Trivia and other brain games

Now and then I amuse myself with very silly stuff. Such as reading the slips previous borrowers leave in my library books listing all their borrowing on that occasion. I'm intrigued to know how come they borrowed a book to my taste and yet their other choices are SF or fantasy or poli. sci., or whether like me they borrow for another person too.

My own choices must look wild, given that I read a lot of nature, art, novels, cosy detective, regencies, heavy psychology, etc., on my account, and borrow all kinds of astronomy and history and political treatises on HP's behalf. But they would all appear on the same borrower's slip.

When that exciting focus dims, I turn to those weird mixed wordette things you have to copy and type to get into blogs and suchlike entry way items. Usually not words at all, even if you can decipher them, which I often can't, but very very close to words, as if, like me and Swedish, I feel as if I could understand them if I listened and looked better.

Turns out there's a whole industry of people being paid by the wordette to type them and put them to use for spammers to get around. Each new invention spawns a new cottage industry. And new language to describe it.

On to other much bigger brain games. This is one my own brain plays on me rather than my engaging in it voluntarily. It sometimes scares people when I tell about this so if you're easily scared by psychic stuff stop reading now!

What this is, an ability I've had as far back as I can remember, is an odd way of knowing things that I never experienced nor could know about, it being the experience of another person. Not deja vu, where you suddenly have the feeling you've had this conversation before or seen this place before. That relates to your sense of your own experience.

But this is different. I can explain it with a couple of examples: many years ago, I was talking to a man I'd just met who was talking about a trip he'd made to England, a part of it I'd never been to, and was out walking.

I suddenly flashed on the scene and blurted out (before I learned not to spring this on people), oh, I know you turned a corner in the road between high hedges, and suddenly in the garden right ahead of you was a Henry Moore sculpture.

The speaker turned all white and upset and demanded how did you know that? were you there? are you following me? all very upset, and I had to explain no, it was just a mental flash I'd had on the scene, sorry. Never been there, knew nothing of the place, just had an image of it before he went on to say it. He looked at me funny after that, I must say.

And there were other occasions when I knew exactly what he was about to say, but this time refrained from joining in!

Oddly enough he was a novelist and you'd think this might be grist for his fictional mill. In fact I read a novel he published a while after I'd known him casually, and there were chunks of conversations we'd had in a group, whole and entire, but not this one. I think it unnerved him.

Another really lovely one: I dreamed of my eldest sister walking up to me as if to a camera and telling me she was pregnant, had just found out, and it was a boy (this was in the days when you didn't know that until the birth) and I asked her if he would be Andrew. She looked very happy. Ages later I heard she'd given birth, had not heard anything directly from her, hadn't seen her for years, but counting back it seemed that I'd dreamed this right when she'd found out. And the sex and name were right. Some psychic connection, perhaps.

That was unusual because it was a dream, but mostly these are waking events.

Or I've met a person and been suddenly very careful around them, seeing visions in my mind of scenes they were to be involved in, and found later that it did happen. Don't want to get into too many details here.

But you get the idea. I have discovered that some people who don't get these flashes of foreknowledge or whatever it is, are really scared about it if I mention them, as if it's a supernatural event or something! to me it's just part of how I roll, doesn't bother me at all, just added information to the newspaper that is life. But it's amazing how often I know just what a person is about to tell me!

I suspect it might be a kind of mental energy generated by the hyperalertness of being the youngest by a long way in a large FOO. Or extreme illhealth as a kid, which does affect your development when you mind is charging ahead and your body can't keep up. Anyway, whatever it is, I do use my powers for good!

Sign me Glinda!