I confess I really don't believe in any of this stuff.  I am certainly 
interested in such experiences, though, and I try to keep an open 
mind.  The hard-line skeptics -- the ones who automatically scoff at 
any report of ghosts or ESP or UFOs, without even looking at the 
evidence -- aren't doing anything to advance human knowledge, imho.

So, here are two experiences I have no explanation for other than 
coincidence:

1. I had a dream about a school friend I hadn't seen in years.  In the 
dream, I was in the Sears auto parts store in West Springfield, 
Massachusetts.  I had seen the store from the road many times, but had 
never been inside it.  One day, a few weeks later, someone at another 
auto parts store told me I could probably find a particular shock 
absorber I was looking for (steering stabilizer for a '67 Beetle) at 
the Sears store in West Springfield.  I drove over there, thinking how 
weird it would be if I ran into my old friend there.  I did.  I was so 
stunned I literally put my hand on my heart.

2. I have a book about the Salem witchcraft hysteria titled The Devil 
in Massachusetts.  Every time I try to read it, I get a migraine.  It's 
been so bad that once I had to go lie down.  I'm reluctant even to 
touch the book anymore, but I can't throw it away because that would be 
admitting that I think it's the cause of my headaches, which is a 
preposterous idea.  My only personal connection to the Salem witchcraft 
thing is that my first wife was a great-great-great-...-granddaughter 
of one of the women hanged, Martha Allen Carrier.  Documents of the 
times show that Carrier might've believed that Satan had promised to 
make her the Queen of Hell after she died.  Hawthorne mentions her in 
his story "Young Goodman Brown."  (I had another book about the Salem 
trials, consisting of a collection of trial transcripts.  Before I had 
a chance to read it myself, I loaned it to a lawyer friend who then 
moved to New Jersey without returning it to me.  He died of a heart 
attack a year later.)

Your turn:

14 responses total.

The first story is interesting, but the second story has a decently logical
explanation: Since you know about your wife's ancestor, book on Salem may have
a negative connotation to you, and so your headaches could be psychosomatic
avoidance of the topic. This is evidenced by your linking of your loaning a
book on the subject with someone having a fatal heart attack -- had it
happened the second he got off the plane, maybe there'd be a link, but having
a parameter as wide as a year suggests you're looking for reasons to have
anxiety about that topic.

I'll try to remember to come back, because I have a few doozies.

Please do come back and enter your doozies.

Re the Salem books, I agree that the association with my ex alone is 
capable of causing a headache.  Also, the guy wo died of a heart attack 
was 61 and had a family history of heart disease, so sadness but no big 
surpise there.  On a visit to Salem last summer we took the kids to the 
witch museum, and one of the women in the gift shop (sorry, "Shoppe") 
turned out to be a Carrier, descended from Martha and thus a very 
distant cousin of my ex, whose maternal grandmother was a Carrier.  I 
had a very nice chat with her and never got a headache.

*sings, a la Simon & Garfunkel* "Oh, I wish that I could be... Giles Cory."

Here's one:

Llewellyn Spell-a-Day Calendar
September 9, 2001:
Four Theives Spell

A spell for binding negative energy, and cursing it.

Notes:
(1) Llewellyn's Spell-a-Day calendar has some other dark stuff, but for the
most part, it's sweetness-and-light, stuff like how to get a better job and
get your housework done.
(2) Note the number of theives mention in the spell name, and the number of
airplanes involved on 9/11/01.

(Oooops... the spell was FOR 9/11/01, not 9/9/01... sowwy. =} )

(and, of course, the calendar itself was written early 2000)

Ok, I've got a few minutes, so here's a short one. About ten years ago or so,
I had a dream. In the dream, Val was studying for class, so I decided to take
a walk outside. There was a T-shaped intersection not far from our house (in
the dream), so I stood in the center of the 3/4 crossroads, and I saw this
girl there, someone I'd never met before. Usually, when I see somebody I don't
know in a dream, I "know" them anyway, as if we have a whole history together,
but in this case, nope, I was meeting her for the first time. I asked her why
she was just playing in the middle of an intersectio, and she said something
about life being a lark, and me having to choose whether I'm going to keep
appropaching it so seriously, or if I was going to learn to enjoy it. I
thought it was an odd thing for her to say, because at the time, I wasn't
having any problems with being too serious at all.

A few years later, I met a girl, Vicki, through a mutual friend. It took me
a few days to realize that she was the girl in the dream, but I really didn't
think too much beyond that. We met in downtown Lansing somewhere.

Anyway, a few months later, following a memorial service of a suicide friend,
moods were taut, and a blew a gasket. Most of the people with me were pretty
shaken up -- I was going through a very dark time in my life, one that I'm
still not quite recovered from -- and I had a MEAN temper. Vikki was
particularly sensitive, so she actually ran off. After I calmed down, I went
into the house I was at (my friends' house), took stock of who was there, made
my apologies, and asked where Vikki was. One of the people who lived in the
house got a quizzical look on her face and said, "She told us that if you
asked that, she's in the place where you two FIRST MET." the quizzical look
was because everyone there knew we'd met in Lansing, about five or ten minles
away, certainly too far to walk in the middle of the night.

So I went out of the house and walked a little bit down the street, to the
closest intersection, which was T-shaped. I stood there for a minute, in the
middle of the intersection, until I heard her start talking to me from the
shadows.

One of these days, I'll give as full an account of the weird Selena shit, but
that's a much longer tale. Unfortunately, it appears to be over. ;~{

Thanks!  That's a really neat story. Gee, I'd love to know more about Vicki-
for her to be that clued in. Wow.

(The mutual friend, btw, was Catdance, and the suicide memorial [which you
probably guessed, Kami] was Pascal's... so that should give you an idea, at
least, of how long ago this was. I forget. =} )

I had a crush on Vicki for most of the time I knew her, but then she seemed
to do that to a lot of people. At one point in there, I was horny for the
three keys: Vicki, Nikki, and Jackie (at least two of whom you knew, Kami).
Of those, I have the fondest and clearest memories of Vicki, but our
connection (as the story indicates) wasn't conducive to a sexual relationship,
even though we seemed to both want one. Some time later, she fell in
monogamous love with somebody and disappeared from the circle I was in.
Ironically, she was later indirectl involved with the straw that broke this
camel's back with Catdance (she and her beau were arrested for disturbing the
peace the night before we moved from Lansing to here, and Catdance spent the
night counseling her over a minor nuissance arrest, and was too wiped out to
help us pack the moving van, like he'd promised).

I think Vicki is a fey spirit, which is probably why she appeared and
disappeared as enigmatically as she did.

That was a weird one.  Did you ever ask her why she said the 
intersection was the place where you first met?  

Here's a minor example that gave me pause at the time:  We were all 
having dinner at an Italian restaurant.  I was sitting across the table 
from my then-9-year-old son.  I found myself watching the couple at the 
table directly behind him, and wondering to myself whether they were 
Jewish or Italian.  (I realize you can be both at once, but you know 
what I mean.)  Finally, the woman started eating her spaghetti using 
the fork-and-spoon method very expertly, which led me to conclude that 
she was Italian.  At that very moment, my son said, "Hey dad, did you 
ever notice how hard it is to tell Italians and Jews apart?"  I asked 
him what made him think of that, and he pointed to the kitchen area 
behind me, where the ambiguously ethnic kitchen staff were working.  I 
explained to him that Italians and Jews were pretty much 
interchangeable: that, for example, in the movies Italians are 
sometimes played by Jewish actors (James Caan as Sonny Corleone) and 
vice versa (Alex Rocca as Moe Green).  I waited till we got home to 
tell him about the weird coincidence.  He has always been very 
empathetic, but this went beyond that.

#9 para 1> Actually, no. We wound up having a very intense and weird
discussion that night, and I only saw her a few more times after that.

That's the first thing I would've asked her after I picked myself up 
off the ground.  I mean, weren't you a little curious?

Here's something I found interesting.

When I first started out at Ring of Steel I had a crush on a girl named 
Bree.  Short and sweet, I made my attempts and failed and Bree's with 
someone else.  Several months later (not more than a few weeks ago), I 
found some more leftovers from the person who had previously owned my 
car.  This time it was a picture of a little girl, the name on the back 
of the photograph was "Brie".  Could it be that the impressions of the 
picture had created my crush on Bree?

#11> Actually, no. It was a period in my life when that sort of thing was
happening on a regular basis, although that was one of the most profound. Now
I'm curious about why things like that stopped happening.

Away back in time, around 1985 or so, I went to an Information Society concert
with Valerie at Royal Oak Music Theater. Not long after that, I had a dream
about a spirit trapped in a computer at Radio Shack terrorizing Tel-Twelve
Mall. I foolishly volunteered to getinto the computer and either pull the
spirit out or tell it to stop, but insteed I nearly got trapped permanently
in the computer myself. I woke up thinking that this would make a decent
story, but it needed tweaking. The final versionof the story involved a spirit
that gets created when lightning hits an electrical transformer. It seeks
liberation, and as part of the process of liberation, it names itself: Serena.

I forgot about the story, and about five years later, I met Selena online.
As the people who knew her on Grex probably know, she was "trapped" in the
conputer from the standpoint that she refused to meet anyone IRL if she knew
them online; she claimed it was a phobia, and based on some of the connection
I had with her, I have no particularl reason to doubt that. Over the course
of our relationship (which existed entirely on the Internet and by phone, and
a handful of cases of things being taken from our house or being put in our
house, as she experimented with meeting us), we of course talked about many
things, and at one point she mentioned that she'd also been at that particular
Information Society concert. So that may well have been where we first "met"
although at best we would have bumped into each other.

(When assessing the dream, by the way, it's important to note that I had no
inkling about what the Internet would be capable of, in fact, I hadn't heard
of the Internet at all, so it's not like the original dream was just a
metaphor for that.)

Not long after I met Selena, she started having major problems with her
partner Krista. They went camping for a few weeks to try to patch things up,
but it didn't work. Krista finally decided that what was "Best" for Selena
was for her (Krista) to just leave. One night during all of this, I had a
dream that Krista and Selena were having a fight, and that Krista turned to
me and said, "What are you doing here? You don't belong here." I just shrugged
because I couldn't speak, being only a spirit in the dream.

The day after this dream, Selena was completely broken up. Krista had left
sometime during the night, taking only the clothes on her back and a kitchen
knife (it turned out later that Krista had planned suicide, but had chickened
out and instead went to New Orleans for a year). The strangest thing, Selena
said: She'd woken up to Krista watching her sleep from the doorway, and in
her grogginess only remembered Krista saying: "I love you." and "You don't
belong here." The first comment, of course, made sense; the second one
confused Selena. We were never quite sure if Krista had been tallking to me
IRL, or if I'd intercepted some moment of Krista being melodramatic about
Selena's lot in life.

There were other incidents like this: I could always tell when Selena was
drunk (she was an alcoholic, but she was "on the wagon" for most of our
relationship), because I'd get drunk [this actually happens to me around other
drunk people IRL, btw, very annoying]. The day that Selena left something on
the porch when she thought we were both at work, and it turned out Valerie
was home sick, heard something on the porch, and decided not to answer the
door... when Selena got online that night, I had to leave the room because
I couldn't breathe from Selena's anxiety attack (for about ten minutes, I knew
what it felt like to be a claustrophobe; it makes my own socialanxiety pale
by comparison). For a long time, Valerie and I slept with a human's space
between us, and could tell when Selena got up in the morning, because the
space would collapse.

Finally, a few weeks after the last message I got from Selena online (7/24/00
={ ), I had a dream that echoed a scene from the "Serena" story, which she'd
read by this point. In the story, it was the scene where the spirit says
goodbye to the detective that's been investigating it. the dream basically
repeated that scene, with Selena saying goodbye to me, and telling me that
her work was done, and that I had many other friends to rely on now. I woke
up feeling very serene and comforted, the calmest I'd felt in months. (I had
other dreams about Selena during that time period, split between dreams where
she came back, where she washiding from me, and where she was dead, but none
of them made me feel anything like closure; that one did.)

Goodness me!  Ancient history reveals itself. <g>  wow.
The coolest thing I ever did with Selena was asking her to help me find
something that had gone missing.  Over the internet, she "looked" through my
eyes- could smell the woodsmoke on my clothes (I'd been out at the bonfire),
see my front room, etc. She was able to help me find the missing object, too.

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