Every once in awhile it happens that I will ask myself a certain obscure question, and that through the seemingly random events of the next day or two that question will be answered through no explicit effort on my own behalf. This is a record of some of those instances which prove, I believe, that some kind of collective subconscious exists among humanity which, like an internet search engine, can be queried at any time and will provide an answer to questions you didn’t even know you ever asked.
Proof #1: Thursday, July 13, 2006: This afternoon around 3:00 p.m. I was talking to this guy Lowell at work about how Billy Bragg and the band Wilco took a bunch of old, abandoned Woody Guthrie lyrics and set them to their own music to make a two-volume tribute album. I told him the albums were pretty good, and that the band also brought in some other famous singers to sing a few of the songs, most notably this one chick whose name I couldn’t remember. I said it was a chick like Lisa Loeb or Fiona Apple or that one chick who sang the song “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” Anyway the point is I couldn’t remember this singer’s name for the life of me. So when I got home from working out this evening to look some stuff up on the computer here, the Windows Media Player was minimized at the bottom of the screen, and I maximized it so I could see what was on it and if it’d be okay to close out the program. When I maximized the screen the first thing that popped up was an icon from the movie “One Fine Day,” as that was the soundtrack queued in the player at the time. The irony is that the track that was currently highlighted for play was a song by Natalie Merchant. Why this is ironic is that Natalie Merchant is the name of the singer I was trying to remember earlier. Keep in mind the last time I opened up Windows Media Player was like two years ago. Coincidence? I think not. I shot a question out, the collective processed it, and it shot it back to me answered.
Proof #2: Friday, August 18th, 2006: The following events actually happened around a month ago to two weeks ago (the actual dates are in my journal somewhere). Anyway, what happened is that late one night, maybe around 11:00 p.m. or so, I was trying to write some poetry at my desk in my room upstairs. Looking for ideas to prompt me, I picked up Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and flipped to the section entitled “Eight Brief Tales of Lovers,” where I proceeded to read the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. I was encouraged by this tale, and decided to write a poem based on the story, and even considered writing a poem for each of the eight stories in the section and calling the whole package something like, Hamilton’s Eight Brief Tales of Lovers, for future publication. Yet I decided the important thing was to at least write the one about Pyramus and Thisbe, and that is what I proceeded to do. I’d been reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and decided to structure my poem in the same way as she did that one, with multiple stanzas of three lines each. I did so, and having accomplished my task I set it aside and went to bed. I largely forgot about the poem until about two weeks later, when I was reading a book from the library while going to the bathroom. The book was The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, which I had checked out because I’d enjoyed his Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow poems immensely. So I was just browsing the Collected Poems, not reading seriously (as is the case when bathroom reading), and flipping through it I found a poem by Hughes entitled, “Pyramus and Thisbe.” You can imagine my surprise at this, but even more surprising was the structure of his version of the poem, which was the same as mine – multiple stanzas of three lines each. To further the irony of this situation, Hughes was married at one point to Sylvia Plath, the person to whom I’d looked for inspiration for the structure of my own version of the poem. I did some research into the poem in the notes of the volume, and found that Hughes had done a whole series of poems similar to what I had planned to do, except his poems were based on myths as told by Ovid (his Tales of Ovid) and mine were going to be based on those as told by Edith Hamilton (which were actually gleaned, in part, from Ovid’s versions). Now I can see someone saying, “Well this is just coincidental, you must have seen his version of the poem at some past time and just remembered it subconsciously,” but I assure you, dear reader, the only poems I had read by Hughes at that point were the Crow poems, and one called The Minotaur. I find all this highly interesting. Sadly, however, I must admit my poem was not as well done as was the version written by Hughes years ago. My version was also shorter, maybe half as long. Coincidence? Who knows.
Proof #3: Wednesday, November 8th, 2006: Tonight my fiancé Lex and I went to see the poet Li-Young Lee do a reading at the WMU Little Theater in Kalamazoo. Last night when we were finalizing our plans, Lex asked me if I was going to ask him any questions, as there is usually a Q and A session with the speaker following their reading. I said yes, jokingly, that I was going to ask him, “How do Asian people name their babies?” Lex asked, “How?” And I replied, “They throw some silverware down the stairs and name their kids after the sounds it makes as it bounces down.” Then I made some funny, metallic Chinese-sounding noises and we both laughed. It was just a joke, one that I’d heard a long, long time ago. Then, tonight, as Li-Young Lee was finishing up the evening, just after 9:00 p.m., he mentioned, for whatever reason, how someone had asked him, “How do Chinese people name their children?” And he proceeded to answer the question with the same answer about silverware as I had given Lex the previous evening, almost exactly a day before. We just looked at each other, Lex and I, and were like, “Whoa, that is so weird.” That’s some coincidence. What are the chances that the one time in however many days or months or years that I actually thought of that joke it would just happened to be the day before the guy I used it in reference to used it himself in our very presence? This is definitely a proof worthy of recording. How strange!
Proof #4: Friday, November 10th, 2006: Yesterday (or maybe the day before) I was paging through a catalog sent by one of my various book clubs and came across a section advertising for certain books of puzzles and optical illusions. One of the books had for its subject the Mobius strip, the name of which caught my attention and thus drew me into reading the description of the book. Upon reading the few paragraphs about the book and its subject I realized that I knew what a Mobius strip was, just that I’d never heard the name of it before, or even thought to think it may have had a name at all. I dubbed it an interesting facet to complement the useless knowledge file in my brain and continued reading through the catalog. What’s odd is that tonight, at exactly 11:27 p.m. (according to the kitchen microwave) I was reading a review of the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” starring Will Ferrell, which opened today. In the article, the reviewer (James Sanford) states that Ferrell’s character is “an even-tempered, strait-laced and completely bland type whose days seem joined together in a Mobius strip: He doesn’t go through life as much as he goes around it, following precisely the same patterns and performing exactly the same rituals again and again.” The coincidence is that I would have had no idea what this article was talking about, referring to the character living life in the pattern of a Mobius strip, had I not just a day ago read a write-up, simply by chance, about that very topic. What are the chances? I mean seriously, I could’ve read that write-up on Mobius strips at any time, days ago, or days later. What made it so that I read about that specific topic just a day before the knowledge I gleaned from it would be needed for a practical application (however seemingly insignificant)? It just seems too coincidental to be coincidental. Something (or someone) has to be behind these sorts of things. A collective subconscious could explain it somehow, as could my theory that there’s no future (because the future never exists until it is present) and no present (because the minute you identify the present it is past), and thus there is only the past. Meaning everything that ‘will’ happen has really already happened, and that we just perceive things the way we do because our minds are human and limited as such. Still, despite our limitations, it seems like every once in a while we catch a break, a shaft of some kind of light, which allows us to sort of remember things that haven’t happened yet.
Proof #5: Friday, February 29th, 2008: So my wife transferred to another bank a few weeks ago, and needing to get in touch with her for something I checked the incoming call log on my cell phone and dialed back the number from the last time she had called me from her new location. When she worked at her former bank I talked to her often on the phone, and had the number memorized. Now, at this new location, I hardly heard from her at all at work and so had no idea what the number was. When I called the number from my cell phone log I reached an automated menu asking for the extension number of the desired employee. I had no idea what the extension was, yet I pushed the buttons “1-1-1-6” and waited. Somehow, and this really is amazing, I was connected directly to the teller station where my wife was working. There is no possible way I could have known even how many digits the extensions at this business consist of, let alone the exact code. The extension number is a general number for the teller station, and so it’s not like I could just push a few buttons and get directly to my wife. I say that to say it’s not like my wife has some assigned number or anything. She doesn’t. She doesn’t even know what the extension number for the teller station is herself. So how did I know what numbers to push? How did I even know that the number consisted of four digits? The short answer is I have no clue. And it wasn’t some anomaly with the phone system either, as I’ve called her through the same extension a few times since.
*Note: These are just a few of the strange coincidences I experience every now and then, ones which I’m sure are similar to ones everyone has if they keep a sort of lookout for them, if they just pay attention. I am one of those who believe that our consciousness is a mysterious and powerful thing that we tend to constantly underestimate. That said, the reader will notice that four of the five instances recorded here are from 2006 and that the fifth is from just a few days ago. That is because I myself stopped paying attention, and forgot about this record until the day of that fifth experience, when the coincidence was so blatant and strong it could not be ignored by my conscious mind. I hope to start keeping track of the stronger of these experiences again, and every once in a while to post a small collection of them on this site. Enjoy, and post some of your own if you can catch them.
Proof #6: Tuesday, March 4th, 2008: Okay, this is an after-the-fact post but I couldn’t submit this without including it. About two minutes ago my wife and I were watching the end “wrap-up” on American Idol and I thought to myself, “Man, if I were on this show I wouldn’t sing such stupid songs, I’d sing something like “Hallelujah” (as best done by Jeff Buckley). I wish someone would sing that song sometime.” Well about two guys later in the wrap-up (about ten seconds after I thought that thought) the guy with the dreadlocks came onscreen and was singing, you guessed it, “Hallelujah.” How do these things happen? I couldn’t have caught his performance subconsciously because my wife and I were watching Family Guy for the last hour. That’s crazy, especially that it happened today of all days, when I recommitted myself to recording these things. Anyway, enjoy!
