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A Philosophical Thread about Good & Evil - Catastrophes, Coincidences & Theodicy

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Because we were talking in this thread about the possibility of "precognitive dreams" (of which I am convinced to exist) and because last week, there was a very unusual week with some "lunatic" occurrences for me AND because I had very unusual dreams, I thought, this might be interesting for you:

I am sometimes having very detailed dreams which seem to be unreal but could be reality in the future and I want to share two of them with you, asking you where this location might be if it exists already in reality. I am also a person who is not a real right-handed man. My parents were very surprised when I was a child that I was using some devices like a left-handed person. I write with my right hand but I use shovels or axes like a left-hander and no one knows why.
I am telling this because I remarked that some of my dreams showed my own apartment or parts of my life like seen in a mirror. It sounds a bit crazy but it is true.

And now a very primitive graphic description of two of my dreams of the last week. To be "lunatic" must be good for something, doesn't it?
;):eek:
If you know where this might already exist or will exist in the future, please tell me:

1. Dream: I was invited to an apartment I have never been before. I know in this dream, this apartment is not mine but I can use it for several weeks. The owner of the apartment will come some time or even days later. I am allowed to use it as it were mine. I have the key and I was told, the door to this hidden apartment it is a blue-metallic door behind a kind of a "tourist-information-center" which is located inside a kind of hill or mountain with a "lookout-point". I am entering the tourist-info which looks a bit like in a cave for me and I really see behind a postcard stand a blue-metallic door which rather looks like the door to a machine-room inside a mountain-tunnel. I open the door with the key which was given to me. The door opens easily and I am entering a kind of corridor-tunnel with a big glass door at its end which also enlightens the corridor. I am going through the corridor into the direction of the light and there are also two doors to the right and the left, but I am going through the glass door and the view is overwhelming in this moment because it is a sunny summer day and I am looking through a kind of plexi-glass wall down to a kind of Norwegian "fjord" with water and ship traffic. On the left side, I see a giant bridge like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and a giant cruise ship is just entering under the bridge into the "fjord" or bay in order to reach its place in the harbour which is on the right from me. (As a said: in my dreams the directions can also be "vice versa").
I am looking around me and this apartment is the most surprising place with the most suprising views I have ever seen in my phantasy. It seems to have two levels with a stairway between the levels and a hidden elevator behind me. It seems to have been machinery rooms before but they were transformed into a luxury apartment some time before I was invited to visit this place. In my dream, I am not sure why I am here but I think I was invited to this place by a very rich friend, maybe in order to work together for the design of something. (By the way, being a professional German student for a long time, I studied almost everything but nothing really thoroughly. ;) )

2. Dream: I am looking from a higher street down to a big building which I see in a diagonal perspective with at least 5 floors but maybe more. The building seems to be a central government's building in a very high developed country and there are national flags outside, so it could be in Brussels or a building of or somewhere in the EU.
I think there are mostly offices in this building but in my dream, I have the permission to live there in one of a few apartments. At first look, this building seems to be a giant glass-block but after a closer look, you see that it has an "E-Shape" with covered parts in the "E", so that the light from the south can reach most of the offices and apartments.
The most incredible part in this dream is the elevator's system which is located on the North of this building because these elevators can really drive in 3 dimensions. I enter one of these elevators and there is a keyboard inside, in which you have to insert a combination like "C3R15". The C is the arm of the "E", the 3 is the floor and R 15 is "Room 15". This elevator is driving down its corridor, then turning to the right and stopping in its own corridor right before the room 15 on the 3rd floor in the "E-Arm C".
When you stay in this elevator and do nothing, it will turn around, drive back to the highest level of this building and wait and slowly sink down in a kind of revolver system of about 15 separated elevator units until it is ordered like the others by the next guest or customer of this building who wants to get to a certain room by elevator.
You can certainly also use the stairs and corridors as usual but this elevator system is much faster.

And now, please tell me, if these apartments or buildings are already existing somewhere in this world or how I can get there:

Recent Dreams 1.jpg
 
I have made a little research and at least the government's building from my dream does not exist yet but probably during the coming next 10 years it is possible to be built because the German companies of Thyssen-Krupp and Siemens are testing exactly these 3-dimensional moving elevators from my dream which do not exist yet apart from this test tower in Germany. Maybe, there are some other tests somewhere else in the world but I did / do not know of them. Do you?


 
I mentioned here on "page" 13 the German scientist Walter von Lucadou as the only German professor who is teaching about parapsychology and metaphysics in a German university ...


and I start to believe, my case could be interesting for him, because there are now some things in my life, which are "weird" even for me:

I am in a "hopeless" love with a much younger colleague and I decided for myself not to tell her that she has become much more than "an object of sympathy" for me, but other colleagues remarked that there must be something out of order with both of us because we are "extremely friendly" with each other.
Well, everyone I asked, told me that she has the same boy-friend for years and it is hopeless for me because of my age and because everyone expected them to marry during the last year - but it did not happen up to now.
I did not want to interfere too much because I do not want to be responsible for a tragedy or some kind of catastrophes, so I did nothing up to now what could change her opinion - although she must have noticed that I "like" her more than all other colleagues. She is always "extremely" friendly to me and she always tries to clear up mistakes between us which might lead to any misunderstandings or a quarrel between us - although we never really had one.

Why did I mention Prof. Walter von Lucadou?

He often quotes examples for "parapsychological" caused coincidences which are happening between persons because of extreme love or extreme jealousy, which are hard to believe. For example, he really believes that the human subconsious is able to cause such coincidences in the material world by "jumping out" of the immaterial mind of persons, but the persons do not know what their own subconscious is able to do.
He mentioned one example in various TV interviews which seemed to be really "spooky" but he himself says that he never believed that such "spooks" are caused by dead persons. At least, he never found one example he could not explain by extreme feelings of living persons.
One of the most incredible examples he mentioned was the case of burning small fires in broad daylight in a company in the German federal state of "Baden-Württemberg". The fire brigades were sometimes called to this company's small factory and they found small fires of which no one could explain how they started.
Lucadou says, he tried to find out, who was there in this company and who was not there when the fires started.
Most obvious was for him that the fires started to burn in the bureau of the young secretary of the company's owner or in the electric installations of his own bureau. Often, the window blinds / louvres of his or his secretary's bureau caught fire in daylight when the sun was shining but mostly in the early cold mornings, when he was leaving for a business trip or when he wanted to go on a holiday week-end with his wife.
As incredible as it seems, Lucadou said, the cause was the "impossible love" of his young female secretary for him which really was able to start a burning fire in some meters distance and she was not aware of this ability, when she was jealous of her boss leaving the company for business or with his wife. The window blinds in their special form in this company have in Germany the French name "Jalousie" and now guess, what this means and why they were burning very often in this company.
After Lucadou and the company's boss talked to his secretary and changed her working place to another part in the company, the fires in this factory stopped immediately.

Now my story:
a) My "beloved" female colleague sometimes or suddenly makes mistakes she never made before - during the 24 hours after I have met her. I do not know if I am the case for this or if our meetings make her a bit confused but it really happens.

b) Last time after we met at our hotel, I came home from the night shift, entered my apartment's living room, thought of her ("What a lovely girl she is! What a pity that this love is impossible!"), switched on the lights because it was still dark so early in the morning and one of the old light bulbs in my ceiling chandelier transformed into a little rocket by separating from its thread, flying some meters into my direction and landing softly but still hot on the carpet only some centimeters from my shoes.
When I put it in some years ago, I did not remark something strange with it but have you ever experienced something similar or a light bulb which looked like this one (?) :

DSCI1607.JPG DSCI1608.JPG DSCI1609.JPG How can an exploded light bulb look like this one?

c) There is a British book of 2004 about coincidences: "Martin Plimmer / Brian King: Beyond Coincidence" and I own a German version of it with 290 short stories about incredible coincidences.

Yesterday, after all these strange things happened, I took it from a dusty shelf and opened it just for fun or for some advice(?), thinking of my problems with my love for this young woman. After I did not read it for some years, I opened some pages and on the third page I scrolled in the middle of this book, I read something which really shocked me and I said loud:
"Das kann jetzt wirklich nicht wahr sein!" (= "This really cannot be true now!")

It was the short and true story about a man who wrote in 1929 a book about a young girl which he encountered later in reality with all the attributes he invented for her in his book.
But when he saw her for the first time in a Café in pre-war Berlin, he did not dare talking to her because she was so young and he obviously more than 20 years older. Before he could talk to her, her boy-friend came up to her and both left the Café. 20 years later, he met her again in the USA, she was married to her boy-friend of those times, but she knew his book, that she was the woman of his book and because he told her everything he ever dreamed of her during the last 20 years, she left her husband and married the writer who "invented" her in his book 20 years before.

What really, really shocked me yesterday is now this: The name of the girl he invented in 1929 in Berlin, found there in reality and the name she later knew in reality 20 years later is ...

... IN FACT THE REAL NAME OF MY COLLEAGUE I LOVE TODAY !

And I did not dare telling her anything about it up to now exactly like this writer did not dare in 1929!

This is "Karma" or "madness of the universe", isn't it?

How could I find this story yesterday in a book I own for years without knowing anything about this story?

What would you do in my case - being me?
 
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I could not sleep so well this day & night and I think, when I will meet her next time, I will ask her for a private conversation during a walk through the city or I try to invite her to a coffee and cake into a Café (will they open again in spite of Corona before Easter?) and I will tell her all my "problems" with her.
In the meantime, I will make photocopies of the three pages with the short story of the writer's "invention" of the girl with her name. I will tell her about all these strange coincidences and I will wait for her opinion and her decision.
Maybe, this is the end of my job at this hotel but I simply cannot go on living like this in emotional uncertainty.

Right now, I am looking again at the exploded light bulb and wondering how high the temperature has to be to make such a glass bubble to the outside. Why did the explosion not destroy the glass in spite of the cracks and only separated the glass from its thread and the lamp?
It is now my very own and special "Rorschach"-test. What do I see in this glass bubble? Is it a flower with stalks and stems? A human head with arms high above like from a dirigent of an orchestra?

DSCI1609b_ji.jpg

Is it "full moon" again and am I "lunatic" because of love? Everything is really strange and weird right now for me in this night and I feel a bit like "Homo faber" in the novel of Max Frisch: An extremely rational man just remarking for the first time in his life that destiny wants to decide his life although he never believed in fate or destiny ...
 
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Oh girl, oh boy, this story will become a long-lasting "Drahtseilakt" (= "tightrope act" ?).
I had the discussions of my life during the last weeks and she does not really like to change her life as it is right now: One boy-friend at home and an old colleague who is on fire with her at the working place but here, we both always controlling ourselves.
Obviously, she likes the "good feelings & vibrations" when it gets dangerous by flirting without really being in danger. At the same time, she is always incredibly considerate and friendly to me, explaining all she knows about this hotel and its computer systems for me in a manner that leaves no questions to ask at all.
I do not know how long this will be going "fine", but right now, it seems to be a competition between us who is able to control himself or herself better at work.
It has almost become a kind of sado-masochistic "occasional sinner's" game with ourselves: Who laughs more and who loves first and who will lose and who will win?
It is madness but ... OK, if she wants it this way at our working place and no one from the colleagues up to the management complains about our strange behaviour and sometimes crazy laughter there in the bureaus ... why not?
Maybe, it is better to work together in such a strange way for a long time than to split forever.
I have never had such a strange "relationship" before and I do not know if this is possible for a longer time but as long as we both like this constant "danger" ... it will be OK for me.
 
Why did I mention Prof. Walter von Lucadou?

He often quotes examples for "parapsychological" caused coincidences which are happening between persons because of extreme love or extreme jealousy, which are hard to believe. For example, he really believes that the human subconsious is able to cause such coincidences in the material world by "jumping out" of the immaterial mind of persons, but the persons do not know what their own subconscious is able to do.
...


c) There is a British book of 2004 about coincidences: "Martin Plimmer / Brian King: Beyond Coincidence" and I own a German version of it with 290 short stories about incredible coincidences.

Yesterday, after all these strange things happened, I took it from a dusty shelf and opened it just for fun or for some advice(?), thinking of my problems with my love for this young woman. After I did not read it for some years, I opened some pages and on the third page I scrolled in the middle of this book, I read something which really shocked me and I said loud:
"Das kann jetzt wirklich nicht wahr sein!" (= "This really cannot be true now!")

It was the short and true story about a man who wrote in 1929 a book about a young girl which he encountered later in reality with all the attributes he invented for her in his book.
But when he saw her for the first time in a Café in pre-war Berlin, he did not dare talking to her because she was so young and he obviously more than 20 years older. Before he could talk to her, her boy-friend came up to her and both left the Café. 20 years later, he met her again in the USA, she was married to her boy-friend of those times, but she knew his book, that she was the woman of his book and because he told her everything he ever dreamed of her during the last 20 years, she left her husband and married the writer who "invented" her in his book 20 years before.

What really, really shocked me yesterday is now this: The name of the girl he invented in 1929 in Berlin, found there in reality and the name she later knew in reality 20 years later is ...

... IN FACT THE REAL NAME OF MY COLLEAGUE I LOVE TODAY !

And I did not dare telling her anything about it up to now exactly like this writer did not dare in 1929!

This is "Karma" or "madness of the universe", isn't it?

How could I find this story yesterday in a book I own for years without knowing anything about this story?

What would you do in my case - being me?

My own story of a crazy love with an age difference of 30 years goes on and on and I still do not really know what to do exactly and the strange coincidences do not end.

She still seems to be in a stable emotional and sexual relationship with a young man in her age and she still is the kindest and friendliest colleague to me I ever had in my life.
We are having something like a platonic, non-committal relationship but the even stranger thing, she makes mistakes in my presence which are really unusual and which make her uncertain and angry at herself.
She usually loses keys every week, almost every key you can imagine - for example from her pockets by taking out handkerchiefs etc., then she is running back and usually finds the keys immediately but even she starts to think if this is still normal because she remarks it only when she needs the keys and up to now she was always lucky enough to find them all again. But I have never met a girl trying so hard to be perfect in doing everything with such a problem. It seems to be almost a "Freudian" problem or something like in the stories of Prof. von Lucadou (above).

Moreover, I bought the British original book about coincidences in order to write the story from this book to someone who is a native English speaker in order to ask him for his advice because I am a rather lazy person and I thought, I could scan this story before I write it on my own a second time and I could use the scans of other stories for my own book project in English.

The next "coincidental" shock for me was that this story about the German writer does not exist in the English original!
The German publisher expanded the ca. 250 stories in the English original for about 40 stories from the German language area without making any remarks about it in the German version.

So imagine this: I own an almost forgotten book for more than 10 years with a short story inside that represents my actual state of emotions with the same problems of age difference and the same name of the loved person and I find this book again and read this story inside which exists only in the German version, not in the English one, at the very same time, when I have the same problem.
The next problem is that the persons in this story met only once (he is 48, she is 20) and then 20 years later on another continent, are falling in love then - and only then - and marry in spite of the age difference (then he is 68, she is 40).

I did tell her that I fell in love with her, but she said, she wants to keep her own relationship and if I do not mind, she wants to go on working with me like this conversation about my love for her and between us both did never happen until she says it happened - which could also be 'never'.
(Very "rational" but also a bit "strange", isn't that?)
But I did not tell her of this story above because she is such a nice and friendly person you can hardly imagine and I still do not want to start a tragedy because she seems to be still in love with her boy-friend (for at least 3 years) although everyone who knows them both is wondering why they did not marry up to now.

Taking all these things into account: my and her age, these coincidences, my feelings for her and her own relationship etc., I have the uncertainty-feeling that really everything I could do in the near future ... could also be the greatest mistake of my life.

I thought to be a realistic, rather cold-blooded, rational-thinking man with 57 / 58 years, but being single and having such an experience of life does not really help me in any way.
As long as this job is so relatively well-paid and we do not have any more problems with each other, I will not change anything which could cause problems for us but these combinations of coincidences drive me crazy when I am thinking about them.

This is still the strangest relationship with a female colleague I ever had and although I try to be very careful, I simply do not know what would be the best behaviour for us and our "Karma" ...
 
I always thought to be a very tenacious and friendly guy but I came to the conclusion that you have to quit a job when there are too much things happening in it which you do not like or you cannot accept any more. I shocked everyone in this hotel by my own termination of this job: the girl I loved but who not really could love me and who was too young anyway, all the colleagues and the hotel management. The main reason is that every hotel is making losses during this pandemic but this hotel management is trying to reduce costs by cancelling contracts with external workers who were for example cleaning the public toilets in the basement and the ground floor behind the bar room.
These workers - usually poor women from other countries - are certainly the weakest parts in the chains of workers for this hotel, easy to be thrown out because they had no German contracts and now guess, who should do their work after they were dismissed: The "Night Auditors" who are said to work less in the nights than most others in the daylight.
Now there is a saying in Germany that you often would not like to be guest in a restaurant if you really knew how the kitchen is run. The "Night Auditors" here are usually not only checking in the last arriving guests and checking-out the earliest departuring guests, they are also preparing in the meantime the breakfast by baking the buns and the bread rolls for the morning breakfast and this could sometimes be up to 600 parts! Everything else was usually done by the kitchen staff, but also not in times when the breakfast room was closed for reasons of the pandemic. Then, the "night auditors" had to prepare complete lunch packages for each guest who wanted them. And now: If I were my own guest in this hotel, I would not like to know that the person who checked me in in the evening by speaking three different languages is suddenly also the same person who is cleaning the public toilets and preparing my breakfast or lunch package in the same night. This also was never part of my contract and this is why I am leaving relatively angry this hotel, which is - unbelievable but true - a hotel with 3 1/2 stars and part of an international hotel chain!
It is sad but sometimes it is necessary to make a cut - and to my own surprise, I am suddenly the hero of the poorer employees in this hotel because after my "dwarf uprising", the hotel management again hired cleaning personnel for the rest-rooms.
After the end of this month, you can hire me and now, after having worked in this hotel for more than one year in which I was meeting more "Covidiots" than I ever expected and finishing with a successful miniature-revolution, I am almost as prepared for civil warfare as "Hannibal" alias George Peppard in the "A-Team" was.

:firedevil:
 
But back to the main topic of this thread and the "Mysteries of Darkness" which I am often interested in:

There is often something in personal and public catastrophes which makes me wonder if this is pure coincidence or more. And if there are sometimes "warnings" we do not really understand as such - or if the time itself is not as it seems.
I mentioned some postings before the Irish-British inventor, aeronautial engineer and philosopher John William Dunne ...


... who was convinced of the existence of pre-cognitive dreams and that some persons could in fact "foreshadow" their fate and how they might die without really knowing it.

I remember a story from the 1990's from Berlin in which a young female student of fine arts was often painting in school flying or floating objects. In her class in a university of art she was almost famous for painting floating beams - sometimes made of wood, sometimes made of metal, usually used for the construction of old half-timbered houses (wood) or modern skyscrapers (metal). She was asked why she was so fascinated by them. She said she did not really know but that she had the feeling that these floating beams are a symbol for the stability of houses as well as for their transience and the transience of the people who were killed by them in Berlin during the WW II.
Finally, she was killed around 1991, by a metal beam, accidentally falling down from a construction site in Berlin just when she left one subway station on the way to her university. Her last painting there was a floating metal beam which looked very similar to the one which killed her in reality. She was the only victim in this accident.

Today is the 11th of September 2021. Everyone of us in our age will know where we were on this date exactly 20 years ago.

And there was a story which also made me wonder if this was pure coincidence or more because it is a bit similar to that one of the German student of fine arts:

When you look at this man and his work, isn't it strange or even a bit scary that in at least one of his works there are flying little airplanes into the body of his sculpture when you know today how he died?




And finally, there is this strange story of this ...


... with unexplicable so-called "anomalies" exactly on this day 20 years ago.


What do you think about this all? All pure coincidence without any meaning?
 
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On this day 20 years ago, amid the horrific carnage that struck New York, we lost one of our own community :(

RIP Taryn - You will never be forgotten
 
Mhm, after I have read a lot about coincidences - and please remember that I mentioned already in this thread the German scientist Hans Berger who invented electroencephalography because of a telepathic dream of his sister - I am convinced that there is a kind of transmitting informations which could be a "side effect" of the relativity of time:


Stories of pre-cognitive or telepathic dreams are so common in German history & science (e.g. Kekulé's dream-vision of the structure of benzene molecule rings)
... and in the surroundings of natural or man-made (German) catastrophes that it is almost statistically improbable to believe these stories must all be pure coincidences.

It happens more often than we usually will believe it and I think, if we could take it as serious as "ball lightnings" are taken by meteorologists after there are now serious scientific theories about their development, it would be "a nice field of scientific research".

I also mentioned here before the book in which my problems with my "almost-girl-friend" seemed to have had a "time-twin" in its German edition.
(In the meantime and after possibly having aroused the "powers of darkness" for my own person, I really hope that my person will not be one day making an own chapter in a new edition of this book! :eek:)

In this book's British edition (Plimmer/ King: Beyond Coincidence), you can find this story on page 162:

An incendiary coincidence

Chris Cleave's hugely successful first novel "Incendiary" -a best-seller in twenty countries - got off to a rocky start in Britain, as a result of a series of extraordinary coincidences.
His book begins with the graphic description of hundreds of people being killed and injured in an al Qaeda suicide bomb attack in London. Cleave had written the book during 2004, but it was set for publication on 7 July 2005, the day a team of al Qaeda suicide bombers launched a series of simultaneous attacks on the London Underground and on a double-decker bus, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more.
All promotion for the book, including TV interviews and bookstore signings, were immediately scrapped. Hundreds of posters for the book, which were already adorning London Underground stations, were very rapidly taken down.
Cleave says the 'morbid coincidences' had a massive negative impact on sales in Britain. 'I had to try to re-assure potential read¬ers that he I was no prophet, nor an al Qaeda operative,' he said at the time.


And in the Chapter 5 before on page 159, you can find this story which is - in my humble opinion - also really "beyond coincidence":

Chapter 5

Life imitating art

The scene is familiar to millions of cinema-goers. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson and Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater plunging into the icy waters of the North Atlantic after the mighty ocean liner the Titanic sinks below the waves to the wails of the drowning and Celine Dion.

As a historical record, James Cameron's blockbuster leaves a lot to be desired, but that's beside the point here.

The point is that this celluloid reconstruction of the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic was an example of art imitating life. What many people don't know is that the real-life events surrounding the Titanic maiden voyage in 1912 appear to be an example of the eerie phenomenon of life imitating art.

The Titan and the Titanic

No one has ever come up with a theory that even begins to explain the extraordinary parallels between the novella 'The Wreck of the Titan or, Futility, written by American writer Morgan Robertson in 1898, and the real-life events surrounding the sinking of the RMS Titanic some fourteen years later in 1912.

Robertson might as easily have been writing a piece of journalism describing the tragic sinking of the Titanic, so similar were many of the details. The month of the wreck, the number of pas¬sengers and crew, the number of lifeboats, the tonnage, length and even speed of impact with the iceberg were all close to identical.

The novella is worth looking at in some detail, so remarkable are the similarities with the tragedy it so uncannily foretells. It begins:

She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession, and trade known to civilization. On her bridge were officers, who, besides being the pick of the Royal Navy, had passed rigid examinations in all studies that pertained to the winds, tides, currents, and geography of the sea; they were not only seamen, but scientists.

... Two brass bands, two orchestras, and a theatrical com-pany entertained the passengers during waking hours.

... From the bridge, engine-room, and a dozen places on her deck the ninety-two doors of nineteen water-tight compart¬ments could be closed in half a minute by turning a lever. These doors would also close automatically in the presence of water. With nine compartments flooded the ship would still float, and as no known accident of the sea could possibly fill this many, the steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.

... She was eight hundred feet long, of seventy thousand tons displacement, seventy-five thousand horse-power, and on her trial trip had steamed at a rate of twenty-five knots an hour over the bottom, in the face of unconsidered winds, tides, and currents. In short, she was a floating city — con-taining within her steel walls all that tends to minimize the dangers and discomforts of the Atlantic voyage - all that makes life enjoyable.

Unsinkable - indestructible, she carried as few boats as would satisfy the laws. These, twenty-four in number, were securely covered and lashed down to their chocks on the upper deck, and if launched would hold five hundred people.

The simple statistics of the comparisons between Morgan Robertson's Titan and the Titanic are remarkable. But it's Robertson's description of the Titans collision with the iceberg which is so chillingly prescient of the real-life events fourteen years later.

Two bells were struck and answered; then three, and the boat-swain and his men were lighting up for a final smoke, when there rang out overhead a startling cry from the crow's-nest. ... 'Ice', yelled the lookout; 'ice ahead. Iceberg. Right under the bows.' The first officer ran amid-ships, and the captain, who had remained there, sprang to the engine-room telegraph, and this time the lever was turned. But in five seconds the bow of the Titan began to lift, and ahead, and on either hand, could be seen, through the fog, a field of ice, which arose in an incline to a hundred feet high in her track. ... seventy five thousand tons — dead-weight — rushing through the fog at the rate of fifty feet a second, had hurled itself at an iceberg.

... The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring, snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings, and fore-and-aft bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the sides of the ship, even where backed by solid, resisting ice; and fill-ing the engine and boiler-rooms with scalding steam, which brought a quick, though tortured death, to each of the hun-dred men on duty in the engineer's department.

Amid the roar of escaping steam, and the bee-like buzzing of nearly three thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings from within the enclosing walls, and the whistling of air through hundreds of open dead-lights as the water, entering the holes of the crushed and riven starboard side, expelled it, the Titan moved slowly backward and launched herself into the sea, where she floated low on her side - a dying monster, groaning with her death-wound.


Late on the night of Sunday 14 April, fourteen years after The Wreck of the Titan had been published, the RMS Titanic, heralded as 'practically unsinkable' by its owners, the White Star shipping line, struck an iceberg and was holed below the water line. Less than three hours later she had sunk beneath the waves. Of the 2,200 aboard, only 705 people, mainly women and children, were rescued.
 
Did Robertson mention that @Barbaria1 's ancestor cause the Titanic disaster? If not, he missed the real story.

The problem is that if you examine enough works of fiction/predictions post facto, statistically you are very likely to find a few that seem prescient. That's confirmation bias.

But out of curiosity, since the real event happened only 15 years after the novella was published, it's likely Robertson was still alive. Did he have anything to say about the event?
 
In March 2001, the Fox network in America aired the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, which was a short-lived (one season) spinoff from The X Files, which had been a hugely popular show with a mass cult following for most of the previous decade (though it had by this time been in terminal decline for a good few years, due to slow, boring plotlines and a general lack of quality writing - something that seems to be a plague upon pretty much all tv shows these days).

Anyway, The Lone Gunmen were a small band of maverick conspiracy theorist hackers that had appeared as guest characters in a number of X Files episodes going back to the first season, but what has subsequently made the pilot episode of their own show so relevant is that it had them attempting (and of course ultimately succeeding) to disrupt a terrorist plot to fly an airliner into the World Trade Center in New York. In the show, the method used was to take control of the plane's autopilot remotely by means of a receiver installed by a rogue maintenance technician, rather than an actual hijacking, but the parallels between this and the actual events just 6 months later are striking.

The producers of the show took a fair bit of flak after 9/11, with some media outlets (the media being what they are) accusing them of inspiring the actual 9/11 attacks (which seems highly unlikely since the real events were probably planned well before the show aired, but that was never going to stop the media looking for a scapegoat after all)

As for the show itself, it was kind of OK with a few interesting characters and did develop a vocal fanbase but it never really gripped the wider public imagination in the same way that The X Files had, and was cancelled due to falling ratings after just 13 episodes.
 
As Windar said, coincidences like this can be found with many historical events. They come from looking back after the event to find thing that seem to have matching details. Had the Titanic not sunk or the Towers not been hit, these stories would have been totally forgotten.

Morgan Robertson, the author of "The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility", died in 1915. He denied having any precognition, and instead attributed the similarities between his novel and the real events to his knowledge of shipbuilding.


Less well known is a short story "How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic by a Survivor", by British journalist William Thomas Stead. Like Robertson, Stead's story was more of a warning than a foretelling. As he wrote: "This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats". Even more coincidental is the fact that Stead was one of the passengers lost on the Titanic.

 
Did Robertson mention that @Barbaria1 's ancestor cause the Titanic disaster? If not, he missed the real story.

The problem is that if you examine enough works of fiction/predictions post facto, statistically you are very likely to find a few that seem prescient. That's confirmation bias.

But out of curiosity, since the real event happened only 15 years after the novella was published, it's likely Robertson was still alive. Did he have anything to say about the event?

I might add that according to my sources, Robertson regarded himself as a "bad writer" who found it very hard to concentrate enough to write a book. He said he simply knew so much about ship-building that he wanted to write a book about it.

Concerning your mentioning of Barbaria:
Let me guess: Her ancestor's name was possibly "Hugh Williams"? Because on page 212 in this book "Beyond Coincidence", you will find this story:

Charmed name

Life jackets, life boats and emergency rations are all useful things in the event of a shipwreck, but having the right name can also help:
"Hugh Williams" was the only survivor of a vessel that sank in the Straits of Dover on 5 December 1660.
121 years later to the day, another shipping disaster in the same waters claimed the lives of all on board, except a man with the seemingly charmed name of "Hugh Williams".
On 5 August 1820, when a picnic boat capsized on the Thames, all drowned with the exception of a five-year-old boy: "Hugh Williams".
On 10 July 1940, a British trawler was destroyed by a German mine. Only two men survived, an uncle and nephew, both named "Hugh Williams".


So, I would recommend to change your name into "Hugh Williams" if you ever want to work on a ship or will become a sailor, because this name seems to make "unsinkable"!

;)

In any case, I will stay with my opinion that "strange coincidences" are happening too often to be explained by "pure coincidence" - and I think, I still have great "theoretical ancestors" like Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and Arthur Koestler, who all had the same doubts about "coincidences".

By the way and concerning the universe's "games with names":

Believe it or not, I had at my first reception in my first hotel a discussion with the shift leader, if this coincidence was "normal" for him - and it was not.
We both had the feeling that someone or some kind of intelligence with a strange sense of humour in a different dimension was sometimes playing tricks on us with the random use of guest's names in our hotel. This hotel was different from my last one which was rather like a big flat US-American motel with 3 floors.
The hotel, in which this happened was a hotel with 15 floors with about 150 rooms and your computer system could show you the rooms with the names of the guests who reserved the rooms. You could check the names floor by floor on the screen.
One late evening in my night shift, two business men arrived independently from each other with unusual German names. One of them was "Herr Hahn" (=> Mr. Rooster) and one hour later arrived "Herr Huhn" (=> Mr. Hen). The next morning, the shift leader said after a look on the guest list: We are having "Rooster" and "Hen" in two rooms on the same floor and the doors are directly opposite. Looks like planned but it was the computer system and it would have been even more fun for us with a Mrs. Hen in the one room. Then I really would like to place them at the same table in our breakfast room, watching what will happen ...

Even more unbelievable for me was this coincidence in the same hotel:
There is a German "rhyme" or rather "saying" which all parents know from their own childhood, telling you that into children's hands should not be given "dangerous" items like knifes, forks, scissors and fire. The saying goes:
"Messer, Gabel, Schere, Licht sind für kleine Kinder nicht!"

One evening, I told the shiftleader that there are a Mrs. Scheer, a Mr. Messer and a Mrs. Licht on the 12th floor.
- Did anyone of us arrange them there according to our German children's rhyme?
- No, he said. And the "Gabel" is still missing, he smiled.
I looked at the list for the arriving guests of the next day and said:
- There it is: A Mr. Gable from the USA will arrive early tomorrow morning!

What do you make out of such "coincidences"? Is the universe itself "thinking" and arranging things and lives in a strange kind of humour, regardless of the people's own desires of having their own lives?
 
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But the most fascinating examples of "coincidences" to me were results from the twin researchers at the University of Minnesota. The psychologists there were "environmentalists" who were convinced that the environment of a child growing up decides how the person will later lead his life.
There were the possibility in the USA to find twins who were separated for adoption and did not know of each other for decades.
(By the way: I found this legislation at those times in the USA a bit strange because most European countries would have ever allowed adopted persons to know at least if they were twins and to find their other twin sisters or brothers at any time after their legal majority.)
The results were not as the environmentalists had hoped - and this is probably the understatement of those decades there.
The matches in life between the separated twins were sometimes "spooky" because twins who are together right from their birth will at some time see and make a difference between them in order to show their own personality. If twins do not know of each other, they sometimes have more similarities than everyone ever had believed before these research results in the USA.
The most incredible result-examples were the so-called "Jim Twins" who became famous for all interested scientists around the world and even I still have photos from a German scientific monthly from 1983.
Their adoptive-parents did not know of the other twin and both gave them the name James. These two twin brothers, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis were born in 1939 and met each other for the first time in 1979 because of the research of Prof. Bouchard at the University of Minnesota. Both were precisely six feet tall and weighed exactly 180 pounds.
Both had dogs named Toy. As young men, they had both married women named Linda, and then divorced them.
Their second wives were both named Betty.
They named their sons James Alan and James Allan.
They had both served as part-time sheriffs, enjoyed home carpentry projects , suffered severe headaches, smoked Salem cigarettes, and drank Miller Lite beer.
And in a lovely final coincidence, they both had a habit of leaving love notes around the house.

ditfurth zwillingsartikel 7a .jpg ditfurth zwillingsartikel 8a .jpg Their garage "workshops" looked - hrm - "a bit similar" and both had a special "similar" bench around a tree in their garden, too.

Finally, please explain me all of this by "pure coincidence". The other possible explanation is similar improbable for me because that would mean: we all are more the puppets and "marionettes" of our genes than we all ever could believe ...
 
But the most fascinating examples of "coincidences" to me were results from the twin researchers at the University of Minnesota. The psychologists there were "environmentalists" who were convinced that the environment of a child growing up decides how the person will later lead his life.
There were the possibility in the USA to find twins who were separated for adoption and did not know of each other for decades.
(By the way: I found this legislation at those times in the USA a bit strange because most European countries would have ever allowed adopted persons to know at least if they were twins and to find their other twin sisters or brothers at any time after their legal majority.)
The results were not as the environmentalists had hoped - and this is probably the understatement of those decades there.
The matches in life between the separated twins were sometimes "spooky" because twins who are together right from their birth will at some time see and make a difference between them in order to show their own personality. If twins do not know of each other, they sometimes have more similarities than everyone ever had believed before these research results in the USA.
The most incredible result-examples were the so-called "Jim Twins" who became famous for all interested scientists around the world and even I still have photos from a German scientific monthly from 1983.
Their adoptive-parents did not know of the other twin and both gave them the name James. These two twin brothers, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis were born in 1939 and met each other for the first time in 1979 because of the research of Prof. Bouchard at the University of Minnesota. Both were precisely six feet tall and weighed exactly 180 pounds.
Both had dogs named Toy. As young men, they had both married women named Linda, and then divorced them.
Their second wives were both named Betty.
They named their sons James Alan and James Allan.
They had both served as part-time sheriffs, enjoyed home carpentry projects , suffered severe headaches, smoked Salem cigarettes, and drank Miller Lite beer.
And in a lovely final coincidence, they both had a habit of leaving love notes around the house.

View attachment 1059454 View attachment 1059455 Their garage "workshops" looked - hrm - "a bit similar" and both had a special "similar" bench around a tree in their garden, too.

Finally, please explain me all of this by "pure coincidence". The other possible explanation is similar improbable for me because that would mean: we all are more the puppets and "marionettes" of our genes than we all ever could believe ...
Check out this, it is a truly fascinating study and is still ongoing:

Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study​



It is not the first but it is the longest, started as a long-running cohort study of 1037 people born between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Great emphasis is placed on retention of study members. At the most recent (age 38) assessments, 96% of all living eligible study members, or 961 people, participated. This is unprecedented for a longitudinal study, with many others worldwide experiencing 20–40% drop-out rates.
 
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