h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

.....I've been told that Deja-Vu doesn't exist. Something about your brain processing the information from your dominant eye a split second faster than the other eye.....ummmmm...well anyway, Hi there.

Okay, I'll relay one of the more vivid incidents: About a year ago I had a dream about a nightgown with roses... very vivid. I could even tell that it sat folded on a wood surface with a hideously obnoxious orange background, amongst some other articles of clothing. I confidently announced to my little sister (who is hesitant about this sort of thing) that I would recieve a rose-printed nightie at christmas from our grandparents in Germany. (We get nightgowns every year from them...) No nightgowns came that year. Grrrrr...
A month ago we visited them in Germany for the first time ever. The whole house seemed like a deja vu, but that's beside the point, because as I went upstairs to the room we were staying in, I noted the tacky hasn't-been-replaced-since-the-sixties wallpaper, and then I saw it. The dresser had two piles of clothes on it, one topped with a rose-printed nightie. It was a painful scene to stare at, because the tacky wallpaper was bright orange.

Just relaying what happened...

don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe in deja v, precognition and all that stuff. I can't remember where I heard that.

Here's my most vivid example.

About a year ago I had a dream. In this dream I was just sitting around painting in my studio. I was visited by an ex-girlfriend who I hadn't seen for 5 years. There was I guy with her who I knew but couldn't place at the time. We had a fairly civil conversation. I woke up and wrote it all down in my sketchbook. I usualy don't do this but my dreams aren't usualy filled with so much detail.

Two weeks later, after I had forgotten about it, I get a knock on my studio door. My ex walks in. She has an old friend of mine with her who I hadn't seen in a long while. We talked for about 15 minutes and then they went on their way....never to be seen or heard from by me again.

I thought something was strange, dismissed it and went back to work at my easel.

Later I flipped through my sketchbook and found where I wrote the dream down. It gave me a chill. The dream and the actual event were almost word-for word-identical...including an awkward pause following a phone call I recieved.

It was pretty weird but I'm used to this kind of thing.

I know, it kind of grows on you, doesn't it? The chill never really goes completely away, but after awhile it's like: "Oh? are we doing this again?" and you just sit back and see what happens, and note if anything else pops out at you.

That whole trip to Germany was literally one big Deja Vu. Mostly it was in single-sense form... you know, just a picture, or a sound, or even how something feels. Travel seems to really bring it out in me. Do emothional situations do it for you? It's supposed to, but rarely does for me.

What about 'stupid coincidences'? Here's one: My sister was watching the Haunting... the remake starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. She left to go to a freind's house or something, and I turned the movie off and rewound it. The VCR channel was on the news and I wasn't in the mood, so I flicked it to the Discovery channel. The discovery channel 'just happened' to be airing a documentry on classic scary movies. The first clip shown? The original "Haunting", starting at the very scene I had stopped the movie at. Sound familiar? You do something (usually unwittingly) and something else happens (totally unrelated to your action) that coincides so closely it gives you chills? How often? I get that once, maybe twice a day. It gets downright annoying.

My "stupid coincidences"... if you can call them that. ( They certainly make me laugh sometimes)

The most common one has to do with the radio. I tend to know what song is going to come up next. My sister is very amused by this. I seem to hear the music in my head and then there it is. And it's not new music. Not the stuff you are used to hearing every day. Just yesterday my sister was around , she changed the radio to some "soft rock" (YUCK!) Phil Collins got stuck in my head (THE HORROR!)..."it's a groovy kind of love"....I told my sister what was coming up and bet her five dollars. Ten minutes later the song was there. I won five dollars.

In college I would drive one of my roomates crazy. For some reason I am especially tuned to songs by "the Police". I would always know when one of their songs was on the air. I explained this useless talent to him one day and he didn't believe me. I told him to give it a week and his opinion would change. At least 4 times a day I would get up, turn on the stereo and find the song that I said was on. He thought it was hilarious.

The first time anything like this happened to me I was in a laundromat with my mother. I was ten yeard old. I was sitting in a plastic chair staring at a washer. The image of water covering the floor entered my mind. A half hour later a pipe burst in front of me leaving three inches of water to shuffle through.

These are just a couple of the ones that always make me laugh. Ive got lots more.

Oh, by the way...sorry about that wallpaper. That must have been rough.

Music figures in... but mostly through Winamp and my MP3s. Freshly shuffled playlists sometimes do my bidding, but not nearly as much to be want to bet anything more than a few pennies on.

Sometimes I get scary/weird premonitions like the whole pipe thing-- but usually it's just me being paranoid. I guess I'm not at any sort of point yet where I can rely on whatever it is to make me money. Of course, I only just turned 18, and Deja Vu and the like have quadrupled in the past year, and it probably doubled in the year before that. You sound quite a bit older than that, and have had time to, ah, develop it.

How about Out of Body Experiences? My dad supposedly did that as a teenager, until he got lost, and almost didn't find his way back. That's about all he's told me about it. I don't think I want to try, but I'm curious about the phenomena.

I generally have much less interesting Deja-Vu type experiences. The one I usually have (and I think it might occur for a lot of people) is this: Something that happens during the course of my day will remind me of something I saw on a particular episode of some TV show, and then that same day or the next, I'll watch the show and see the very same episode. That must happen to me once a week. No, it's not all that impressive. In the case of shows I watch consistently, like the Simpsons, I've probably just seen them so much that I can sub-consciously keep track of how often they rerun things. But it's also happened to me regarding shows that I've seen maybe three episodes of and haven't watched for over a year. I'll just flip on the TV with nothing better to do, decide to watch the show, wonder if it'll be "that last episode I saw the last time I watched" and boom.

Wow. If there IS something paranormal going on, than I posess what could quite possibly be the lamest psychic power imaginable. And I don't think it's even that unique.

*smirk* You visit my persoanl page often, don't you?

It's either lame psychic ability, or you're very talented at predicting what networks will air during sweeps week. (But I get that one a lot, too.) Conspiracy.

Cheers! to the lame psychic abilities!

As for out of body experiences. No. Never had one.

It seems that I get whatever i have from my fathers side of the family. Dad seems to be pretty sensitive to stuff. One of my sisters also has some talent. She sees things in dreams sometimes. Nothing important though. She gets really freaked out about it at times. My other sister (the youngest) is like a piece of lead. Nothing gets in.

My fathers talent seems to be in seeing aparitions. We lived in an extremely haunted house when I was a kid. I've got some realy good stories about that place. up until a few years ago I wrote them off as an overactive childhood imagination. Until my uncle validated the stories for me.

Apparitions? Weird... I was going to ask you about that, but the message started looking a little long. (Not a total coincidence-- it seems like the next logical thing to bring up.)

So what did you see as a kid?

My grandmother's craft store was haunted by two ghosts (that we know of), a tall, pale woman with long dark hair (possibly oriental), wearing a white, waistless dress, and a little blonde girl (whom only I saw, once). The tall lady would throw things around, turn fans on and off, the usual. (One time she bent a flourescent lighting fixture almost in two, and the flourescent light still was technically in it, and worked-- I was deeply impressed.)

There was one time a friend and I were upstairs, in the loft behind and above the store (but still inside the canaverous warehouse) and there was a little blonde girl playing hopscotch or something, semi-translucently, of course. Then she ran back to one corner of the loft and stood there facing us, whilst the lady in white took form behind her, holding her shoulders. My friend and I ran down to the shop area, faces white with shock. Except when we explained ourselves, she claimed not to have seen the little girl or the woman, but only a whispery, floaty mist. I got really mad at her for lying, at the time, but I guess that's all she saw.

Oh, and I was the only one to ever hear the lady in white. I was wearing a really dorky, ill-fitting dress one day that my grandmother had bought me, and I wore so not as to hurt her feelings. I guess the ghost picked up on that. While I was in the back of the store, I didn't so much as hear laughter coming from the loft, as much as I felt like I was being laughed at. I looked up to the balcony and saw a faint shadow, trembling with giggles. I was hearing the laughter IN MY HEAD. Ugh!

ps
My little sis is as dense as lead, too. She finds strange coincidences, too, but generally only when they have to do with something that I was present for. I count them as mine-- she just finds them first. I had a brother, but he was autistic, and I don't know if he ever saw anything, and he died when he was six and I was nine, or something.

Damn it. I just typed about 200 words and my computer froze up...I shall angrily start over

My old houses ghost was that of a little boy of about 8 years old. I would see him often. Usually he would be walking up the stairs and past my bedroom. Every now and again I would wake and find him glaring at me from the foot of my bed. I would hide under my covers. My dad would see the same thing although only a smoky blur. He was an angry ghost. I'll explain why in a minute.

We had my uncle stay at the house one weekend while we went away. When we returned we found my uncle cowering in a corner of the house. He wouldn't say what happened. He never went inside the house again.

Here's the reason why the ghost was so angry.

My house was built next to a salt-marsh. Back in the 50's some neiborhood kids were playing cowboys and indians. They got carried away and did something terrible. The boy was hanged. I learned of this a few years ago and still don't know how to react.

The house I'm in now is also haunted. It's 214 years old so I suppose it would have to be. I've only ever seen her hands. She moves things. She's playfull actually...just letting us know she's there. The only other person to see her was a friend of mine and we saw her at the same time.

I'll tell you more later. Gotta reply to other posts and it's getting late.

I don't know what happened to the lady in white or the little blonde girl (though I suspect their stories differ, because of different clothing styles possibly indicating different points in time. i.e. the girl was in shorts and slippahs (flip-flops) and the lady was either in a long mu'u mu'u (local waistless dress) or a victorian era nightgown.) But it seems that the Lady has taken the little girl in as her own.

I'm very tempted to go to the furniture shop that resides there now and ask whether they've seen anything *dramatic pause* suspicious.

ps
Saw the pics of your work, VERY nice. (What's the medium you used on the Kumabear portrait? Charcoal?) Um, did you go to an art school or anything? I'm going to be going off to college here pretty quick, and I'm planning on being an art major (concentrating on digital imaging, mostly, but not because I can't cut it in real art). Can you tell me what to expect?

Didn't find this one on your page, actually. Did a forum search for stuff about this subject.

But anyway, other people get the rerun thing alot, as you said. It's not impressive. It's just the main thing I get. I have had some more interesting experiences. For instance, once I dreamt I was stepping-on/squashing some kind of small animal (I think it was a frog) in our driveway. This was unusual (BESIDES the fact that I normally don't dream about killing small animals) because A): I rememered it, and I usually can't remember my dreams - and B): The location was recognizeable as being OUR DRIVEWAY when I woke up; Normally locations and events that I recognize in my dreams turn out to be completely imaginary when I'm awake. Anyway, when I went outside that morning, I found that are cats had killed something in the driveway(not a frog). But it was in the exact spot that I remembered my dream taking place.

...I really could have recounted this event to you more dramtically, come to think of it.

But you said that you stepped on it in your dream. Are you sure you didn't step on it the night before, dreamt about it, and then woke to find that the cats had toyed with it a bit? (If there was a Nike skidmark in the frog, I'd say it was a dead give away... ) Maybe you saw your cats as an extension of your own spiritual being, trodding upon the frog of doubt... or maybe I shouldn't be mixing cough syrup with Kava Kava.


Ugh! Just realized really bad pun's presence in there! Bad, bad pun! No treat for you!!!

ps
Please explain the mouse-like sock puppet lurking over your right shoulder. (Unless you're a Shakespeare buff, and it's a very-bad-word-but-it's-a-synonym-for-shrew - like sock puppet.)

Just out of morbid curiosity, what was the actual animal?

I wouldn't suggest going back to the shop. I asked the people who live in the house if they noticed anything peculiar a while back....They thought I was crazy. Who knows? Maybe I am.

As for the kumabear ...that was drawn in ink on some 300lb watercolor paper. It only took about five minutes.

I did go to an art school, actually. Are you planning to go to a university or an art school?

As for what you can expect...bring a pillow to your art history classes. You'll be doing a good deal of sleeping. Avoid being an illustration major...The classes are great and you will learn alot. The problem though is finding work after graduation. I was an illustration major. Jobs are hard to come by. Now I focus on painting large canvasses.

Go for anything that has to do with design. Good money and you will find work afterwords.

Whatever you choose, be prepared for "interesting" models in your figure drawing classes *chills*

I'm going to Southern Oregon University in Ashland in a couple of weeks here. I don't think they have illustration majors there... just art. Interesting models? *sour face* Whatever happened to drawing fruit and stuff? Unless you are talking about the fruit... *pales* ... I'll shut up now.

Oh, but about the shop... even customers saw her (or her path of destruction). She wasn't one of those that only showed herself to us few. She wanted EVERYONE to know she was there. Besides, I've been looked at weird before. Check this out: http://www.FishInKona.com/

I originally posted it on the Lord of the Rings - Movie forum, claiming that I'd make the perfect Balrog. I'll be getting rid of the link soon, so hear it while you can. Please don't steal it, though. I'm a tad paranoid about someone using something of mine like this w/o my permission. Go ahead-- crank the volume. Yeah... that's me.

No, the puppet is an actual shrew, as in an anthropromorphisized cartoon animal. And it's on my right hand. I explain him more fully on my personal page. Basically though, I only use him for H2G2 "roleplaying," so he won't be contributing anything to "serious" discussions like this.

Zeb: "You just TRY and keep me quiet, Emar."

Sorry, that one just slipped out. But back to the topic at hand; Yes, I may have indeed SEEN the animal's carcass earlier (I think it was a rat, by the way), but I know that I never actually stepped on it in reality. I say this is because I don't remember having seen the animal before. Had I killed it myself, I definitely would've remembered it, but if it had just been another cat-victim I happened to find, I could have just decided to deal with it (pitch it into the woods with a shovel) in the morning, then forgotten about it. The other possibility is that it was just a coincidence that I dreamed of killing an animal in the driveway. After all, our cats are killing things all the time. It might NOT have been in the same spot as in my dream, but I only REMEMBERED my dream taking place there after I saw the carcass.

What does Zeb look like? Typical button-eyed sock puppet, or a more sophisticated furred deal?

More importantly, does HE get Deja Vu, and other unexplained phenomena a lot?

Man, he's a little tough to describe. I'm gonna post some pictures of him on my page as soon as I get some storage space. But if you MUST have a visual image NOW, he started as a cartoon character (and still will be, but that's another story) so he's more complicated than just a sock puppet. Picture a brown rat, with a really pointy nose, and a couple of really sharp fangs jutting out from his lower jaw. No eyes to speak of, just one straight, black eyebrow. Very surly and ill-tempered looking. In my cartoons, he wears an ill-fitting trenchcoat, so I guess that he wears one as a puppet as well. The main thing that sets the puppet version of him apart is that he ends at the waist, where I put him over my hand.

And no, he doesn't really seem like the kind of guy to have precognition and such. Maybe an occasional sense of Deja-Vu, but he wouldn't think much of it. Now, can we get back to the subject at hand? I'm sure Kumabear has been very patient with me for getting us sidetracked. Sheesh, this is exactly why I don't bring Zeb out for "real" discussions.

Chenchrae,......I think you just hurt my speakers.