Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Paranormal Portent?

Portent (noun): a sign or warning that something, especially something momentous or calamitous, is likely to happen.

Before I had my current smartphone, I had an old-fashioned cell phone, and I used to get an issue of "phantom dialing," in which some random number might be called. The phenomenon can be explained by random presses of the keys of the cell phone, caused by random contacts of the elevated key buttons with my clothes. But I've used an Apple smartphone for many months, and never seemed to get (prior to this week) any such issue of unexpected activity on the phone, even though for many months I have carried my smartphone in my pocket during a daily walk. Part of the reason is that my smartphone locks me out after a short interval, throwing up a login screen requiring a password before accepting inputs. 

But yesterday very oddly after returning from my walk while carrying my smartphone, I was very surprised to see on my smartphone the screen below, which I had not knowingly summoned. It is an "Alarms" screen I can never recall seeing before on the smartphone. 


Searching for how to reach this screen, I see that it requires special activity from my smartphone startup screen. To reach the screen above, you have to open a Clock app, one I can never recall previously using.  I do not have that app on my smartphone startup screen.  So for someone from my smartphone to accidentally get the Alarm screen above, he would have to first press a small slot at the bottom of my phone, and then press a small Clock icon (a combination of events that would be extremely improbable to occur by accident). And since the default tab on this Clock app is the World Clock tab and not the Alarms tab, it would seem to require an additional click in just the right place, to get the Alarms screen from the Clock app. And it seems that no accident would allow that, as my phone's login screen would block such presses from occurring accidentally. 

Given the great improbability of accidentally reaching the screen shown above while having no intention of doing so, I must therefore consider a spooky possibility: that the hard-to-explain appearance of the Alarms screen that I saw was a kind of paranormal omen, harbinger or portent, a vague warning that presages some future event that is a cause for alarm. On the same day this happened, I had a dream about a very alarming event that might happen in the future. I won't mention what that event was, to avoid alarming the reader. 

Postscript: This morning I had another dream that may have been a warning of a future calamity. The dream was vivid.  High up in some tall tower, I could see far away three raging fires, and huge columns of black smoke rising up from these distant fires. Then in the dream there was a huge shower of rocks that I could see from the tower windows, rocks falling upon the building I was in and the surrounding area, rocks falling from the sky. 

Post-postscript: On the 17th (a few days after publishing this post) the Alarm screen anomaly recurred. This time I did not notice it after a walk. A few minutes after viewing a text from someone on my phone, while in my home, I was surprised again to see the Alarms screen shown as above (I having made no conscious attempt to access the Clock app producing the screen). On this phone there is no feature automatically causing an app you previously accessed to be more readily accessible. For the Alarms screen to have shown up on this day, there again would have had to have occurred (within a very short time, maybe two minutes) some two accidental touches of the phone which both would have an improbability of about 1 in 100, there being about 1 chance in 10,000 of their combined occurrence.  

No comments:

Post a Comment