At 6:45 a.m., I was having a quite fascinating dream wherein I was developing a psychological theory that would help determine what approaches would be best to help individual employees through corporate-wide changes. It was an interesting theory, and I was skating at the edge of consciousness as I half-dreamed, half-developed the idea.

I was at my old workplace Borders, talking with old friends and starting to create the questionnaire that would drive the theory, when suddenly I was in a bed. My ailing grandmother - who I have never, to the best of my knowledge, dreamed about - ran into the room in her favorite outfit, threw herself onto the bed, and began to cry.

I stroked her hair and told her that it was all right, in a dream so vivid I could feel her body against mine, the same gramma hug.

Then I woke up.

If I am psychic, something bad will have happened to my grandmother at 6:45 a.m. - if classic theory is to be believed, she will have died, but I'd also accept some form of major upset like a fall or a stroke.

But while I do believe in strange phenomena, I also do believe in just random coincidences. I've had the amazing time when I was thinking of someone and then they called!, but I also know that that's the call I'm going to remember. Chances are good that I'm not going to remember the seventy or eighty other times I was thinking about someone and they didn't call at that moment.

I firmly believe that with the amount of experiences packed into an average seventy-year life, there are bound to be at least two or three coincidences just by chance that are so astronomically unlikely that they smack of something otherwordly. As humans, we're horribly bad at evaluating odds, and I think that most psychic phenomena is pure hooey, a strange moment remembered when the thousand mundane experiences get forgotten. In a life with a million experiences, you're going to hit the million-to-one shot sooner or later.

I'd like to think that there's something greater out there than just us, packed into tiny cages of bone and meat.... But I've done psychic tricks at parties and I know how easy it is to get people to believe. (If you want to prove to someone you can read their mind, then take their hand in yours and lead them to the exact spot they're thinking of. The reason this works is because every time you step forward, you tug gently on their hand; if you're going in some other direction, they'll provide a slight whisper of resistance, and you can then correct your course.)

If I don't hear from my mother by this afternoon, I'll send her an email. If something grand and wonderful has happened, then I'll mark the moment. But if not, I'll remember this moment - this vivid, out-of-place dream - and catalogue it as another potentially-eerie moment that just didn't work out.

Current Mood: cynical

(Tell me I'm full of it)