Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
197: Second Sight and Deja Vu
0 Playsin 5 hours
Hello and welcome back to another creepy, cryptic episode of your favourite paranormal podcast! This time we are diving into some visual, mental and certainly mysterious phenomenon.
We have all probably heard of deja vu, but what do we really know about it causes, or correlations? Kelsey puts on her professor glasses and gives us a mini-lesson on the science we've learned about this glitch-type feeling. Surprising causes have been reported on, as well as other similar or opposite phenomenon, like jamais vu.
Alanna takes us to Aberfan, Wales and an event that was seen by many people before it occurred, yet no one could have stopped the tragedy. But how could many have dreamed of a similar event, and what happened after? Well for one, thing, the Premonition Bureau was started. So you know there's gonna be a follow-up episode!
Darkcast Network Promo of the Week: Rogue Darkness Podcast
See you in two weeks! Keep it Cryptic!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:01
Speaker
Darkcast Network. Indie pods with a dark side.
00:00:24
Speaker
You are listening to Castles and Cryptids, where the castles are haunted, and the cryptids are cryptic as fuck, and I'm Alana. And I'm Kelsey.
Technical Mishaps and Humor
00:00:34
Speaker
think maybe my computer might be on to two. No, I don't know what happened when I tried to put on the intro.
00:00:41
Speaker
We were both like, wait, what? It just stopped. it just went, dark cast network.
00:00:50
Speaker
Long pause. You're like, yes, continue. I don't know. Maybe I hit it again. I don't know. i was like, okay. That was weird. Two, one. And then I was like, I'll just put it on because we can't start this bullshit.
00:01:07
Speaker
And then I was like, oh oops. Maybe we made a noise at the same time. But I was like, whatever. That happens. And then it just stopped making, it stopped playing. was like, I didn't touch anything.
00:01:17
Speaker
It was really weird. oh Lord. Well, that's okay. If that's as weird as it gets, I'm fine with it. You guys are like, yeah, we didn't know there was a problem. You didn't even have to tell us.
00:01:30
Speaker
Right? yeah But we did, because we would have been acting weird.
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah. Like, wait for it. Oh, my God. I don't know. One of these days, we'll maybe upgrade from just recording in laptops and mugs.
00:01:51
Speaker
Mugs? Mike's plugged right in. Mugs.
00:01:57
Speaker
But that would mean learning how to do it on something else. Maybe when it's my full-time job. And I have the wherewithal to figure that all out.
00:02:11
Speaker
Oh my gosh. um Yeah. So what are we talking about today? i got nothing. I got nothing at intro-wise. No.
Exploring Deja Vu and Premonitions
00:02:23
Speaker
weird this one should be fun i mean oh yeah i think something i've had on my list probably since almost day one touched a couple ah couple times um always thought it would be something interesting to be able to dedicate an episode to and properly research and look into like premonitions uh but yeah deja v that kind of stuff.
00:02:58
Speaker
I find it really fascinating. Yeah. These kind of phenomenon of like, have I seen this? Or I have seen this. or what the fuck did I just see? It's all so interesting. It's like, but did our brains just come up with that? What is happening?
00:03:14
Speaker
Right? Well, yeah. I experienced deja vu quite a bit. like, not often, but I feel like it's really specific when I experience it.
00:03:27
Speaker
yeah same. Um, like, I experienced stuff, um, or thought I remembered experiencing stuff, uh,
00:03:42
Speaker
like, years before i started working at the job I currently work at, I thought I had had deja vu about working at the job with people I had never met before. then ah when it ended up happening, and it was, like, it's only when it happens that you remember feeling like you saw this before,
00:04:07
Speaker
Right. Like you're accessing a memory. This never would have been possible. Yeah. Yeah. something So I find it really interesting because a lot of times for me, at least it's very specific.
00:04:21
Speaker
Like, it'll be like me in a certain place and like one to two, sometimes three different people like saying different things to me in a certain order And like what I'm doing or what I respond. And it feels like that whole like situation has happened before, which. Yeah. The whole interaction. Yeah.
00:04:48
Speaker
yeah I've had that for sure. And then you're like, I don't know, sometimes it's like, well, we're doing this, we're doing a podcast, like, maybe we have talked about this thing before, but it's just that weird feeling of, like, you got dropped right into ah reality you've been in before or something. Yeah, it's hard to describe. yeah um So it's interesting to finally be able to, like, research and be like, oh, maybe that maybe that specific feeling is more more common than we think, and maybe some of the things that might be causing it we'll get into.
00:05:22
Speaker
that's cool and I like reading about specific cases and stuff like that because um not to shout out a book that I didn't really like but we have a book ah downstairs a non-fiction book called the Deja Vu Enigma and I was like oh this cool it's gonna be like delving into the phenomenon and stuff like that and it was but just like it's just one of those like non-fiction books that for me was really really hard to read it just like I like, oh, this is like like a textbook or something. Like, I just, you know, just kind of dry. And I was like, fuck.
00:05:59
Speaker
Some of the sources and stuff I ended up looking at, that's how I was feeling. A little textbook-y. Right. It can be. Like, depending how you dive into it. we'll try to it fun. don't really understand how your brain works and all that stuff. Oh, fuck no. Not fully, so...
00:06:19
Speaker
right It's interesting. like we I think they recently started talking more about how they don't really know why we sleep, necessarily.
00:06:31
Speaker
yeah It seems like all creatures do to different extents, but the purpose of it and how everything has evolved to sleep is Right. It's like we know we need to because our bodies go crazy if we don't. But like, other than that, I think we have a very big understanding of it.
00:06:54
Speaker
You're right. It's when you call um tech support and they're like, have you tried turning it off and on again? It's like... but for people. We just need reset. Have you tried having a nap?
00:07:05
Speaker
Yes. Did you go to sleep? Oh my
Anecdotes from Alana's Call Center Experience
00:07:08
Speaker
god. Somebody had a really good one-liner the other day at work because I work at a call center so there's always you know we're getting crazy people on the phones and then you're getting off the phone and people will look around and be like well that sounded fun and stuff like that.
00:07:22
Speaker
And this one girl Colleen she just she she had got off a bad call or someone else had and she just said sounds like he needs a snack and a nap and everybody was just like that's great i'm gonna use that always like perfect for anybody being a dick situation yeah it stuck around for a while who couldn't benefit some people you can't do anything to help them no matter what you do never be good enough i had an older lady on the phone today that was like
00:07:56
Speaker
I had to tell her we couldn't renew her plates because she had fines on her motor vehicle file. And she goes, well, that was a stupid ticket anyway. That wasn't a real ticket. Cause I'm not going to pay it. So what are we going to do for me?
00:08:09
Speaker
Well, there's nothing we can do when you have a fine on file. It blocks us from doing it to your motor vehicle profile. So, uh, well, they were stupid. It just proved to me they were all idiots anyway.
00:08:21
Speaker
It's not your fault. was Like, yeah, no, I get it. It's frustrating. Yeah. She was like funny. Like mad, but not at me, you know? Yeah. Okay. like, take that up with the police then. Go to your local police branch and argue your ticket, i guess.
00:08:40
Speaker
You're not going to pay your ticket? You're not going to get a registration then. Yeah, exactly. You're You like old enough to know. You won't be able to renew your registration. You can't renew your driver's license.
00:08:53
Speaker
Ugh, seriously. get it together people
00:08:59
Speaker
oh my gosh anyway i don't know i guess we are just gonna dive into it yeah unless we've already done this oh god it's almost because there's so many more things nowadays that don't well they have Like, we've come up with different terms, too, in the internet age. Like, there's glitch in the Matrix, which obviously exists before the Matrix movies.
00:09:27
Speaker
And then, like, the famous, well, it's become sort of internet podcast famous, the the Reddit or the internet red lamp story, which is, like, one of those stories where...
00:09:41
Speaker
like buddy gets hit in the head or something and he experiences his whole life kids wife whatever until he starts like focusing on this weird red lamp in his room that just seems distorted somehow and then he's like looking at looking at that until he wakes up in the hospital bed and found that he's just recovering from that hit to the head or whatever it's like some of those stories it's like what the fuck are those i don't even think we have a name for those kind of like parallel universe like you just popped out into a different timeline stories.
00:10:12
Speaker
They're crazy. Gordo just stayed over there.
00:10:19
Speaker
Ugh. It's like something dry in my throat.
00:10:24
Speaker
Oh my god, I heard someone on a podcast today say their cat's name was Doja. was like, Doja cat. That's really good.
00:10:35
Speaker
Ugh. Anyway. Gordo's Being Gordo. Gordo's like, I'm not in front of the mic. I'm just beside it.
00:10:46
Speaker
Such an attention whore. Yeah. yeah All right. Get him a mini mic. Like those little tiny ones people are always holding
Gordo the Cat's Interruptions
00:10:55
Speaker
up in their little TikTok videos and everything.
00:10:57
Speaker
God, that's so stupid sometimes. That video where somebody goes, are you aware you're a cat? And the cat just goes.
00:11:05
Speaker
Nice. What? Oh, I like... I love animal videos, too, where, like, Pat was showing me one of a big old dog, like a Great Dane, don't know, something with those big old cheeks or whatever, and he was sitting like, a child seat in the back of a car just with a big look on his face like, what?
00:11:24
Speaker
I know I'm too big for this car seat. I'm just a big baby. Gordo is a big baby. eby He just laid, look at him. He's just laying between me and the mic.
00:11:38
Speaker
Buddy, practically on the laptop oh no yeah between you and like okay goodbye he's like a living uh what is that thing that the sound operators carry a boom he's like fuzzy and he goes by your mic ah he can muffle the sound he's like stick into my fur it'll yeah i was like either those are a mic or there's something else but yeah it's like they're like um I don't know what they're called, but like the foam that they put on a mic helps to muffle the vocal fry type things. speak into my fur. It'll this it'll just clean up the audio.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah, this one came with this thing I could put in front of the mic that's supposed make the P sounds less poppy. Yeah, mine had foam that can go on top of it, but...
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think I used it because it made it really quiet. I found the mic had to be so much closer to me. Right.
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, mine's pretty bad. I feel like I have to be really close to mine before we I sound as loud as you. I don't know.
00:12:53
Speaker
It depends, because mine, like, I unplug every time we record, and then putting it in and out of the drawer, like, the dial for the volume of my audio going into the mic gets moved, probably. my God. We're nothing if not consistent.
00:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, so it changes almost every time. Dude. It's odd. All that to say, like, subscribe, and donate on Patreon.
00:13:23
Speaker
We can sound professional, maybe. Oh, well. Well, I'm ready for some stories. i have I have some information first, and then I have a couple a first-hand accounts of interesting things.
00:13:44
Speaker
So this is kind of a ah thing your about different theories and histories about deja vu.
Origins and Science of Deja Vu
00:13:52
Speaker
so deja vu means already seen.
00:13:56
Speaker
And it's just described.
00:13:59
Speaker
Is it French, Kelsey? Sorry, I'm just kidding. is. Crazy. think it's something I've read today. Little accent-y things and everything. Yes. Sorry, it just really reminded me. I don't know how to...
00:14:13
Speaker
I don't know how to type on my keyboard, so I had to keep copying pasting the word deja vu. Because I don't know to do the accents when I'm typing it. No, because, yeah, and think you have to make your keyboard do it. Otherwise, that key you can just do the correct thing after.
00:14:32
Speaker
ah Yeah, I've, like, fucked up. ah keyboard or two when I was a teenager accidentally turning it to French so I didn't want to no mess around with that no no no no this time and it's one of those ones that's in the excuse me English lexicon just briefly I was on Reddit today and there was an ask a Canadian thread about what's a skill we specifically have as Canadians and somebody just said um I call it cereal reading, like cereal box French, like just being able to read basic labels and instructions with French and English.
00:15:09
Speaker
I call my cereal box French. yeah I cannot speak French, but I know enough French words that I can tell you the context of a paragraph or something. I'll be like, this is about a house and it's blue and there's something about a door. and We can read it right?
00:15:30
Speaker
exactly. Ask me to read the French paragraph out loud? no Oh boy. No, she cannot. It's embarrassing sometimes as Anglophone Canadians. Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
Our accents are not the greatest. Yeah. So it means already seen. it's described as the phenomenon of feeling like one has lived through the present situation in the past.
00:15:59
Speaker
It's like living through it again. And it's an illusion of memory. And despite the strong feeling of recollection, the time, place and context of the quote unquote previous experience,
00:16:13
Speaker
um it's like uncertain or impossible. Like it feels that way that it would ever repeat in the same way, which is how I thought I felt. And I was like, oh, glad to know i am just like everybody else.
00:16:28
Speaker
It is weird, though, because it feels every time that you're like, how could this specific, you know, conversation have happened again? then you're like, well, maybe we've talked about certain things, similar things to similar people.
00:16:43
Speaker
It's not that far-fetched, I guess. but Approximately two-thirds of, there's different surveys that they reference, approximately two-thirds of a surveyed population reported experiencing it at least once in their lives.
00:16:58
Speaker
So, like, about two-thirds of people experience it, some a lot more than others. Okay. So, like, it might not happen very often, but there's people that it happens to lot, which we'll get into later.
00:17:15
Speaker
I felt like most people would have experienced it at least once, but I guess you never know. think Well, I guess two-thirds of people that they asked. Hmm.
00:17:28
Speaker
And the term déjà vu was first used in 1876 by Emile Boirac, a French philosopher, whose book The Future of the Psychic Sciences included a section talking about the sensation of déjà vu. Ooh, I like that title.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, The Future of the Psychic Sciences.
00:17:57
Speaker
pretty cool yeah we should still call them that it's like science yeah right makes it sound more legit than like whatever other parapsychology or whatever stupid terms we always have yeah i think parapsychology
00:18:14
Speaker
pardon me uh in this book it was presented as the reminiscence of memories and i think this is like a quote from the book saying these experiments have led scientists to suspect that deja vu is a memory phenomenon and we encounter a situation that is similar to an actual memory but we can't fully recall that memory so it sort of feels familiar because we're recalling something that it did actually happen and continue saying our brain recognizes the similarities between our current experience and the one in the past
00:18:54
Speaker
And we're left with a feeling of familiarity um that we can't quite place. Right. It's just a bit off. Off. Yeah. So, like, kind of saying you can recall certain aspects, but you don't necessarily recall the whole situation. Because there's different kind of types of deja vu, it sounds like.
00:19:19
Speaker
Oh. lot of stuff they talk about, like... um
00:19:25
Speaker
Like remembering certain conversation or like a situation, but not remembering the whole context of it. And then if you're put in that situation again, you kind of feel like you've lived through it or that kind of things. And then there's people that it's like the full on everything.
00:19:46
Speaker
Like, I'd say I've experienced where it's, like, the whole situation, it the conversations, it's what you're doing and what everybody else is doing for a certain amount of time. It's not just, like, um one thing of, like, somebody saying something or... Yeah, like a whole movie scene kind of replays. Yeah.
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, there can be, like, different extents of how you feel. And there is no exact... cause, I guess. But there are quite a few theories as well as what they've identified as different contributing factors people who experience deja vu which I didn't really know. i thought these were kind of interesting.
00:20:29
Speaker
Like, how would you even study it? I feel like I'm just like, okay. There are ways. but There's some really weird ways but you can technically induce deja vu.
00:20:41
Speaker
Which all sound terrible. Yeah. Oh no.
00:20:48
Speaker
Make them do the same thing 20 times over. but Yeah, pretty much. um So deja vu manifests occasionally as a symptom of seizure auras.
00:21:04
Speaker
so People that experience seizures, normally before their seizure comes on, they have different things that they call seizure auras, and that's different symptoms that they experience.
00:21:16
Speaker
ah So some people experience deja vu before they have a seizure, which I thought was fascinating. Huh. That is weird. Yeah.
00:21:28
Speaker
So some researchers have associated chronic or frequent pathological deja vu with neurological or psychiatric illness as well.
00:21:40
Speaker
ah so like it happens to them all the time? Pathological? Yeah. So there's people that experience chronic deja vu. god. Which is actually scary.
00:21:52
Speaker
um i have one case of it. Yeah, nobody likes reruns. Yeah. Whoa. yeah whoa um experiencing deja vu has been correlated with higher socioeconomic status.
00:22:08
Speaker
um And that they said that people with a with better educational attainment, so people have access to better education, also experience higher rates of deja vu.
00:22:19
Speaker
And people that are, i think they said something said 18 to 25, but like people that are younger also tend to experience deja vu at a higher rate than people over a certain age.
00:22:33
Speaker
hey I mean, that one I could almost think of a reason for. I'm like, well, you're older. You don't remember things as easily. Yeah. Maybe.
00:22:44
Speaker
The socioeconomic status and all that, I'm just like, huh, okay. Right? And then, like, better education. i was like, whoa. I never would have thought.
00:22:56
Speaker
yeah And they've learned all this through different studies that they've done. um and surveys with people yeah like their specific uh like how often they experience it what kind of deja vu are they experiencing like how detailed it is and that kind of stuff crazy uh i guess people who travel often also report deja vu more often people who frequently watch movies or are better at remembering their dreams are also more likely experience deja vu so you should ask Pat if he remembers if he experiences deja vu since he never remembers his dreams no he doesn't that's exactly what i was thinking but he watches a lot of movies right but he doesn't travel often
00:23:51
Speaker
No, not anymore. That's so strange. I know. if someone had just asked me what thought deja vu had to do with, I mean, I would I guess just think about It wouldn't be like travel, being I think it's brought on by these triggers. No, but like just the way that everyone says or when we when we research like memory and stuff that every time you pull a memory, it's like you're remembering the memory of that memory almost.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah. like I have that later on. That it's like every time you recall a memory, it's diminished kind of. Like you're not actually... And through that, you can sometimes alter it or misre start really misremembering stuff.
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah. and you Yeah, you definitely kind of think about that stuff when you're like in the true crime realm and thinking about... witnesses memories and recollection and how it can be relied upon but not really that reliable a lot of the time so crazy uh okay i guess migraines have also been associated with deja vu and in the past researchers have attempted to find links between deja vu and anxiety
00:25:12
Speaker
um which originally they said that there wasn't really any correlations but later on with my examples I have um quite a few of those people like suffered from anxiety and some of them quite debilitating anxiety so I'm not really sure like I think they just don't really know but they've also attempted to find links between deja vu and dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia and But again, didn't really find any correlation. Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
All of the things. Well, and but that at the same time, it's not like we've been doing major studies into this for a long time, have we? Not... I mean, maybe in the last, like, 15 to 20 years.
00:25:57
Speaker
I gotta think it's not, like, a priority among all the other mental illnesses we have. Not that it's a mental illness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, unless you're having chronic deja vu, it's not really life-threatening or um affecting you day to day. I would hope not. Genetics may also be a factor for those who experience it as the, now we're going to get really science-y,
00:26:30
Speaker
The LGI1 gene, I think it is, on chromosome 10 is being studied for a possible link as certain forms of the gene are associated with mild forms of epilepsy.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, so there is people with epilepsy, like, obviously, like, epileptic seizures and stuff that are experiencing deja vu more often because of their seizure disorder.
00:26:56
Speaker
So they are trying to figure out, like... Is one causing the other or they both like um correlated somehow? um So there's even partial seizures.
00:27:12
Speaker
um
00:27:15
Speaker
Which I didn't really look up. Sounds like rabbit hole I could go into. Yeah. So, deja vu is reported during seizures, even just partial ones, causing researchers to suspect a link.
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:32
Speaker
Seizure scary. I've seen somebody have a seizure. It's freaky. Yeah. I never have, but... the It was scary. Like ah someone you knew?
00:27:47
Speaker
It was a substitute teacher when I was in middle school. Yeah, we, i don't even remember her name. She barely had like introduced herself. She was, had just finished taking attendance pretty well. And ah it's really bad because the kids in my class were, you know, like it's a substitute teacher. So they were misbehaving and that kind of stuff. Yeah.
00:28:14
Speaker
And she was getting really mad. And she was, like, yelling. And then she had a seizure. God. And we didn't understand what was happening. Shit. And... She wouldn't even have time to tell you about it, probably. No, we had no idea. and yeah, it was really scary. And...
00:28:38
Speaker
Some of the people that had been, like, misbehaving and stuff because she was yelling at them when it happened, like, they went home because they thought they had caused it. And were really, really upset and kind of freaked out.
00:28:51
Speaker
Did she just, like, collapse? Yeah, she was standing at the front of the class and... kind of just started shaking and then she started like slowly falling but she the front row of desks were all empty so she like grabbed onto the one front desk and it started sliding and then she just kept sliding across the floor as she was like falling oh gosh no wonder you guys were like what the fuck is happening yeah i mean we were in grade seven so how old would i have been Oh, okay.
00:29:23
Speaker
I would have been 11. Wait, in grade 7? What? 7. Yeah.
00:29:33
Speaker
Oh, okay. I'm trying to remember it now. It's also 11 ago. Yeah, I would have been 11. So we were freaked out. Like, we had no idea. We didn't know what seizures were. you we didn't know what to do. um Anything like that.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. déjà vu is also associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. um And this experience is a neurological anomaly related to epileptic electrical discharge in the brain, creating a strong sensation that an event or an experience currently being experienced has already been experienced.
00:30:21
Speaker
Oh, God. I forgot think I passed out during that sentence. youre
00:30:27
Speaker
Experience currently being experienced has already been experienced. Oh my lord. makes me feel like I'm on drugs.
00:30:38
Speaker
Perfect point, because my next sentence is certain medical drug combinations have also been reported to increase the chances of deja vu. Weird. How the fuck do yeah figure that one think it's just like if you make yourself a little loopy because they were talking about certain drugs but didn't really other than one that said it was a medication you take while taking um or a medication you would take uh to help with like flu-like symptoms like flu medication um didn't really specify what these drugs or drug combinations would be used for didn't want people trying it
00:31:19
Speaker
Maybe. Trying to induce deja With all the other stupid challenges on social media. Try the deja vu challenge. Chug some flu medication.
00:31:33
Speaker
Chug some Buckleys and then do a handstand. Bonus points if you cause yourself a permanent mental illness. Wahoo!
00:31:45
Speaker
So there's also um different ways your brain processes memory that also might be causing deja vu for some people, at least.
00:31:58
Speaker
There's something called the b split perception explanation. This is when a person experiences a current sensory event twice successful successively.
00:32:09
Speaker
Not successfully. Successively. ah So these are kind of confusing. So this one is... Two times in a row they experience something. that That's how I interpreted that.
00:32:24
Speaker
I don't know. no No. So this is somebody's brain processing one event as two separate ones at the same time. um the first theyre time their brain is processing it briefly...
00:32:40
Speaker
It's kind of degraded or in a distracted sense. And then it's immediately followed by the second perception of that same event where it is processed more fully.
00:32:51
Speaker
And the person, um their brain is relating it back to the first event and making them feel like they've already lived it. But they lived it just in that moment. So your brain is...
00:33:04
Speaker
Doing a double take. Yeah, that's that's. Yeah, exactly. i get I put that at the end of it. My phone saying kind of like doing a double take, like you look at something, your brain doesn't quite process it. So then you look back at it and then your brain fully processes it and you're like, whoa.
00:33:22
Speaker
And I have to put it into words to try and process it with you. and That's funny that we've said it the same way. Yeah. Yeah. It's causing the person to feel like their current surroundings was experienced twice.
00:33:35
Speaker
um Yeah. Kind of like a double take. So they have, you kind of have to process it twice to fully understand what's happening in that current moment. never thought about it that way.
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, and then Wikipedia had some other good ones. These I could not put into my own words for the life of me. So this is what Wikipedia had to say.
00:33:58
Speaker
um As far as like memory, ah research has associated deja vu experiences with good memory functions, particularly people with long term implicit memory ah Recognition memory enables people to realize the event or activity that they are experiencing has happened before.
00:34:18
Speaker
And when people experience déjà vu, they may have their recognition memory triggered by certain situations which they have never encountered.
00:34:29
Speaker
Recollection-based recognition refers to an ostensible realization that the current situation has occurred before. so
00:34:41
Speaker
It's kind of like, I don't know, even if you're not, haven't ever been in a situation, um you kind of know what to do in that situation, or you feel like you may have been in that situation before. Because you've maybe been in like a similar one or something. I think so. Okay, I think I get that.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah. um Then there's familiarlia familiarity-based recognition. um so these are all different forms of like memory. It refers to the feeling of familiarity with the current situation without being able to identify any specific memory or previous event that could be associated with a sensation.
00:35:24
Speaker
And thus, encountering something that evokes the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to deja vu. So I'd say that's like, if you remember the smell of pizza,
00:35:38
Speaker
you might not specifically think of a certain memory of pizza, but you remember the smell of pizza.
00:35:48
Speaker
Okay, okay. Yeah, it's like a familiarity based thing. You don't recall a specific situation necessarily, but you recall that that's how pizza smells.
00:35:58
Speaker
Because you're like, I've done this before. Or I've smelled this before. Yeah, but you aren't. Yeah. Yeah, but you aren't necessarily thinking of a specific situation.
00:36:09
Speaker
um Sometimes okay, this is going to sound stupid, but sometimes I'll just be like, ah you know, shaving my legs and a certain brand of like shaving cream. I'll be like, oh, that brought me back to like, you know, when I first started showering and shaving my legs as a teenager. And it's just like, why?
00:36:29
Speaker
don't know. sure I've used that shaving cream since or whatever but yeah it's weird it'll just be like it's scent and memory as we know are just intertwined yeah and that's one the biggest ones for sure scent memory uh this one I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right it's crypto cryptomnesia looks like crypto like a crypto bro and then amnesia cryptomnesia
00:37:02
Speaker
don't need ya amazing i like anything with crypto in the front of it i just hope it's gonna be like right i thought you would yeah what does that prefix mean i don't even know but it's on everything this was a little yeah this one's a little weird too in which information that was learned is forgotten, but is retained in the brain, leading to occurrences where new or different situations may evoke, quote-unquote, forgotten feelings, emotions, or components, um making the new experience feel like it has already happened, but being able to recall a reconstruction of a prior memory.
00:37:50
Speaker
no okay. okay It was just making me think of like when you forgot that you knew something and then you were like, oh yeah, that's right. I didn't know that. so ah yeah I think I understand.
00:38:05
Speaker
ah Memory is not fixed and each successive recall of an event is merely a recall of the last reconstruction. So that's kind of what you said. Remembering a memory, it can you're remembering the last time you remembered it. You're not necessarily remembering the memory itself.
00:38:22
Speaker
Exactly. You get to watch it like exactly as it played out. It's more like you take out an old photo or something and it gets faded every time. No, i don't know. Yeah. This reconstruction, however, may now differ so much from the original event that is, though it has never been experienced before, even though it seems similar. That can like lead to misremembering things.
00:38:49
Speaker
It's like, do you ever hear there's, well, at least one case I can think of, though I can't remember the names, but like ah um ah a woman, ah she was like a victim of a sexual assault, I want to say. Yeah.
00:39:05
Speaker
In the lineup, or the, like like, misidentified the guy and was like, no, I remember that's the guy. And then they later found out through DNA that it wasn't the guy. And she was convinced. And she went on a book tour with him or something?
00:39:20
Speaker
Maybe. I don't remember. yeah i was like, yeah, it's it's I think it was a pretty famous case. Yeah, she... well Watch as we try to misremember this. Sorry.
00:39:33
Speaker
No, I remember she's white lady. She worked in a church. um And the guy that assaulted her was a black ah man that broke into the church.
00:39:46
Speaker
And she, yeah, she picked him out a lineup, swore it was him, everything. They cleared him. I think it was the Innocence Project or something ended up clearing him of charges. And then they went on tour together talking about um how, like, she, it still even, like, to this day or the last, whatever I was watching about it, was saying, like, still when she recalls it happening to her, it's still him.
00:40:15
Speaker
that's giving it to her yeah because now he's proved it's not right because now she's got his face in her head kind of thing yeah it's crazy she's kind of arguing against eyewitness testimony right well it shouldn't be taken as complete truth by itself yeah it's not that reliable which i find interesting yeah
00:40:43
Speaker
It's crazy to think that you were convinced that that is your attacker and it's not.
00:40:51
Speaker
oh
00:40:56
Speaker
So the this was also from the Wikipedia. Yes. The ones that always want me to donate. Yeah.
00:41:10
Speaker
yeah These were still some more explanations on what might be causing vu in some people. okay There was a study done, um or I guess this doctor back in 1965, Robert Efron, he worked in Boston's General, ah Boston's Veterans Hospital, and he proposed that déjà vu is caused by ah dual neurological processing ah caused by delayed signals in your brain. And
00:41:50
Speaker
Efron found that the brain sorting of incoming signals is done in the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere. However, signals enter enter the temporal lobe twice before processing, once from each hemisphere of the brain.
00:42:07
Speaker
and normally they have a slight delay of milliseconds between them. And Efron proposed that if the two signals were occasionally not synchronized properly, then they could be processed as two separate experiences, with the second experience seemingly to be reliving the first experience.
00:42:27
Speaker
So that's like your brain actively not processing stuff in real time properly? Blame on the brain. Blame it on the brain.
00:42:40
Speaker
Not that blaming on the alcohol. Blame it on the brain. Isn't that like a... even know. I'm just referencing like... I'm referencing like Prince who I don't even know that well. But I know he has a song called Blame it on the Goose. scmmy or no I can't remember the ro rest of the song.
00:43:00
Speaker
Oh my god. I can't remember who... No, I... Yep. Okay.
00:43:06
Speaker
Blame it on the rain's not... Purple rain is Prince. I know what I'm talking about. yeah Never. Blame it on the rain might be Milli Vanilli. No idea. Wait, who are you singing?
00:43:19
Speaker
That's so funny. ah There's a song that features Jamie Foxx called Blame it on the Alcohol. Ooh. Jamie Foxx-y. Yeah, I was singing Milli Vanilli.
00:43:33
Speaker
ah There is... also a dream-based explanation where in uh there was 20 percent of people that responded in a 2004 survey that reported their deja vu experiences ah coming from dreams and about 40 percent of the respondents reported that they they came from both reality and dreams so people felt like they dreamed like the original scenario of deja vu
00:44:06
Speaker
um So in their yeah dreams, they felt like they were having deja vu? Or deja vu was like of the dream? Yeah. Both. So there's people that experience... Breaking my brain, man!
00:44:20
Speaker
They feel like they're having a dream about almost what's to come, but they don't realize it until it happens. And then there's people that experience deja vu within their dreams.
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah. Because deja vu based on a dream could be interpreted as a dream premonition. Yeah. Which... we'll get into ah that so far know i just have i have a tiny bit there's um that i ran across because i wasn't sure how much you were gonna cover about premonitions no mine's more like a specific case mostly so yeah oh okay cool i just have like a couple sentences that said some researchers including a swiss scientist named arthur funk hauser that's a great name
00:45:11
Speaker
Oh my god, bringing in the noise, bringing in the funk. Yeah, Funkhauser firmly believed that the precognitive dreams are the source of many deja vu experiences.
00:45:24
Speaker
Researchers also connected evidence of precognitive dream dreams experiences to deja vu experiences that occurred anywhere from one day to eight years later.
00:45:37
Speaker
oh So... What is Gordo doing in the background He's playing with a toy. So much like background noise today. He's being ferocious attack cat.
00:45:49
Speaker
You should see him. He's whipping it around on the floor and around. don't know. I'm hearing scratching and you know batting and ah don't know. He's so ferocious. You wouldn't believe how ferocious he is.
00:46:06
Speaker
You get that toy. You get that toy.
00:46:11
Speaker
i thought I saw something the other day that was like, um dogs, it was like a National Geographic article or something. So probably couldn't click into it because it wouldn't be free to read. But it was like, dogs look up at humans, they're like, but you know, humans like they're their there parent or something like that. Whereas like, cats look at their humans like they're their kids. And that's why they always have to bring you Food, like a dead mouse, because they think you can't feed yourself, and they think you can't do anything for yourself.
00:46:43
Speaker
They think we're a hairless cats. That's so funny. They pity you. We're part of the pack. Yeah. They're like, you little stupid human. You incapable. Like, I have to lay on you to keep you warm. Like, you idiot.
00:47:00
Speaker
I know when you're feeling sick, and I gotta to comfort you. What the hell? Yeah. So funny. Yeah.
00:47:10
Speaker
So the last theory I have is the something I think I've heard people talk about it before, don't necessarily know a whole lot about it, the collective unconsciousness.
00:47:24
Speaker
Oh, I love that term. I find it really fascinating. Apparently, Wikipedia at least, said it was a controversial theory from Carl Jung.
00:47:39
Speaker
I don't know if that's controversial. Oh, it was originally, Carol Young? Okay. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Wildly quoted and I believe you're often misinterpreted too.
00:47:50
Speaker
So, yeah yeah, I don't know. Probably Freud too. I don't remember.
00:47:58
Speaker
It states that all people have a shared pool of knowledge that has been passed down through generations and we can unconsciously access this knowledge. And if we can access shared knowledge, then deja vu could potentially be the effect of recognizing one of the collectively stored patterns.
00:48:18
Speaker
home That's all it really said. But I can see that because they talk about like when what babies are born, they they know how to cry. to Yeah. like The things you just inherently know. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I can see to a point that, like, and on maybe you have some sort of, like, knowledge in there. um Like, evolutionary interesting knowledge. yeah on yeah Especially when you think about, like, people's near-death experiences where they come back and they say, my whole, like, worldview was changed and I had so much more, what's the word I'm looking for?
00:49:07
Speaker
but ah
00:49:11
Speaker
something faith in other human beings I guess because you realize that like we're all one we're all part of one thing and you know yeah i am you you are me we'll be reincarnated as each other someday all this stuff and like everything you do hurts someone what else it's just like that whole thing or whatever yeah yeah so i can't I can see that one like some of these theories and stuff are pretty good it's definitely something to think about was ponder anyway yeah uh it also on wikipedia had some like related terms uh that are all also french so let's do this a french lesson uh i'm gonna pronounce all of this wrong except for vu know how to say vu
00:50:05
Speaker
I just read an outliner Outlander line the other day. Jamie, oh, no speak French, is it? To the Indians. I mean the Native Americans. They're just pretending.
00:50:18
Speaker
um Okay, hit me with them. I want to know have I heard these before. There's Jamie Vu. Oh, never seen. Yeah, you got it.
00:50:29
Speaker
I'm testing your French. Let's go. I think I have heard that one maybe like once in my life. Yeah. It's any familiar situation which is not recognized by the observer. Which I was like, oh, shut up, French.
00:50:46
Speaker
The observer does not recognize this situation. Okay. Which I don't understand. Yeah, I don't necessarily... Yeah, I've never had this feeling.
00:50:59
Speaker
No. It's often described as the opposite of deja vu and involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that they may have been in the situation before.
00:51:17
Speaker
i don't really understand that. I wonder if it's like... You know how you're like driving home or something? I know you have a very short commute, you bitch. no But like they say what you get like that driving blindness sometimes where people don't remember what they thought about or did coming home.
00:51:38
Speaker
Like I wonder if it's like when you're driving sometimes and then you like you look over and you see something that you haven't really. You're like, I drive this way all the time, but I never really noticed that thing. Like I wonder if it's like something like that kind feeling.
00:51:51
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't really get it. that That one had the least explanation from some of these. Yeah. um There's also deja vecu, meaning already lived.
00:52:03
Speaker
And it's an intense but false feeling of having already lived through the present situation. And recently it has been considered a pathological form of deja vu.
00:52:17
Speaker
Oh. So this is kind of where we get into people experiencing chronic déjà vu. right. um Yeah, because however, unlike déjà déjà has behavioral consequences.
00:52:34
Speaker
So patients with déjà vu often cannot recall that this feeling of familiarity is not real. And because of the intense feeling of familiarity, patients experiencing déjà vu may withdraw from their current events or activities, and patients may justify their feelings of familiarity with beliefs bordering on delusion.
00:52:56
Speaker
So, like, they really, they don't understand that they're experiencing, like, deja vu or something similar to it. They really think that they've, like, lived through it all before. So then they withdraw from everything because, like, there's nothing...
00:53:14
Speaker
exciting guess um strange maybe like everything's already happened right so you're like in a play of your own life or something you feel like you're just going through the motions ultimate groundhog day no yes the groundhog day style but it's not the same thing it's not the same thing every day it's every every experience you're having feels like it's already happened Don't like that. It's not doing the same thing. Yeah, yeah it's very scary.
00:53:48
Speaker
Seems like it would be very scary, yeah. There's also preskavu, meaning almost seen. i It's the intense feeling of being on the very brink of a powerful epiphany, insight, or revelation without actually achieving the revelation.
00:54:08
Speaker
Some of these are so specific. I'm like, dude, no group of names for these. This is a fancy way to say you're deja vu edging or what? I don't really understand that definition. The feeling is often therefore associated with a frustrating, tantalizing sense of incompleteness or a near completeness.
00:54:30
Speaker
I summarize that as, and I think the article might have said something along the lines of like something um or always feeling like something is on the tip of your tongue.
00:54:42
Speaker
Like you're, you're just waiting. And then that feeling of, Oh, hold on. Now this is going to drive me crazy. I can't, what's the word? And just being just fucking did that five minutes ago.
00:54:54
Speaker
yeah I totally get it. But you're always stuck in that feeling. It doesn't go away where there's always, which i think would also be terrifying.
00:55:05
Speaker
Oh, so annoying. Yeah. Yeah. I already have a terrible memory. So i yeah, feeling like something's on the, you start a sentence and then I'm like, what is that word? I'm like, wait, shouldn't this be happening when I'm like 55, 60 at least? No.
00:55:20
Speaker
Oh, by the way, National Geographic told me my brain starts shrinking at age 40. So let's have that to look forward to. Can't wait. Here, do this exercise to stop it. And then you click on the link and it's like, paywall, you can't read this article. I'm like, why do I get your stupid emails then?
00:55:38
Speaker
I don't Unsubscribed. I think is so sure I But then sometimes they have really cool pictures because it's National Geographic. Oh, yeah.
00:55:49
Speaker
do like their emails. Yeah, it comes to my work email, so it's kind of fun. um There's also Deja Rev, which means already dreamed.
00:56:03
Speaker
No, there's a Cirque thing that's like, Rev, Reve. Yes, no, i went we went to a show in Vegas that was called La Rev, and it was like Cirque du Soleil, it had water things. and That's pretty cool. Aerial acts. Oh, it was very cool. Like the oh and look when we went to that Beatles one, that was so cool too. It was like it went by so fast though.
00:56:29
Speaker
True. yeah I think that one was so fast. shorter than the rib. I think so. I think, I feel like it was pretty short. Gotta do another.
00:56:42
Speaker
Yeah. This is the feeling of having already dreamed something that is currently being experienced, like a dream vision kind of thing.
00:56:55
Speaker
Because I do have recurring dreams. They're usually just late. don't know if that's necessarily that or if it's like dreaming about something that already happened to you. I don't really get that one. That one's all that said about it. Okay.
00:57:08
Speaker
okay That one's a little bit confusing. Then there's the last one is deja entendue. Meaning all er oh um literally umten do ah meaning already heard already and it's the experience of feeling sure about having already heard something even though the exact details are uncertain or were perhaps imagined oh my god me listening to every podcast have I heard this one already literally this story or this episode sometimes I'll be like wait
00:57:42
Speaker
I'm sure I've heard this story before. Well, sometimes it's not marked as played, but I listen to it somewhere else so that I feel real crazy. Wait, so yeah I have heard this.
00:57:55
Speaker
I know, I was like listening to some Drinking the Kool-Aid today and then I thought it went to the next episode, but I guess it maybe went to my next Unplayed episode of theirs on Spotify because I was like, why are they talking about it being April?
00:58:08
Speaker
can't really get it. This is not right. I got to look at what episode I'm listening to here. um So the first story I have is I don't have a name, but he was interviewed quite a bit. And there was quite a few articles that were talking about his story.
00:58:28
Speaker
This one I grabbed is from the ah BBC. And it was the story of this 23 year old British man who experiences constant deja vu.
00:58:40
Speaker
um which they believe um through research and talking to him, it was triggered by, like, severe anxiety. wow. How I kind of said that they hadn't really found correlation between anxiety and déjà in his situation they have.
00:58:59
Speaker
An extreme case, maybe. Yeah, this was... Yeah, this one's pretty freaky. um He's been studied but by scientists from the UK, France, and Canada, and his condition is described as so persistent that he avoided watching television, listening to the radio, and even reading newspapers because he felt like he had encountered it all before. he literally can't do anything. Yeah. No!
00:59:29
Speaker
So like if you went to like read a new book or something... ah Yeah, nothing. Like, he can't experience anything new, basically. Fucking Gordo!
00:59:41
Speaker
She's just describing my hell. and like And the cat hair, like, stuck to my face. Fucking hell, man. Bloody hell.
00:59:52
Speaker
Everything's conspiring against us to record the rest of this. Okay. Um... So he reported experiencing these symptoms early in 2007, shortly after starting university.
01:00:07
Speaker
had a history of feeling like anxious, um particularly in relation to contamination, which was leading him to wash his hands very frequently to shower two to three times per day.
01:00:20
Speaker
um so like OCD behaviors as well. And his anxiety worsened around the time that he began university. um And his anxiety and then low mood led him to take a break from university.
01:00:34
Speaker
And that's when he began experiencing deja vu. His recollection of these early episodes was that it would last for minutes, but could also be extremely prolonged.
01:00:48
Speaker
Oh. um Minutes even sounds long. Right? It probably feels awful. ah yeah. Yeah. For example, while on holidays in a destination that he had previously visited, so somewhere he had been before, he reported feeling as though he had become trapped in a time loop.
01:01:09
Speaker
He reported finding these experiences very frightening. um After the holiday and stuff, he and his break, he returned to university in 2007 and described the Deja Vu episodes as becoming more intense.
01:01:23
Speaker
Damn. Then, for some reason, decided to take LSD. And from then on, the deja vu was fairly continuous. He was trying to joggle something loose. Something was already fucked up I don't know. I don't know, but it made things significantly worse because now it's basically constant.
01:01:48
Speaker
um you know Now he's getting acid flashbacks about his deja vu. Maybe... liby Um, yeah, he worked, like, with this cognitive neuropsychologist, um, talked about his history and everything. They determined, um, through a bunch of, like, tests and stuff that he was otherwise completely healthy.
01:02:10
Speaker
um Yeah, they said that, like, his brain and everything um is otherwise, like, functioning, but it's completely traumatized by this constant sensation that his mind is playing tricks on him.
01:02:26
Speaker
um For minutes and sometimes even longer, he feels like he would be reliving experiences. Yeah.
01:02:35
Speaker
So bizarre. are The doctor that worked with him said, quote, there was one instance where he went he went to get a haircut, and as he walked in, he got a feeling of deja vu, and then they he had deja vu of the deja vu, and he couldn't think of anything else, and probably had to leave.
01:02:54
Speaker
i think we have to call that quadruple vu. Right. Inception vu? Oh, no. Deja vu within the deja vu?
01:03:05
Speaker
I've seen that. I've seen this shit before, y'all. damn um but for eight years he felt trapped in this time loop um the more distressed he became by the experience the worse it would seem to get um again the brain scans showed completely normal ah so suggesting that this was something psychological rather than a neurological condition and while this case on its own does not prove the link between anxiety and deja vu It is an interesting question um for further study, the doctor says.
01:03:40
Speaker
and unlike many other memory problems, deja vu seems to occur more in young people. um Oh, this is where I had it be People first experience deja vu at the age of about five or six or seven. And it happens most often between the age of 15 and 25 tailing off as people get older.
01:04:02
Speaker
I wonder, ah could you even ask people younger than five how to how if they've experienced deja vu? Yeah, that's a fair point. Might be hard. it's It's interesting to think that there's specific ages that are more susceptible to it.
01:04:19
Speaker
Yeah. um There's a Dr. Akira O'Connor, a psychologist from the University of St. Andrews. who believes that in most cases the momentary misfiring of neurons in the brain is what's causing these false connections.
01:04:36
Speaker
um she or He says one idea is that the is that deja vu is a sort of brain twitch. um Just as we get muscle spasms or eye twitches, it could be that the bit of your brain which sends signals to do the familiarity and memory is firing out of turn.
01:04:55
Speaker
So that's kind of what I talked about before about like Maybe your brain's just not processing what it's seeing properly every once in a while. Yeah,
01:05:06
Speaker
I get that. Yeah, um that doctor says that none of the current theories definitively solve the mystery of déjà vu, partially. As you kind of said, it's really fleeting and spontaneous nature, making it really impossible to reliably study in lab conditions.
01:05:24
Speaker
But kudos on them for trying, honestly. Yeah, they have determined certain ways to do it, I guess. um He says that the methods of trying to induce deja vu are pretty crude.
01:05:39
Speaker
We've used hypnosis and experiments using lists of words. This sounds terrifying. my god, trigger Another method is called caloric stimulation, and this just required squirting warm water into people's ears.
01:06:00
Speaker
What? Which, great. I thought that was so bizarre. I was like, you can squirt warm water into people's ears and give them deja vu? Okay. Why is that called caloric stimulation? I thought it to be like stuffing them with cake. have no idea.
01:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, right? What? Okay. okay He said it's meant to deal with various problems like vertigo, but one of the common side effects is deja vu.
01:06:29
Speaker
And people have suggested it's because the ear canal is near the temporal lobe, which may control it, meaning deja vu. Whoa. Yeah, so it'll give, like, squirting water in the ear will give them vertigo, but it also can sometime, one of the side effects of that is deja vu.
01:06:49
Speaker
I guess. ah If it can fuck with your balance and stuff, your inner ear shit, I can see it. Why not? but Why not? um Yeah. So this doctor, he has encountered cases of chronic deja before with some patients even insisting that they had already met him because of the ju deja vu.
01:07:15
Speaker
He said people greet you like an old friend, even though they've never seen you before. And some of these people are on Skype on the other side of the world, but it's still that same feeling.
01:07:27
Speaker
Weird. And he says since news of this 23-year-old man with chronic deja vu appeared in newspapers, ah there's different like people that are coming forward with it.
01:07:40
Speaker
He said, I've had people from Australia and America emailing me It appears to be something quite rare, but there are people who say they're experiencing that or that they went through a period of it or know someone who has.
01:07:54
Speaker
ah wow And then partway through the article the story said that some people say I shouldn't investigate it and that explaining or that explaining rainbows ruins their beauty. um Kind of thing like you shouldn't.
01:08:11
Speaker
But it's your brain. Like, I feel like you need to investigate it. don't ah I'm all for it. It's not harmful. Whatever.
01:08:22
Speaker
It's... Yeah. ah He said, personally, I've always loved getting deja vu and finding out what causes it just makes the experience more beautiful. Yeah, I don't think that if you found out why it happened... Well, if if you found out why...
01:08:38
Speaker
exactly why it happens. It doesn't mean it would like necessarily stop happening. like We understand a lot of shit better now that we did, but we still do it. We're like, now we know how babies are made. like i don't know.
01:08:51
Speaker
yeah um I do have one more story. This one's a lot shorter. ah from This was from thecut.com and it was written by um pat Long, who herself suffers from epileptic seizures um and she experiences deja vu quite often.
01:09:14
Speaker
um So I thought this was kind of interesting perspective for the article she wrote. um She said that she gets these epileptic seizures from a growth and eventual removal of a lemon sized tumor from the right hand side of her brain. Oh yeah. um Before her diagnosis she was fit and healthy ah she said, until that is the afternoon that I woke up on the kitchen floor with two black eyes after suffering my first recorded seizure.
01:09:48
Speaker
um ah Seizures or fits occur after an unanticipated electrical discharge in the brain, and they're usually preceded by something called an aura, um which i touched on briefly, a sort of minor foreshock lasting...
01:10:06
Speaker
Up to a couple of minutes before the main event begins, and the nature of the aura differs greatly from patient to patient. Some people experience synesthesia, which I think is where you can, is that where you can, like, taste stuff?
01:10:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, all your senses can get mixed up. Yeah. Like, I can see what... Yeah, I can see what your name tastes like, or something one Redditor said.
01:10:36
Speaker
Yeah, so they could experience that. They could experience extreme euphoria. She said people even orgasm at the onset of a seizure.
01:10:47
Speaker
Which I had never heard before. no so But honestly, it doesn't completely surprise me somehow. I know, it's like, ah yeah.
01:11:01
Speaker
I don't know. I've heard it called... the petit mort the little death the orgasm so who knows what the fuck happens with your synapses and shit yeah she said in her article though mine aren't nearly as exciting sounding uh distinguished by sudden shifts in perspective a rapidly increased heart rate anxiety and the occasional auditory hallucination um But she says, by far the most significant trait of my aura is the striking sensing sense of having lived through that precise moment before at some point in the past, even though I never have.
01:11:43
Speaker
um She says, during my most intense seizures, during my most intense seizures and for a week or so afterward, this feeling of pre precognition becomes so pervasive,
01:11:58
Speaker
That I routinely dis struggled struggle to discern the difference between lived events and dreams, between memories, hallucinations, and the products of my own imagination.
01:12:11
Speaker
That's rough. It's confusing enough when you're like... get drunk and don't remember something happening. can't imagine. That's how I felt too reading this. I was like, oh damn. Yeah, you're like, what? Did that really happen or was that just in my dream?
01:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, very unsettling. She says, I don't remember deja vu happening with any kind of regularity before the onset of my epilepsy. ah Now it occurs with varying degrees of magnitude up to 10 times a day, whether as part of a seizure or not.
01:12:43
Speaker
So was like, damn, 10 times a day. Yeah, I wonder if she can get on that. there I remember the one case over there, the little really, really little kid, toddler who had so many seizures and the only thing that could stop there like hundreds of seizures a day was some sort of CBD medication. Oh, yeah.
01:13:05
Speaker
I was like, that's crazy. So cool that they find that stuff out. Try it out, lady. Yeah.
01:13:13
Speaker
Yeah. um She continues saying, I can find no pattern to explain when or why these episodes manifest themselves, only that they usually last for the length of a pulse before vanishing.
01:13:27
Speaker
ah
01:13:30
Speaker
um She was talking to the same doctor that talked to that 23-year-old guy. There's like a Dr. Mulan. Mulan. Okay. ah move in um This is her saying what that doctor told her. I spoke to one woman who said that her feelings of deja vu were so strong that they were, um that for her her, they were exactly like autobial autobiographical memories. um Some of the things that happened to her were quite fantastic.
01:14:00
Speaker
She'd have memories of taking helicopter flights. And these memories were hard for her to overcome because she had to spend a long time trying to work out whether something happened. something had happened like or not um so like her deja vu was so the doctor was telling her about another case of a patient she knew where her deja vu was so severe that um she couldn't distinguish what it had what her real life was or not huh like a false memory yeah sort of maybe
01:14:37
Speaker
Sorry, I'm like really trying to process it, that's all. I feel like I'm so quiet. I'm just like, okay, that's very interesting. and i think I left it out of the other um story, but the doctor, like there's more in the articles, of course.
01:14:52
Speaker
like Oh, yeah. um There was one of the doctors that said that they had a patient that when they were doing one of the surveys, they kept them around because the they were asking people, oh, how often in the last 30 days did you experience deja vu? And they were like, yeah, most people said two to three times, um which I think is also very high. Like, I feel like ah maybe once a year, like two to three times a month.
01:15:23
Speaker
I would say rarely. yeah if you were to poll me about it, I would say rarely or sometimes. Yeah. And one of the people they were interviewing said that they had experienced it 12 times that week. And they were like, you stick around for after the survey. We need the doctor to report.
01:15:42
Speaker
Sorry, my friend. That's how they figured out the chronic. I think so, yeah. ah The last little thing I had was how she closed out her article saying the night before completing this piece, I had another seizure.
01:15:59
Speaker
ah The deadline had clearly been on my mind as I suddenly had an intense memory of sitting down to write these closing sentences. And when I regained my composure enough to read the finished article the next day, there was nothing but blank space.
01:16:13
Speaker
It was another illusion. And now I'm actually typing this conclusion. it is, to borrow a famous, soul-cism. I don't know what that means. Like, deja vu all over again.
01:16:25
Speaker
was that word?
01:16:28
Speaker
Oh, sorry. Deja vu all over again. It looks soul-cism. don't know. Deja vu. What the hell? But yeah, so she had deja vu about writing the closing to her article and then thought she had written it. Then the next day when she opened article went, oh, I didn't write it.
01:16:44
Speaker
And then wrote it. That's fucking annoying. would say, what? thought I finished this work. Didn't. Right? Yeah. Ugh. Yeah, I'd be so mad.
01:16:56
Speaker
Yeah. Right? I thought that was kind of interesting. I was like, oh, she had deja vu like while writing the article about having deja vu. Yeah, for some of these people it sounds almost debilitating. have chronic deja vu. I'm a chronic deja vu sufferer. Yeah, like is there was a couple other little anecdotes about like um this one woman, I think it was like an elderly couple, she's like, yeah, my husband won't watch anything on TV because he can guess the plot of
01:17:28
Speaker
everything because he feels he's because he's seen it all before like he just can perfectly guess the plot of everything was like jesus that would be terrible that's gotta be some sort of esp though come on i don't know but then they talk about like the one i talked about that that that kind of feeling constantly like causes people to kind of get depressed and like withdraw from like doing things and stuff because that yeah there's no like joy in it there's no sense of like learning um then no the the 23 year old guy he had to drop i think he like
01:18:15
Speaker
stopped going to class and basically couldn't do anything for those eight years. um Because, like, in school, he felt like everything had already been taught to him.
01:18:26
Speaker
it seemed like school triggered him, honestly. You said it started when he went to university or something, right? Yeah, his anxiety got really bad, and then he left.
01:18:37
Speaker
And then when he came back, he took LSD, and then it got worse. Yeah. Yeah. That probably didn't help. I don't think so. Because that turned the deja vu into chronic deja vu, it seems.
01:18:52
Speaker
Well, sometimes it's fun and you want to try it, though. I get it.
01:18:57
Speaker
He's just like, anything! Maybe he needs to just do like a Oh, what are all the fun um new hallucinogenics that are all trendy now? Like the peyote and the... Oh, the alaska.
01:19:12
Speaker
ayahuasca that's the one yeah that like people they yeah they go on like set up specific vacations where they're like and then we had to detox first and then we get to do the trip and the guy from we're here to help gareth reynolds was just like and i couldn't get deep enough the first so i had to get multiple ayahuasca hits or whatever and i was like oh boy yeah sounds intense wow yeah Yeah.
01:19:44
Speaker
That was like a whole episode, dude I know. i was like, my notes were seven pages. oh really? I was just laying on the floor half, like, asleep now. He's unsquatulated. He's,
01:20:00
Speaker
um, yes, squashed on the floor. Yeah. Alright, well we're going to take a quick break and see about some premonitions.
01:20:13
Speaker
little different. But still sort of the same. No. So creepy. so creepy
01:20:57
Speaker
Witchcraft. The occult. Extremist beliefs. Murder. Tune in to Rogue Darkness each Friday and join host Raven as I uncover horrific crimes committed under the misconceptions and misunderstandings of witchcraft and other belief systems.
01:21:18
Speaker
I'll cover a wide range of crimes involving ritualistic killings and extremist beliefs to cult persuasion and supposed possession. Anything and everything that borders the line of horrifying.
01:21:29
Speaker
There's always three sides to a story. Side side b and then the truth. Let's uncover the truth together and explore the darkness of mankind, one crime at a time.
01:21:42
Speaker
Available wherever you get your podcast fix, simply by searching Rogue Darkness.
01:22:16
Speaker
we're back me dog isn't he's retreated to my bathroom floor where's he gone oh wherever it's coolest yeah a dog did that at work today it just fully laid on the on the cold floor with its legs spread eagle like a snow angel it's just like uh And i walked I walked across the lady and was like, yeah.
01:22:45
Speaker
I was like, oh, he's enjoying the cold floor. And she's like, yeah.
01:22:52
Speaker
And that's it. Yeah. he's He was on the carpet out here in front of the room. But now he's on the tile floor and in the master bathroom. um Because it was it was kind of rainy again today. So we turned the air conditioning off. And then he gets rainy very easily.
01:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, he's pretty fluffy.
01:23:14
Speaker
Oh my god, he fucking sir sheds a lot this year. Sir sheds a lot. thank Never have I ever felt that stupid joke so hard. that People like Akita owners being like, yeah, they shed twice a year for six months at a time. And I'm like, ah!
01:23:31
Speaker
But they do. like I'll like vacuum the floor and then he like lays on and then he gets up and there's dog hair just like tufts of it that were just like hanging off him and like brush and I brush and I brush it. It's like Gordo.
01:23:46
Speaker
Gordo I brush him it'll never stop. yeah Every time you swipe it's full. Constantly. They're just so floofy. Yeah, need to get a ah little cat tunnel that just, like, vacuums the cat and they just walk through it And he can just and just make it a closed donut that he can't escape that just vacuums him constantly.
01:24:11
Speaker
Right. There's got to be a better way. Yeah, sometimes i pick a... pick him when he's outside on the deck and then like I think I got a picture of our one little squirrel that I call Squirrely Dan that comes to the bird feeder picking up a tuft of his hair i'm like see birds squirrels and stuff love all this thick hair for their nets absolutely I to say so sorry Daniel I don't know why but he said he hates the squirrels around his house or something and we talked about Squirrely Dan
01:24:46
Speaker
Maybe because they get into the garden. I forgot to ask. Oh, yeah. I'll have to clarify. If he's just a squirrel hater. No. I don't really have any squirrels here. they eat a lot of the bird food, so Pat would scare them off sometimes, but they're just so cute. Yeah, I have quite a few birds. Like, I'll hear the birds in the morning, like in the tree and stuff, which is nice.
01:25:12
Speaker
I mean... it's not four the morning. Yeah, they don't fight with the birds. the but The little sparrows go in there, they get their feed, and then the squirrel goes in, and then we have a couple of territorial magpies that'll come around, and and they will shove the other people off.
01:25:30
Speaker
They're dicks. They're like, like, excuse me, and bullying this um crow or some other bird one day where I was like, what the fuck? And they're like,
01:25:42
Speaker
Get out here! out here! Rah! Rah! And they're like circling him in the trees and stuff until he like left. wow I know. We're like, dude. this This birdseed is for everyone.
01:25:53
Speaker
Don't be a bully. yeah
01:25:59
Speaker
i didn't Okay. so next on ah premonitions and deja vu phenomenon,
01:26:12
Speaker
some premonitions about a tragedy so it is going to be a little trigger warning sad okay stupidest trigger warning ever but like you you know think of it more like our true crime cases so okay yeah there might be some death that's all that's all so i'm um Just giving a little heads up.
01:26:43
Speaker
But mainly going to talk about something that's just called the Aberfan disaster Aberfan incident tragedy, which occurred in Wales.
01:26:57
Speaker
Oh, good. um It's the name of like the town in in Wales that it happened in. okay. um Town city.
01:27:08
Speaker
I'm not... But like, yeah, it was that goes back to the 60s. So in Wales in 1966, in October of that year, there was one morning where a little girl.
01:27:23
Speaker
oh gosh. And Welsh Welsh names and things. I'm just going go ahead and say. Don't think I could have even looked up a pronunciation for a name that's spelled E-R-Y-L.
01:27:35
Speaker
Probably Errol. Something like that. Errol May. okay. I don't know Welsh names and and yeah you know language is notoriously ah tricky. but Yeah, for sure.
01:27:52
Speaker
I do have one name later on where I was like, oh, that's the same name as the Taskmaster guy's last name. So I think it's called Davis. Anyway, a little girl named Errol Mai told her mom...
01:28:05
Speaker
Something sort of sinister sounding. She said, Mommy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it. That'd be pretty creepy.
01:28:22
Speaker
Yeah. And this was like, if I recall, about two weeks earlier, she had some so something to her mom about she wasn't afraid of dying. And she was like, you're little girl. Why are you saying that? Kind of thing. Oh,
01:28:37
Speaker
It didn't bode well, but we'll say. ah No, but it is sad, though. Kids say some pretty creepy shit. I used to write down the weird things that Rain would say on, like, post-its because be I'm never going remember this.
01:28:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good idea. It just starting to get into the videotape everything. Like, yeah, my dad had, like, VHS and stuff, but, you know, it's not like I didn't have pictures of her at every month like some you know yeah people have nowadays not that there's anything wrong with that um so Aberfan which was a place adjacent to another or this one's tough to pronounce Merther Tidville go with that Tidville T-Y-D-F-I-L
01:29:29
Speaker
At least it's not the the longest place name in the world. I think that's Welsh. It's like... So this is roughly 20 miles northwest of Cardiff, which is the capital of Wales.
01:29:41
Speaker
And in this area, coal mining was a huge industry. So coal had been called a lifeblood industry by some of the sources. So um definitely communities depended on it there in southern Wales, I believe.
01:30:00
Speaker
yeah yeah i have a little bit more on it with some s science-y jargon oo with the top quality steam coal bituminous laying in large quantities just below the valleys and hills they took advantage of it uh and why not when you're rich with resources um yeah yeah lord knows if there's just something there people will find a way to get at it
01:30:29
Speaker
So opened in 1875, Aberfan's Merthyr Vale Colliery became the biggest pit in the South Wales coal field, generating huge quantities of waste.
01:30:42
Speaker
Yeah. I guess mining's pretty messy in a lot of the different styles. Yeah, i like dirty and... Dangerous.
01:30:54
Speaker
Oh yeah, they have to go so far sometimes into the earth. I know there's a lot of coal mine disasters, and this isn't exactly that. but There was just like a recent one, too, thankfully. the Oh, really? It didn't.
01:31:10
Speaker
I think the cave-in or whatever just blocked their exit, but the three, i think it was three miners, they were safe. Oh, wow.
01:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, but they were like, however many... meters like 600 meters or something below to the ground um but they had enough food and stuff to last them like a week uh yeah because there's like different like deposits or something they have in there um for like safety rations and everything that they're supposed to have for different types of collapses yeah it reminds me of another case
01:31:56
Speaker
okay because i think there was one where someone they got trapped in due to a fire and there was people still alive down below but like the people up top were like nobody's down there we can't rescue anybody until the fire stop and they just like put a manhole cover on it or something. I don't know. i don't remember the details.
01:32:19
Speaker
It was on one of those disaster podcasts I listened to where i was like, this is fucked up where people were like, I just remember they were like still alive underground in a mine with a fire, unable to get out.
01:32:32
Speaker
was like, fuck. Yeah. That's so scary. Like people that put their lives on the line like that for jobs. Yeah. These are inhumane conditions. Come on. Like we shouldn't be doing this shit.
01:32:46
Speaker
Don't get me started on like strip mining. If you ever read, yeah there's like a John Grisham novel where they talked about how horrible that shit is. They're just like, we'll just blow up this mountain sort of or whatever.
01:33:01
Speaker
Cool. um Yeah. So not great. um In this case, 50 years of waste was dumped in some, what they call spoil tips and on the flanks of Mirthara Mountain, sitting above Aberfan. It's like they pile up the debris from the mind endeavor.
01:33:25
Speaker
jeez. Avalanche, anybody? It's a whole lot of something they call slurry, yeah. boom Oh. Um, not great, Bob.
01:33:38
Speaker
The geological makeup was largely sta sandstone in this area, dotted with underground springs, making it less than fully stable, in my opinion. Or as we'll see.
01:33:50
Speaker
But um this one fateful Friday in October, a heavy rainfall caused extra catastrophic damage. And then a slide of debris poured down the mountain, thundering down the spoil tip.
01:34:03
Speaker
Like... basically the top of the spoil tip thing fell, i guess. um and it And it reached to a speed of up to 130 kilometers or 80 miles per hour.
01:34:20
Speaker
And then the mass reached a depth of 12 meters or 40 feet when it hit the bottom and it actually you a hit Aberfan, the town and slammed into the Pantkless Junior School where school had just started for the day so meant it was like this they called it junior school i think it's like an elementary or maybe like a middle school probably yeah young younger students it reminds me i think I covered like um it wasn't I think due to mining or anything but there was like
01:35:05
Speaker
Or maybe it was. There was an avalanche I did. it was it was a while ago now. Oh, really? yeah but it was like a thaw freeze kind of thing had like warped the side of the mountain and it did the same thing. It like came down and it like wiped out the town and stuff. Yeah, and it was like early, early in the morning. fuck.
01:35:33
Speaker
Those cases, man. Yeah.
01:35:37
Speaker
lands landslide shit yeah i remember i talked about the frank slide one i don't remember which one you did now oh so scary though it's just like terrifying or maybe that's the one you did did something else yeah i did something sometimes i'm like i don't know somebody talked about this yeah there was there was yeah there was miners involved in the one i talked about the frank slide In Alberta here. I remember that.
01:36:12
Speaker
God, I should listen to our back catalog one of these days. Yeah, God, don't we listen to our own episodes? Sometimes Spotify will put it on because when you when you're done listening to like, oh, the latest episode of From Sinisterhood and I'm driving or something, I can't change it. It'll just put on the latest episode of whatever else you follow. And sometimes it's our
The Aberfan Disaster Unfolds
01:36:34
Speaker
podcast.
01:36:34
Speaker
Yeah. No. No. I'm scrolling back. I'm trying to find it. Hold on. Because I remember the picture. I'm sure the picture was of the mountain.
01:36:50
Speaker
That's what I chose for the thumbnail. I'm positive. oh Yeah, it could have been the one where I talked about the Frank slide. Okay.
01:37:03
Speaker
So... so Unfortunately, yeah it was very early. it was early in the morning on this one too, or just as school had started.
01:37:13
Speaker
And many people in the town of Aberfan heard like an ominous rumble or what some sources said sounded like a, like a jet or something like a roar.
01:37:26
Speaker
and don't know, a dull roar. of the collapse happening, but between the speed of how it happened and there was mist also on the day, they couldn't really see what was happening. There was no way to prepare for it, obviously.
01:37:40
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's just moving too fast. No, exactly. um But yeah, like I said, it slammed into the school and the people on the scene, all the residents and citizens ah rushed over to try and help dig out any survivors. But precious few would be recovered alive, unfortunately.
01:38:03
Speaker
in total, there was 116 students and five teachers killed on impact at the school.
01:38:11
Speaker
And I think in total with the deaths in town, it was 144. So was pretty bad. Yeah. For like a small city area, I expect everybody was almost affected somehow.
01:38:26
Speaker
Like knew somebody. Oh, yeah. For sure. oh hate to think of those ones where like multiple families are affected or multiple people in a family die. I mean.
01:38:40
Speaker
um so it's like overwhelming grief they were people are wondering if they could have been prevented you know all those sorts of questions that go around after these sort of things happen um and yeah probably like with a little prevention or caution could have avoided somewhat of a disaster like in many cases um there was a national cold board chair chairman I guess his name was Lord Robins.
01:39:09
Speaker
I didn't really look it up after the first time I wrote it down. was like, that's a weird name. I could be wrong. I was wrong about a different name or later on where I went to double check it and I realized I had totally misspelled it as Bryce when it was Boyce.
01:39:23
Speaker
Anyway.
01:39:26
Speaker
But he said, no, it couldn't have been stopped. But there were others that had brought up concerns about safety in the area. There were other spoil tip slides that had happened in the area before.
01:39:37
Speaker
um and a local government engineer had expressed concerns and written to the National Cold Board about tip number seven, which was the one that collapsed, and its proximity to the school.
01:39:49
Speaker
So that guy knew it was a danger, and I think most people did. mean, piling up the debris up the side of a mountain pretty well. and so Yeah. Yeah.
01:40:06
Speaker
does not seem very smart to me i think it was just so unstable that it just like it was like its own little mountain or something yeah and it's just like come on people knew in the back of their minds that that wasn't super safe like yeah um so there was a few more people who had some sort of precognition of this event.
Premonitions Related to Aberfan
01:40:32
Speaker
um Quote, one woman, Carolyn Miller, had a vision of the disaster on the evening of October 20th. So that was the night before, I guess. In her mind, she saw an old schoolhouse nesting in a valley, then a Welsh miner, in coal miner, then an avalanche of coal, sorry, hurtling down a mountainside.
01:40:55
Speaker
At the bottom of this mountain of hurtling coal was a little boy with a long fringe, Like bangs. um Looking absolutely terrified to death. Then for a while I saw, quote unquote, rescue operations taking place.
01:41:10
Speaker
I had an impression that the little boy was left behind and saved. He looked so grief stricken. I could never forget him and also with him was one of the rescue workers wearing an unusual peaked cap.
01:41:22
Speaker
So she had like a specific image. Yeah. And that's weird. I know. And then later she thought even weirder because she saw the boy on TV coverage of the tragedy when the rescuers were there digging people out. wow.
01:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, she saw that same little boy that she'd seen in her vision. Jeez. That would be creepy. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And um there was another instance where, as we would later learn, um the night before, the day before, an eight-year-old student named Paul paul Davis. That's the name then.
01:42:05
Speaker
I'm like, it's the same as the Taskmaster guy, but it's spelled like Davies. But when he says it, he's also Welsh, and he says it sounds more like Davis. So I'm just like, Paul Davis.
01:42:17
Speaker
um And this little boy, Paul, had also drawn he had drawn a picture of a mass of figures digging at a hillside accompanied by the words, The End.
01:42:30
Speaker
Wow. Okay, thank you. Right out of a horror movie. I would not yeah love to see that. The End. But sadly, like...
01:42:44
Speaker
for some of the people that predicted it, like, most of it, most of the predictions now that I have done the research were adults, but, like, him, he was one of the children, and then he died. And I'm just like, that is so fucking sad.
01:42:57
Speaker
like, it come. That's really creepy. i know. it's like, Babadook, or, yeah, it's very horrible, like, in my mind. But, like, at the same time, what's the point? What's the point of seeing your, your,
01:43:11
Speaker
Death the night before. Without enough information to do anything about it? Oh, exactly. And that's the theme here.
01:43:23
Speaker
Unfortunately.
01:43:26
Speaker
um Because there was a few others. So, like, ah there was a lady named Mary Hennessy who had a dream before the disaster. um Quote, she had dreamed about Aberfan the night before the tragedy.
01:43:39
Speaker
In her dream, there were a lot of children in two rooms. Eventually, they moved to a larger room where they seemed to be playing in small groups. At the end of the room, there were long pieces of wood or wooden bars.
01:43:50
Speaker
The children were trying somehow to get over the top or through the bars. I tried to warn someone by calling out, but before I could do so, one little child just slipped out of sight. I myself was watching from the corridor.
01:44:05
Speaker
The next thing in my dream was hundreds of people all running to the same place. The look on people's faces were terrible. Some were crying and others holding handkerchiefs to their faces. It frightened me so much that it woke me up.
01:44:17
Speaker
End quote. Wow. I know, it's like detailed sometimes. I don't think I've ever dreamed of like a natural disaster.
01:44:31
Speaker
generally know right they're much more mundane than that i mean i have weird dreams i've told you about about them before oh i know you have the recurring one like the zombie i'm getting cut yeah i'm like i have one where i i get cut in half by a serial killer oh fuck so that's not the same one where the torso's cut in half crawling after you no that's me i'm the torso Or so, yeah. don't.
01:45:03
Speaker
Why? It's not something calling after me. It's me. Yeah, and I, yeah, it's like some weird farm or something, and I drag myself up to the road, and I think help is coming, and the car pulls up, and it's actually my captors, and they just take me back, and then wake up.
01:45:20
Speaker
It's always a version of that, even though that's, like, the most horrific one. That's, like, the fucking horrible true crime case where the lady gets both her arms cut off, which we have not covered, but... she survives somehow but like yeah it's always you're having right yeah and then i get out and i've had it so many times like i've probably had at least a hundred times because once i have it that night anytime i every single time i go to sleep like for the rest of that night i'll just keep having that same dream over again
01:45:53
Speaker
um i hear that's a thing yeah night yeah so i now like there's certain ones that i know like that one and i think one of the other ones that i know so once it like repeats a couple times i can normally like wake myself up oh my god a couple times yeah yeah because it'll cycle through a couple times and i'll be like hey wait a minute wake up wake up wake up and then i'll wake up yeah and Oh, you're almost lucid dreamy.
01:46:22
Speaker
Yeah, you're like, this Yeah, and then I'll, I normally have to, like, play around on my phone for, like, half an hour, an hour, um and then sometimes I can get back to sleep and it won't go, but sometimes if I go to sleep again too quickly, I'll just, like, go back into it.
01:46:38
Speaker
Yeah. I wonder, I've heard of the techniques for trying to lucid dream better where like you draw like a circle on your hand and then when you're in the dream you can look at your hand and if the hand has the circle you know you're awake.
01:46:53
Speaker
I don't know. It was something I heard. I don't know. that's the i we dream i I've only ever been able to do it in dreams I've had like more than five or six times. a where I can recognize that like i have had this dream more than once I've never been able to do it in a dream I've only had once right yeah you don't seem to know those ones are dreams so much I don't know. Yeah. Like I say, mine you mine tend to be similar in the way that you're trying to move and you can't because it's like the quicksand or like youre your legs or whatever incapacitated.
01:47:29
Speaker
But usually mine's just like, I wake The Spider-Man running on the spot. Let's go. Yeah. Usually just wake up and I'm like, you're just trying to move your legs in the bed and you just had to go pee.
01:47:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't know if I got... I did hear someone talk about a recurring dream they had on a podcast where they were trying to have sex with Emma Watson in their dream and everything kept stopping them. Like, they'd get her clothes off and she was wearing more tight jeans.
01:47:56
Speaker
But now sometimes have dreams where I'm wearing jeans that are too tight to walk. And then I wake up and I'm like, you have to go pee. You just can't move your legs because you're in bed. I've had... I've had a couple dreams before where I went to the bathroom in my dream and I thought in my dream, God, I better not be peeing in real life right now.
01:48:19
Speaker
And I've thought that in the dream. Like, man, when I wake up, I better not actually be. better not be peeing in the closet like some dick. No, up in my dream, if I get to a bathroom, all the toilets are fucking disgusting. That's what happens in my dream.
01:48:32
Speaker
They're unusable. Damn. Oh my god, I better i go on or I'm actually gonna have to pee. um Okay.
01:48:42
Speaker
ah Okay, so I talked about her dream.
Aftermath and Controversies
01:48:45
Speaker
ah So after the tragedy, a lengthy inquiry followed, which finally resulted in some responsibility being taken by the coal board. ah Yay! That's good.
01:48:57
Speaker
So they took the blame, but then they also appropriated some money from the disaster fund. Boo, that's bad. Yeah, the fuck? I know. I hate them so much. I didn't look but much more into that. i thought it was going to make me so mad, but it said that they took some of the money allocated for the victims and families.
01:49:17
Speaker
It was supposed to go to them, but they used it to pay to clear the remaining tips, the remaining spoil tips that were sitting up there. Wow. Yeah. Instead of using your own money to fix the problem that you created, use the money that was supposed to go to the victims of your fucking problem.
01:49:38
Speaker
Wow. Really shitty looking. Um, so they're not the hero of my story, but there are some cool people, which, yeah, we can almost do another episode on some of these guys.
01:49:53
Speaker
Uh, so just to kind of close out what happened there, the Merthyr Vale Colliery closed 1989. and um And this the incident happened in open for a while.
01:50:10
Speaker
um yeah the Queen had waited eight days to visit Aberfan after the fact, which apparently pissed people off that she took so long to go there. Even though... what the One article said that the Duke of Edinburgh went there like the next day. So i was like, isn't that Prince Philip?
01:50:28
Speaker
like So your husband showed up and you were just like, blah, blah, blah. Anyway. So it didn't look good. So then she went back three times trying to save face. And eventually in 2012, they dedicated a new primary school, which I'm like 2012. It's like 60 years later.
01:50:47
Speaker
That's like two generations. know. um And now a section of the Merthyr Tidfill Memorial Gardens is dedicated to the 144 victims of the disaster.
01:51:01
Speaker
wow crazy um So that and brings us to um something that was birthed out of this sort of ah adventure and tragedy um from the ashes. ah We're going to talk about something called the Premonitions Bureau. Ever heard of it?
01:51:25
Speaker
No, but it sounds cool. I like that. Anything Bureau. Bureau sounds so undercover and like top secret, right? I'm part of the Bureau. Investigations.
01:51:41
Speaker
There's a subreddit called the RBI. Can you guess what that stands for? The Reddit Bureau investigation. People bring all their questions to it.
01:51:53
Speaker
I might have to bring this one up to some subreddit because with our little gems and stones from Jasper, I think I've told you that Pat thinks that one of them is um old black bubble gum that we found somewhere. And I'm like, no, I think we bought all those from a rock and gem store.
01:52:12
Speaker
And that's just a weird, shiny, bubbly shaped rock. It's like black It can get pretty smooth. Yeah, they can get pretty smooth.
01:52:24
Speaker
It's not smooth. It's weirdly... Anyway, I don't know what it is. It's just charcoal bubblegum. It could... Yeah, like the texture almost looks like charcoal, but then it kind of looks like sparkly. But it's hard, like the rest of my little gems and stuff.
01:52:40
Speaker
And stones. So like, I might have to bring it to the... There's a subreddit called r slash what is this thing. might have to it on something like that. Or like the gem.
01:52:52
Speaker
stubborn it but anyway that's a mystery in the making
01:53:01
Speaker
i just keep saying to pat why would i pick up bubble gum dried bubble why would i buy dried bubble gum at a rock store so he just went well you know sometimes people will put bubble gum under the tables and like yeah i know that's why don't touch underneath tables
01:53:20
Speaker
And also, what has bubblegum been fucking black and sparkly? But I also went looking at all, like, I'm like, black rocks and gems and nothing looked the same. So now I don't know what the fuck it is.
01:53:34
Speaker
It's literally cryptic.
01:53:39
Speaker
Yeah, I have a black sparkly, like, heart that's kind of flat. Oh. yeah i love the carved it's a yeah yeah yeah i think have something like that too yeah it's very very sparkly though it looks fake oh really some natural stones and gems are sparkly and have different patterns whatever yeah we can't get into it here such a visual medium hate the
01:54:15
Speaker
have the poster picture of that and also my, uh... Now imagine, if you will, plaques, buckly rock. It looks like, um... And my, um... Oh, fuck, I keep wanting to call it an orchid.
01:54:28
Speaker
No, my plant. My, uh... Dahlia. My Dahlia bloomed. I know I talked about the last time because my brother said something. Also, he said that goof, I guess we talked about the word goof and what it meant in Canada, and it's a Canadian prison slang for pedophiles. So that's why it's such an insult.
01:54:51
Speaker
like Oh, really? i didn't realize. I think I said it was regional or something that I had heard it in New Brunswick in the East Coast. And then both my siblings texted me to be like, it's prison slang.
01:55:03
Speaker
was like, wait, what? I've never heard that.
01:55:09
Speaker
You've never been in prison. Yeah, damn. I'm missing out. I heard it on the streets in New Brunswick back in the day. when I was a rough and tumble on the streets gal. No. Okay.
01:55:25
Speaker
Okay. So this Premonitions Bureau, i got some stuff from a source,
Psychic Phenomena and the Premonitions Bureau
01:55:36
Speaker
ah written an article written by Fiona Sturgis of The Guardian.
01:55:41
Speaker
And the article subtitle was How the Aberfan Disaster Prompted One Psychiatrist to Launch a Nationwide Search for Seers.
01:55:52
Speaker
So... This guy, John Barker, was a 42-year-old psychiatrist and superintendent of a large mental hospital in Shropshire. Shrop.
01:56:04
Speaker
Shrop? Doesn't that make you think of Shellstrop and The Good Place? Oh, yeah. Eleanor. Yeah. Eleanor, Shellstrop. Shropshire.
01:56:15
Speaker
It's hard to say. you know. And is it Shire or Shear? Because, uh... Probably sheer. Anyway. He was particularly interested in usual mental conditions or illnesses.
01:56:29
Speaker
And he was also, fun fact, a member of Britain's Society for Psychical region Research. Fuck. so hard to say. The Cirquical Research?
01:56:41
Speaker
Well, and I've heard about it in America and they generally refer to it as the s SPR because it's a lot easier to say. But yes.
01:56:53
Speaker
ah Yeah, the British version. British. ah So he was fascinated by some patients or children that were sometimes referred to, I don't know if in his time, but whatever. They were often referred to as psychiia psychiatric orchids.
01:57:16
Speaker
This is why I have orchids on the brain. Orchids. Orchids, like the flower. And this was a term coined by a W. Thomas Boyce. And this was the guy that I double went to double check his like name and um position. And that's when I realized that I had written down Bryce.
01:57:33
Speaker
And that was not person. Oh, okay. I was like, wait. It was just like coming up with like Instagram and stuff. And i was like, I don't think this is the guy I want. Yeah. um But i guess he's...
01:57:50
Speaker
kind of contemporary i thought he was going to be like an old dead guy but
01:57:56
Speaker
wikipedia or whatever was like voice is an american pediatrician and professor emeritus of pediatrics and psychology at uh the oh at the university of california san francisco so smart guy not dead not dead Nothing Wikipedia could tell me.
01:58:18
Speaker
It looked familiar. i was like, okay. But he wrote something called The Orchid and the Dandelion. So as far as ah what this Barker guy would have known about him, I was a little confused because I thought Barker was a little before his time because he was doing this research in the 60s. I don't know. This guy's still alive, but whatever.
01:58:40
Speaker
He could have still been alive in the 60s. So this orchid and the dandelion calling children orchids or dandelions was this guy's way of sorting them by a sort of what I've called strength of mental ability.
01:58:56
Speaker
Like sort of how some people have a strong mental constitution, physical constitution and don't get sick. You're like, oh, not My mom would always, my mom was always like, we're hardy peasant stock.
01:59:13
Speaker
That's right. You're probably like royalty, you know? they have all those bloodlines mixed and you get those stupid immunodiseases.
01:59:22
Speaker
I do. You and your rich blood.
01:59:27
Speaker
Just like frail. Frail. I'm like a Victorian child. ah and just used to laugh when mom would be like, yeah, you're good. You got a cast iron stomach.
01:59:40
Speaker
I'd be like, yeah, I do.
01:59:43
Speaker
Didn't used to puke a lot.
01:59:47
Speaker
So, ah sorry, this might seem a little tangential, but these researchers were looking into, so about the orchids and the dandelions,
01:59:58
Speaker
um they were looking into why they were seeing some discrepancies, like about 15 to 20% of the kids were experiencing over 50% of the recorded mental illnesses or stresses.
02:00:15
Speaker
um And his theory was that it was a blend of some of the nature and nurture that they would receive. Pardon me. Which, of course, that's an age-old argument. Yeah.
02:00:29
Speaker
Yeah. It's not one or the other, I don't think. No. But he specifically said, or it said that he argues that four-fifths of children appear to be dandelions who can thrive in most environments.
02:00:43
Speaker
The remaining fifth are orchids who are more exquisite and unusual and have a higher potential than dandelions. But for this to be realized, they require a particular environment and careful gardening.
02:00:56
Speaker
End quote. That was his words. Wow. That's such a weird way to to say that people are different.
02:01:09
Speaker
I know. i don't know when it was written, but it seems kind of insensitive. You're dandelion and I'm an orchid. I'm an orchid, okay?
02:01:19
Speaker
It does. It seems a little... Four-fifths of people have dandelions and I'm an orchid. Just... I don't know. oh Yeah, it's a way to try and categorize people easily, maybe.
02:01:36
Speaker
The weirdest way I've ever. But, like, I get the concept, you know what i mean? Where they're like, well, guess obviously people are different and...
02:01:48
Speaker
really hard to do those kind of experiments with what happens when you put a kid in this environment and like they have I've heard of trying to this where they're like what happens when kids don't get you know verbal like people talking to them for the first two years their life do they not learn English yeah kind of not and then they just like yeah it's like really traumatic yeah Wait, sorry, the monkeys?
02:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, they did it with, like, a study with monkeys. Oh. Without giving, like, verbal cues and affection and stuff? Yeah, they had monkeys and, like, a, What? They had a group of monkeys and half of them were given... it was, like, a... Um...
02:02:40
Speaker
a stand-in for, like, a mom. One that was, like, just a, just basically a roll of, like, mesh, like, wire mesh with, like, a face on it.
02:02:51
Speaker
And they would just spend all day hugging it. oh my god! Yeah, and then something like that. And then the other half of them were given one that was, like, soft and cuddly that they could, like, hug and stuff.
02:03:07
Speaker
Like their actual monkey mom. Yeah, it was so depressing as I hugged Gorda closer like, no.
02:03:18
Speaker
I was telling Pat I saw, or i was like, oh, let me scroll this YouTube ad get rid of it. It's talking about the pandy. oh and you touch it and it and it cuddles you back. And I was like, this sounds stupid.
02:03:31
Speaker
And then I go to skip the thing on my phone and I was like, oh, but it is like a cuddly shaped panda bear. And I was like, actually.
02:03:41
Speaker
Kind of like it. I would hug that panda and it would hug me back. Yeah. This is not an ad. Okay.
02:03:53
Speaker
Okay, yes, that was that was um some of the theories of the Thomas Boyce guy, the Orchid and the Dandelion author. But back to this ah John Barker, who ah comes into play after the Aberfan thing.
02:04:08
Speaker
He studied Munchausen syndrome. um As I said, he was a psychologist. Yeah, so he had some specific interests. Yeah, I was like, that came out of left field.
02:04:19
Speaker
Really? Honestly, the... honestly the I like found a New York Times article when I was finishing. I was literally just going like, oh, going to type my notes today.
02:04:31
Speaker
And then ends up finding a bunch of stuff in a New York Times article where i was like, I could probably do another episode on this John Barker guy. He's really interesting. His background and stuff.
02:04:45
Speaker
Um, but so he was also researching for writing a book about people who predicted their own deaths when he heard about the Aberfan disaster. So he was into it.
02:04:56
Speaker
Jeez. Yeah. Yeah. He called, he was working on this book called scared to death. And then he called the phenomenon of people predicting their death, psychic death. And I was like, oh such a death. Oh, I feel heard that before.
02:05:12
Speaker
Really? I hadn't until I came to that last article and I was like, Ooh, damn.
02:05:22
Speaker
So he asks sort of colleague, Peter Fairley for help. Um, Oh, cause he wants more info on predictions.
02:05:33
Speaker
Fairley was a science editor at London's Evening Standard, and they wanted to publish an appeal for more premonitions that people might have had. They wanted to find out if anyone else had had any premonitions about the Aberfan disaster, and so they published a thing in the paper at to which they got 76 replies.
02:05:50
Speaker
Holy. Crazy, right, Gordo? Let your arm shake himself up.
02:05:58
Speaker
um So there was a ah quote about Fairley in the the New York Times article that said, Fairley was a tubby, jovial man who got his big break in April 1961 when he predicted on the base of little more than warning ah warning to ships in the Pacific and a feeling that something was up that the USSR was about to launch its first manned spaceflight.
02:06:23
Speaker
Fairley's story ran on the front page of the newspaper Yuri Gagarin flew into space two days later and Fairley's pay was almost doubled. but Wow.
02:06:35
Speaker
He's a little bit of a predictor himself.
02:06:39
Speaker
um and so once they published this appeal for more premonitions if people had them uh there was the one that became a particular interest ah from a lady named kathleen lorna middleton um to which i said kate middleton yeah but But then also, i so some articles had said Linda Middleton, but the New Yorker or the New York Times said Kathleen Lorna Middleton. So I thought, oh, maybe they just got Lorna confused with Linda and some of the things.
02:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's annoying. Right. So I think her name is Kathleen. but do know she was a music and ballet teacher living in a place called Edmonton. Oh, no. We copied her name.
02:07:34
Speaker
Yes, it's it's referred to online as both a town or sometimes as a suburb and suburb of North London. So, Greater London area.
02:07:47
Speaker
Yeah. um I mean, if you counted everything that was in the Greater Edmonton area of our city, oh my god, we'd be like the Greater Vancouver area. We're fucking huge. yeah Oh yeah.
02:07:59
Speaker
All these little suburb cities. um So this music and ballet teacher, Kathleen Middleton, awoke at 4am on the morning of the Aberfan disaster and in her words, awoke choking and gasping and with the sense of the walls closing in.
02:08:19
Speaker
Creepy. I know. She knew. and And like that one's like barely a prediction. Like at first I read it was on the same day and i was like, okay. Okay.
02:08:31
Speaker
But then it was like, oh no, it was a couple hours earlier. But like, you know what I mean? Barely four hours before the accident. ah Yeah. What could you do? um Kathleen was born in Brockton, Massachusetts and moved to England with her family during the Depression. ah Because they were English and it was the Depression. And they just said they'd be more money back there.
02:08:55
Speaker
ah But if not, she probably would have tried out for like Hollywood or something because she was a talented dancer when they lived in the States.
02:09:05
Speaker
Then she opened her own studio in England at 69 Carleton Terrace and called her students the Mary Carltons.
02:09:20
Speaker
um And then they just told a little bit of her backstory which I thought this little anecdote was interesting. On a winter's day when she was seven years old, Middleton watched her mother, Annie, frying eggs in the stove.
02:09:33
Speaker
After about two minutes and without warning, the egg lifted itself up. It rose up and up until it almost touched the ceiling, Middleton wrote in a self-published memoir. Middleton giggled, but her mother was concerned.
02:09:47
Speaker
She consulted a fortune teller.
02:09:51
Speaker
Damn. It's a flying egg. What the fuck? I said frying egg, not flying! Yeah. um She consulted a fortune teller who told her that an egg that flew out of the pan often symbolized a death.
02:10:08
Speaker
A few weeks later, one of Annie's best friends, who had recently married, died and was buried in her wedding dress.
02:10:16
Speaker
Oh, Annie was the mother, Sorry. Sorry. I thought her friend was seven years old getting married.
02:10:27
Speaker
um That was just the start. She would experience premonitions all through her life and oftentimes a headache ah would proceed or like some physical ailment where like a headache would come before an earthquake or she'd see names and numbers appearing in front of her eyes.
02:10:46
Speaker
um I cannot say what I really felt or indeed what I feel now, Middleton wrote. I am drawn to these events by what appears to be a blaze of light, an electric light bulb. And ah one of her students at the school said, she would say sometimes, I just turn it off. I am too busy. I'm too busy, Williams recalled. And she would wave her hand.
02:11:09
Speaker
I'm too busy for this. I don't have time for Honestly, but I think that's what some like psychics and mediums have to do to just not have it on all the time or just. Be able to tell the spirit to go away, you know.
02:11:25
Speaker
Can't imagine.
02:11:28
Speaker
So John Barker had also had his own supernatural experiences in his life and became drawn to cases of psychic death and people frightened to death, etc. um he was exploring that kind of theory. um oh yeah, and that's where ah noted the uh, that one wasn't near one of the articles I used, I should say, the psychiatrist who believed people could tell the future by Sam Knight.
02:12:01
Speaker
That was a good source and very cool. Um, But Kathleen became the star student of the Premonitions Bureau, ah which was officially opened in 1967.
02:12:13
Speaker
And people were encouraged to send in their dreams, you know, of their visions if they had one, and they would be monitored for accuracy. so okay.
02:12:23
Speaker
That's good, at least, if, like, they're trying to fact check. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're scientific background, I think. So they're really like, yeah, I'm interested in this.
02:12:36
Speaker
And he's a psychologist and stuff. He's like, excuse me, it's gotta be a thing.
02:12:44
Speaker
So many of the premonitions came to nothing, but Kathleen was surprisingly correct a lot of the time. And John Barker would write her to congratulate her every time she got a premonition right.
02:12:56
Speaker
So i didn't include all of them here. but I started to go off on that tangent. Jeez. Well, there was a whole article, six Premonition Bureau things they, you know, major things they got right, and, like, she, like, I have a little bit more, obviously, but, like, she had ah basically predicted some big ones, like the Robert Kennedy's assassination and stuff like that. Just, like, damn, if only they had to listen to you a little bit more.
02:13:31
Speaker
ah because like Because, like, that was one of the ones where she got, like, a specific name. Where other times, if you just see, like, a plane crash over the mountains, you don't know what to do about it or whatever.
02:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, you can't do much about those kind of ones. No, you can try. But, like, because there was a lot of that predicted the Aberfan thing, which is what I first heard about and got me into this. And I was like, oh, damn.
02:13:57
Speaker
So, yeah, so more about that. Um... A quote that said Barker received 76 replies to his Aberfan appeal. Two nights before the disaster, 63-year-old man from Backup in Lancashire had dreamed that he was trying to buy a book.
02:14:16
Speaker
He faced a large machine with buttons, which he thought might be a computer. It's 1967. Sorry. What? I'm trying to buy a book.
02:14:28
Speaker
He's trying to buy a book, but it now has a screen. Yeah. What kind of is a dream is that? What do you want from me? What? Yeah. Sorry. I said you're trying to buy a book.
02:14:40
Speaker
That's what you dream about? Attempting to buy books? Seems like something I would dream about. ah Yeah. um He faced a large machine with buttons, which he thought might be a computer.
02:14:54
Speaker
White letters spelled Aberfan on the screen, a word he had not heard before. In Plymouth, the evening before the coal slide, a woman had a vision at a spiritualist meeting.
02:15:05
Speaker
She told six witnesses that she saw a schoolhouse, a Welsh miner, and, quote, an avalanche of coal hurtling down a mountainside toward a boy with long bangs.
02:15:16
Speaker
And within minutes of the disaster, a 30-year-old film technician from Middlesex jumped up from her chair complaining of an earthy, decaying smell, which she recognized as that of death. So just like a lot of little...
02:15:30
Speaker
weird ones with that. And after the tragedy, Barker replied to about 60 of these ah precogs, as I called them.
02:15:42
Speaker
that's So stupid, minority port.
02:15:47
Speaker
But he called them percipients. um About seven were the best, ah after he kind of narrowed it down. um What's her name?
02:16:00
Speaker
not linda my kathleen middleton was one of the main ones as well as this guy named alan hencher who was a post office telephone operator who correctly predicted a plane crash in cyprus down to like basically the exact number of victims so there were some that were really good i don't know yeah Yeah.
02:16:23
Speaker
And Fairley devised an 11-point scoring system for the predictions, 5 points for unusualness, 5 points for accuracy, and 1 point for timing. So they were really trying to be scientific and cataloging about it.
02:16:36
Speaker
5 points for what? Uniqueness? huge Unusualness. Unusualness. 5 points. 5 points for accuracy and 1 point for timing. 5 out of 5 for unusualness.
02:16:52
Speaker
It does seem, I don't know how else you would rate that. and Reminds me of, listened to the disaster hour podcast and they'll do ah like five points each for, was it predictable? Was it preventable? And was it,
02:17:10
Speaker
Something else. And then if it gets like all 15 points, then they're like, we get to point that finger! like, it's cute. I like their little rating system.
02:17:21
Speaker
So, this basically just to ah cut it out here. But, um yeah, it's just the beginning of the Bureau story, which, as I said, I could, we could talk about them more and Barkley. Yeah, it sounds crazy, though. Yeah.
02:17:40
Speaker
premonitions bureau like what this is a real thing yeah um but to yeah kind of cap it out there was one that happened could have been their very first prediction if it hadn't happened at the same day that the bureau was announced to be opened in the newspaper like the same day they were asking for people to send in their premonitions It was January.
02:18:05
Speaker
This guy this thing happened. So Donald Campbell, he was a 46-year-old speed racer who was attempting to break another record. So he would like... um ah He had some land speed records and also on water. Oh, okay.
02:18:19
Speaker
Speedboat, whatever. And while attempting to break his own world record on his second run on Coniston water in the Lake District, his boat somersaulted off the surface and sank, unfortunately killing him.
02:18:33
Speaker
So it like, I don't know. He was going so fast, it like clipped the water so hard that somehow it went under. don't know. That's scary. Yeah. Like, he had broken, like, eight world records, and this time he died.
02:18:50
Speaker
But the night before, while playing a card game called Russian Patience, with a friend, he drew the Ace of Spades, followed by the Queen. Which we all know the Queen Spades is bad if we've ever played the Crazy Eights.
02:19:04
Speaker
No. You don't play with that rule? You've not played Crazy Eights? No. I don't play it.
02:19:15
Speaker
Damn, it's so fun. It usually just means you have to pick up five cards in that and if you do that rule. So it kind of sucks. um So he remarked to a friend that this was the same hand that Mary, Queen of Scots, drew the night before she was beheaded in 1587.
02:19:36
Speaker
And I like history, but I don't know how he knew that. Yeah, I was going to say, and how do we know that? Yeah. That's probably written somewhere. Um, he thought it meant he would die or someone would die. as the one quote put it, I know that one of my family is going to get the chop. Campbell had said, I pray to God. It is not me.
02:20:01
Speaker
The chop, the chop. I, you've been shocked. I feel like that was the second source. I feel like the first source was a little bit more like, I think I'm gonna die tomorrow. You know? This one, he's like, ah, someone in my family. was like, okay. I hope it's not me.
02:20:16
Speaker
Yeah. Better not be me. Oh, fuck you. um but yeah, it's true that in the UK, uh, that one article mentioned how in Scotland and the outlying Hebrides Islands, something called the Second Sight is...
02:20:33
Speaker
commonly reported you know part of their superstition not that unusual for someone to have that ability um and barker's hope was that we could harness this site to help protect prevent the tragedies that could be to come so a real life minority report sort of like not that we're going to predict everyone's little murder but if there's going to be yeah a disaster that we could see it Ideally, the system would be linked with a computer. He wrote, with patience, it should be possible to to detect patterns or peaks, which might even suggest the nature and possible date, time and place of a disaster.
02:21:11
Speaker
Wouldn't be cool. And um in the first year, the Premonitions Bureau collected 469 predictions.
02:21:22
Speaker
Not all of them were frightening. A young Australian living in Beckenham named George Cranmer claimed to foresee the winner of the Grand National Horse Race. His tip for the derby came in second. It was pretty good.
02:21:38
Speaker
But Hencher and Middleton were the experiment's stars. In the fall of 1967, both predicted a railway crash on the main line heading into London. On November 1st, Middleton had a vision of the crowd on a railway platform the platform and the words chair charring charring charring cross which i know that's a train station um for four days later a passenger train from hasting was derailed on its way to the station killing 49 people hencher was on a night shift and was taken to the sick bay with a headache at the time of the crash the evening news which was the evening standards main rival put the strange case of the two who knew
02:22:17
Speaker
on its front page. Quite honestly, it staggers me, Barker said. The newspaper reported somehow, while dreaming or awake, they can gate crash the time barrier. And that's where we decided to end it.
02:22:30
Speaker
Should we decide to pick it up. Yeah. That's interesting if they got so many of them. I know!
02:22:40
Speaker
469 predictions in their first year? What? Crazy. Yeah.
02:22:45
Speaker
yeah Before the the internet, even, for it to reach how many people that you get, like, 400, almost 500 people reply to you.
02:22:56
Speaker
I know. They said it was, like, a national newspaper, so I don't think it had more than, like, 10,000 subscribers at the most. Like... Yeah. Crazy. i know. I wanted to go, like...
02:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, before I found the New Yorker article today, and when I was typing up my notes, I honestly like had more on the six predictions that they, their main predictions that like Kathleen and the Alan guy made. And then I was like, no, let me round out this one we've got. And then if we have time to delve into those ones, another episode, we'll do that.
02:23:27
Speaker
but it's yeah might have to save it for patreon right i was like i could do another whole rabbit hole like case on this john barker guy and then like all the predictions of the bureau so like yeah that could be a fun ah follow-up episode you're right yeah wow well hopefully you guys enjoyed this one's gonna end up being a long one i think so but i it was fun
02:23:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think there was too much to cut out. We didn't even tangent that much at the beginning or anything. No, I think we only recorded for maybe 10 minutes before we did ah ah in the like proper intro.
02:24:15
Speaker
So yeah, we'll see. yeah it's okay, you guys don't mind. Nobody complains that they're too long.
02:24:25
Speaker
Except us when we're trying to edit them and we're like, God, don't we ever stop talking? That's true. oh And on that note, next week, are we talking about?
02:24:39
Speaker
Cults. Cults, cults, and more cults. Cult, cults. Cult cuts. And cultish. Not all the cults are...
02:24:52
Speaker
you know, obvious cults these days. Some podcasts argue that, you know, every reality show is a cult. I'm probably in the Outlander cult. You know. ah Yeah.
02:25:05
Speaker
People are loose with the term cult nowadays. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um.
02:25:15
Speaker
Until next time, keep it cryptic. Yeah. Bye-bye.
02:25:47
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Castles Encrypted. We love all our listeners and appreciate every subscriber, every new review, every listen, rate and download. Our music is by Kobe Off Air and our cover art is by Antonio Garcia.
02:26:01
Speaker
We are also a proud member of DirkCast Network where you can find the best and spookiest of all indie podcasts. Follow us on social media where we are at Castles Encrypted on mostly all of the things now including TikTok.
02:26:15
Speaker
Check out our bonus content on Patreon cryptid clashes, video mini-sodes of your hosts making asses of themselves, ask me anything, quizzes, other special episodes, and more.
02:26:28
Speaker
Starting at just $2 a month, you can get one to two extra episodes, depending on your level. We produce, edit, and research everything ourselves, and any support you can lend helps us to keep it cryptic.