A Precognitive Dream?

You probably know how Youtube.com works. Somehow it presents video clip choices that are good guesses for what you might want to see, based on whichever videos you have previously clicked on or searched for (particularly recent clicks and searches). I remember something odd a few months ago. I was telling someone that one of the videos YouTube had presented in my list of suggested video choices was one that matched the very specific content of some dream I had that day (I think it was a performance of the same song I had heard in my dream that morning). I joked with the person, saying, "What, can YouTube read my mind now?"

Today something similar happened. This morning I dreamed of the rooftop dance scene in the 1961 movie West Side Story. This evening I saw in my list of suggested YouTube video choices a video of exactly that scene, a very good musical number you can watch here. Now, you might rather easily explain this coincidence if I had in recent months searched for songs from that musical, or clicked on songs from that musical. But I have not done that in more than a year, searching instead for other things on YouTube almost every day.  

One hypothesis to explain the coincidence is precognition. I should keep an eye open on whether there are any further strange matches of this type. 

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed today. It's kind of semi-green. 

A Precognitive Dream?

Yesterday I dreamed that Nancy Pelosi was at the Democratic National Convention, telling jokes about politicians in the Republican party. The convention will be held in Chicago this week. I did an internet search to see whether I could find any information to corroborate this dream. I saw a news article saying that Pelosi will be in Chicago, and will be featured on Stephen Colbert's Late Show as part of its coverage of the  convention. Now, Colbert is a comedian, and his Late Show is basically witty banter,  so we can assume that Pelosi will tell a joke or two about the Republicans, just like in my dream. 

If the dream was precognitive, it was not my first such dream. About a year before the World Trade Center collapsed, I had a dream of it collapsing. It is the only building that has collapsed in one of my dreams. 

Postscript: Pelosi did speak at the Democratic National Convention on August 21, 2024, but her speech had no jokes. There was widespread discussion on the Internet that day about whether at the convention on the previous night Barack Obama had made a certain type of joke by indicating with his hands a certain length while referring to Donald Trump's focus on crowd sizes. And The Guardian stated that in her speech at the convention Michele Obama  "lampooned" Trump on that night. So I can merely describe my dream as being roughly accurate, but not precisely accurate. 

Did I Get a Paranormal Warning of the September 1 Ida Disaster?

On May 6, 2021 I posted a post on this blog entitled "Spooky Outage." I described a mysterious power failure in my apartment that occurred at 9:01 AM on May 4, 2021, and lasted only a few minutes. Nobody was doing anything unusual in my apartment at the time, and the power returned without anyone touching any fuse box or circuit breakers.  When I checked the power company's web site on power outages on May 4, it showed no sign of such an outage. I asked a security guard at my large apartment building on May 4 whether he knew of any power outage at our building, and he said no one had mentioned such a thing. On May 6 he told me he had asked the building superintendant (who would have known if anyone was working on the electricity at our building), and that superintendant said he knew nothing about any power interruption. So the power outage seems to have occurred only in my apartment on May 4. 

I thought several times before September 1 that the 9:01 event might have been a warning relating to September 1, 2021 (September 1 being a date of 9/1, which corresponds to a clock time of 9:01).  Nothing bad happened to me on September 1. But on that day the city where I live (New York City) experienced a record amount of rainfall, as remnants of Hurricane Ida struck the city.  Thirteen people in New York City were suddenly killed by the storm.  Referring to Wednesday September 1, 2021, a news story states this: 

"The New York City metropolitan area was struck by sudden disaster on Wednesday night as the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded subways, roads, and homes. At least 45 were killed in New York and New Jersey, and a total of at least 52 across the Northeast. Ida was the worst natural disaster to strike the area since 2012’s Superstorm Sandy."

Another "TV Precognition" Experience?

In the post here I described an astonishing event in which there popped into my head for some reason an idea for something that would be funny on a TV show I was watching -- the concept of magician Michael Carbonaro putting a frozen fish into a microwave, and then later removing from the microwave a live moving fish. Within 60 seconds the TV show (which I had never watched before) had exactly such a sequence of events occurring.

Last night something similar happened. I turned my TV to the Turner Classic Movies station, which was showing a 1984 comedy movie I have never watched before: This Is Spinal Tap.  A few seconds after turning to this channel, for some reason there pops into my mind a memory of a quote from the movie, in which a dimwitted character incorrectly said something like "Boston isn't a college town."  The memory may have come from a review I read of the movie in 1984.  About 10 seconds after recalling this memory, I hear something like this on the TV:

Character 1: We had to cancel the Boston concert.
Character 2: Don't worry, Boston isn't much of a college town.

Events like this (suggesting precognition) don't fit in with our existing ideas about how time works. But there are speculative models of time in which precognition could be occurring. For a discussion of one such model, see my post "Does the Future Splash on the Present?"