There has to be an explanation, but with the available evidence, as usual with this type of experiences, we can only make highly conjectural guesses. It seems like the trunk incident can have the more satisfying explanation, but I don't really have much to add to the speculations from more knowledgeable people in this thread.
Jodie: your memory is faulty, just like anyone else's. Same with your perception. No matter how strongly you think you saw or remember something, misperception and misremembrance happen all the time. Take words of example. How many times you thought you "heard" a word that wasn't actually mentioned by your interlocutor? We are great at filling the blanks when information is missing, and most of the time we don't realize we're doing it. Then, on top of that, there's bias.
I'll share a personal anecdote that involves some of these elements that, combined, can easily lead one to think it was magic. I guess it's easy to decipher now, but at the time I found myself stratching my head over it for a long time.
Something like 12 years ago, I was at my parents' house by myself, just about to have lunch, when out of joy I started singing a popular tune which I had never been particularly fond of. But there I was, suddenly singing that song for no apparent reason. One or two seconds after that, a commercial whose existence I wasn't aware of popped on my TV with that same song, in roughly the same pitch. It certainly was a new commercial because I wasn't the least familiar with it. I knew the song, but not the commercial. It was a synchronicity! It had to mean something! I had recently read Jung, and even if some of his stuff sounded crackpot to me at the time, I was willing to play along, out of curiosity and because some of my friends were into that kind of stuff.
One or two years later, after I had given some thought to the inconsistencies of "magic" and realized I had no other choice but to be a skeptic due to my attachment to consistency, I had an epiphany and realized what most probably happened that day:
That ad was probably very new, and I certainly wasn't aware of it, but that doesn't mean that I unconsciously hadn't been hearing the song from the ad for probably a week more or less, at the same hour, at the beginning of the same commercial break, right after hearing the news theme. Some commercials are regularly scheduled. My guess is that my brain had unconsciously gotten familiar with that pattern for a long enough period to expect it, but short enough to not be consciously aware of its existence. It's a bit like going to work without making conscious decisions, only that in this case there's not an underlying awareness of a particular goal such as "going to work". Even if you act like a zombie, you ultimately know, deep down in your intestine, that you're going to work. This, instead, happened as a more isolated incident, which made it more likely to be experienced as "magical".
