The hundreds of first-hand accounts of reality shifts (aka:
mind-matter interaction MMI, quantum jumping, glitches in the Matrix) on
this and the following pages have been collected and shared through Cynthia
Sue Larson's RealityShifters since 1999. Special issues focusing on
particular types of reality shifts (such as: the Dead seen Alive Again,
Seeing Loved Ones Before They Arrive, Invisibility, Walking through Walls,
etc.) can be found by browsing through the RealityShifters
archives and subscribing to the (free) monthly ezine. Hundreds of stories
are reported here in this "Your RealityShifter Stories" section of this web
site, and the phenomenon is documented in the best-selling book, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the
Physical World.
Jimmy Durante Dies Again
Susan
Yakima, Washington
One Hot August 1977 afternoon in Palm Springs, California, I
was writing checks for the monthly bills, when I heard on the
TV that the beloved entertainer Jimmy Durante had passed away.
I was so sad at this news, as I had been a fan of his wholesome
entertainment all of my life. The TV show had excerpts from his
television show of him singing his song, "Inka-Dinka-Doo", and
some of the many skits with famous entertainers, like Tallulah
Bankhead, Eddie Cantor, Robert Mitchum, Charles Laughton, and
Peter Lawford. Jimmy had seemed old for so long, that I was
alarmed when he suffered a stroke in late 1972. His health
declined from then on. Wheel-chair bound and visibly frail,
accompanied by his adopted a daughter, Cecilia, at his 83rd
birthday bash in 1976 (his last public appearance), he once
again sang in his famous gravel voice "Inka-Dinka-Doo". I
whispered a blessing and a heartfelt good-bye, and thought I
will really miss his joyful spirit. I mentioned it to my
daughter when she came to visit later that evening, and told
her of my sadness at his demise.
Three years later on January 29, 1980, my daughter brought
a newspaper with a headline banner that read: "Beloved
Entertainer Jimmy Durante Dies", just shy of his 87th
birthday. Need less to say I was DUMBFOUNDED! Although my
life has many Reality Shifts, this was the first one in which
another person remembers the alternate reality.
Tube Coincidence
David
Clacton-on-Sea, England
Back in 1992, I experienced a very strange coincidence that
defied reason. I was the manager at a west-end London
Underground (subway) station, one of the biggest. A
desperately worried plainclothes policewoman came to my
office having lost her warrant ID card. This is almost a
crime of negligence to a member of the police. I phoned the
station supervisor at Holloway Road, a north London station
where she had started the journey. He remembered her showing
it in the lift, and said he would check the station. After
ten minutes, he returned, saying he could not find it.
I told the lady the unfortunate news, and we chatted for a
few minutes. The phone rang, and it was the supervisor at
Holloway Road.
He said that a contractor working on the station with him
had popped into his office and overheard the last phone
conversation with me. He said that he had been at Liverpool
Street Station an hour before, and seen a person hand a
warrant card to a City Policeman saying she had found it on
the station. I told the policewoman this, and she later told
me she had retrieved it from the police station at Liverpool
Street.
The odds against this line-up of events (there are nearly
three hundred tube stations) must be immense. The contractor
seeing the find just before the moment of overhearing the
conversation. Indeed, truth is stranger than fiction.
A Very Special Dog
Minerva
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
There are so many things that are hard to explain... like
synchronicities, for example.
Two years ago, right after my 40th birthday, my family decided
they wanted to get me a dog as a belated birthday present. We
went to the Humane Society, and each one of us individually wrote
down our first choice, without telling anyone else. To our
surprise, we all agreed on a beautiful female dog named "Pattie"
by the workers at the pound!
Since my family in Mexico calls me Pattie, we figured that is
the main reason we chose her. It helped that we all liked her
markings: Irish-golden bright red with white.
We took her to a room to get acquainted, before deciding if she
would like us or not. She immediately snuggled with me, and moved
wherever I moved. It was so endearing. I asked the pound volunteer
if she knew about Pattie's history. She only said: We have no
history. We found her on September 24th (my birthday) wandering the
streets. That was it. We had to have this dog. She was named like
me, and was found on my birthday, and followed me everywhere.
Wonderful synchronicities!
After couple of months, we started noticing that Pattie had a
white "swan" on her back which included the neck, beak, and body of
the bird. It's amazing. What's most amazing is that my mother has
called me "Swan" since I was little. Goodness. I love it when
synchronicities happen!
The Missing Coin and The Glass of Warm Water
Blaine
California
I'm the engineer/scientist in the family (three patents); thoroughly
skeptical, with a some knowledge of psychological and physiological
explanations for many otherwise unexplainable occurrences. My father
and are alike in this regard, but my mother and my eldest sister have
encountered many strange events in their lives, and throughout my life
I've heard many of their stories. Apart from some inexplicable "luck"
that repeatedly occurred on St. Patrick's Day, I've only had two truly
head-scratching incidents, although several stories mentioned (the
missing book, the empty pocket of change, the closing time) have also
occurred to me.
The Missing Coin
Blaine
California
I was living in New Jersey in the mid-80's. One of the major
highways is a toll road, and my commute required me to pay exactly a
dollar on a daily basis, in four quarterly installments. So often in
the morning I would cash in a dollar bill, drop the 3 quarters in a tray
in my car, and use them thereafter to feed the toll machines, as I did
on this day. So I was driving home one night when something started
going wrong with my car. I pulled off early, incurring a 15 cent toll,
leaving a quarter in the tray. I found a gas station with a phone booth
and pulled in and parked, glad that I still had a quarter to use for the
phone. Except, of course, that the quarter was not in the tray. I
remember looking, staring, closing my eyes, looking again, but the
quarter wasn't there. I got a really eerie feeling because I have often
wondered about the hand of God, miracles, etc., and, I'm sure like many
others, had desired an explicit act of some kind to warrant or justify
faith. So I spent extra time crawling around the floor of my car,
looking in the seats, checking my pockets, etc. for that last quarter -
to no avail. I probably called collect to my nearby girlfriend's house,
I don't remember what was wrong or what I did about it, but I absolutely
recall coming back to the car and seeing the quarter in the tray from
the outside before I even opened the car door.
I have a meager theory about some of these things - about how our brain
builds symbolic representations of what we see and sense etc.,
and that, of course, on occasion, the brain just flubs it. What we
perceive as a normally consistent world, apples falling, trees waving in
the breeze, is a symbolic assembly in the brain for what we're not
directly looking at. An imperfect assembly at times for all of us, and
sometimes for some people, a perpetually imperfect assembly, as for
example "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", a book of stories about
neurological illnesses by Oliver Sacks, who is the real doctor who
really did the things in the one story that they based the Robin
Williams movie "Awakenings" upon.
This theory can be stretched to apply to scenarios involving a few
people. Other theories, such as the coin flipped into one of other
dimensions envisioned by String Theorists (the cutting edge of particle
physics), are also plausible. I collaborated once with a very brilliant
man who published an article in Scientific American in which, among many
other things he cited me for this collaberation, he discussed the
probability that a person's wave function (in the quantum physics sense)
could cause them to shift instant to the surface of Mars. It involves a
very very large number, which is the subject of the article, but the
point is that it is entirely possible given today's understanding of
physics. So maybe the coin's wave function just blipped somewhere else
and came back. The odds would probably favor my theory.
The Glass of Warm Water
Blaine
California
Late one Saturday California morning, late 1980's, probably 11ish but
perhaps a bit earlier, I decided to do a little cleaning up around the
house. In front of the couch was a glass of water, blue plastic in my
mind even though I didn't have blue plastic glasses at that time, but
that's how I remember it. My wife had had a glass of ice water the
night before and hadn't taken it to the kitchen. The glass was on the
floor a few inches in front of the couch near one of its ends. We
hadn't used that room that morning. I picked up the glass and was
struck by the fact that the glass and the water within it were warm to
the touch. Not as far as hot, but distinctly warm, much warmer than tap
water, warmer than aquarium water (high 80's). I showed it to my wife
who basically shrugged her shoulders at it after disavowing any
knowledge with regard to it. I feverishly considered the
possibilities. Despite being California, it was possible that the
furnace had been running that morning, that the heat flow came out under
the couch and had heated the glass of water. At some point I felt the
warm air indeed emanating from under the couch and pretty much
discounted that possibility. The only other explanation was that the
glass had been exposed to the morning sun, and, being blue, absorbed
quite a bit of heat. But the glass had been in front of the couch which
would almost certainly have blocked the rays, and moreover, the sun
didn't shine into that room until the afternoon.
Again, its possible for the glass to have heated itself, decreasing its
entropy as overall entropy elsewhere increased. Maxwell's demon might
have made an appearance. I don't have any alternate theories.
