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.  

Strange Saturday

 When I woke up this morning I picked up my smartphone, and was surprised by what I saw. There was displayed a message I had received months ago, some junk marketing message. Why, I asked, would that old message be displayed on the screen of my smartphone? Then I realized there was a connection between the message and the name of a deceased relative.  Was this just coincidence, I wondered? Or could it be that the deceased have some way to manipulate smartphones in a way that drops hints about their continued existence? I will "keep an eye open" for such an anomaly, but I cannot claim yet to have much in the way of evidence for it. 

Then there was the "ghost cat" that made a brief translucent appearance on my monitor. 

I had a dream this morning of one cat (either a living cat or a ghost cat) looking down at the body of a dead cat. I used Google's ImageFX to try and recreate what I saw in the dream. The resulting AI-generated image showed a cat with open eyes floating above a lying cat with closed eyes. The dream image rather hinted at the possibility that the soul of a cat may survive the death of a cat.  I posted the image on Facebook, saying that it was an AI representation of what I had dreamed. (I would post the image here, but a rule I have always followed is to never, ever publish AI work or art work on this site, with the exception of diagrams that are obviously diagrams.)  

My image was not quite what I wanted, because the "ghost cat" in my image did not look transparent. A few hours after publishing the AI representation of my dream on Facebook, I saw something weird on my screen. Somehow my screen was blending some post I was writing on a different topic, and the AI art of the floating ghost cat. But now somehow the "ghost cat" was translucent, which it was not before. I could see through the "ghost cat" to see text I was writing underneath it. Somehow, by some process I cannot explain, the intended image of a ghost cat had become translucent, as ghosts are often reported to be. I tried to reproduce the effect, but was absolutely unable to. 

Was this somehow some paranormal sign meant to suggest: yes, the soul of a cat really does survive its death? All I know is that I can't explain the translucency I saw. 

Postscript: As soon as I finished the post above, I walked outdoors to take a walk. Immediately (while still at the doorstep) I saw a large black-and-orange Monarch butterfly fly by me, no more than an arm's length away. This is the only time in the three and a half years I have lived at this location that I have seen such a Monarch butterfly at this location. I noted well the synchronicity between this symbol of life after death (the Monarch butterfly) and me just finishing a post mentioning life after death. Monarch butterflies are a symbol of life after death because caterpillars undergo a death-like transition before becoming butterflies that soar up into the sky.  Below is a quote from an earlier 2017 post of mine:

"A few days ago my wife's father died. This morning I had a dream that seemed to fuse together the symbol of the rainbow and the symbol of the butterfly. In my dream I saw a big butterfly in my apartment, one with a rainbow-like set of colors (I can never recall noticing colors so clearly in a dream). In my dream I simply opened the window of my apartment, and the butterfly flew out. I then awoke. It's the only dream I've ever had of a butterfly.

The symbolism of the dream seems striking: the rainbow theme, the butterfly theme, and the 'escaping from the prison' theme of the butterfly flying out of the apartment window. A metaphor for the soul escaping the prison of the body?"

To read about very, very many dreams I have had that seemed to symbolize life after death, and very many dreams I have had about the deceased, read my long post here. 

Also, upon returning from the walk I took just after writing the top part of this post, I noticed a small feather in the middle of the floor, in a very noticeable position in the center of a living room.  I cannot account for how the feather  appeared there, and there was no one else in the home during my walk. Some consider feathers as a life-after-death symbol, as angels are often depicted with feathers. About 2 hours before I noticed the feather, I took pictures of the area that the feather was found in; and the pictures showed no such feather.  The feather was found about 4 meters from a front door on a day not windy, leaving only the slimmest chance that its appearance where I saw it could have been the result of a gust of wind when I opened the door. I noticed no wind on my walk. 

Post-postscript: "Strange Saturday" turned into "Spooky Sunday." This weekend I am alone in a house until my wife returns mid-week. Last night in the middle of the night I was surprised to see an internet router device was lit up, one that I always turn off and make lightless before going to bed. After awaking in the morning I then walked up to the second floor of the house, and found the ceiling lights of the main living room were on, lights sufficient to light up the whole large room. I had (to the best of my remembrance) turned off the lights before leaving that room last night, at a time it was dark outside.  The physical arrangement of the stairs and room is such that accidentally leaving on the overhead lights at night is extremely improbable.