Ties in well with my Rusty Nail post.

In our attempts to gain supernatural insight, humans have consulted tea leaves, animal guts, bird flight, umbilical cords, crabs, shoulder blades, runes, books, coins, clouds, fecal matter, mahjong tiles, logarithms and there are, literally, hundreds of other well defined systems for consulting the divine, which is to say, divination. Like drug use and magick, divination has a history as old as humankind and for all that time has been slightly disreputable; something about fortunetelling has always irritated established power structures, perhaps because it offers a direct and untaxable link to wisdom, an end run around the dreary formalities imposed by authority.

Typically, divination systems have three components: randomness, codified meanings, and interpretation. In tarot, for example, the cards are selected randomly, each card is associated with meanings collected in books, and the tarot reader interprets the cards and meanings that show up. And here’s an interesting thing: though divination tends to be associated with psychic abilities, in fact most methods are better suited for people like myself who exhibit no psychic talent; after all, why would a person with genuine psychic ability go to the trouble of learning the usually complicated systems associated with most divination systems? Wouldn’t it be easier to just, you know, be psychic?

as it happens, I have an opinion on that

But what you really want to know is, ‘does divination work?’ and as it happens I have an opinion on that, and the supernatural is not necessarily involved. I believe that an acceptable ‘minimum’ explanation for the uncanny insight received via divination can be derived from the combination of randomness, codified meaning, and interpretation I’ve described. It may be that the intersection of randomness and judgement is a reliable way to access unconscious knowledge, a relatively easy way to tap the kind of inner wisdom that we sometimes receive in the form of dreams, visions, hunches and other premonitions. A corollary to this idea is that all of the paranormal claptrap typically associated with divination—the gypsy robes, the ceremonies, the meditations—might all be useless window dressing, and that the real secret of divination lies in the entirely human skills that we bring to our chosen fortunetelling technique. And if that’s the case, the inescapable conclusion is that you might as well try it yourself, rather than relying on others. After all, who has more unconscious knowledge of your life situation than you yourself? And what are you risking, other than demonic possession?

All that said, I have had experiences with tarot that elude rational explanation, and curiously, these experiences have not tended to be particularly helpful—it’s more like I’m abruptly playing poker with an intelligence considerably vaster and less scrutable than my own… if you can imagine that; put another way, it sometimes feel as if I’m being trifled with. But on the other hand, these brushes with the divine inspire awe and a certain humility, and given my cynical, egocentric ways, may be the best reason of all to persist in divination.

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When I was in college, my housemates and I invented a game that we called Strawberry Shortcake. We first played it while eating, you guessed it, strawberry shortcake. The rules are simple: players take turns describing the most extravagantly ideal strawberry shortcake eating scenario that they can conceive of, and at the end of a round the player who has described the scene that is most ideal, most deliciously blissful, most outrageously, over the top paradisaical, is judged the winner. I remember winning one round by envisioning a gentleman’s library carved into the side of a Tibetan mountain pass, with a glass wall on one side to facilitate yeti observation.

the ability to imagine delight is like a muscle

Now I grant, Strawberry Shortcake is not going to replace Texas Hold’em on ESPN anytime soon, but it does have some interesting aspects. For one thing, my friends and I noticed that as we played successive rounds, the scenarios we conceived grew progressively richer and more enjoyable. It seemed that our capacity for imagining and visualizing delight was like a muscle that grew stronger with exercise. The game also increased our enjoyment of the present moment – paradoxically, imagining other, more joyful situations for eating strawberry shortcake seemed to add joy to our actual situation. And finally, whenever we played, we had to overcome an initial reluctance; something about deliberate mental creation of ideal circumstances seemed onerous, although we always enjoyed the game after we got started.

I have played Strawberry Shortcake since those days, though probably the name should now be changed to, ‘beer’. And there is still enormous resistance to the very idea of the game, and I still find this resistance puzzling. Of course, it may be that the game is simply dorky, but I think it goes deeper than that. After all, much conversation among friends is devoted to the creation of negative scenarios; who of us hasn’t been in a thousand conversations about things that can go wrong, or how a revolting predicament could be even worse. Why is it easy and common to visualize and talk about possible calamity, but relatively rare to deliberately visualize equally possible utopia?

I wonder if the answer has something to do with our early observation that the capacity for joyful invention seemed to grow stronger with use. Perhaps the ability to imagine delight is like a muscle, and perhaps many of us are rather flabby in that area. Maybe competitive visualization can help with that. So I here present strawberry shortcake to the world as an enjoyable way to exercise the imaginative capacity. Feel free to play with any food or beverage you like, and with as many people as you can cajole into joining you.

But can a game like this improve our daily lives? Well, of the four of us who invented the game, one was already wealthy and talented, two have since become wealthy and talented and they’re good looking too, and the other is, um, me. So those aren’t bad odds.

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I have mildly precognitive dreams. When I record my dreams for a few weeks, and review them, I find slight but definite foreshadowings of real life events. This capacity of mine does not extend, yet, to reliable stock predictions but it is entertaining and a reminder that we humans mingle with eternity on a nightly basis, whether we remember it or not.

Let me share three such dreams, in descending order of probability:

it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily

First, I recently dreamed that I would be meeting with a restaurant owner and that he would be giving me advice. And in fact, the following day, this event did take place. Now, this dream is not mysterious—the fact is, I knew about the meeting, but it had slipped my mind. It would be fatuous of me to claim psychic abilities for what is plainly a case of the subconscious merely reminding me of a previously scheduled event. On the other hand, it does demonstrate that information is processed below the level of conscious thought.

Second, I once dreamed of escape through a long, wet, exceedingly narrow tunnel. The next night, impulsively, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I hadn’t seen before and didn’t know much about. But the climactic scene was familiar; Andy Dufresne’s escape through a narrow, watery sewer exactly replicated the scene from my dream. Now this, I aver, begins to resemble a genuinely psychic event. I hadn’t seen the movie and had not, at the time of the dream, even decided to watch it. But perhaps I read a review or overheard conversations about the movie. So it’s possible that, here again, I subconsciously processed information not available to me consciously; it’s even possible that my subconscious engineered the event by prompting me to rent the movie, close the loop begun with the dream, and thus have the rather thrilling experience of foreseeing the future. But if so, how fascinating; it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily, a mind that organizes more information than I am able to, a mind that, apparently, has its own agenda.

My final example is somewhat disturbing, at least to me. I was scheduled to visit a company in Michigan as part of a due diligence team. In a dream—or nightmare, really—a few days before the trip, I saw myself and others at the company standing around in shock, contemplating a horrific disaster unfolding on television. The sense of dread was so palpable that I considered canceling the trip. But in the end I didn’t let a mere psychic event outweigh corporate need, and so I visited the company on September 11th, 2001, and stood around with others, watching on TV as hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center.

Now this seems impossibly strange. And yet… there were people who knew 9/11 was coming: the hijackers and their handlers, at minimum, and in the shadowy world of government, perhaps there were yet more. Is it possible that my subconscious sifted vast amounts of subtle evidence, made a prediction, and passed it to consciousness via my dream? I don’t honestly know. And here’s another thing I don’t know: what would be the difference between that and genuine precognition?

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