGIN” somewhere in California. Got it.
I walked out into the DMV parking lot to go home — and there it was! The OEMGIN license plate! An elderly couple was getting into the car belonging to the license plate.
I introduced myself and started talking to them about their license plate, and about what a coincidence it was for me to have seen it moments after I had looked it up!
It turns out the license plate was, as I recall, the initials of the husband (OEM), coupled with the first three letters of the wife’s name, Ginny (GIN).
Think of it. It’s one thing to stumble upon one license plate out of 20+ million plates. That’s pretty far-fetched.
It’s quite another to stumble upon it moments after having first discovered its existence.
What are the odds?
That’s my fluke story.

Ok here’s another thing. not sure what category to put it in, but I was reminded today as I washed a cushion cover from the sofa.
Some years ago I brought two dark brown sheepskins for the sofa. After getting them however, I decided that as we had two sofas I would like the other to have a green theme to go with the sage green silk pillow I had brought.
So I went looking for one for weeks, and found they really didn’t make sheepskins in sage green. Then guess what happened, after washing both sheepskins, I noticed the one I wanted green was turning green while the other stayed the exact brown.
So after two washes I had a sage green sheepskin matching the colour of the pillow, not mottled but completely sage green as I wanted . Weird. Lyn x.

Here’s a precog from Wednesday morning.
I woke around 7.30am from a dream set in the neighbouring city of Manchester and which involved the presence of a particular friend who in real life has just recently moved back to that city and started a new job on Monday.
To summarise the dream it involved me (following his path) getting from location to location in the town, following written instructions, but losing my bearings..there was the clock tower by the railway station, a number 20 bus, asking a woman at the bus stop for directions, crowds, and generally being uncertain if I were near my desired location or not.
I woke and noticing from my phone that the friend in question was online I texted him these dream details adding “You didn’t get lost on the way to work did you?”
My phone rang straight away…it was him but oddly he wasn’t answering my question as he hadn’t bothered to read it. He simply took the receipt of a message as evidence I was awake and available to receive a phone call. HE chats away about this and that and there are other voices around him..he’s on the train he says…I hear him asking somebody a question and then he brings the phone call to an end by declaring “****!, I’ll have to go.. I’m on the wrong train”
Did I precognize this detail of the conversation? If so its a conundrum as the conversation only took place as a result of having had the dream..so which came first? Or was the information – if you accept it was a hit and not mere coincidence – received clairvoyantly in some way, an awareness of present facts at a distance rather than future conversation about those facts? :/