It’s understandable that you have doubts, especially if it’s not part of your experience, that’s how most people are. They need to experience it for themselves. I can only say, that the more open your are to it, (my reason for sharing) the more likely you are to look for it and find it. That goes for things other than psychic abilities, too.
I have seen ufos, not lights but actual ships. Before I saw them, I would watch shows with videos that captured shots of lights, and I was on the fence whether it was true. There are liars and fraudsters and people who fake crop circles. After I saw the ships I believe in ufos. That is to say nothing of what was in those ships or that liars and fakers still continue to play games.
Another example: A plane crash happened in my neighborhood. It was the second one in the area. I lived near an airport. I’m a writer so I started playing with the idea of more planes crashing without reason. Just a what if scenario, in my mind. After I started the story, a total of 8 crashes happened in 6 years. The airport almost shut down. Around the fifth crash I asked someone who lived closer to the airport if they were concerned one might crash into their house. They scoffed at me, saying no. Two months later a plane crashed across from their house.
Now, I would also hate to admit that someone else had any ability that I didn’t have. All I can chalk it up to is, I am a sensitive person and sensitive is painful, so this psychic stuff might just be a gain from all the bad shit I go through. Also, the rest of my life is more boring than most other people’s lives. I stay at home like a hermit, so maybe God likes to spice my life up one way or another.
I admit I am prone to delusions of grandeur. But I am also someone who not afraid to be wrong 99 times in order to experience a mystical event just once.
I’m happy to acknowledge the existence of abilities that I don’t have. Synethetes, human calculators, savants, and other geniuses all have purely mental abilities that I don’t have. I don’t doubt the existence of those things because they make claims about their extraordinary subjective experience that are falsifiable and survive controlled testing. The same cannot be said about psychic abilities.
Make some concrete, public, risky predictions and let’s see how you fare.
I don’t control it. And I mostly only realize things in hindsight. I have yet to determine how it’s even useful.
I could say for example that one day people will not leave their homes for anything, for the sake of prediction, but many others like futurists might say something similar. Again, that type of prediction is different from what I experience. I could never open a shop and charge people money to predict their futures. I am open to the idea that some can. As there are varying degrees of savant.
I could tell you a few stories in my life that would point to something odd going on, but you would probably have to be me to appreciate them. Take my entire life in context. Besides, I can’t change your mind if you aren’t willing to see it my way. I guess I’ll have to accept this a more private experience.
I understand skepticism. I don’t understand the pride of the skeptic. I mean, isn’t the goal to discover what more there is to believe and not hold out forever?
He told me to take a risk and predict something, but only if it affects everyone, concretely, because that would be proof. Meanwhile, I found a gun on a highway after dreaming it and felt like god was playing a cosmic joke on me.
I have no reason to lie and don’t get a kick out of fooling people about small things like gun finding. It’s frustrating because I share to open minds not to close them.
The tornado thing of hers is clairvoyant and I gain nothing from doubting her story.
I had no way of knowing I’d ever be assigned highway work. And the timing of the orange jumpsuit prisoners came exactly a second after I picked up the gun and turned around. I dreamed a scenario, like that, not exactly like that, but close enough, six months prior. It might not be an ability, like a special super power, but it was odd beyond everyday life experience.
If I was a skeptic, I could say, the gun was planted there by someone who knew those prisoners would be doing detail around that area. But it still doesn’t account for the dream or the timing involved.
side note, a co-worker ended up taking the gun home with him, showing off with it, shooting himself in the head by accident, surviving, then going to jail for what happened. I didn’t predict that. But I also wasn’t the one who was going to take that gun home after that sketchy dream. If not psychic ability, then danger intuition.
Alternative hypothesis: you don’t faithfully remember your dreams from six months ago, and when something happened to you that had a few similarities to a partially remembered 6-month-old dream, you filled in the gaps in your memory with details drawn from a present experience. The dream you remember is “close enough” because the memory is built from pieces of the experience it ostensibly predicted.
This kind of false memory happens all the time, it is well documented and studied, it’s been manipulated in laboratory settings, it’s the most mundane phenomenon in the world. And it well explains your subjective experience.
It doesn’t have to affect everyone. It needs to be: concrete (i.e., the criteria for a successful prediction are clearly articulated before their occurence), public (i.e. it’s not enough to have had them in your head and then say “I totally knew that would happen”; writing them down privately in a form that establishes when they were made would count), and risky (i.e. the prediction should ideally be so unlikely that the only explanation is clairvoyance; a prediction of something ordinary, or a prediction that is satisfied by too many outcomes, will be expected to come true just by chance).
The claim your making doesn’t satisfy these. You have private experiences that aren’t recorded and aren’t shared until one of any number of “close enough” outcomes indicates that they were in fact predictions and not just passing thoughts of no consequence.
You’re right, false memories do happen. However I remember this dream. It does bug me that it was not exact, but I don’t think people who are more psychic than me get it exactly, either. Getting it precisely could alter the course of fate, which I personally don’t think is meant to be changed.
There’s a thing in Buddhism called supramundane powers.
I can reduce rationality and logic to mere guessing, nothing more special than truth simply assumed. Doesn’t feel good does it to be dimissed so casually?
There is no such thing as coincidence.
Forget Buddhists and their secretive practices for a moment, my brain left my apartment and ended up in another state when I smoked Salvia Divinorium. The mind can do other things besides compute a frail truth table.
Guesswork requires confirmation, judgment. Judgment requires rationality. It is not only about guessing, but also about proof and evidence, methods to reproduce what theses predict.
Conjecture and “I had a dream once” do not verify anything real or substantial, no matter how coincidental they are.
Birds, rabbits, wolves, can sense a storm coming. Does that mean they’re “psychic”? Not necessarily. At least, not by the mystical connotations purported here.
Though I suspect that, reward or not, if someone was indeed able to demonstrate a psychic ability, it would be all over the news. And not just the local news.
Why?
Because it is so clearly linked to what is often called “supernatural” or “paranormal” powers.
And how far can that be from God?
Besides, if you can predict the future, that means the future already exists to be predicted. And if the future already exists that shifts the discussion immediately to the extent to which human autonomy itself exists.
It seems a lot of people do, if their frequency in the UK is “internationally recognized”.
In any case, there was plenty of opportunity for something that happens regularly near you to seed a dream that came true when that regularly-occurring thing occur again. The mundane explanations still seems like the best one for what you experienced.
Mundane explanation: you had an elaborate and realistic hallucination while under the influence of a potent hallucinogen.
If I predict, “I feel like I should stop here because something will happen here in the near future”, that’s not what I would call a “risky prediction”, it’s frequently true that something will happen in a given location in an unspecified amount of time. This becomes more true if “something happens” includes both something happening at the spot where you altered your day, or at any spot where something happens differently because you’re 30 seconds behind where you were. If so broad a set of things counts to satisfy “something happened”, it is virtually guaranteed at the time of prediction that the prediction will turn out true, and so it doesn’t require any exotic mental abilities to explain it: mundane explanations suffice.
I had no intention of stopping at any bus stop - I just wanted to go, but I was compelled to stay put for a short while.
I had no intention of wanting to go home early that day - I got excited about the endless possibilities of what I could do with those extra hours: shopping, a cheeky drink, visiting someone, but I was compelled to go straight home.
I have never stopped at a bus stop unintentionally, or felt the need to get up and go straight home, since. You?
Hey! if it’s good enough for Royals and Aristos, it’s good enough for me
So the claim is that you felt a strong desire to do something that you don’t usually do, and then some event followed that you interpreted as somehow causally related to your strong desire. Am I understanding that right?
If so, I don’t see anything requiring more than a mundane explanation: the causal relationship is spurious. You stopped for any one of a hundred reasons that people get feelings every day; some network in your brain was triggered by any of a hundred local stimuli of which you were not consciously aware. Later, you experienced something you felt was meaningful, tied it to the earlier feeling, and remembered it because it confirmed your beliefs.
You are likely to have had similar strong feelings that made you do unusual things that were not followed by noteworthy events, and you forgot them as people frequently ignore disconfirming evidence. People are fallible, and that’s why science demands rigor.
If I gave the impression that I can sit down and see what I fortell, I can’t. My predictions, about ten of them, haven’t been risky. Innocent predictions. Maybe ability is the wrong word. Psychic occurrences.
