The Psychic Multiverse
How premonitions and other unexplained phenomena can be described as intersecting worlds
Runs in the Family
My mother experienced premonitions of major events and would share them with our skeptical family, only to have her visions confirmed time and time again. Vivid examples abound, including when she woke us up in the middle of the night to reveal that my sister, who lived in a different continent, was going to have a baby soon — my nephew born an hour later.
My father was exposed to similarly inexplicable phenomena, most notably toward the end of WWII, when he was a teenager in Budapest. Arrested by the Gestapo, he was thrown into an armored van with half a dozen men and a lone woman. She claimed to be a psychic, busted for telling a bad fortune to a worse Nazi. The prisoners dared her to predict their fates.
She pointed to each of them in turn, describing their imminent future: “Count these minutes, this being your last day… I’m sorry to say, you will be beaten to death tonight…” The prisoners listened with laughter and terror. Finally she got to my father. “And you, you are the lucky one! At this time tomorrow, in this same van, you will be headed in the opposite direction.”
They thought she was crazy, nonetheless freaked out by her dire predictions on their way up the mountain. Sure enough, the next day, at that same time, in that same van, my father was headed back down to where he was arrested, living to tell me the tale forty years later. He never heard about the fates of the rest, but if his turned out to be true…
I also feel premonitions that manifest, befuddling and intriguing my science-obsessed mind. Less like my mother’s harbinger of good news, and more akin to warnings as experienced by my father, my own intuition has alerted me to danger. In no such instance was I able to act on or influence the outcome — I was simply given a courteous, if foreboding, heads up.
Reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode “Purple Testament,” where a US lieutenant at war is able to see who will be next to die from a scintillating shimmer on that person’s face shortly before, I somehow sense the last time I see someone alive — not always, but often enough to further alarm and intrigue me, make me seriously question what the hell is going on.
I was twelve or so, visiting my ailing grandmother in the hospital. Diagnosed with bone cancer, in her seventies and a lifelong smoker, she stubbornly held on with the same tenacity she brought to driving the rest of the family nuts. Far from finished yet, at least in any visible way, she shouted at a nurse when I sensed, almost imperceptibly, her end.
“She is going to die,” I thought, or more accurately, felt. She died that night. That feeling has recurred several times, across the country and through the decades, with no more than a few days from me experiencing that unsettling, creepy, yet transcendent feeling to the about-to-be deceased dying. “He is going to die… They are going to die…” as they die, and I shiver.
A Close Call
Recently my teenage son was about to go out, and I felt a compulsion to warn him. “Be careful out there,” I suggested for the first time and for no special reason, my kid growing up in New York City and commuting on his own since he was eleven. I always worry a little, a healthy concern from a father for his son. But I sensed that night was different, couldn’t tell why.
I dismissed my concern after he left, and didn’t think about it until about one o’clock in the morning, when insomnia struck out of the blue. Born with flat feet, bad eyes, and ADHD, I’m otherwise fit, with a cast iron stomach and no trouble sleeping — unless OD’ing on habañeros, or experiencing a breakup. But late that evening, something wasn’t right.
Tossing and turning, I hit the light and checked my phone. The opposite of a helicopter parent, I nonetheless have a tracking app installed on our family phones, depicting a dynamic map of NYC and its burroughs, floating avatars depicting both my kids’ locations. I don’t do it to spy, I do it in case of instances exaclty like this one, when my gut tells me something’s wrong.
Nicky my seventeen-year-old was in Central Park, and in motion. Our GPS capabilities these days are astonishing, tech the US military didn’t have until shortly before we did. The data in and of itself didn’t alarm me, as we live on the Upper West Side, and he’s got a girlfriend on the Upper East. He typically traverses across the park, which is post-Giuliani fairly safe.
Assured he was fine enough to be trackable, and in motion toward home, I turned off the light, put my phone away, and fell asleep. My concern continued into my dreamscape, though, as within it he appeared, gasping for air in our small kitchen. I kept opening the refrigerator, imploring him to drink water and eat something, and he kept scowling, slamming it shut.
The next morning I woke with residual stress, soon relieved to knock on his bedroom door, open it, and find him fast asleep. “Wake up!” I shouted as usual, getting him up for school part of our daily ritual. Always late, we didn’t have much time to discuss the evening before, let alone squeeze in any meaningful breakfast. “I don’t have time,” he yelled, on his way out.
Life catching back up, I didn’t think about my premonition, insomnia, or his late night through Central Park again, until he brought it up after returning from school. “You ever have a really close call?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere, while opening the refrigerator door. “Like you look back at it, and think that you were so close to maybe even dying?”
Confirming my fears, he was riding a Citibike along the main path in Central Park, when a high speed police patrol car roared from behind. “I had my headphones on, listening to music, and didn’t hear him coming,” said Nicky. “He was going really fast, and just missed me as I weaved to the left. Afterwards I realized he could have hit me so easily. I lucked-out.”
When Universes Collide
Each day we make thousands of decisions, and each decision has an impact on our lives. A vast majority of our choices have little if any long-term consequences, while a few have the potential to completely transform our existence. Deciding between chocolate or vanilla ice cream will likely prove meaningless, yet selecting this career or that is certainly significant.
Such major, momentous choices with obvious, significant repercussions fascinate me less than the unnoticed or forgotten actions that somehow reverberate into seismic, life changing circumstances. Consider the “near misses” we encounter throughout each day, how all of us are literally a second or two from calamity and even death from one moment to the next.
Think about it: an activity as common and everyday as walking across the street is fraught with peril. A one- or two-second delay or rush might mean the difference between that otherwise unseen car narrowly missing you or killing you. My son’s close call with that squad car could have, with even less of a space or time difference, put him in the hospital, or the grave.
The German film Run Lola Run is based on this idea of seconds transforming entire lives. The heroine hesitates, continues, or leaps when running into a tenant and his dog on their steps, each reaction in a sense splitting the Universe into three distinct timelines. Whether Lola is arrested, redeemed, or killed in the end results from sheer circumstance.
The science and mathematics of Chaos Theory is based on the observation that small changes generate enormous consequences. Speculation regarding the Multiverse assumes that every possibility actually plays itself out. These two concepts complement each other when we imagine our lives continuously branching within a Reality of endless pathways.
Although untested and perhaps untestable, speculation about the Muliverse is enticing because it helps address otherwise vexing fundamental questions, such as “Why is the Universe the way it is?” Simply answered, if an infinite number of Universes exist, and everything possible is actual, then we just happen to be in one where we can, and do, exist.
Speculating further, suppose that within an infinite number of these infinite Universes, everything is identical up until that instant when my son did or did not die that night. Might my unconscious mind have somehow been tuned into these infinite parallel Universes, so that my premonition was somehow a bridge between boundaries, joined in that fateful moment?
If true, then within infinite Universes my son was injured, in others sadly killed, while in still others the police car took an entirely different route, this blog never written. And if so, then maybe the engine of our intuition, the source of our creativity, are in these whispers across worlds, echoes throughout Eternity. Meanwhile here and now, I’m glad my son is OK.
