Precognition? Strange modern phenomenon…

I realize that most will regard what I am about to say with skepticism, at least I would hope that you would. http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/ibm-predicts-mind-reading-machines-20111221-ncx that brain-reading technology will be commercially available by 2017, and the defense department working on similar technologies for "intention surveillance" over the past decade, it would be irresponsible to assume anything magical or supernatural about it without at least considering these more practical possibilities.

I keep a dream journal. I know, so 1990's... But as a writer, I find that it helps me get in touch with aspects of my own psyche that are conducive to the creative writing process. So, for the past 15 years or so I have time-dated journals describing dreams as well as other random thoughts as they occur to me, to come back to and elaborate on at a later time.

The more I play through the latest http://elderscrolls.com/ title, the more I get the impression I've been there before. Not only that, but very specific themes repeatedly cause me to go back to my journals, to see how I described specific dreams it reminds me so much about.

One in particular, took place months before I had even heard about a then upcoming release of the next ES installment. (I was too wrapped up in Rift at the time to notice sooner.) It was an extremely vivid "tour" behind the scenes of the development of, oddly enough, an Elder Scrolls game. (Not so odd though since I've been a fan of the series for a good decade now, and was still actively modding for Oblivion at the time.)

In my journal I described a few specific scenes, one being wandering through a forest much like the one surrounding Riverwood (with a prescient emphasis on water effects), and another playing a stealth type character at night being perched on a cliff looking into a town almost identical to http://www.iparadigm.org/images/overlook.png.

Pretty generic, I know. Plus it went on to show certain of the developers' apartments or dorms and this convoluted machinery that reminded me of a room-size PC watercooling solution that had somehow sprung a leak... Life-sized dummy robot NPC's and monsters running around... It was all rather amusing actually. (It was also pretty funny hearing the guy in Riften advertise his Falmer Blood elixir that could "see into other people's thoughts.")

But there were a couple of specific images from this and others that stood out. Like a very Nord looking warrior coming up over a rise that was extremely reminiscent of the one you ascend on the way to Bleak Falls Barrow in this same dream. This I remember thinking seemed like a perfect promo for a new Elder Scrolls game!

Another involved many druid-like characters in black robes chanting some deep monotonous words all around me. It was so striking not only did I write about it but I told my father the next day. I joked that I might have been gassed, and that the people I was renting from in this small town in southern Oregon may be part of some strange cult...

When I saw the video months later of the unveiling of Skyrim where all the developers came out in identical black robes, and the leaked footage of the same snowy theme and Nord ascending a mountain clearing, it was so similar to the context of these dreams, I couldn't believe it. It was very much like the feeling I got when the entire production staff of the biotech company I worked for recently all dressed up as worker bees for Halloween, parading around the complex with signs that read "join us, we are the hive mind!" Kind of cool, but more than a little creepy given my knowledge of certain technologies.

Now, I'm not accusing Bethesda of buying into the whole Ray Kurzweil cult of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity, using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception-style technology to burrow into the minds of their modding community or anything. That would just be... wrong.

I guess I'm not sure what I'm suggesting. So, in the absence of more concrete evidence, which I cannot provide beyond recalling these events as they occurred and were significant to me, I'd just like to extrapolate a bit on a hypothetical scenario where I suppose that certain powerful individuals and organizations have unleashed a "wireless human network" which allows people with similar interests or talents to communicate, directly or indirectly, possible through dreams or a form of shared consciousness.

My own experience extends far beyond the scope of this article, and while the subtleties of dream interaction may seem relatively innocuous, I would not be so quick to overlook such a thing being undertaken behind the backs of the general public "for their own good," nor the inevitability of others using it for less than benevolent purposes. How such a thing could have gone so largely unnoticed though is the real mystery.

Perhaps people do experience these things, but honestly don't understand or consider what they are participating in is human technology, and are therefore unwittingly aiding the agenda of those who would use it without our knowledge or consent, possibly to steal intellectual property? Or maybe the uninvolved wealthy and powerful too have suspicions but no more control over what is being done to link us all to this hypothetical techno-hive-mind than the rest of us?

I have believed for some time that modern drunk-with-power corporations wouldn't be able to resist mashing the new quantum/nanotech button when it came out. My intuition (or rather my knowledge of human nature) is telling me there is a larger move going on right now in the "elite" (read super-wealthy) corporate world to push exactly this sort of thing. You'd think we'd be pushing immortality research, and colonizing space. But I suspect the control and ownership achieved by such experiments might seem more readily attainable, more exciting, and more fun.

As the cliché goes, if man in his scientific pursuits were to discover irrefutably God does not exist, at least in the form we were expecting, we would be compelled to create what we feel that concept should have been. Either out of desperation, inspiration, arrogance, or to condescend at those "still gullible enough" to believe. So, in our hypothetical future endeavors in that regard, would we be so convinced humans needed the hand holding "mystery" of being lied to about what they were experiencing, or the truth intentionally withheld?

If these corporations were so hell-bent on pushing mind-reading technology, it would only be logical to demand an off switch, not to mention the biological equivalent of an antivirus, firewall, friends list, etc. Even then, if there is one thing you learn in the technology industry, it is that any information system can be "hacked." Would the novelty really be worth the risk?

I suppose if we weren't the ones taking it...


Also, if anyone can post or PM me a link to the announcement video I referenced, where the dev team all came out in black druid robes with the Skyrim theme/Nord chanting, I'd really appreciate it!

Patch 1.2.

A competent tester would have caught magic resistance breaking before they release it, nevermind a real life seer. Unless he/she runs out of falmar blood of course.

There's a word or phrase for changing ones' memories after seeing new information. As in, you could have had a dream that you didn't remember very well and then once they saw more information about it, it filled in the gaps and now you remember the dream clearly showing the new information. Specifically you could've had a dream about some skyrim place and if you were to write down details it'd be very sparse. But once you saw scenes in Skyrim the memories coalesce and now you could write down much more detail about the dream.

It's pretty hard to accept that as a viable answer but the existence of such a human phenomena is well documented.


edit: Also your forum might be more popular if you got rid of the animated background. It was hard to read your post with it shooting stars at me.

Cryptomnesia.

Confabulation might be closer.

In response to my previous post on http://www.iparadigm.org/01-09-2012/precognition-strange-modern-phenomenon/, some friends over at the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331402-skyrim-precognition/ suggested a couple interesting considerations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia sort of reminds me of the concept behind the Johnny Depp film "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Window". It deals more with memory recall issues where a person is unable to recognize recalled material as such, and believes it something new. Some of the experiments that have been conducted to test this are interesting, as it gets into the arena of the "collective consciousness," in a Jungian sense applied to a phenomenon like the modern internet, where people watch so many Youtube videos for example, they might recall a concept months later and not immediately reccognize which specific video or where exactly it was from.

An interesting side note is that with today's bombardment of raw information bandwidth, I believe most everyone does this to a certain extent. The human brain only has a physical capacity to store and access so much information at a time, then has to compress and categorizes the remainder into archetypes. So, I would predict that as the quantity of information passed into long term memory increases exponentially, so would the incidence of such memory recall glitches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation seems similar, but leans more towards disorder, dementia, and is often seen as an early sign of schizophrenia. This is because: "Although patients can present blatantly false information... Individuals who confabulate are generally very confident about their recollections, despite evidence contradicting its truthfulness."

This is a classic clinical diagnostic device, when a patient is unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Of course any scientist would be effectively rendered immune to such by rigid conformity to The Method. All hypothesis must be tested, all conclusions validated and verified. I would probably classify "Confabulation" as a form of self-reinforcing delusion, where a person honestly BELIEVES what they are saying without the will or capacity to consider alternative explanations.

It's like the old axiom though, if you can ask yourself the question, you probably aren't crazy. If one evaluates their own investigation of certain "paranormal" concepts as such, then investigation of the paranormal in and of itself cannot constitute diagnosis of mental illness. Otherwise, anyone who ever downloaded SETI @ Home would have to be deemed schizophrenic!

I do realize however, that you all have only my word that I keep these journal entries. I am personally leaning towards "strange series of coincidences" in this specific case. I do know how I described these dreams, and the correlation of detail was remarkably specific (who knew Beth would use druids), but still, it need be nothing more than that.

Something I feel is at least worth considering in our modern context however, which is why I touched on it in my previous article, is the concept of man creating (or re-creating) "God." This has been a "trope" in fiction for ages. The series "Heroes" for example, covered this notion in the motivations of the Petrelli family. Whenever radically new technologies emerge that would further enable such endeavors, we should expect some wealthy or powerful egomaniacs to attempt to use it towards such ends, either “for the greater good of humanity’s future,” or otherwise as a means of reinforcing their own alleged “divine right,” delusions of grandeur and what have you.

I have long been a student of the occult, more as a hobby than anything else; I find it interesting to study various systems of spirituality and compare aspects of their collective lore, history, and practice, to gain insight into the human experience (not just that part which has been accepted into popular "canon.") Probably why I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer so much in high school, apart from all the female leads being fantastically hot!

Something I always found interesting was the concept of an Astral Record, which is expanded on by certain "systems" of Remote Viewing. The film "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspect_Zero" dealt extensively with the later, and it was a real program funded by millions of defense dollars in the sixties and seventies, headed by "Major" Ed Dames and later "renowned" psychic Ingo Swann.

What I found most interesting about it was the method. It dealt largely with association of blind, non-related (mostly numerical) data with target information. The "seeker" would "ask a question," by association of an unknown target with a set of arbitrary numbers they consciously declared to be "connected." They would then write these numbers down and jot the first scribbled pattern or "gestalt" that came to mind. It was then a process of gauging impressions from various points on the pattern that emerged, the nature and shape of the pattern itself, separating personal reactions and intrusions (called "AI's") from allegedly real data about the target, detaching yourself emotionally from the process, which gets into forms of meditation and mental discipline common to many esoteric schools of spirituality, and gradually was supposed to allow you to "pull" enough information about the blind target from the "astral," which, like the Ancient database in the Stargate series, is supposed to be "all out there."

I never much bought into this, but it was particularly interesting considering the sort of people who were involved. Military people, wealthy people. It became something of a modern ouija board at some point, sort of the cult cocktail party supernatural spectacle du jour...

So, back to the notion of creating God. Historically, and especially in fiction, it is always some secret society or cult that gets involved in such a thing. I expect that modern humans, much like Ray Kurzweil's cult of the Singularity, will inevitably attempt to do something like this, and when they do, it is almost a certainty they will incorporate elements of various theological and spiritual systems, much like the Christian religion incorporated aspects of earlier pagan traditions to make it accessible to a larger audience.

When considering how such a system will inevitably take shape, I would expect much to involve reading intentions, profiling associations, just as modern "sense making" software delivers targeted content and advertisemants based on internet surfing habits, to bring individuals with similar talents, interests, and experiences into "circles" of association, to use popular MySpace jargon.

I only question if it will ultimately be something we may choose to participate in, or something that is done TO us? Will we be able to put on a "hive mind helmet" or activate a device to enable surfing the collective consciousness? Or will we all be wired up constantly, to whomever these few controlling the technology decide, with no say in the matter whatsoever?

I tend to expect the later, based on my experience of human nature. So, I'm always on the lookout!

Considering that everything we are and everything we see is naught more than the dreams of a mad god it does not surprise me that we should all know each other's thoughts as we are all essentially just a figment of the same dream.

http://www.iparadigm.org/01-10-2012/remote-viewing-and-the-internet-2-0/

PS: I removed the stars! =P

The number of things happening is so immense it would far more strange and supernatural to not see coincidences happening all around us.

A few months before Skyrim was released, I had a dream in which I went through that narrow passageway below Helgen, the one just after the cave-in with the water flowing through it.

But it was just a dream. It was no more telekinesis or precognition than any other dreams, because I most certainly did not encounter a Dremora with lootable Daedric armor in that passageway in the real game like I did in my dream.

Anyone remember this from the "answer his questions" option of the Morrowind character creation sequence?

http://www.iparadigm.org/wp-content/gallery/tesiii-morrowind/mgess9-copy.jpg

Currently I am contemplating a Mysticism mod. There is some great lore here to tie into:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Psijic_Order