The Internal Geiger

Remember that whole wanting to know the future thing? I'm afraid I haven't always been entirely honest with you. It didn't end with the lines on my palm or the John Titor post or even the visit to the psychic fair. Those are just quirky phases that brought out my wicked, irreverent side. The truth is my relationship with the future is different. And I'm willing to bet yours is, too.

Tell me this happens to you: You're walking down the soda aisle in the grocery store. The wheel on your cart clicks and drags like the bag boy just used it to transport an elephant to the far end of the parking lot. All the cans look red to you. You stop to reach for a d.p. (Dr. Pepper for those of you north of the Red River) and in that instant, you're not reaching for a d.p. at all. Your hand is wrapped around a shrink-wrapped steak and you're picking it up off the floor. With absolute clarity, like a half-second movie reel named Mundania clicking through your mind, you are holding that steak, until the d.p. returns and you hear the cart wheel clicking again. Flash forward twenty minutes: an overly-ambitious shopper bumps your elbow in the meat department and you're there with your hands around a shrink-wrapped steak, picking it up off the floor. The precise half-second reel you saw twenty minutes earlier.

At which point I yell, "Why can't it be lotto numbers!"

Just kidding. Sort of.

Is this coincidence? Maybe. A suggestion of the mind I subconsciously summoned into fruition? Perhaps, but for me this goes far beyond the whole I-just-thought-of-Aunt-Edna-and-Aunt- Edna-called phenomenon. Until recently, I had no idea others didn't experience these mini-reels ten, sometimes twenty, times a day. To me, they seemed like educated outcomes of a multi-tasking mind seeking its way through the world each day. It never occurred to me to pay attention to how accurate they were.

Last Summer I met a psychic who recommended a book written by Pete Sanders Jr., an MIT-trained scientist who theorizes that everyone has these abilities. In You Are Psychic, Sanders's free soul method teaches how to expand these inborn tendencies and harness them into things far more useful than steak at the Piggly Wiggly.

I bought the book and studied it until I had, quite literally, freaked myself out using it. I would know the color of cars that approached from around blind curves. I would see what people were wearing hours before I bumped into them. I became worried I wouldn't be able to censor these reels out of my life when I didn't want them, so I put the book away. I allowed life to fill back in the spaces of my awareness until I could breathe again and I'd forgotten all but a few mundane flashes each day I rarely stopped to consider. My normal.

Until moments of uncertainty. Moments when a sure-thing would be just this side of heaven. Moments when a heightened sense could save me a hassle or a heartache. Would my timeline somehow collapse on itself and allow me a moment of clarity to help me make that decision? Could I trust it if it did? Would I always wonder if I was moving toward that seen moment or away from it?

Sometimes these mini-reels feel like an internal Geiger, a steady reading that lets me know I am where I'm supposed to be, even if it is in the meat department of a grocery store that day. Sometimes they are a blip that goes undetected. My normal. Always, they challenge my understanding of time.

If you had the opportunity to glimpse your future, would you?