• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

I'm seriously freaked out.

Everyone has had something unexplained happen to them?
Wrong. Nothing unexplained has ever happened to me.
 
Well, JP, I'm not going to bounce all over you regarding those other threads. On the other hand, though, make sure that you're reading the replies (I know you are) and applying the advice. In other words, when people say things like "it might be confirmation bias", apply that yourself when these freaky things happen: ask yourself "am I getting the whole story here? Is this person keeping a dream log? Or does she only remember the dreams that come true?" When you see people talk about unconscious cueing, remember that -- and the next time something freaky happens, say to yourself, "could there be some pattern in the way these people drive that might be providing clues that could very well happen?" You might want to do that before you post the next freaky-thing thread, and turn this into a discussion of what might be most likely, or what other people would explore, or possibilities you might have missed.

Honestly, I haven't read through all the threads, so I really don't know the totality of your experience here. I'm just sayin' that part of the reason for this Forum's existance is for education, so it's really important to learn from what people are saying (unless it's BS, of course), and then go apply it. And pay attention to how your worldview changes, because that in and of itself is a pretty cool and interesting process. : )
 
JP1283 said:
To Joe and Skeptigirl:

No, I am not messing with you. No, these are not people or stories I have made up. They have happened to me, and I know that there isn't any way to tangibly prove that to you. I turn to the JREF with these stories because I realize I'm being irrational by believing in them, in the hopes that I can get some objective feedback from people who don't believe in it. I don't want to believe in it, and I'm sorry that I've made you think that I have some other purpose here other than to do that.

I noticed Moxierain joined this forum because of this topic. She is a friend of mine on another forum, and she can vouch for me that I'm not certifiably crazy or just trying to make trouble on a different forum.

And I agree with the poster that says that I associate with a very "woo" crowd. I try not to, but Shannon has been in my life for practically my entire life.

I only really start a thread on this forum when something really freaks me out. I have a lot of issues with fear, OCD, and anxiety, and these easily get to me. It hurts my feelings a little that I've been told to "get a life" by two of the posters here.
Click to expand...

JP1283 said:
I envy all of you. I really do. Because you have experienced nothing out of the ordinary that made you fearful or scared. And you didn't have anybody to belittle you for being scared about it.

No, I am not certifiably crazy, Keri. No, I am not playing games. I am trying to convince everyone here that I'm not just some spam poster who gets his kicks writing stories and posting them. What would I have to gain from that? You're right, perhaps swearing on graves was melodramatic, but I guess I was trying to drive the point home that I don't have any ulterior motive or anything here.
Click to expand...

JP1283 said:
You're right about the counselor. I went in to see my general practitioner two weeks ago for a follow-up on my depression and anxiety, and she gave me a referral to a counselor. Unfortunately, that particular one doesn't accept my insurance plan, nor does the one she referred me to after that, so I'm still in the process of looking. I suppose it would be better therapy than posting it on a web forum.
Click to expand...

JP1283 said:
Explorer, you are definitely right. I thought about telling Shannon that I don't want to be her friend anymore because of all the drama she creates in my life (and my head.) If she makes it through the next two weeks, I might do that. It really isn't healthy for me mentally to be hanging around her if she has this effect on me and my thinking.

The timeline that Sara gave is two weeks. Apparently each person died within two weeks of her having the respective dream about each one. Shannon is driving to Idaho from Reno a week from this Friday, and I'm concerned about her going. However, I feel a lot better today about it than I did yesterday, as I talked with a few other friends about it (who think it's weird but that it won't happen.)
Click to expand...

JP1283 said:
That was a stupid comment. I had just read the responses that you, skeptigirl and kerikiwi wrote and it was somewhat retaliatory, and I apologize. I know that everyone has had something unexplained happen to them.

But why do you presume that I'm lying about everything I've posted about to everyone here? Do you think you're above me in your intelligence, or because you think I'm crazy or a nut who just posts weird stuff for fun? That's not the case at all. I don't know how many more times I can say it.
Click to expand...

By the nature of internet communication, it is impossible for us to know / you to prove the truth of your past experience or the honesty of your beliefs.
What can be done is to establish a pattern. Certain patterns of behaviour arouse suspicion because they look indistinguishable from trolling .
One thing you can do to establish confidence is provide data in support of these experiences. A prediction is worth a thousand anecdotes for example.
Can you give us some data?
The full name of the individual who is predicted to have an accident and the details as dreamed / envisioned- location / topographical description / other vehicles involved / approximate time of day / weather etc., etc.,.
if you or your friend can provide such corroborative detail now, before the accident which is predicted- and that detail is confirmed at a later date- then we have a case to answer.
If(as I expect) the dream is just a dream and no accident happens, then we lose nothing.

(ETA- Should you feel unwilling to put such data on an open website, do so by Private Message. PM it to me and skeptigirl for instance. It is considered seriously offensive on this board to reveal PM content without the sender's permission. This gives a record - before the event- which would be supported by two established forum members with known sceptical views.)
 
Last edited:
skeptigirl said:
Since we were playing on teams, it was her team's turn (each team had 2 people) and I asked her team their question. The question went something like this:...Which couple reunited to film the movie "Back to the Beach?" (That's not exactly how the question went but you get the gist.) At first Shannon said it was Brooke Shields and "that other guy," but I told her she was wrong. She thought about it some more, then looked at me hard and, out of the blue, she said "Frankie Avalon and..."
Click to expand...


heh... I like this one. It reminds me of playing a partners' game of trivial pursuit years ago when we got a question about where the author of "The Graduate" was living when he died. We had no idea, so being silly, my partner and I looked at each other, had the same thought, and said in our best Chris Farley imitations - "you're going to end up living in a van down by the river!" The answer was "a van". Woohoo! We're psychic!

I play trivia every week at a bar and have frequently noticed questions that I get right and have no idea how I knew the answer as it seemed to be a topic that I knew absolutely nothing about. That's just normal. We know all sorts of trivial little tidbits that we have no idea we even know or where we picked them up, but a question triggers what's left of the memory.

Anyway, JP... all I can do is echo what others have said. Things are going to be fine and this is NOT something that should cause anxiety for you. You have some really woo woo friends who are likely very prone to confirmation bias and possibly to just making stuff up. A friend of mine was, for awhile, hanging around a young woman who kept having husbands and fiancees die or have other horrible tragedies happen to them under strange circumstances. There were three within a couple years. The thing is, it became obvious that none of these men even existed. The young woman apparently just liked getting attention from claiming all this drama in her life. Yeah... she needed psychological help.
 
Last edited:
Age plays a big factor on the cause of death. If I'm not mistaken, the majority of deaths for people between 5 and 21 is due to auto accidents. If this person was to predict the death of your friend by something more rare, I'd be more impressed.
 
I live about 600 miles from most of my family. Every year, there are a couple of times when some family member or other is driving out to see us. During those times, of course it passes my mind that "Oh, no. I hope they don't get in an accident." I imagine that happens to almost everyone who hears that someone else is going on a long car trip.

In fact, if I'm waiting for someone who's driving to me and they're five minutes late, the first thing that crosses my mind is "I hope they weren't in an accident." Given how much people drive in the US, I would be shocked if most people didn't think such thoughts.

Because of this, some people will occasionally be "correct" and the person who is driving will get into an accident. This doesn't mean it was predicted, it is just statistically bound to happen. This is all that ever happened with your friends "predictions". Nothing supernatural, just the human mind worrying about something which, occasionally, does come true.

You spending any energy worrying about this is unnecessary and counterproductive. Stop doing it. :)
 
JP1283 said:
Hi guys. I have something I need to talk about.
Click to expand...

I see two possibilities here:

You're in desperate need of some serious psychological help.

You're in really desperate need of some serious psychological help.

Even if what you're writing is complete BS - and I have every reason to think it is, going by your other threads - you're still in need of help, because only a person with serious issues would find the need to spam this crap all over a message board. Get help.

Fast.
 
Irish Murdoch said:
I'm sure lots of unexplained things have happened to me. No unexplainable things have, though.
Click to expand...

I guess my statement was poorly worded, because I certainly didn't mean unexplainable. In fact, I didn't even mean things that require explanation. That was sort of my point--just because something seems strange or inexplicable in your own subjective experience doesn't mean it is.
 
JP1283 said:
I envy all of you. I really do. Because you have experienced nothing out of the ordinary that made you fearful or scared. And you didn't have anybody to belittle you for being scared about it.

.
Click to expand...

JP, as I noted before, I spent my entire life surrounded by "mediums" and "Psychics". I had my grandmother and my own mother tell me the time of day I will die. I was seven at the time. Talk about terrifying? I attended saences and readings throughout all of my childhood, and they were positively creepy.

I myself believed I could get messages from the dead, have premonitions through dreams and mediation, see ghosts, and read tarot cards with unbelievable accuracy. I sincerely believed this with all my heart. It took studying the art of cold reading and watching hours of videotaped readings, readings that I performed, to truly understand what was going on.

When it came down to it, it became obvious. I had mastered the ability to capitalize on hits. I was very, very detailed and specific. I did not just throw out wild, generic guesses all that often. But, I did see I was incredibly good at picking up on body language and following the hot leads. The misses were quickly dismissed. I almost always knew from conversing a little about who I was reading. People who are eagerly seeking this type of information are more than happy to fill you in. Once a cold reader has this info, it colors everything they are saying.

The people I read for always came away feeling I was perfectly accurate. They remembered me as having a great gift. Same for my mother and grandmother before me. But after reviewing the tapes objectively, I learned just how fallible the human memory is. I also discovered that people would tell me and others that I had given them specific information that I had never given them. Because they wanted to believe, they embellished their stories to make them better, or because they really wanted to believe it that way.

I also hung with that woo crowd. They liked that number three thing a lot. They embellished their stories quite a bit, too. I heard the stories recounted over and over again, and the level of accuracy and number of things that "came to pass" grew with each retelling. Woo types are indeed given to theatrics. I think they know they're lying, too, but they want to impress. The way lots of people exaggerate this or that to impress.
 
JP has, as he stated, PM'd data regarding the people involved. I will keep that private.
Should anything come of this, I will reveal the data after obtaining the permission of JP and any other party he feels should be contacted.

While I'm in little doubt this is a fairly typical case of coincidence and selective misremembering, we do have a record before the event.

I have asked JP to clearly decide what would constitute a "hit" in his opinion and he can post that here or by PM as he prefers.

Nb. So everyone is in no doubt. This is the JREF Forum, not JREF itself. Nobody on the forum speaks for the JREF organisation and this recorded prediction is in no way connected with the JREF Paranormal Challenge.
 I would hazard a guess that JREF would be unlikely to accept predictions involving serious accidents , because of the obvious possibility that someone might actually stage such an accident to claim the prize. Clear moral issues arise, just as with genetic testing for susceptibility to disease: Imagine the sort of problems the insurance industry would face in the case of true precognition.
(ETA- And the fact it is doing fine is a major indicator that true precognition is so rare as to be a matter of occasional coincidence).
 
Last edited:
SoapySam, can you characterize the claim/prediction without giving any of the private info? Is it something like named person X will die in a car accident within two weeks or something like that? (In other words--close calls don't count, nor do non-fatal accidents.) Also is there any way to verify any of this? Most highway fatalities around here don't even make the news, except maybe in an obituary. (Seriously--there are still 40,000 - 50,000 per year in the U.S.--it would monopolize the news if covered.)

Good to emphasize that this is not the JREF Million Dollar Challenge (and apparently qualifying and applying for that is impossible at this point). However, maybe he could apply for some of the other cash prizes. If I had any money, I'd offer some.

Meanwhile, JP, you noted that you're not making any claims or telling any lies. Here in the 21st century, apparently no one tells lies anymore--they mischaracterize things, mislead, etc., but never actually lie. You've been careful not to make any explicit claims, but you are certainly implying that you think your friend has psychic abilities. If you don't believe (as you sort of stated in the weird verb tenses in the OP), then why would you be afraid?

Again, do you believe, or not? If you believe, then will you change your belief if this prediction doesn't happen? Or is this belief some kind of blind faith where all the proof in the world (and good explanations of why things seem strange as the confirmation bias) won't change your mind?

If you don't believe, then what's the deal?

This is where the issue of honesty arises--you can't simultaneously believe and disbelieve.
 
I can post what I would consider a "hit" here. If she does in fact, perish in an auto accident within the next two weeks, while she is out of town (I mentioned in detail to Soapy Sam that in Sara's dream, she felt that it wasn't local as she got the news of Shannon's death late), I would take that as a hit. (Shannon will be driving to Idaho within the next two weeks; I will be getting the exact dates later tonight when I call her.) Anything less than that, such as a close-call, a fender-bender, or a flat tire, would not count as a hit for me.

Hi, Joe...I don't particularly believe in my friend's (or others') psychic abilities...I fear they are real. When I hear of a strange coincidence, such as Shannon telling me a long time ago about how she thought she would die in a car wreck, and then someone else telling me they have dreams about people dying and then they do, and that they had one about Shannon dying the same way that Shannon thought she would...it gets under my skin and freaks me out. No, I don't believe in it, per se, but I fear it to be true. If after the next two weeks nothing happens (which I hope is the case, obviously) I think it will help me to overcome these feelings of fear that occur when I hear of things like this.

ETA: I am not interested in any prizes at all. I am not trying to bet that this will happen. I don't want it to happen. If in fact the premonition comes true, I would never want to collect money or anything else for it; it would be reprehensible for me to do so.
 
Last edited:
JP1283 said:
That was a stupid comment. I had just read the responses that you, skeptigirl and kerikiwi wrote and it was somewhat retaliatory, and I apologize. I know that everyone has had something unexplained happen to them.

But why do you presume that I'm lying about everything I've posted about to everyone here? Do you think you're above me in your intelligence, or because you think I'm crazy or a nut who just posts weird stuff for fun? That's not the case at all. I don't know how many more times I can say it.
Click to expand...
I posted the evidence that led to my conclusion. Other's can draw their own conclusions. And I PM'ed you that, from what you posted, either you are imagining stuff or you are trolling. Either way, the stories are not real.

I agree there is a serious lack of mental health services for people who cannot afford them. It's a disgusting commentary on society that we are stuck paying an outrageous amount for corruption and a needless war, yet we don't provide basic care for the weakest members of society.

If you have insurance, do you have a job? You might consider looking for services you pay for rather than have medical insurance to cover. Why people will spend a $1,000 on a computer, and if you are like me, $100/month for the computer-cable hookup, but not pay out of pocket for a dentist or a psych consult, is beyond me. There may be some low cost services in your area. Have you looked?
 
Last edited:
JP1283 said:
I can post what I would consider a "hit" here. If she does in fact, perish in an auto accident within the next two weeks, while she is out of town (I mentioned in detail to Soapy Sam that in Sara's dream, she felt that it wasn't local as she got the news of Shannon's death late), I would take that as a hit. (Shannon will be driving to Idaho within the next two weeks; I will be getting the exact dates later tonight when I call her.) Anything less than that, such as a close-call, a fender-bender, or a flat tire, would not count as a hit for me.

Hi, Joe...I don't particularly believe in my friend's (or others') psychic abilities...I fear they are real. When I hear of a strange coincidence, such as Shannon telling me a long time ago about how she thought she would die in a car wreck, and then someone else telling me they have dreams about people dying and then they do, and that they had one about Shannon dying the same way that Shannon thought she would...it gets under my skin and freaks me out. No, I don't believe in it, per se, but I fear it to be true. If after the next two weeks nothing happens (which I hope is the case, obviously) I think it will help me to overcome these feelings of fear that occur when I hear of things like this.

ETA: I am not interested in any prizes at all. I am not trying to bet that this will happen. I don't want it to happen. If in fact the premonition comes true, I would never want to collect money or anything else for it; it would be reprehensible for me to do so.
Click to expand...
If you're on the level (sorry for the "if", I just have no sure way of knowing), then I think that what you're doing in ruminating on all this stuff, and looking for reassurance concerning it, is just feeding your OCD. That's how OCD works--and it also allows you to find patterns in your experience that don't really correspond to anything "out there". Don't feed it. Rather than search for reassurance on a sceptics' forum, it would be better to talk to people who know what you're experiencing. You can do it here: www.stuckinadoorway.co.uk .
 
Things don't happen every day, Skeptigirl. The events that I've posted about have happened over the course of the past three years. Some of the events have happened close to each other. I began posting on this site in April, 2005. Perhaps instead of dismissing my threads as lies, you could read over them? You don't have to if you don't want to, obviously...but the events that have happened have hurt me and it hurts me when people I tell about them say they're lies.
 
Last edited:
Thanks, Irish...I am already a poster on Stuckinadoorway and I have posted about these things on that forum as well. I believe you can still find the threads on there. I have the same user name.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom