The Strange Tale Of The SS Serendipity

 Reading the latest issue of Reader's Digest last night as I awaited drowsiness to overtake me, I landed on one of Your True Stories that captured my attention. It was sent in by Vernon Magnesen, Elmhurst, Illinois. You can read that story online here.

The now mostly forgotten capsizing of the passenger cruise ship SS Eastland in 1915 provides the backdrop. 

It seems Vernon's grandparents were slated to take a cruise on the Eastland, when on the evening of their trip, Henry, his grandfather, got into a ferocious argument with his landlord. This made him ill enough to cancel the trip and save his and his family's lives. Vernon Magnesen refers to this as a "miracle" argument that allowed 22 descendants a shot at life.

Upon further research I found that a young George Halas, had he not missed boarding due to a delay as recounted in this video about the disaster, would not have become Papa Bear of Chicago Bear's fame. Halas, who was twenty years of age at the time of the Eastland tragedy, lived on for another sixty-eight years, establishing himself as a legend in professional football.

Serendipity? I've noticed that disasters are often sources of stories of such "miraculous" tales. And often premonitions are involved.

Novelist Marian Manseau Cheatham parlayed her family lore of her grandparents' premonition about danger for those who boarded the Eastland in the novel Merely Dee.

Cheatham explained it this way:

I discovered that my paternal grandmother had a ticket to that 1915 Western Electric picnic, but the night before the big event, my great-grandmother had a premonition of danger and begged my grandmother not to go. Grandma listened to her mother's pleas and remained safely at home. That weird twist of fate changed our family's destiny, and mine.

In Merely Dee the titular character ignores her mother's premonition and sets off anyway for more of an adventure than she could have imagined.

Finally I want to reference Jay Bonansinga's nonfiction book The Sinking Of The Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy in this connection. Having access to firsthand and eye-witness accounts, as well as archival material, Bonansinga is able to flesh out several premonition stories.

In chapter 2 he relates the story of newlyweds Paul and Louise Jahnke. Louise had a sudden premonition that "Something would happen to the boat." They went anyway, but not before leaving instructions with their landlord about what to do with personal belongings and such in case they didn't return. They didn't.

Also related is the story of a Mrs. J. B. Burroughs, who had a visit from a friend who had a horrible dream of a "ship turned over on its side, and hundreds of corpses lying in a row." The dream was laughed off at first but Mrs. Burroughs later came to recognize it as a divine warning. The details of the dream were uncannily accurate.

Bonansinga's Chapter 2 ends with an account of Western Electric employee Josie Markowski, who endured a week of feelings of dread about her company's picnic trip on the Eastland to the point of having second thoughts about going.

On the morning of departure her mother ironed the dress Josie was to wear, and Josie was struck with the thought that she would never wear it again. Her mother urged her to go anyway and put the bad thought out of her mind lest she "bring it on the boat."

Like many disasters the SS Eastland disaster seems to have left a legacy of warnings heeded and unheeded and quirky twists of fate - all part of the strange world in which we live.

Why Study The Paranormal?

After confessing a fascination with "the soft edges of science" biologist Lyall Watson wrote in the introduction to his book Beyond Supernature:

I am not wedded to the proposition that the supernatural must exist. If one defines supernatural experience as - the experience of something unusual, something which exceeds the limits of what is deemed possible - then there is clearly a vast field of experience, of repeated experience, from all over the world, just waiting to be explored. The fact that such reports are, by their very nature, largely anecdotal, has led to their being discarded as unacceptable to science. Which is a pity and a waste, because I suspect that answers to some of the riddles of the paranormal might well lie in the pattern and contents of such reports.

Words such as supernatural and paranormal trouble me somewhat because they often become mingled with an unfortunate superstition to the point of ridiculousness. Perhaps nature and normal are so incompletely and poorly understood that we are drawing false lines.

For my part I collect personal anecdotes of unusual experiences - what some call "glitches in the matrix" - and study them. As suggested by Watson, I look for patterns. Premonitions, near-death experiences, visions, etc., all interest me because they are so common. Drawing too hasty a line between what is natural and what is supernatural doesn't help here.

I have come to accept that mind is primary in the universe. In my thinking it is impossible to start with matter and make sense of the universe and life without acknowledging the primary role of mind and intelligence. Nothing makes sense without sense in the first place. Or else all is a very long string of meaningless coincidences beyond human comprehension.

Closing thought: The unusual really is usual if we are paying attention. 

Déjà vu: A Strange World Experience

A strange world experience I am very familiar with - and I believe most everyone else is as well - is what the twentieth century parapsychologist Emile Boirac termed Déjà vu. That is, the weird feeling that one has previously experienced the present moment or memory before. In French Déjà vu means "already seen."

Most of us feel there is something mystic, or at least uncanny, about the experience. Materialists, who have no room in their worldview for mysticism, tend to dismiss this phenomenon as "reintegration." Psychology professor and professional skeptic Ray Hyman explains reintegration as the memory of an event or place resurfacing upon the appearance of part of the stimulus that formerly aroused the memory.

Among the more mysterious-inclined explanations for Déjà vu are legitimate memories available through reincarnation, or perhaps precognition.

I lean towards the latter. Inasmuch as down through the years I have had flashes of insight (not always experienced as Déjà vu) that illuminated my future, I tend to find precognition more in line with my experience. I have had many premonition as precognitive dreams.

Coming as I do from a Christian background, the concept of reincarnation is unfamiliar and strange - although I am fascinated by and open to it.

Then again, for those who are familiar with the Matrix movie franchise, Déjà vu could be something akin to what Neo called a glitch in the Matrix.

My personal Déjà vu experiences have tended to be about situations that I suddenly find myself in and knowing what is about to happen just before it happens. I don't dismiss Hyman's explanation out of hand, but sometimes it just doesn't seem to fit - at least not for me.

I have often pondered if time is not an illusion. Is it possible that the past, present and future somehow all exist simultaneously?

In all this I have to say that the one suspicion that Déjà vu arouses in me is that reality is not exactly what it appears to be. Perhaps reality is a many-layered thing and the mind has to be prepared to look more carefully at these various layers.

My Strange Life As A Blogger

Always I've considered my blogging efforts an  outlet, even as therapeutic at times.  A writer I'm not, so I never thought I was creating literature. I enjoyed reading other blogs and thought to myself, "what the heck, why I don't do that to sort things out in my own mind." I tend to be very introspective but I've never been consistent with my diaries and journals - until blogging made that easy.

When I started I believe I was at a very low place emotionally. I titled my first blog The Blushing Animal. My inspiration was a Mark Twain quote: "Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to." I believe I had intended to collect evidence of the many ways we humans fall short of common  decency.

Then a strange thing happened. I soon realized that while I did basically agree with Twain's assessment, perhaps the majority of us (certainly I think it true of myself)  try to be decent humans. Oh yes, we fall short often and sometimes even tragically. I'm still not sure if the majority of us should be blushing or just redoubling our efforts to be nice, however, I just couldn't endure focusing on the negative. So that blog was very short-lived.

A more open approach was needed so Groping The Elephant was born. The little parable of the six blind men and the elephant by John Godfrey Saxe was my inspiration for this one. Gee, we all see things differently and all tend to be certain we are right - and we are ... in our own minds!

Groping was my first attempt to reconcile the spiritual person I originally was with the more nihilistic person I had become. Personal pain led to my bitterness. Scientific materialism was a great springboard for my cynicism. No matter how much I looked at the stranger side of life, always there was an effort to rationalize it all away.

I groped the elephant of life for quite a while before I decided I had changed.  I wanted to ease up a bit and show more openness to ideas I had pushed into the back corners of my mind. Though I always made it clear I thought of myself as just another blind man groping at something I was in no position to fully comprehend, I realized I was at times heavy handed.

So I scratched that one as well.

By now I was having trouble being consistent in my blogging. So Doug's Dribblings was born. The dribbling part referred to my infrequency. There also was a secondary image in my mind of slobber and drooling. I refuse to take myself too seriously. I know I turned off a lot of my cynical blogging friends (who probably wouldn't consider themselves so much cynical as realistic) who found me during my agnostic-on-the-way-to-atheist phase. (In the spirit of groping at the elephant I never thought it necessary to break my ties with these folks, and still don't if they are inclined to agree to disagree.)

Now I have a new internet service and I consider it yet another opportunity to start afresh. That is the why of The Strange World Of Doug B. So now my hair is let down even more.

There is so much I don't know about life and the Cosmos, but that's okay. It's always liberating to step outside of narrow confines that have either been imposed on you or that you have imposed on yourself.

I urge everyone to try it sometime. You may find you like it.

My job has kept me and has hindered my efforts to launch this current blog. I'm having to work at it as I find the time. But I foresee more time in the future (hopefully). In the meantime I'm keeping notes on the strange things I encounter and want to share with my readers, in my own life as well as those strange things that happen to others.

As always, I'm a bit uncomfortable with words like supernatural and paranormal. But sometimes it's confusing to define terms. I suppose I'm skipping slowly towards the fortean label. Really I dislike labels but can't deny their occasional usefulness. And I suppose I should add a note about my use of the word God or god. If when you see me use that you think of the popular or common  Jewish/Christian/Muslim concept, you will be misunderstanding me. I do believe everything - no, EVERYTHING - is divine and I believe there is a Supreme and divine mind back of EVERYTHING. Exactly what that means, I don't pretend to know. This blog isn't an effort to proselytize.

Five (Odd) Facts

My cyber friend Alice G of Whatsoever Is Lovely blog recently tagged me and some of her other blogger friends to give five facts about ourselves. So here goes and I hope I don't bore anyone:

1) I am a high school dropout. This one I'm not proud of. After my parents divorced when I was eleven, my school work took a back seat to other things, like goofing off and playing hooky from school. I swiftly fell from the top of my class to passing on a D average. I failed the ninth grade for excessive absenteeism, but was later passed into high school via social promotion, where I promptly developed an uneasy and unpleasant relationship with school guidance counselor. I had improved my attendance and my grades, but any time I did miss a day he was right there at the front door to hassle me. I was out sick on my seventeenth birthday (which in my state was the legal age to drop out of school), and even though I had not given thought to dropping out, promptly did so when my social worker snidely told me over the phone that he assumed I was going to quite now that I had turned 17. "Yes, you're right," I told him and slammed down the phone. (Maybe fact number one should have been that I was an impulsive smart aleck when I was a teenager; really I think I was just hurting really bad inside.)

Addendum: In my twenties I obtained a GED and enrolled in business college, graduating with honors.

2) I have memories of being a child and occasionally seeing otherworldly creatures, quite vividly. Up until my late teens I often (but not always or even usually) would be overcome when alone with a feeling there was another presence with me. I haven't experienced that so much in recent years, but do still have occasional auditory and, less frequently, visual hallucinations. I now tend to think of this as my personal muses.

3) My mother always related the story of how when she was pregnant with me she felt God had a hand on me in a special way. Although she was prone to miscarriages and had a dozen or so, even having to take to bed at some points in the pregnancies of my two brothers, she came through her pregnancy with me in fine fashion, actually having to be careful about her weight gain. When I was born she chose Nathan for my middle name, after the biblical prophet, and all my life that is what she mostly has called me. And she is the only one who calls me that. It is a special name between us and doesn't sound right coming at me from anyone else. (Now I don't think I'm any kind of prophet, but do confess to having had more than a few premonitions or examples of clairvoyance throughout my life.)  Really.

4) I am a habitual and vivid dreamer. My dreams are often intricate. My dreams have often served as guides in my life. I view them as a window into my soul. My waking filter, I'm convinced, hinders me from seeing more of what lies deeply hidden in my psyche. Consequently, I'm a big believer in the value of dream analyses.

5) My mother began buying toy guitars for me when I was five years old. Seems I always had one around when I was kid. When I was twelve, she took down her old Gibson acoustic and began teaching me guitar chords for real. At the time I took to it like a duck to water. Right away I wanted to use the guitar as a solo instrument. We were poor and couldn't afford lessons, so I wasn't sure how to accomplish that. But after a while I began to, as it where, pull the music out of the wood. I have always heard what is in there but often had to search to find it. Later I benefited from books on music theory and guitar. I can read music, but prefer to close my eyes and listen with my inner ear. Playing solo guitar has been symbolic of my loner lifestyle and individualistic way of doing things. I have never been comfortable following recipes for anything, but prefer to follow my instincts, to make changes and create variations.