I apologize for any confusion here, I was referring to the distinction in the subjective experience of compulsion and desire. I only meant that I have no reason to doubt that these feel different to you, and was calling back to Unknowing’s accusation that I’m unwilling to accept what I don’t experience. I don’t experience such a distinction, but I have no reason to doubt that others do.
This is question begging. We agree you felt something, and we disagree about the cause of that feeling. The impression that a compulsion was externally caused is not particularly strong evidence that the compulsion was in fact externally caused. We can trick ourselves into feeling external influence fairly easily (see, e.g., the ideomotor response). No information provided by the compulsions was anything you couldn’t have known, and nothing that happened is so extraordinary that the only or best explanation is that an external force acted upon you. What you felt may have seemed externally caused, but the mundane explanation is that it was not.
Perhaps they did. That does not mean that anything extraordinary was going on. The situation you described, when stripped of the subjective significance you’ve given it (and that your friend and dreamcatcher-vendor may have given it), is a mundane and predictable experience: you didn’t buy the last dreamcatcher, then someone else did.
There is of course a difficulty in conveying an experience like this, especially in this context. But I think it’s reasonable to take the skeptical stance as the default. You’re claiming that some force unknown to science influenced you in violation of every physical law. That’s an extraordinary claim. That’s a claim that, if vindicated, would have far reaching consequences, not least in requiring an explanation for why it’s never been detected in any sort of controlled condition. When faced with an extraordinary claim, with evidence that admits easily of much more ordinary explanations, we should favor the ordinary explanations, even if that means accepting that your feeling of compulsion was endogenous and your brain misled you. That too is an ordinary experience for humans.