Nancy Pickard wrote this piece for a writers’ blog, the lipstick chronicles. When I read it, I asked if we could repost it. It illustrates how creativity can tap into the future, how writers sometimes come up with scenariors and characters that are actually precognitive.
We’ve posted several synchros that are similar: Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished sea adventure about the cannibalism of a young cabin boy, Richard Parker, that eerily mirrors an actual event that happened 47 years after Poe stopped working on his novel; Morgan Robertson’s novel Futility, about an unsinkable ship that was written 14 years before the Titanic went down, I also had a similar experience with a novel I wrote called Storm Surge.
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It’s spooky when scenes from my books come true.
That happened just a couple of weeks ago, in Abilene, Ks., but before I tell you what happened there, I’ll tell you what happens in the book:
In The Virgin of Small Plains, our heroine goes with three women friends to a restaurant in the small town. As they travel there, they’re aware of severe storm warnings. At the restaurant, while they’re seated at a round wooden table, one of them looks out the windows and notices that the sky has turned seriously ominous. She tells the others, and they all get up and troop to the windows to look. At that moment, a tornado warning siren blares. The women hurry to the restaurant basement with the rest of the customers, except for our heroine who hangs back to stare at the boiling clouds.
In Abilene, our heroine (me) goes with three women to a restaurant in that small town. (The photo is of the restaurant, “The Kirby House.”)
As we travel there, we’re aware of severe storm warnings. At the restaurant, while we’re seated at a round wooden table, I look out the windows and noticed that the sky has turned seriously ominous. I tell the others, and we all get up and troop to the windows to look. At that moment, a tornado warning siren blares. We hurry to the restaurant basement with the rest of the customers, except for our foolish heroine who hangs back to stare at the boiling clouds and to exclaim, “Wow, this is just like in my book!”
Years ago, I wrote a book called Dead Crazy that featured–God knows why–a victim who was an old woman who collected porcelain pigs, plastic pigs, pigs made of every craft material.
Her body was found in her bathtub, with pigs floating around her. (Why in the world did I ever think this was an attractive idea??) About three years after the book’s publication, I opened the local paper to read of an old woman who had been murdered. She collected porcelain pigs. Her body was found in her bathtub. At least there were no pigs in there with her!
Then there’s the story of the bird who went missing in my book and the one who went missing in real life, and how similar their happy endings are. Again, this is from The Virgin of Small Plains, which I’m beginning to think I spirited out of the same ether that creates real life.
In the book, a big red parrot escapes during the aforementioned tornado. His current owner, Abby, is heartsick to lose him and puts up signs, etc., all over town. His original owner was Abby’s teenage love, Mitch. In the novel, Mitch shows up in town after a 16-year absence. He goes to his parents’ home. The big red parrot just happens to fly into the back yard at that moment when Mitch is there. There just happens to be an old cage in the basement, and Mitch collects the bird, glad (and amazed, as are we all) to be reunited with his old parrot again.
When I wrote that, I thought, “nobody’s ever going to believe this.”
But I left it in, because that’s what happened, dammit. I can’t help it if it’s the truth!
Now here’s what happened a few months after Virgin came out:
I have Friends With Birds. Cockatiels. One day, one of the birds escaped and flew away. My friends were heartsick, just as Abby was in the book. We put posters on posts, just as in the book. A week passed, the temperature was dropping, we were sure the bird was a goner in more ways than one.
They got their beloved bird back, just as in the book! Here’s how. . .
On the day it flew away, it apparently headed straight toward Kansas City, Mo, where it landed in the back yard of people who keep Cockatiels!!
They had an old cage, and they brought the bird in, just as in the book.
The happy ending to this real life story is that the people who found the bird finally saw one of the “lost bird” notices my friends had put in the local papers, and called to say, “We have him.”
And what is the moral of that story to me, as a writer? It’s that I can trust my instincts about what is “true.” Just because something is a wild coincidence doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
The uncanniness doesn’t end with stories that come true after we make up our fictional ones. Sometimes things from our books come true before our books are written:
Since publishing Virgin, two people have told me of murders in their small towns that were nearly identical to what I used in my novel, right down to the cover-up and the same roles that the characters played in the real-life towns. I have no memory of every hearing of those actual murders, and yet I re-created them in my book! How can that be?
I suspect what happened is not so much uncanny as it is the strong likelihood that I did learn about those cases years ago, they stuck in my subconscious, and then they percolated up as “plots” that I thought I made up. I’ll never know for sure if that’s what happened in my creative process. The whole thing gives me the shivers anyway, whatever the explanation. I’m horrified that my plot actually happened to (at least) two women.
Enjoyed the post – there probably isn’t much that is completely unique.
The fact that we are interconnected, that time is a construct, would lend credence to the idea that what we think of as novel thoughts are probably floating around out there, and have been forever.
Good point, Nancy!
I totally agree.
What a COOL post and subsequent comments! Loved it.
Hey Nat! Hope all is well with you.
All is well, thanks. I am just swamped with ‘Family’. Kid stuff, Mark stuff, and my work stuff. It sort of goes in cycles….I am in a frenetic one right now. Some quietly exciting developments happening. 🙂
Hi Trish,
This reminds me that we can access our dreaming mind, the one that scouts ahead all the time in our sleeping, in our waking life, especially if we’re in a creative flow. Anyway, there’s something in T.C.Lethbridge’s “Power of the Pendulum” about prescience like this that I want to look up. If I find it, I’ll get back to you. Blessings!
Thanks, Adelita!
I’m not sure how I stumbled in here, but I’m SO happy I did! I hadn’t heard of this type of synchronicity before (where life imitates art, or visa versa). I’m definitely going to keep an eye out. I’ve certainly experienced some of my own precog stuff…dreams, premonitions, and the like. But as a person who loves to write, this opens a brand new horizon of adventure!
Makes me wonder BIG.
Hi Grace, thank you for stopping by. Loave that last sentence of yours: Makes me wonder BIG.
I love it, too. Trish and Rob, thank you for re-posting my blog. It’s really an honor to be featured on YOUR blog. Love to you guys.
Thank YOU for letting us repost. It;s such a cool synchro!
hey grace – just saw you over at my place! thanks so much for coming by there – and i wonder BIG, ALL the time!!! 😉 great to see you over this way – you’ll love it here!
I love stories like the ones just posted.
I have had synchronicities with paintings I was working on, where the apparently random subject matter comes true.
I have always experienced the creative process as a “welling up” from the same place as my dreams– the Imaginal Realm.
DP – absolutely – you describe it perfectly with “welling up” – a welling up and a pouring out – voices speaking from that somewhere else – and images emanating from that same place –
Ooo, paintings that come true. I love that very very much.
One of the most powerful for me, personally: I was painting furiously for an outsider show. I started the canvas knowing the theme was going to be “Wisdom: the Gnostic Sophia”. Once I start painting , the work takes on a life of it’s own, and I found myself placing an image of Tara in the right middle, and an image of an open lotus in the left middle. The next day I went to Los Angeles to take refuge with Lama Gyatso. It was a private ceremony, with no other students. At the end of the ceremony, Lama wrote on a card and then handed it to me. He gave me a “refuge name”. It was two words that translated to “Lotus Tara”: the 2 images I had placed on the canvas the night before! (The painting has been purchased and is in a goddess temple.)
Wow, that’s a powerful one, Debra! Really, like something out of Heroes!
I think I wrote about this in a comment on one of your earlier posts, but I can’t find it now so I’ll put it up again. Sorry if this is a repeat.
I once wrote a short story about about a fictional boy and his dog. People told me it was a good story and they encouraged me to submit it to Reader’s Digest. To my surprise, Reader’s Digest published it. A few weeks later I got a call from the publisher saying that a man had written them a letter demanding to know who I was and how I knew about the incident with his dog. Confused, I got the man’s contact information and called him directly. It turns out my story was identical in almost every detail to something that had happened to him as a young boy – right down to the names of the boy, the dog, and several other minor characters. I wasn’t even born yet when his real life incident happened, and he swears he never told anyone about it, so it isn’t like I could have heard the story from anyone else and thought I made up. To this day, I have no explanation as to how I wrote that story. It just came to me one day and I wrote it down.
That’s why I think creativity and ideas come from somewhere outside of our own minds.
That’s a pretty amazing story!
you’re so right, ME – about creativity coming from somewhere outside our own minds – these stories are all incredible and certainly evidence of that – especially intriguing because of their having come true in the reality we know as reality now – another example of creativity coming from somewhere outside our “minds” is, i think, the piece i posted today at my primary blog – it comes from a trip i made last year – which happens to me a lot – creativity outbursts while driving – i was in arkansas going through thousands of acres of cotton fields – i’ve driven that road many many times – but this time, it was as if i were watching a “movie” because i literally saw the cotton pickers and heard them calling out – the voices were screaming and it’s as if i were a conduit to them – i grabbed a pen and begin scribbling on a notebook in the passenger seat – the result is what i re-posted today – the image with the post is very close to what i saw except that the “voices” i saw were all looking at me – gee – this is nothing at all about when stories come true and creativity – but – perhaps it’s a reverse story – thanks!
So you tuned in on events in the past! Off to see this post of yours.
trish, this was my trip last october – the cotton fields – it was an incredible experience – and left me sobbing – literally – a visceral response to those fields –
Now I can go look. Got distracted!
very similar thing with “moonbeams over glasgow” – will send you a note about the details but a very similar thing – and a number of other pieces, as well, have come from such experiences – and from dreams – even lucid dreams – the piece on words unspoken posted today is one – with this piece, i actually awoke this morning to find my scribbled notes in my bed – and i’d been dreaming that i needed to jot down the words that were coming [again, like voices in my dream] – now, if there’s some shrink browsing around here listening to me talk about all my voices………..
The voices of the muse! I read that post of yours about the cotton pickers. It’s stunning!
Wow, Me, that is wild– and totally believable to me. It was good of you (and brave) to call him directly. Did he believe you when you told him you knew nothing of his story?