Sceptic or not?

[EssendonRam]

Last weekend, for some weird reason, the name of a former work colleague and friend (Randolf) occurred to me for no apparent reason. We’d been good mates but, with both of us changing jobs (after initially both leaving one employer and coinciding at a second employer a year or two earlier), we’d slowly drifted apart to the extent we’d not actually spoken, let alone caught up in person, for a few years.

At the time, I thought nothing much of it beyond checking if I still had Randy’s number in my phone (I didn’t) and then checking if we were still ‘friends’ on Facebook (we were). 

I resolved to message him to catch up when I got home later that night...and then, to my shame now, promptly forgot.

Until Tuesday when, entirely coincidentally, I learned Randy had passed away without warning last Friday.

He had just turned 50 and had been in good health as far as anyone knew. His wife and son are shattered as you’d expect.

Has this sort of coincidence ever happened to anyone? If so, what happened in your case?

I should emphasise here that I’m a complete sceptic re the supernatural and the afterlife and the like. One of my closest friends has always maintained that, as a child, he’d “realised” that his father had passed away and said so aloud. At the time, he believed the man to whom his mother was married was his biological father. He learned otherwise, as he remembers it, by the chain of events his announcement of “the death of his father”; it turned out that his mother had “strayed” and that his biological father had, indeed, died around the time John (my mate) “knew” his father had died.

I know two of his elder siblings (by almost ten years) quite well and both agree with his recollection of the events. None knew that their father was not also John’s, prior to John blurting out that his “father was dead”.

I’ve always liked John’s story but never believed it. But....

Aside from being devastated for Randy and his family, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the coincidence of thinking, seemingly for no reason, about him and of making contact with him makes me feel a little weird and, even, a little guilty.

At the time, I certainly had no sense of foreboding at all. No sense of anything at all.

His name occurred to me for no discernible reason as far as I can tell for the first time in a few years. The ‘thought’ literally was “Randolf. Should  see if we can catch up”. 

That was it.

Since Tuesday, another incident I’ve always previously dismissed has me ‘wondering’. A few years ago, a friend from my childhood got in touch after we’d lost touch literally 25-30 years previously. She’d mentioned at the time that she’d been actively seeking me out after feeling compelled to do so late in her pregnancy with her younger son. Then her marriage devolved into an abusive relationship and it took her a few years to extricate herself from it.

As we got talking about it, it turned out that her younger son was born in December 2007; I joked about the fact that I “died” in October-November 2007. Three times in fact. The first time was on 31 October 2007 and I was apparently clinically dead for 45 minutes whilst they were performing CPR. After being comatose for a month, I awoke on what was her younger son’s birthday.

She’s never hidden her belief that she “knew” I was dying or in health trouble of some description. Again, I’ve never given it much credence. To be honest, I assumed it was likely related to concerns about her marriage because she and I had gone out as kids.

 

[Wolfie]

I used to work in sales for a metals company in Sheffield and for 12 years or so with a guy called Mark. We became close friends and would have a boozy night round each other’s house with our respective partners every few weeks with good food & a lot of red wine. 

One of these nights, he produced a really nice bottle of wine: Lebanese Chateau Musar and even though it was gorgeous, at 20odd quid a bottle, was well above what I’d normally spend, so I never had it again & all the wine we consumed after that on our nights together was in the usual 5-10 quid range  

A few years later, I changed jobs & moved to Newark, divorced & re-married etc etc and our relationship dwindled to the odd text now & then plus the promises to meet up - but never did. 

Anyway, one Saturday I was in a lovely little wine shop in Newark and, completely on impulse, bought a bottle of the Chateau Musar. I really don’t know why. 

I got a phone call from my ex-wife on the Monday evening to tell me that he had died from a DVT on the Saturday at East Midlands Airport after getting off a plane.

I drank the wine (with several toasts to him) on returning from his funeral.

[McRainy]

Yes, it happens all the time. Regularly have these sorts of 'coincidental' connections, and have had a number of premonitions in dreams. 

Two examples which made an impression on me: 10th September 2001 I had a really vivid dream about a plane flying over a city. There was a mad looking face in the window and then the plane flew into a tall building. I told my partner about it in the morning and it stayed clearly in my mind, whereas dreams usually fade. Later we saw the news, and I realised that's what it had been about. I didn't know it was a premonition, and there was no sense of needing to warn anyone; I didn't understand it until I saw the footage of the attacks. 

Another one was where a figure in a dream told me that I was going to meet my sister, and then gave me a sword. I didn't have a sister, so didn't think anything of it until later the next day, when I got a phone call from my Grandmother asking me to go and see her. When I got there, she told me that someone had traced her address and been to see her. That person was my sister, who had been adopted away as a baby, and who I knew nothing about. My Gran then said she'd found something at the back of a cupboard in her house which she'd never seen before. She fetched it to give to me; it was a samurai sword. 

These, and many others, are too specific and too significant to be coincidences or random associations. I have also experienced other 'psychic' phenomena, such as seeing furniture thrown across a room when no one was there. 

I don't find it strange tbh. I think everyone and everything is connected, in ways that we don't understand, everything is just energy. I don't think time is the strict linear sequence of events that we conventionally experience either. 

This is why I don't have much regard for strictly materialistic philosophies. There are definitely more things in heaven and earth. 

[Highgate]

I think I'd have to be filed in the 'hardcore skeptic' category on matters such as this.  They just seem like coincidences to me, which should be expected to occur frequently enough, given the billions and billions of thoughts and events that happen in the world each day.  But then, I'm wrong about lots of things!

[McRainy]

2 minutes ago, Highgate said:

They just seem like coincidences to me, which should be expected to occur frequently enough, given the billions and billions of thoughts and events that happen in the world each day.

Yeah, I just randomly happened to dream that I'd got a sister at the age of 34, the day before she got in touch. And all the other stuff, and the dead people, and the flying furniture. 

I suppose if you haven't experienced it you'd be skeptical, but it's pretty common. It's not out of synch with some of the weird stuff that's being discovered in physics either, such as quantum entanglement. Takes more effort to have a closed mind imo. 

[Highgate]

1 minute ago, Lambchop said:

Yeah, I just randomly happened to dream that I'd got a sister at the age of 34, the day before she got in touch. And all the other stuff, and the dead people, and the flying furniture. 

I suppose if you haven't experienced it you'd be skeptical, but it's pretty common. It's not out of synch with some of the weird stuff that's being discovered in physics either, such as quantum entanglement. Takes more effort to have a closed mind imo. 

You are right I haven't experienced anything like it myself.  But when you think about it, how many dreams are remembered every night by the roughly 7.6 billion people on earth? On average, even in a world where nothing supernatural occurs.  how many of those dreams will resemble events that will occur the following day, or shortly thereafter?  Not an insignificant number i would expect.  Or during a person's entire life, of all the dreams they had, isn't it normal that some of them will be spookily predictive of real world events?  A certain number of remarkable coincidences are to be expected throughout the course of our lives.

Yeah, quantum entanglement is astonishingly strange.  So is the entire quantum world in fact, but it doesn't really apply to human brain's (which are the source of the dreams), In the macroscopic world, where matter is in constant contact with everything around it, decoherence is instant, and the oddness of the microscopic world is replaced by the 'normality' we see around us.  It's a good thing too, or or we would be in superposition ourselves and be simultaneously present in several locations at once. 

[EssendonRam]

56 minutes ago, Highgate said:

I think I'd have to be filed in the 'hardcore skeptic' category on matters such as this.  They just seem like coincidences to me, which should be expected to occur frequently enough, given the billions and billions of thoughts and events that happen in the world each day.  But then, I'm wrong about lots of things!

Trust me on this: there are few who’d be more sceptical than I am...

But - admittedly at a time when I’m feeling burdened by some pretty ‘heavy’ goings on both personally and professionally, I suppose - the coincidence has me slightly shaken.

[McRainy]

10 minutes ago, Highgate said:

It's a good thing too, or or we would be in superposition ourselves and be simultaneously present in several locations at once. 

Are you sure we aren't?

Flying furniture, cough! A large screen in a room I was in chucked itself about ten feet to smack against a wall. I was about four feet away from it when it happened; it was right in front of me. Other people in the building heard the noise and came to see what was going on. It was in a building in which we had also experienced locked doors and windows repeatedly opening and slamming through the night, and a number of other phenomena.

I don't particularly expect anyone to take my word for it, but I know what I saw, so as far as I'm concerned, all bets are off. 

[Highgate]

3 minutes ago, Lambchop said:

Are you sure we aren't?

Flying furniture, cough! A large screen in a room I was in chucked itself about ten feet to smack against a wall. I was about four feet away from it when it happened; it was right in front of me. Other people in the building heard the noise and came to see what was going on. It was in a building in which we had also experienced locked doors and windows repeatedly opening and slamming through the night, and a number of other phenomena.

I don't particularly expect anyone to take my word for it, but I know what I saw, so as far as I'm concerned, all bets are off. 

No, never entirely sure I suppose. 

I'd really like to investigate that house ?

 

[EssendonRam]

25 minutes ago, Highgate said:

You are right I haven't experienced anything like it myself.  But when you think about it, how many dreams are remembered every night by the roughly 7.6 billion people on earth? On average, even in a world where nothing supernatural occurs.  how many of those dreams will resemble events that will occur the following day, or shortly thereafter?  Not an insignificant number i would expect.  Or during a person's entire life, of all the dreams they had, isn't it normal that some of them will be spookily predictive of real world events?  A certain number of remarkable coincidences are to be expected throughout the course of our lives.

Yeah, quantum entanglement is astonishingly strange.  So is the entire quantum world in fact, but it doesn't really apply to human brain's (which are the source of the dreams), In the macroscopic world, where matter is in constant contact with everything around it, decoherence is instant, and the oddness of the microscopic world is replaced by the 'normality' we see around us.  It's a good thing too, or or we would be in superposition ourselves and be simultaneously present in several locations at once. 

And the hyper-rational me reads this and can’t help but agree...and smile knowingly as I do so.

Human beings have a remarkable capacity for remembering events in ways that, for want of a better term, suit them and seem to reveal order and patterns that don’t exist.

But the events are so proximate. I’ve thought through any triggers which might’ve been a subconscious link to Randy but I’ll be stuffed if I can think what it might’ve been.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m too much of a sceptic by nature to believe that it’s not fully explicable... it’s just that I wish I could work out what it was that prompted me to think of Randolf completely randomly.

[McRainy]

3 minutes ago, Highgate said:

I'd really like to investigate that house

It's a farm in Somerset next to an old hill fort with a lot of faery legends attached. 

Coincidentally, I thought about starting a thread on faery lore this afternoon, then thought, nah, I can't talk about that on here!

[Highgate]

8 minutes ago, EssendonRam said:

And the hyper-rational me reads this and can’t help but agree...and smile knowingly as I do so.

Human beings have a remarkable capacity for remembering events in ways that, for want of a better term, suit them and seem to reveal order and patterns that don’t exist.

But the events are so proximate. I’ve thought through any triggers which might’ve been a subconscious link to Randy but I’ll be stuffed if I can think what it might’ve been.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m too much of a sceptic by nature to believe that it’s not fully explicable... it’s just that I wish I could work out what it was that prompted me to think of Randolf completely randomly.

I agree with that entirely. 

But of course that doesn't explain some of the more startling and precise events or coincidences that occur.  I'm afraid I've no explanation at all for the experiences you've mentioned, except that maybe it's just a series of remarkable coincidences that have happened during your lifetime, something like the same lottery numbers coming up twice in quick succession.  Which does happen. 

You wouldn't be human if it didn't make you wonder though. Incidentally a couple of generations ago, around here anyway, premonitions of death would have been accepted as a simple fact of life by nearly everyone. 

[Highgate]

13 minutes ago, Lambchop said:

It's a farm in Somerset next to an old hill fort with a lot of faery legends attached. 

Coincidentally, I thought about starting a thread on faery lore this afternoon, then thought, nah, I can't talk about that on here!

What sort of 'faery' lore are we talking about? Sounds very interesting, although I'd just consider it mythology probably ?

[Parsnip]

A few years ago i decided randomly to send the parsnip wife a text saying that Steven Gately had died. In the 5 mins between texting her and telling her it was a joke she'd managed to inform all her family and friends of this tragic event. This ridiculous thing then became a running joke between us - every now and then I'd ask her what had happened that day and she'd say 'nothing much, Steven Gately died though.

Then one morning in a premier inn in London (maybe 6 months after the initial joke) I read the news that the poor lad actually died. I woke the parsnip wife up with this news - for some reason she took some convincing. 

[McRainy]

55 minutes ago, EssendonRam said:

Human beings have a remarkable capacity for remembering events in ways that, for want of a better term, suit them and seem to reveal order and patterns that don’t exist.

Surely the same principle applies to the process of seeking explanations which fit with the materialist worldview. It's simply filtering what you'll accept to fit in with your existing belief system, and so not really 'skepticism' at all. 

[ramit]

My friend and i had numerous apparent telepathy incidents over the phone.  i would feel a need to call him and he would pick up his phone before it rang and say my name.  It also worked the other way around and happened at least twenty times over the years.

My grandmother was visiting us in California and one evening she was very much at unease, was sure something had happened back home, that someone had died.  There was no calming her down, she was a bag of nerves and just stared at the telephone drinking coffee.  At 2am the phone rang and she was informed that her brother in law had died suddenly.   Just about every adult Icelander can tell you a similar story from their family and it's not considered unusual even, it's just accepted that foreknowledge does happen.

[McRainy]

37 minutes ago, Highgate said:

What sort of 'faery' lore are we talking about? Sounds very interesting, although I'd just consider it mythology probably ?

Have you heard of Robert Kirk? He's a 17th century Scottish clergyman who wrote an account of the faery lore and second sight amongst his parishioners. Mythology, if you will, but part of people's lives in his day, and common in some form to all cultures. 

Faery beings, land spirits, or genii loci, traditionally dwell in hills, woods, by springs or remote spots. They are reputed to interact with humans in various ways, not always helpful. There are various accounts in bardic tradition and medieval ballads, such as Thomas the Rhymer. There are numerous books on the subject published by Bob Stewart, who is a friend of mine, hence the interest. 

Here's another anecdote: one midsummer in the early 90s I went up to nine stone close on Harthill moor with a friend from Sheffield and his daughter, who would have been about five. We were standing around talking whilst the girl played amongst the standing stones. After a while, we noticed that she was lying down with her ear pressed to the ground. When we went to see what she was doing, she asked why there was music coming from underground. Neither of us could hear anything. A few years later I was reading a folklore book about Derbyshire and came across the legend of a shepherd who had fallen asleep in that circle at midsummer and been spirited away to dance with the faery folk underground. The main thing he remembered was the beautiful music. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kirk_(folklorist)

[EssendonRam]

3 hours ago, Lambchop said:

Surely the same principle applies to the process of seeking explanations which fit with the materialist worldview. It's simply filtering what you'll accept to fit in with your existing belief system, and so not really 'skepticism' at all. 

Awareness of precisely that is why I wanted to put the question ‘out there’.

You could argue that I’m sceptical of my normal scepticism in this instance. It’s not a reaction I’m particularly comfortable with either. Hence, my references to being shaken earlier.

[archied]

4 hours ago, Lambchop said:

Have you heard of Robert Kirk? He's a 17th century Scottish clergyman who wrote an account of the faery lore and second sight amongst his parishioners. Mythology, if you will, but part of people's lives in his day, and common in some form to all cultures. 

Faery beings, land spirits, or genii loci, traditionally dwell in hills, woods, by springs or remote spots. They are reputed to interact with humans in various ways, not always helpful. There are various accounts in bardic tradition and medieval ballads, such as Thomas the Rhymer. There are numerous books on the subject published by Bob Stewart, who is a friend of mine, hence the interest. 

Here's another anecdote: one midsummer in the early 90s I went up to nine stone close on Harthill moor with a friend from Sheffield and his daughter, who would have been about five. We were standing around talking whilst the girl played amongst the standing stones. After a while, we noticed that she was lying down with her ear pressed to the ground. When we went to see what she was doing, she asked why there was music coming from underground. Neither of us could hear anything. A few years later I was reading a folklore book about Derbyshire and came across the legend of a shepherd who had fallen asleep in that circle at midsummer and been spirited away to dance with the faery folk underground. The main thing he remembered was the beautiful music. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kirk_(folklorist)

Had a similar experience many years ago ,, visiting a Kirk ( church ) in ayrshire ,came across an oldish lady laying with her ear to the ground in the graveyard , was a bit spooked but plucked up the courage to ask what she was doing , she smiled and said listening and jestured for me to do the same , I got down and put my ear to the ground , after a few minutes I told her I couldn’t hear anything , she smiled and said ,, I know , it’s been like that all day

[Wolfie]

7 hours ago, Lambchop said:

Coincidentally, I thought about starting a thread on faery lore this afternoon, then thought, nah, I can't talk about that on here!

Sounds a lot more sensible than most of your political posts, to be honest ??