AIBU to believe FIL time slip experience?

So many of these "experiences" are so very easily explainable.

Loads of people have stories of thinking of someone they haven't spoken to in a while and then Wow, lo and behold, their phone rings and it's them! At the exact time they are thinking of them, with no rational explanation! Must be something supernatural, right?

Wrong. What neither conciously noticed was a trigger that made both of them think of the other at the same time, a song on the radio station they both had on in the background, a story on the news they both watched half an hour ago, or something in the newspaper they both read. Something that they didn't realise made them each think of the other, and one phones, and voila! Magic.
But not. Not even coincidence.

Similar explanations can be made for many of these. You dreamed someone was going to die and they did but it was out of the blue, a stroke or heart attack? No, your subconcious brain recognised signals your concious brain didnt, or didn't want to register. Your uncncious processing told you there was reason for concern, hence dreams of death, you knew but didn't know there was a reason they might die. And then they do...it wasn't a premonition at all.

Brains are complex. That's the explanation. Not mind reading or the supernatural or woo. Just glorious, complex, woefully misunderstood human brains.

I'll share my 'woo' coincidence.

My husband was walking the dog early one Saturday while I was enjoying a lie-in. The phone rang but I didn't get to it in time - 1471 (yes, it was a while ago) revealed it was my PIL's number so I waited till my husband was back and let him know to give them a call

He called, and his dad answered because his mum was out. He usually phoned them once a week but always spoke to his mum as his dad didn't like speaking on the phone and only ever answered it if he was the only one in the house. Both FIL and MIL (when she got back from the shop) were adamant they hadn't called us, so we couldn't explain the call I'd missed earlier.

That evening we got another call - from his mum, to say that his dad had suddenly died of heart failure. He was old, but hadn't been ill.

My husband, who is a Christian, likes to think the missed call was God's way of making sure he spoke to his dad on the day he died.

It's no different to religion though is it?

It's not surprising we look for the 'coincidences' in difficult times, it's comforting.

That's why so many remembered coincidences happen at times that loved ones die.

It's the way our brains have been evolved to cope.

Whatever the reason for it it's very very interesting.

Very much not the implication of your previous posts where every explanation is met with another astonishing coincidence that you've calculated as less likely than it really is, but OK. Who knows what the teapot mice are doing to our brains.

You make me smile @SurprisedWithAHorse .

I'm agreeing with you I'm just talking about why the mind wants us to 'believe in the woo' and saying that that isn't a bad thing.

You seem to be missing my point.

goodness me you are a kill joy aren't you?

This really does say everything, I think, about why people cling to this stuff so desperately.

I object, though. I love the idea of mice in teapots.

Shame it didn't transfer to lottery tickets!

I wonder why!

But no doubt someone out there used a significant date or feeling and won, so they must be the psychic ones.

Another coincidence I experienced in the same year in France about 3 months after this friends death was that I was called back to the UK to be witness in a criminal trial so I boarded a flight back to the UK to attend it.

My dad was supposed to be picking me up from the airport but he died that morning suddenly from a heart attack, he was 44.

At least I didn't have to take another phone call / be at the call box at the right time!

That was a shit year which is probably why my brain wants to think about the coincidences but the fact I was flying home that day was also improbable. A simple coincidence.

I know, but goodness me you are a kill joy aren't you?

There wasn't a wrong prediction, it was always right. Shame it didn't transfer to lottery tickets!

Coincidence and logic/ probability and neurology explains most 'woo' stuff but if some people believe in religion then that is no different in my mind from people believing in woo stuff.

Why did my brain tell me to go to where the phone was ringing at the precise moment I did to receive the call I received about my friend, I'll never know. But it did. Her's was a sudden tragic young death so there was no message I could have been obviously subconsciously receiving, but there I was.

My logic tells me it was simple coincidence but these fluke coincidences are interesting which is why there is such a market for ghost stories, time slip stories (best one I've read is 11.22.63 - by Stephen King) and things like the marvel multiverses.

Well, he was known as the baby sex predictor in our family.

Yes of course he was. It doesn't change the fact that when there are only two possible outcomes, all combinations of guesses are equally likely. Of course you're going to remember and note the fully successful streak but it's no less likely than any other specific combination.

That's why we also get psychic pigs and octopi predicting the outcomes of football games.

Oh and when she said 'oh that one's been here before' she didn't mean at the play centre!!!

Well, he was known as the baby sex predictor in our family. The eldest of 10 future grandchildren, too young to predict the first but the next 9 were right!

And he was right about friends babies etc.

He also had an imaginary friend when he was younger who told him things that he wouldn't have otherwise known at his age, of course he was most probably getting the information from elsewhere but it he was a very interesting young child in what he seemed to know.

Someone approached me in a play centre and said of him too, 'that one's been here before'. Most peculiar.

He doesn't have any of it now from what I can tell, although he's 17 and doesn't speak to me that much being a teenager, more grunts than anything!

As a 50:50 chance, getting it right each time was no more or less likely than any other combination of correct/incorrect guesses.

The confirmation bias is very clear.

Oh I've done that too.

But that's much easier to 'predict' logically isn't it, because of the age of the person and the point they are at in their life?

My son ALWAYS got the sex right when he was a toddler/ young child. 50/50 chance I know but that was over several pregnancies.

What you'd really need is all the times something bad happened and you didn't happen to be doing something at the time that you'd later come to see as a premonition. Then do the maths.

I would expect things to coincide occasionally. It would be weird if they didn't. How many times, for example, did you dream about a black haired person and not meet a new one the next day? Is it really so astounding that on one occasion you did? I've had those sorts of dreams, dream of a red dress and then saw someone wearing one. Never saw it as a premonition. We dream about lots of everyday things, then we see lots of everyday things. It's inevitable that they'll sometimes match up.

I'm already starting to see a bias towards noting bad things rather than happy ones, too. Why aren't there so many premonitions around someone announcing an unexpected engagement or pregnancy?

Well that's that then.

@MammaYamada given that the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy when dinosaurs roamed, that would require time, and significant space, travel.

I'm not sure that a "time slip to prehistoric times" is actually more probable than "a giant beast still living". And both are less probable than "humans tell themselves stories and make shit up all the time."

I've had a couple of experiences.
Years ago at school aged 13/14 I had a vivid dream about someone, a boy with striking blue eyes and blonde curls, I didn't know anyone fitting this description.
Next day at school I was in our communal area and this boy from my dream was there, looking exactly how I'd dreamt, he was new to the school that day.

A few years back I had one of those dreams that wakes you up trembling and sweating. I had dreamt I was at a funeral and was really upset.
Later that day MIL died. She hadn't been ill and it wasn't expected, she was early 60's and had a massive stroke.
🤷‍♀️

@Trampley yes I believe that too. I once heard that our dreams don’t pan out in real time, that they all happen in a split second before we wake - whole complex stories.

Years ago I was sleeping and I had a dream that was culminating in me being put into a guillotine, and as it came down I heard a crash - my mirror had fallen off the wall and woke me, right as the guillotine came down. That made me believe that the brain is capable of coming up with a full story in a split second, as the mirror falling couldn’t possibly have coordinated itself with my dream.

Yes I have. I was married with two children
I went outside to put rubbish in the bin.
some how I lost over half an hour. I felt myself wakeup still holding the rubbish in my hand. I felt like I had gone somewhere with people talking to me warning me. I was told in 12 months 10.30 am the date month I would be leaving this home
divorced. I couldn’t believe it.
i told my mother and she wrote it in a note book then I forgot about it
A year later Divorced living in a new home.
I visited my mom, we remembered the note book. The removal truck and I an kids left my home at 10.30 am on the day an month written in the little note book

Not quite a premonition but I couldn’t shake the fact that someone very close to me was going to die during the second lockdown. I thought it was going to be someone I saw a lot, maybe a good friend, and assumed it would be from covid. I was really uneasy and told quite a few people how worried I was

Thats just thinking of something highly likely though. It’s a pandemic so quite probable that a lot of people will die, including people you know and are close to. So it’s not woo when this happens. I’m sorry it was your dad, but it really was highly likely that someone close to us all was going to die. It was probably more of a shock if it didn’t happen tbh.

I think the Lochness Monster might be a time-slip phenomenon to prehistoric times, and that is why there's no physical evidence.

And if you talk about chances they can be calculated in different ways, looking at the 24 hour clock the phone rang a minute at most after I arrived at the post box otherwise I'd have seen there was no post and gone back so the chances of me being there at that precise minute could be calculated at 1 in 1440 which is actually more like how the odds of it happening felt.

Lol yes, I didn't realise a turn of phrase would be subject to such scrutiny! !

It still was a massive coincidence to be there at that precise point in time. Even more so because I had a feeling that I needed to be there, which is why I was there!

King's Cross fire - I know other stories about this (and their probable explanations), but this one's about a premonition that wasn't.

I'd arranged to meet assorted friends for an after-work drink near King's Cross. I didn't usually get the bus, but did that evening because it happened to pass as I was running to my Tube station. The bus was diverted and then terminated, which was when I found out what was happening.

Naturally concerned about my friends, I rang everyone until we were all accounted for. Every single one had been delayed or had decided not to get the Tube for one reason and another.

Lucky? For us, yes. Miraculous? No. Any other evening, we wouldn't have discussed how each of us travelled to the bar or bothered about someone being late. Similar sets of circumstances must've happened all the time, minus the tragedy that made them significant that day.

Still, some of the friends felt there'd been some 'intervention' or they'd 'just known' it wasn't a good idea to get the Tube. You sometimes add these extra layers of meaning afterwards, perhaps because of your emotional connection to the tragedy or even a slight sense of survivor guilt.

Incalculably small chance = 1 in 336.

Not a big chance, but a calculably small one.