Thought Of The Day

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
-Buddha

Other Thoughts Of The Day

Photo: Mike Perry 2010

Footsteps Of Dead People

Ghosts or sightings of dead people: must admit I have never spotted any myself but I have felt a presence and have noticed a lingering smell - such as my dad's blend of tobacco long after he had died. I've also experienced things like my father's watch stopping at the time my son was born. I think I may have heard something as well ...

This happened when my mum was near to drawing her last breath. She had only days to live so it was a very emotional time. Two days before she died I was in the bathroom having an early morning shower when my wife called out that she was popping down to the local shop for something. "Won't be long," she said.

"Ever near us, though unseen ...
the fair immortal spirits tread;
For all this boundless universe is life;
there are no dead."
Bulwer-LyttonI finished my shower and all was quiet as I dried myself when I heard someone slowly coming up the stairs, their footsteps slow and precise. I took no real notice as I presumed it was my wife back already.

I got dressed and made my way downstairs for breakfast when I heard my wife at the front door. She told me she had just returned. "But I heard you come up the stairs," I said.

"Well it wasn't me," she laughed.

Puzzled and a little apprehensive I searched the house and felt quite relieved that there was nobody about. It would have been impossible for anyone to get in as all of the doors and windows were locked - and yet I definitely heard someone coming up our stairs and passing the bathroom.

My wife did say that it was perhaps my mum paying a last visit. Then I remembered another incident from when I was a child of probably five or six.

I was home from school as I hadn't been well. We lived upstairs in a flat (apartment). Suddenly my mum and I heard slow footsteps coming up the stairs. I remember being terrified listening to the steady tread on the stairs and continuing towards our living room.

The door opened and it was my grandmother! The front door was unlocked so she had just walked in. This was the one and only time she ever visited our flat, even though we lived there for nearly fourteen years - I won't go into the reasons why.

I remember vividly to this day how, when she came through the door, I was shaking with fear because I didn't know who it could possibly be.

The steps sounded exactly the same as those on my own stairs that morning.

It may seem very fanciful, maybe I'm fooling myself, but I feel that it was either my mother or her mother on the stairs that day.

Famous Coincidences: Mark Twain

Though known of for many years previously (recorded by the Chinese in 240 BC) Halley's Comet was named after Edmond Halley, he concluded in 1705 that the comet returned every 76 years. If you missed the last one, we'll all get a chance to see what all the fuss is about on July 28th, 2061 (fingers crossed!).


Halley's Comet is thought of as a once in a lifetime experience but it wasn't for the writer and satirist Samuel Langhorne Clemens better known by the pen name of Mark Twain. I'm sure you will know that he wrote such classics as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Many famous coincidences you have to take with a pinch of salt, but this one about Mark Twain and Halley's Comet does seem to stack up. He was born on November 30th, 1835 exactly two weeks after the comet's perihelion - along with, of course, many other people.

The difference is that mark Twain made a prediction in his autobiography, published in 1909. He wrote:

"I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
And, sure enough Mark Twain left this earth on April 21st, 1910 the day following the comet's perihelion. So his prediction proved correct.

It's a nice story but doubters will no doubt point out that in 1909 Mark Twain wasn't in the best of health and already suffered chest pains. It wasn't too difficult, therefore, for him to predict that he would die the following year.

I prefer, however, to just to go along with the Halley's Comet and Mark Twain coincidence as I feel sure he'd be chuffed to think that we do.

Further Reading:
Titanic Coincidences
Famous Coincidences: Abraham Lincoln

Photos: Mark Twain - Mathew Brady; Halley's Comet - Public Domain.

Visualisation Helped Man Escape From WW2 Prison

Popular self-help books are always on about using visualisation techniques to attract the things we desire. True enough, they can work. As that song used to go, "If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?"

Visualising and concentrating on something, however, can be something more than this. In The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Joseph Murphy gives a significant account which led to several coincidences or synchronicity, this follows but in my own words:

Visualisation helped a Dr. Lothar von Blenk-Schmidt to save his sanity during his imprisonment by the Russians in world war 2. The doctor had previously been an electronics engineer but was now forced to labour in coal mines, having to shift something like 300 pounds a day. If prisoners failed to do their quota they had their food rations cut.

To relieve his despair he began to concentrate on his escape to America, determined that his subconscious mind would find a way. He wrote. "I would imagine I was walking down Wilshire Boulevard with an American girl whom I met in Berlin prior to the war."

In his imagination he drove his imaginary American automobile up and down the boulevards of Los Angeles, saw himself in restaurants and made his vision highly and vividly detailed. As he said, "These pictures in my mind were as real and natural to me as the trees outside the prison camp."

This dreaming gave him hope and helped to retain his sanity and strength during difficult times.

Then an odd sequence of events occurred. One morning, after shouting out his number the guard was called away. When the guard returned he repeated the same number, and the next man stepped forward. Blenk-Schmidt realised there were now two number 17s on the list and he would not be missed.

With good fortune on his side he managed to walk out of the camp undetected. First he survived by fishing and hunting wild fowl and later hitched rides at night on coal trains heading for Poland. Once there he was helped by friends and eventually reached Lucerne in neutral Switzerland.

At the Palace Hotel he met an American who invited him to be his guest in Santa Monica, California. This led to his dream coming true, down to the last detail, even to an American wife - the identical girl he had met in Berlin prior to the war! When he first arrived in Los Angeles he describes how the chauffeur of the man he befriended drove him down Wilshire Boulevard just as he had imagined while in the Russian camp.

Dreams really can come true.

Photo: Russian soldiers in WW2 - Public Domain

The Hologram Theory And Synchronicity

"Yes but how can everything link up, how can we be a part of everything?" A question often bandied about when trying to explain things such as coincidence, synchronicity, psychometry and so on.

One answer is The Hologram Theory - which I intend to keep very simplistic!

We probably all know what a hologram is - it's a flat picture that looks to be 3D and stretches away to infinity. From various angles they can sometimes appear to be slightly different.

That's pretty straightforward.

But there is something strange about a hologram. If you cut them in half, and then maybe in half again, each section will contain the whole original picture. And if you cut the pieces again and again they would still contain the image - no matter how many times you do this.

The smaller the pieces get, the pictures may not be quite so clear, but they will still be there - just a bit hazier.

Now some say the universe is a Hologram!

The physicist David Bohm, for example, theorises that the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

David Bohm tells of how we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate 'parts', but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible.

Now back to keeping it simple! If we followed this theory - each part of us is the whole universe (God?). We are a snippet like one of those pieces of the hologram we cut up.

Everything interpenetrates everything. So when the phone rings and we 'know' who it is before we answer - we know because we are part of that other person (who is ringing us).

We may be a bit hazy, like those small pieces of the hologram but, perhaps, if we can learn to tune in properly, with the right energy, we can gain a clearer sight of the whole universe - and all things will become possible because there will be no time, space or separateness.

Okay, that'll do for now but The Hologram Theory would explain synchronicity, telepathy, being in two places at once and so many other things. Maybe it's worthy of further thought.

Small Coincidences: A Microwave And A Coat

My wife and I have been out all day (it's now 5.05pm) so I'm a little behind in writing a post. What to write about? I wasn't at all sure, so I decided to check my emails first. Perhaps I might come across a coincidence or something.

There was an email from Amazon UK saying that our order had been dispatched. It's something we had been expecting for over a month - the microwave we wanted had been temporarily out of stock.

I left my office to shout down to my wife, "Good news, the microwave is on it's way."

As I glanced out of the upstairs hall window a delivery van drew up outside our house - and it was our Amazon order! If he had been any earlier we would have been out.

Okay, not exactly a mind blowing coincidence but it made me smile.

While we had been out today we went to the nearest big town, Plymouth, as my wife wanted to buy a new coat. We traipsed round the shops - not exactly my favourite pastime! - and couldn't find one she liked. Well there was one coat that got the approval for looks, but they didn't have her size.

We had some lunch and then was making our way back to the car. There was one shop we hadn't tried, which is usually quite expensive. "They might have a bargain," said my wife tongue in cheek and I felt my credit card tremble with fear.

But there it was: the perfect coat - right colour, size and, most importantly, price - actually a bargain. It had been reduced to half price and there was a ticket saying it had been cut by another 50%! Almost unbelievable, surely a mistake. My wife was right about there being a bargain.

We got to the till to pay and my wife mentioned the extra 50% off. "Oh that's not right, it doesn't start today," said the assistant, "but as it's on the ticket we'll have to honour the price."

I guess the lesson is: there is a time for everything.

The Precognitive Dream Of An Air Crash

Precognition, which happens in dreams, is unfortunately not always good news, especially if we ignore the message. Here is such a story to which there are three parts.

Firstly there is the dream which David Redman-Thomas had back in the late 1960's. He awoke one day screaming with fear. When his wife, Merle, asked him what was wrong he laughed it off and said that he had imagined himself plunging from the sky.

Merle also had a dream, the second part of this story.

She described the dream about her trainee amateur pilot husband. "In the dream I watched my husband take off and fly around the airfield. Suddenly the plane plummeted to the ground. I recognised the control tower and other buildings very clearly. It was Wycombe Air Park. It was all so realistic that I woke up in tears. My husband told me not to be so silly and to go back to sleep."

The following Easter Monday David drove his wife and children to Wycombe Air Park where he was due to have his very first solo flight that morning. Everything was arranged and David kissed his wife and headed towards his aircraft.

He was stopped on the way by his friend, another David - David Poore - who invited him for a ride first in his aircraft.

Merle continues with the story. "That was when my dream started to come true. I saw them take off and to start circling the airfield. Then the engine began to miss badly. As I watched it fell from the sky and out of sight behind some trees. It all happened within five minutes of take off."

The two Davids died in the accident.

The third part of this story happens the day after the crash. It was broad daylight and Merle saw an image of her husband's face.

Merle explains, "At two o'clock the next day, following the accident, I was at home talking to my mother when suddenly I saw David staring at me from the opposite wall. His face was completely unmarked, but I noticed his hair was standing up at the front as if somebody had cut a lock from it."

"I hadn't wanted to see his body, but the next day my father-in-law handed me a lock of hair as a keepsake. He told me David's face was unmarked and that he had cut the hair from exactly the same spot as in my vision."

As usual I leave readers to form their own conclusions.

Further Reading:
Coincidence or Synchronicity - Example 4 - About precognitive dreams.
Coincidence or Synchronicity - Example 5 - A dream which came true.