From time to time throughout my life, I have had psychic-seeming experiences where I have known something that it should not have been humanly possible to know. Some of these things I can explain to myself by saying that it's some sort of Derren Brown/Sherlock Holmes observation of something everyone COULD see, but doesn't, even if this involves something humans are not consciously aware of such as changes in hormone levels.
Examples of this category include correctly identifying the winner of each presidential campaign since 1992 months in advance, knowing the gender of unborn children, correctly spotting that a family member was having an affair, and knowing that an individual promoting the Muslim Student Association at my school was gay before being told that by my gay friend.
With the presidential campaigns, it is possible that I subconsciously picked up on something, such as charisma or confidence, that would lead others to vote for the individual, and extrapolated on that that the individual would win. With the babies, we do not yet know all the changes that are produced in a woman's body while pregnant, for example it was recently discovered that the fetus' blood mixes with the mother's, and it is possible that there is a pheromone or something that allows some minor percentage of the population to know the gender of the baby.
The moment I knew my aunt was having an affair was when my grandmother called my mother to berate my mother for being fat and to tell her that her sister had lost a lot of weight. I instantly knew she was having an affair, and then questioned what would make me say that, and realized that she'd been married for over 15 years and nothing special had happened recently in her marriage that she might want to get into shape for. A few weeks later she ran away with another man. Similarly, it is possible that I picked up on some cue imperceptible to the conscious mind from the young man at the MSA booth, perhaps a brief facial expression, that allowed me to identify him as gay.
Others could be explained as self-fulfilling prophesies, such as the time I had a strong conviction that the softball team I was playing on was going to win a game. Although I was a piss-poor player, I was the person who completed the action that won the game, and this was probably at least in part because of my confidence that my team was going to win.
Similar to this was my prediction to my father that if he enrolled me in a school for 9th grade, his mother would fall ill, there would be a large snow storm, and he would pull me out of the school midway through the term. His mother was in her late 80's, so her falling ill was not something that should have by itself been surprising, and would have likely happened in any given year. Large snow storms are not uncommon on the northern eastern seaboard of America, where I lived, so again, this would have been somewhat likely to have happened in any year.
By telling my father he would pull me out of the school, I set up the situation where there was an expectation that the teachers and principal would end up treating me unfairly, and a heightened awareness to the faults of people I knew were not good people. This probably also effected my behavior towards the school staff. which may have partially resulted in their poor behavior towards me.
However, some things continue to confuse me. When I was a young pre-teen, I was sexually abused. Following some instances of abuse, I experienced two phantom pregnancies. I had some of the physical symptoms of pregnancy, and as I stated earlier, I knew the genders of the babies. The first was a girl, and I decided to name her Judith. The second was a boy, and I named him Sylvanus. I sang to my phantom fetuses, and I had a very specific song that I sang, from the movie "The Prince of Egypt", about a river carrying them to safety. I mentally willed my children to go to France, where I have extended family, in the hopes that they would be able to live normal lives there.
This sort of semi-psychotic relationship with a non-existent child would not in itself be spectacular, and could easily be explained as a dissociative identity style invention of a fictional individual, had it not been for the fact that I went to the UK many years later and stayed with a French family with two children, named Judith and Sylvanus. I had not known this family, or the friends who had arranged for me to stay with them, at the time of the phantom pregnancies. Intrigued, a few hours after having met the children, I started humming the song I sang to my phantom babies. They both started to cry.
If I had only met a child named Judith, I would have been able to accept that although it is a somewhat uncommon name, it is popular enough that any two people could have separately come to the decision to name a child that. I could probably have even convinced myself that if it had been just Sylvanus. But to see both of them, as siblings, being on holiday from the same country I willed my children to, seems so astronomically improbable that I have trouble wrapping my head around it.
I do subscribe to the infinite multiverse theory, where every time a sub-atomic particle has a choice of behaving in one of two ways, a new universe branches off that was until that instant identical to the one it branched off from. And I do believe that in such an infinite universe no matter how improbable something seems, if there is any statistical probability of it happening, it must happen in some number of universes. And I know that it is an act of hubris to believe your improbable thing is an exception to that rule. But I still struggle to accept that this could explain something as personally profound as this.
This exact type of thing (babies switching wombs) is mentioned in Jewish literature. In the Midrash (basically the Jewish equivalent of the Muslim Hadith, but not legally binding; in general, halakhah cannot be derived from the Midrash), it says that Leah was pregnant with Joseph and Rachel was pregnant with Dinah. Leah knew that their husband Jacob was destined to have 12 sons. She had already borne him six sons, and his two slave-concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, had born him 2 sons each, so she realized that if she bore him a seventh son her sister Rachel would not even have as many children as the slave women. Therefore, she prayed that the children would be switched, so she would give birth to Dinah and Rachel would give birth to Joseph. (BT Berakhot 60a; Tanhuma [ed. Buber], Vayeze 19.)
This exact type of thing (babies switching wombs) is mentioned in Jewish literature. In the Midrash (basically the Jewish equivalent of the Muslim Hadith, but not legally binding; in general, halakhah cannot be derived from the Midrash), it says that Leah was pregnant with Joseph and Rachel was pregnant with Dinah. Leah knew that their husband Jacob was destined to have 12 sons. She had already borne him six sons, and his two slave-concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, had born him 2 sons each, so she realized that if she bore him a seventh son her sister Rachel would not even have as many children as the slave women. Therefore, she prayed that the children would be switched, so she would give birth to Dinah and Rachel would give birth to Joseph. (BT Berakhot 60a; Tanhuma [ed. Buber], Vayeze 19.)
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