Schrödinger's cat on my doorstep

Time for a personal confession...
I use the word "confession" because, unlike the other personal experiences I have reported so far (which came uninvited), the event I am about to describe seems to have been directly related to something I did - or tried to do. And it is an activity that is often best left unmentioned, unless you are willing to risk being considered a kook. A mad(wo)man. A lunatic. Someone who is not to be trusted with the simplest tasks in life... You get the picture.

The outward appearance of the event was anything but spectacular; if you're expecting the time-shift equivalent of some "mother ship" appearing, you're in for an anticlimax, to put it mildly.

Still, it boggles the mind.
And while I usually don't mind letting go of my (rational) mind, there is something about this event that makes me want to keep silent about it.
Hence the term "confession".
(And don't be surprised if I later change my mind about publishing this and take the post down.)

Something odd happened on the evening of July 23, 2008.
It had been a breathtakingly beautiful summer day, with all the colours burning bright in the sunlight that filtered through dark grey stormy clouds. (There had been a storm the previous night, and there was another coming later that day.)

I had been out for a coffee with a relative of mine. It had been a most interesting meeting: we had a conversation that, I feel, directly pertains to what I am about to describe, but would rather withhold it, for fear of "tainting" the thought process (and possibly even clouding the memory itself). Let me just say that it was a conversation about a dream that might indicate that dreams perhaps could be more than just "processing" of our daily rubbish (garbage, if you're an American ;) - that perhaps they sometimes could be a very real meeting point of different levels of Reality.

As I was coming home that evening, maybe ten or twenty metres from my doorstep, I suddenly saw my neighbour's cat. It was sitting by the rubbish bin, looking at me.

There aren't many cats loose around my neighbourhood; in fact, that was the only cat I ever saw in my street.
And this cat had a very distinctive appearance. Its fur had a colouring and pattern that I hadn't seen on any other cat; and most of all, it had a very visible patch of discolouration around its nose, the consequence of a disease he had had years before.

My heart leapt when I saw him.
I slowly approached him.
He didn't move; he just kept looking at me.
"Is that you?" I asked him, calling his name.
If he ever replied, I didn't hear or understand him. But then, there was no need for a reply: I could see quite clearly it was him.

It was my neighbour's cat - who had died two years before.

I stood there looking at him for a while; and then I slowly walked away and into my home.
The next day I didn't see him. Or the next.
I did see his (former) "owner" a few days later, and I inquired - as breezily and "by the way" as I could - about his cat. Oh yes, it had died. How did he know for sure? Because he saw him die. Did he get another one? No, no way - too much trouble. "I thought I had seen him," I finally added. Didn't he see a cat just like his around lately? No.

I know what I saw.
Maybe the man, for some obscure reason, didn't tell me the truth: maybe he did not see him die, so he could not know for sure that the cat was dead.
But that was the only time I saw the "late" cat (who had been quite elderly at the time of his purported death) in more than two years, ever since I had stopped seeing him around and later learned he was dead.

Until a few days ago.
It was late in the evening and I was returning home.
When I walked past my neighbour's door, I saw the cat again, sitting where it had been the last time I saw him.

This time, I walked even closer to him, to have a good look at him: yes, it was him. There was his unmistakable patch around the nose. And he seemed to know me.


I know I said I wouldn't talk... but now I think I might as well admit to you openly (after all, you already suspected I was a kook, right?) that the first time, on July 23, 2008 - or rather, the night before - I had been doing an "exercise", the aim of which was to switch to a different timeline.

It certainly resulted in an occipital headache that defies description. No industry-strength pills could relieve it - and that's saying something, considering that: a) I hardly ever get headaches, and b) an aspirin is usually enough to dispel my headaches.

Then, later that day, when I met with my relative, she told me about a dream that she could not get out of her mind: it had been a "Technicolor" dream (something that, in her own words, never happened to her, as she only dreams in "black & white"); it felt as vivid as any present reality; in her dream she was perfectly aware of the obvious change between the waking reality as she remembered it and the (also "waking") reality of the dream.

I am not usually interested in dreams, but this time I was impressed.
I didn't tell her (but she may find out now) that while she was sleeping I had been suffering the mother of all headaches, after having tried to "immerse" myself completely - mind AND body - in a different timeline: a timeline that corresponded exactly to what she had dreamed.

Did this have anything to do with the cat?
I don't know. I just felt it had to be mentioned, considering that both events were highly unusual, to put it conservatively.

What baffles me is this: IF (and it is a big "if") my mind-forcing the boundaries of time/space had somehow provoked the apparition of that cat... what was it that made it appear a few days ago? My mind frame and activity had been totally different from what they were on July 22/23, 2008.


I may be editing - or just removing - this entry in a while.
But in case you just like reading about phantom cats - nah, let's call them Schrödinger's cats :) - here's a short mention of a similar event.

Deja... WHO?

Sometimes, the most seemingly pedestrian and "uneventful" occurrences are the most fascinating ones. They certainly are to me: there is nothing to cloud the essence, the core of the event, whatever it was, and the number of elements subject to misunderstanding or misinterpretation is reduced to a minimum.

One such story is a dream coinciding with the waking reality next day that my mother had when she was in her 20s. It is very simple indeed: one night, my mother dreamt - among other things - that she was walking down a busy central street in her hometown when an unknown young man - "nice, nothing special" - came walking from the opposite direction. They exchanged a brief glance, as passers-by often do, and went on walking, each one in their direction. The dream - rather, a fragment of a dream - ended right there.

It was probably because she dreamt this just before she woke up - or at least that's how she recalled it - that she remembered this last, uninteresting fragment of the dream. In fact, she recalled the man's face quite vividly; and she was perfectly certain she had never seen him before. She then put the entire thing - not much! - out of her mind and went to work.

As she was walking down the busy central street from her dreams, there comes the young man from her dream: he came walking towards her, they exchanged a passing glance and went on walking. (She thought he looked at her with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, but that might have been a reflexion of her own astonishment. Or maybe... eh, who knows.)

I am sure some so-called "skeptics" (you see, I am a skeptic: a true one, i.e. an open-minded one, which is why I don't like the term being misused and hijacked by fearful ignorants :) - would jump in to say that she probably thought she had seen him in her dreams but it was a false deja-vu; or that she had seen him before but she "forgot" about him.
None of these "explanations" allow for the simple fact that the person might be telling the truth: that it was indeed just as she said. Nor do they - always relentlessly looking for a well-definable "reason" for everything! - explain the reason for the appearance of that specific person in her dreams at that time.

I remember reading about an identical event in a book on time slips: a woman dreamt about another woman limping out of a subway station (I think) towards and past her.
And that was it.
If I remember correctly, she even felt slightly irritated upon waking because she didn't see "the point" of such a, well, pointless dream.
She went on about her daily business; and as soon as she approached the subway station of her dreams, there came the woman, limping up the stairs and past her. The woman (the dreamer) turned around and watched her walk away.
And that was it.

That was... what?
That is the question.

What I find interesting about such events is precisely the fact that they are not "meaningful" - they bear no visible "message": they are, or seem to be, simply fragments of everyday life... before it occurs. Or before we perceive it as occurring.

I tend to believe such occurrences are actually time slips: for some reason, this woman and my mother had access to the stream of time "in the raw", if you will - unprocessed by the "time-keeping" mechanisms in our own minds.

Which always reminds me of how children take a relatively long time (and have a hard time) to learn the distinction between "yesterday" and tomorrow"... and yet, they never confuse the concept of "you" and "I", do they?

Think about it. ;-)

If you liked reading this, you might enjoy this book that would explain such occurrences in the light of parallel universes or "multiverse" theory:



Of course, you might also absolutely hate it.
I'd like to hear your opinion in any case. ;)