Every football game my friend J would make sure our clothes were clean, shirts tucked in, everything in order, etc. Josh sticks to this ritual today; whenever he has an exam he’s nervous for, he will wear nicer clothes because he thinks he will do better. And he typically does.
I can believe that this ritual, since it is comforting that it would make him perform better. It probably would make me perform better due to the pseudo effect.
My friend J has been researching Jung and his universal archetypes and the idea of synchronicity. It was not until he listened to the The Police’s final album also entitled “Synchronicity” that he began to take it seriously. He began to obsessively research how Synchronicity, explained by Jung and Sting, is when random events that have no discernible connection are somehow connected through meaning. Jung believed that this was due to the collective unconscious portraying itself through reality; that there’s a larger pattern to life and not just random chaos. In his own personal experience, the idea of an underlying pattern guiding life is a better alternative to chaos. It isn’t something that at our stage of evolution we can understand, but one day we may be able to grasp and see evidence for this common theory.
The idea of the unconscious manifesting itself in dreams and the idea suggests that it also manifests itself in reality.
My friend V says that at every Russian wedding, it’s custom for the audience to yell “bitter” once the vows are being read to the couple. And that when they kiss, everyone stops and counts how many seconds the kiss last. According to superstition, the amount of seconds predicts how many children they will have. In Russian communities, a lot of kids is desirable so the longer the kiss the more bliss.
There’s another version of the superstition that says the amount of seconds is how long the marriage will last.
Personally, I like the first version because it’s hopeful and exciting to have great things in store for the future. On the other hand, if someone has a horrible marriage at least its end is in sight.
This was a story I’ve heard from my parents and several relatives for years. So I have three older brothers because my dad was married twice before my mom and his second wife, M, unfortunately passed away when my brother R was 13. Eventually my father remarried and had me when my brother turned 20, but the wound left by his mom’s sudden death never left him.
Fast forward to his 23rd birthday. We were celebrating as a family in the backyard, playing music, about to cut the cake. A toddler (barely three or four) says that his mom says hi. Everyone took a double-take and told the toddler to explain. So he did:
There’s a belief that those who are really young and really old (so babies and senior citizens) can see into the paranormal world since they still have a close relationship with it. So the toddler says that he saw R’s mom in her funeral attire, looking the same as she did when she was healthy. R was taken aback by it and didn’t know what to say. I don’t think anyone did.
My mom believes this story wholeheartedly. She’s told it to me several times and so has my father and brother, yet I don’t remember it. Which is odd, because I was the toddler who saw her. I served as the medium for which she could connect to her son, who she could see was still mourning for her. And the fact that although I could barely articulate words, I was able to describe her perfectly is creepy.
When my friend Z was 13, she asked for a Ouija board for Christmas. An odd request, but her parents didn’t really believe in those sort of things so they got her one. Z had always used the Ouija board as a joke with her friends whenever they had sleepovers. All day they messed around, making up gibberish and pretending a “spirit” was talking to them. The family had a big laugh and when night fell everyone went to sleep.
That is except for Z. When she went to bed that night, she couldn’t fall asleep because when she got into bed there was a huge weight put on her legs, like someone was sitting on them. Once Z realized what was going on, she got out of bed, ran to her parents’ room frightened for her life. Her parents subsequently threw away the Ouija Board and that was the end of that.
Z told me that she stopped using Ouija Boards ever since because of the unforeseen consequences that it had. The Ouija Board was used by the Occult to speak to spirits who had passed on, and Z saw herself as disrespecting that mode of communication. The testy thing about Ouija Boards is that once it is used, any spirit can pass through. It’s like trying to open a door to a closet full of balloons just to grab the purple ones. It’s virtually impossible to do that.
When Z told me her experience with Ouija Boards, I actually believed her and never want to go near a Ouija Board. I’ve known for her for a bit and she’s a pretty rational individual. So if she was terrified by something she thought was a ghost, well then it probably was a ghost.