I’ve never been one for fortune-telling, but I’m scratching my head after I learned about an odd experience my mother-in-law had recently.
Every now and then she’ll have coffee with a neighbor, I’ll call her Fatma, who is known to be skilled at telling people’s fortunes by looking at the coffee grounds left in their cup. My wife says Fatma clairvoyantly knew that she was clearing out her desk and leaving a job one day and another time had a vision of her visiting many large, historical buildings — the next day my wife got a job offer to scout locations for a film set in the 17th century.
This time around, Fatma told my mother-in-law that someone, not a young person, would have a health problem related to his/her foot that would result in her having to expend some energy (e.g., by taking care of this person). A day or two later she got a call from her brother in Sweden, who’s in his 50s, and learned that he broke his foot. Now he’s coming to Istanbul to stay with my mother-in-law for two weeks of R&R.
Bam.
So, what do you make of this kind of thing? Coincidence? Faulty recall? Psychic powers?
I’m still a skeptic.
3 comments ↓
Confirmation bias, perhaps? She remembers the instances in which the prediction was right, but not those in which it was wrong?
However, I don’t discount the possibility of psychics, either. You never know.
I have a sister in law (bill’s brother’s wife) that is that way also. She has called us prior to things happening or has called us to confirm that she knew a specific thing had happened that we had not made public yet. We are in CO, she is in NM.
She makes a pretty convincing argument towards believing.
Confirmation bias might be involved, but I’m still not sure how to explain those (possibly rare, I don’t know) cases when she predicts something with uncanny accuracy. Even if it’s 3 out of 100, those 3 are so weird that they warrant some explanation.
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