Snail on shingles

 Yesterday, September 11, I did some remote-viewing practice using the app RV Tournament. I was given the coordinates 6156-4124, and these were my notes.

I was then given two possible target images to choose from, and I chose the correct one with perfect confidence.

I consider this a pretty good hit. The snail in the target image isn't actually on a shingled roof, but it is on a dark surface, slanting in the direction I indicated in my sketch. (Surprisingly, this was a "practice round," with immediate feedback, which I'm usually bad at. I've done 102 practice rounds and guessed only 47 of them right -- 0.8 SDs worse than would be expected by chance. For "tournament rounds," with delayed feedback, I've done 34 and guessed 24 right -- 2.4 SDs better than expected by chance. That's a whopping 3.2-SD difference between the two types of round!)

The next day, I posted my dream, "The coypu assembles a new zodiac," in which a coypu (nutria) calls one animal after another to "come and join the general dance." Otto left a comment quoting the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland. Note some of the words that show up in the first stanza:

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail,
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle -- will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?

I know the Mock Turtle is referring to pebbles on the seashore, not to roofing shingles, but it still seems like quite a coincidence. "Turtles" -- again, with a different meaning -- have also been in the sync stream recently.

Apparently I remote-view better with delayed feedback -- so is it really remote viewing?

So, this is weird. The way RV Tournament works is every day it gives you a set of coordinates keyed to a target image, and you try to pick up psychically what the target image is. Then it shows you two images and you guess which is the target. The next day, the correct target is revealed, and you find out if you were right or wrong. I'm usually right -- about 80% of the time.

As you can see, the probability of my guessing as well as I have by chance alone is 1.6% -- not an astronomically low number (the sample size is still quite small), but certainly "statistically significant" by most standards. (If you're wondering how it's possible to get 78.6% of 15 rounds right, it's because the latest round hasn’t been judged yet. My track record is 11 out of 14.)

In addition to the daily "tournament" image, RV Tournament provides three "practice" images every day. The procedure is exactly the same, except that the feedback is immediate. As soon as you've made your guess, it shows you the answer. In "practice" mode, I show no evidence of remote-viewing ability whatsoever, guessing right exactly as often as predicted by chance. In fact, I often receive a rather clear psychic flash, but for the wrong image.

As I've said, 1.6% is by no means an impossibly low number, so one obvious possibility is that I've just been lucky with the tournament so far for no particular reason, and that over time both success rates will approach 50%.

If that doesn't happen, then the question is what is causing the difference. The only difference between the two types of trials is the time between guessing and receiving feedback. (You can also receive cash prizes for doing exceptionally well in tournament rounds, but I haven't signed up for that, so that's not an issue.)

My hypothesis would be that what I am doing is not actually remote viewing in the strict sense, but precognition. Instead of getting a paranormal glimpse of an image located outside my field of vision, I am getting a paranormal premonition of what I will see the next day, when the correct answer is revealed. In practice mode, I try to get a premonition of what I am going to see in a few seconds. Then, a few seconds later, I see both images and make my choice; and a few seconds after that, I see the correct image only. With these two future experiences so close together in time, it is easy to imagine that I might easily attempt to foresee one but in fact foresee the other. In tournament mode, though, the two future experiences are separated by approximately 24 hours, making that sort of mistake less likely.

Okay, now RV Tournament is just messing with me

If I had seen a green door, I would have dismissed the image as coming from my own mind, not the target. I didn't see that, though; I just saw the general geometrical layout, with the diagonal lines of the path leading to the verticals of the door.

The scribbled lowercase letters are notes on color: yellow, red, white. I guess the y and r are a hit, since I put them in an area where the wall is kind of orangish. The white circle on a stem (I thought it might be the back of a person's head) corresponds to nothing in the target image, although I suppose conceptually it is consistent with the fact that this is a path leading to a door, the sort of thing you would expect a person to be on.

As I have said before, my mental images when I do this are so crude and low-res as to be completely useless for any imaginable practical purpose. I wonder, though, if you had access to the notes of hundreds of people all remote-viewing the same target, if you could use them to reconstruct a pretty detailed "composite sketch." Obviously, whoever is behind RV Tournament (it's supposed to be someone called Michael Ferrier) has access to just that. I hope that in addition to the sort of crude statistical analysis he is reporting -- x% of users' guesses are right, which has a y% chance of occurring by dumb luck -- there are "composite sketch" studies going on behind the scenes. What you'd do is give 100 viewers' notes on the same target to someone who doesn't know what the target image was, and have them sift through them, noting common threads and trying to reconstruct the original image. If most viewers' images are roughly of the same caliber as my own, I bet you could get some fairly high-quality results. If the composite sketch experiments are a success, the next step is to get a contract with the military, law enforcement, CIA, NASA, or whoever. Unbeknownst to RV Tournament users, some percentage of the coordinates they are given will actually be keyed not to the stock images we are told they are keyed to, but to genuine unknowns on which the customer wants to gather intelligence. Then the next day show the users two stock images, neither of which was really the target, and let them all think they were just unlucky that day.

My money says they're already doing this, because, really, how stupid would you have to be not to think of it?

This green door thing really makes me wonder about the mechanism behind these psychic flashes, though. If I saw the target image, even through a glass darkly, anything that even hinted at possibly being a green door would be the first thing to jump out at me. That -- not the funnel shape formed by the path and jambs, and certainly not the vaguely reddish-yellow color of some of the stones in the wall -- would have been my primary impression. This suggests the unsettling possibility that RV images are not direct perceptions by the viewer but communications from a differently constituted mind.

Really, though, a green door! What are the odds? Where does extrasensory perception leave off and synchronicity begin? And what's next -- owls?

So far, I've been doing extremely fast-paced gestalt viewing, where I just scribble down my first impressions in five seconds or less. Once I've gotten into the groove, I might try my hand at some more leisurely, detailed Courtney Brown style techniques, using a pencil and paper rather than a touchscreen.

Flexible graphite arms, purple rubber, and remote viewing

On the afternoon of August 13, the same student who randomly mentioned owls serving as alarm clocks in colonial America asked if she could tell me about a dream she had had about a month ago.

In the dream, she was visited by small purple aliens "from a Blue Planet, but not like Earth because they actually classify Earth as a Green Planet," and they took her on board one of their "flying laboratories" to show her how new aliens were created. "They wanted me to see it because they were really proud of how the whole process works. I didn’t mind, because these aliens are always quite respectful. I'm a bit frightened of them, but only a bit."

There were two big machines in the lab. One made the body parts, and the other assembled them. "First you make the arms, and you have to put, uh, this into the machine" -- and she held up a case of refill lead for a mechanical pencil.

"Lead?" I said.

"No, this. It's not actually lead."

"It's actually graphite."

"Yes, graphite. And the machine uses that to make the arms. When they come out, they're not attached to anything, and they're kind of wiggling and wobbling all over."

"Really? But pencil lead isn't very wiggly."

"I know, but that's how the machine makes it. Their arms are really quite wiggly. They're strong, but they don't actually have any bones."

She went on to explain how the rest of the body -- the torso and the head (this kind of alien levitates and doesn't have legs) -- is made by putting different material into the same machine. The material for the rest of the body is purple rubber. Finally, the arms, torso, and head are put in the second machine, and a complete alien comes out.

"When the alien came out, they told me not to touch it, because it was still very -- you know, it breaks easily, like glass."

"Fragile."

"Yes, the new baby aliens are extremely fragile, and they're transparent. They aren't purple yet. You have to wait a bit until it's safe to touch them -- well, you still can't really touch them. You have to wear special gloves like this." She sketched a glove with webbed fingers and drew small circles all over it.

"What are those circles?"

"They're like what an octopus has on its tentacles, they use those gloves to move the babies when they're still fragile -- they didn't let me do it -- and they put them in, I guess it's called a flying nursery, where they stay until they're purple."

"Who takes care of them? I guess they don't have moms and dads if they come out of a machine."

"No, they don't, but there are adult aliens that take care of them. They showed me a bit of the flying nursery, too. They had this thing they were really proud of : an oven, and they would put the babies in the oven."

"They put the babies in an oven? Why did they do that?"

"Well, I guess it's not really an oven. I just called it that because when they opened it I could feel that it was quite warm inside. What it does, is it makes them grow up faster. Well, not grow, because the babies aren't smaller than the adults, but they become adults faster. You can put transparent babies in there, and when they come out they're a bit purple -- not completely, but they've started to become purple. And normally that would take weeks. They've really sped up the process."

"Why do you think they wanted to show you all this stuff."

"They were just proud of it, and when you've done something you're proud of, you want to share it with other people and help them understand it a bit."

⁂

Shortly after hearing about this dream, I tried to visit Synlogos, but autocomplete unexpectedly took me instead to SynchroMiss -- a blog I visited months ago when I was methodically going through a list of links to 2009-era sync blogs. The most recent post, "SATuRN STRANger TRANSgender," included this:

Just after I had expressed incredulity that something made of graphite could be "wiggly," I run across this reference to an "incredibly stretchy" material made from graphene.

The reference to pencil lead really being graphite, and in the context of "arms," also syncs with this comment of mine about pencil points, bullets, and "Graffites."

Even the "purple rubber" from which the rest of the alien is made is a sync.

On August 6, I started using the RV Tournament app to practice remote viewing. They give you target coordinates and let you sketch and write notes on the screen. Then they show you two photos, and you guess which was the target image and state your level of confidence. The next day, the correct answer is revealed, and your cumulative score is adjusted based on whether you were right or wrong and how confident you were.

For my first attempt, I decided to keep it simple by trying to get only the predominant colors of the target image, ignoring everything else. The color I got was purple, but then, despite my intention of focusing only on color, I got a spontaneous mental image of a torus, or doughnut shape, and scribbled that down, too.

Neither of the target images was purple, but one of them featured tori, and I correctly chose that one with 90% confidence.

So I saw purple torus when the target image was actually some rubber tori. Later my student would report her dream in which aliens were made of purple rubber.

So far I'm doing okay in RV Tournament, although the number of trials is still too low to draw any real conclusions.

The chances of getting at least 5 out of 6 right by dumb luck are 7/64, or about 11% -- nothing particularly remarkable. And my mental images are extremely crude -- usually enough to choose Image A over Image B, but not enough to describe the target image itself in any real detail.