#32 Text:
Aus einer Familienchronik: Anna Determann wurde geboren am 27. September 1812. Aus ihrer Jugendzeit erzählte ihre Tochter Hermine folgendes: »Als Mädchen von zwölf Jahren steht die Mutter einmal in Ueffeln, wo ihr Vater Kantor war, vor der Haustür und sieht über den Kirchhof einen Leichenzug gehen. Voran ihr Vater mit den Schulkindern, dann eine Kindsleiche und einige Männer und Frauen als Gefolge. Der Zug kommtnicht durch das Tor des Kirchhofes ihrem Hause gegenüber, durch das alle Leichen getragen werden, sondern durch das Tor an der anderen Ecke, das nur für die Kirchgänger bestimmt ist. Da meine Mutter ihren Vater in der Wohnstube weiß, erschrickt sie heftig und schreit: >Vater, Vater!< Der kommt aus der Stube, und da erzählt sie ihm, was sie gesehen. Er will es ihr ausreden und sagt: >Sieh mal, Kind, schon deshalb kannst du es nicht gesehen haben, weil durch dieses Tor niemals eine Leiche getragen wird.< Einige Tage später stirbt das Kind eines Heuermanns, und in der Nacht vor der Beerdigung stürzt das Tor ein, durch welches alle Leichen getragen werden. Das Kind muß durch das andere Tor getragen werdengerade so, wie meine Mutter es gesehen hat.« Translation: From a family chronicle: Anna Determann was born on 27 September 1812. From the time of her youth her mother Hermine told her daughter the following story: "As a girl of twelve my mother once stood in front of her house in Ueffeln, where her father was Cantor, and saw a funeral procession passing over the churchyard. At the head her father with the schoolchildren, then the body of a child and several men and women in train. The procession comes not through the churchyard gate opposite her house, through which all bodies are carried, but through the gate at the other end, which is designated only for churchgoers. "Since my mother knew her father in the living room, she took great fright and screamed: 'Father, Father!' He comes out of the room, and then she tells him what she saw. He wants to talk her out of it and says: 'See here, child, you can't have really seen it, because no body is ever carried through this gate." Several days later the child of a hired hand dies, and in the night before the interment the gate through which all the bodies are carried breaks down. The child must be carried through the other gate--exactly as my mother had seen." Comments: Now we have a vision not only with details, but with one detail contrary to previous practice, and yet this vision too comes to pass. It's as if the Scotsman saw a trout swimming next to his brother in a pond that never had trout, but before the vision became real a stream with trout was diverted to the pond. The point that EJ seems to be making is that a true vision actually does predict the future: it sees things before they happen. This could mean a lot of things, but I will suggest just one: powerful intuition. So then, am I a seer? Not at all. In the preceding week at the radio station I had handled the news, which included daily items about weather and problems with the Challenger. There had been four postponements, and NASA clearly wanted to get the shuttle off of the ground. It was not hard to foresee a disaster on the way, but hard consciously to accept it. My unconscious mind had no such hesitation and made the bizarre manifestation of speaking the warning out loud. The "vision" was just my imagination. Similarly, I think, the Scotsman in #31 might have feared that his missing brother had gone a-wandering in the bogs; his unconscious mind presented him with a likely picture, complete with trout detail. The mother in #32, though a little girl, may have seen that gate crumbling in the same week that she saw that little workman's boy coughing so hard. Her unconscious mind might have worried, "How will he be buried if he can't go through that gate?" We need to know more before we can credit the two with some kind of supernatural vision. TKF: I would accept your suggestion that your and the Scotsman's experiences may not have been true visions, and develop it by suggesting they are instead informed guesses based on a little unconsciously assimilated "statistical" data and some luck. That is, "forecasting" as opposed to "foreseeing". A prediction based on some kind of internalized statistical analysis and imagination. In line with your idea below, a blend of analytical and imaginative faculties may have formed a million hypotheses/fantasies, based on an unconscious analysis of data, but it only remembers the one which happened to come true. The difference between the believer and the sceptic? The believer's mind creates myriad positive hypotheses (ie something unusual is true, a priori), one of which will fit reality. A sceptical mind creates all null hypotheses - nothing unusual is true until proven. To the sceptic, an unusual happening would not fit any previously created positive fantasy/hypothesis but would present itself and be judged true based on its contradiction, not support, of expectations. In this way, the illusionary effect we are proposing would not happen. I do not agree with extending this idea to the cemetary gate example. This seems to be a truly inconceivable happening, quite out of line with previous history (unless you make up clues such as the coughing child and the crumbling gate!) Not forecastable - even the most imaginative of believers would have difficulty coming up with this one. There are simply no seed data to develop. If the reader before this point had the same doubts we have have just expressed, now Junger has shown that a true vision is inexplicable by scientific analysis. GK: There is another factor: There may be a tendency, after the vision becomes reality, for the seer to recast the original vision to make it conform more exactly with what actually took place. TF: But if you say "after the vision becomes reality" you are accepting at least its partial confirmation by the reality, right? That is already significant. And a final factor: The seer may have many other visions that prove to be wrong, so that the one that proves right begins to look like a coincidence: reality confirmed one of the many potential futures envisioned by the unconscious mind
