Interesting article with a tale about two women who travel to Versailles and share a strange experience in the gardens that they end up, after much research and study, describing as being an encounter in the garden from Marie Antoinette's perspective. They feel they stepped inside Marie Antoinette's mind as it existed during a turbulent episode when MA was in danger.
I am not an authority on this subject but while reading this article I was reminded of another strange encounter documented by a well-known author.
I believe that it was John Steinbeck who described in his book of collected WWII experiences "Once There Was A War" an event which happened to him one evening during the Blitz.
From memory he recalled walking along a lane one night and passing a warmly lit cottage home with an old woman visible through a window. It was a peaceful scene. I think the story went that he didn't remember the cottage being there when he went by earlier and asked someone local about it. They told him that there had indeed been a cottage at that place but that it had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the old lady who lived there a long time before he walked by the spot.
Anyway, nice story. The world is full of things that are hard to explain.
Sorry, I find the story with the cottage quite easy to explain.
Imagine two alternate universes:
1. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there never was a cottage at that place. The man forgets about it because it's not an interesting story.
2. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there was a cottage at that place that had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the lady who lived there. The man describes this in his book because it's an interesting story.
There are a lot of people in the world, and because they are all humans, they all have faulty memories. The few faulty memories which happen to correlate with supernatural events get shared, and the rest are forgotten.
In terms of Fortean experiences, these are sometimes called timeslips, and there's plenty of them documented, however that encounter in Versailles is the one that usually gets rolled out. There's been a few cases of forward-slips, definitely looking forward to getting my hands on a hover-car is things like this are to be believed.
I've heard about those, where people notice things going very silent before a mundane but out of place scene unfolds before them.
Wing Commander V. Goddard claimed to have spotted a Royal airforce base several years into the future, noticing mundane, but ultimately true details like the changed color of the aircraft mechanics overalls.
The only remotely paranormal experience I ever had was when I was in the Pyrenees mountains in France. It was the middle of the night and I sat alone between large rusty metal structures, that had been airlifted down from an old abandoned mine higher up.
It felt historically significant to me and being young and stupid, I decided it might be an interesting experiment to "open my mind" to the material. Not that I had any idea what that entailed. I just sat there and let my mind drift, while consciously disabling anything that felt like a firewall on my thoughts.
Suddenly I got jolted into the far too real experience of a mine elevator cable snapping and men screaming as it went down. In fact, I felt like I was one of them, screaming along with them, fully experiencing the sensation of immediate life threatening panic. It was completely unexpected and quite terrifying. I jumped up and ran out of that field, only calming down when I was far away from that place.
I would not qualify it as an actual trip to the past. More as an example of what kind of things the human brain can create when given free range. But I won't completely dismiss the possibility of material holding on to some form of memory, mostly because of how vivid and unexpectedly intense this experience was.
A good discussion is https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/1991-castle.pdf , which highlights the curious criticism of https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/parapsychology/1950-sabine.... which argues that it wasn't retrocognition but precognition of their future research on their vision - so the archive research 'proved' their vision because the vision was of that archive research in the first place! Thus, you could never prove retrocognition because it could just be precognition of the proof.
I found the epistemological paradoxes here amusing enough to write some more about: https://gwern.net/retrocognition (My contribution here is to suggest that Sabine doesn't go far enough: precognition of verification is also self-refuting, because if it's possible, why haven't we already precognitively copied the proof of precognition into the present?)
Reading this makes these psychologists sound like they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to end up chasing their tails in both directions winding and unwinding the timeline.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadI am not an authority on this subject but while reading this article I was reminded of another strange encounter documented by a well-known author.
I believe that it was John Steinbeck who described in his book of collected WWII experiences "Once There Was A War" an event which happened to him one evening during the Blitz.
From memory he recalled walking along a lane one night and passing a warmly lit cottage home with an old woman visible through a window. It was a peaceful scene. I think the story went that he didn't remember the cottage being there when he went by earlier and asked someone local about it. They told him that there had indeed been a cottage at that place but that it had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the old lady who lived there a long time before he walked by the spot.
Anyway, nice story. The world is full of things that are hard to explain.
Imagine two alternate universes:
1. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there never was a cottage at that place. The man forgets about it because it's not an interesting story.
2. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there was a cottage at that place that had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the lady who lived there. The man describes this in his book because it's an interesting story.
There are a lot of people in the world, and because they are all humans, they all have faulty memories. The few faulty memories which happen to correlate with supernatural events get shared, and the rest are forgotten.
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/time-or-dimens...
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/bizarre-...
Wing Commander V. Goddard claimed to have spotted a Royal airforce base several years into the future, noticing mundane, but ultimately true details like the changed color of the aircraft mechanics overalls.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/fascinating...
It felt historically significant to me and being young and stupid, I decided it might be an interesting experiment to "open my mind" to the material. Not that I had any idea what that entailed. I just sat there and let my mind drift, while consciously disabling anything that felt like a firewall on my thoughts.
Suddenly I got jolted into the far too real experience of a mine elevator cable snapping and men screaming as it went down. In fact, I felt like I was one of them, screaming along with them, fully experiencing the sensation of immediate life threatening panic. It was completely unexpected and quite terrifying. I jumped up and ran out of that field, only calming down when I was far away from that place.
I would not qualify it as an actual trip to the past. More as an example of what kind of things the human brain can create when given free range. But I won't completely dismiss the possibility of material holding on to some form of memory, mostly because of how vivid and unexpectedly intense this experience was.
I found the epistemological paradoxes here amusing enough to write some more about: https://gwern.net/retrocognition (My contribution here is to suggest that Sabine doesn't go far enough: precognition of verification is also self-refuting, because if it's possible, why haven't we already precognitively copied the proof of precognition into the present?)