Is Telepathy Real?

I believe that there is more to humans than we can imagine.  I believe that there's some sort of extrasensory communication that goes on between individuals.  Maybe something like telepathy.

I believe in it because I swear, it's happened to me before.  There are two incidents that stand out in my mind the clearest, and the two that seem so perfect that I can't really argue that it doesn't exist.  At least, the only argument for it I can give is my personal experience.  Whether or not you believe me is entirely up to you.

The first time I genuinely began believing in it, I was about 13.  I'd already started reading whatever I could find on the supernatural and occult, which as a kid, is kind of harder to get your hands on and you're not entirely sure what you're looking for.  I think that one of the biggest things I started with was Time Life Books series Mysteries of the Unknown.  It kind of gave me a little bit of knowledge about a whole lot of things, and gave me starting points to start seeking out information on my own.

Anyway, back to the experience.

My parents were divorced and my mother had remarried.  My father was our custodial parent and we would visit our mother on the weekends, who lived about an hour away.

I detested the man she married.  He seemed...mostly okay towards her.  Later in life, I learned how much of a bastard he was towards her, but she was a foreigner in a land where she couldn't read or write the language, and for her, marriage was not necessarily out of love, but one of survival.  The man was not extremely well off, but he had a decent home, was retired and lived well for a single man that had an ex wife and grown children.  He owned a three bedroom, two bathroom house and had a den with a large pool table.  He'd made his money by being a truck driver and painting houses and lived fairly well.  At the time my mother married him, he hadn't entirely retired and she would ride in the truck across country with him.  The house was older, but nice.  I remember that the dining area had an elaborate, crystal chandelier that hung low and the wallpaper was a sort of filigree design in a deep red, the swirls and lines of the wallpaper actually having a strange velour feeling to them (I'd never seen wallpaper that was fuzzy, so I thought this was odd). 

He had ha terrible temper.  He expected my mother to cook him a very specific breakfast, at a specific time, and that was generally how he lived.  My mother was more of a live-in maid with additional benefits, and he was very controlling.  At one point, he had bought her a car, but when she decided she wanted a job other than waiting hand and foot on him, he literally sold the car a few days before she started her job.  So in spite of that, she walked to work.  As long as she did things for him, he was fine.  But if she asserted herself in any other way, he grew angry.  He often complained loudly about how her food 'stank' (because she cooked herself her Thai food, even after cooking him whatever American style meals he wanted her to cook...because her knowledge was limited, there was a learning curve that was not a great experience for her, but that's another tale).

During the times we visited, we stayed out of the way.  He was generous enough to let us use the pool table he owned, as he didn't entertain anyone anymore, and we were fine to be about the house as long as he was not home, or he was not otherwise occupying whatever space we happened to be in.  He was fine with us being there if we weren't seen or heard.  This can be troublesome for a two young girls, one with a rebellious streak a mile wide with a penchant for glam rock and anything that was particularly loud.

One morning, during one of our visits, he was home and up and about in the house.  I could hear my mother in the kitchen, going through the routine of preparing breakfast and coffee for him. 

Of the three rooms, one room had a full sized bed and a twin in it.  Generally, we slept each in a separate room, but for whatever reason, I chose to sleep in the same room with my sister, she on the full and me on the twin.  I was fighting waking up, because I did not want to get up and deal with this man, or just wake to stare at the ceiling in wait for him to retire to his bedroom or go out for the day.  As I am not quite asleep, I start thinking of a song that is popular at the time.  So don't laugh at me, but it's Michael Jackson's song Black or White.  I can recreate the song in my head, but I don't know the words.  I can hear the instruments, the beats, the timbre and pacing of the song.  But I can't remember the lyrics.  And as the song moves into the chorus, that is the part I remember.  And I can hear his voice clearly singing the chorus.  And in that lull of sleepiness but not quite being asleep, I'm hearing this music in my head, recreated by a memory.

"Turn the radio off," my sister says firmly from across the room.

It was like bursting a bubble.  I was confused and intrigued.  I asked her later on what she'd meant by it, curiously, wanting to know if she was awake or perhaps said it in her sleep.  And she stated that she'd heard the song Black or White, but it was weird.  She could barely hear it at first, but she said that when it hit the chorus, it was like someone had turned the radio up full blast.  I quipped at her, as bratty kid sisters do, that there was absolutely no radio in the bedroom.  "I must have been dreaming then," she said.

It would be years, more like decades, before I actually told her what had happened from my perspective.

The second incident I'd had, I was in my early thirties.  I'd moved from Houston to Abilene and had been living there with my family about six months.  I drove a truck, had my husband, two daughters, and best friend with me driving into town to meet another friend and her family.  At one point, I had this tightness in my chest, my heart was racing and I almost swerved off the road.  My husband asked me if I was okay, and everyone was alarmed.  I told him I was fine, but I had to call my mother.  I don't know why, but I was fixated on calling my mom.  

Once we got to the bowling alley where we were meeting to play, I hopped out of the truck and began to call.  My husband reluctantly took the girls into the bowling alley and my friend stayed with me as I called my mom.  When she answered the phone, without any preamble, I said, "Mom, what's wrong?"

At first she was confused.  "What?" She responded.  "Who?"

I repeated myself and she still was lost.  Finally I said, "Mom, it's Kathy. God told me to call you.  What's wrong?"

At which point, she went into hysterics.

Now, this isn't generally my mom.  I deal with mom when she's angry, when she's confused, and when she's all sorts of other emotions.  Hysterics is not something that my mom does.  So when I finally got her calm enough to talk, she did.

She told me that my sister, who had lung cancer, had come back from a cruise with her friend and started getting double vision.  My mother has bad anxiety and doesn't drive on freeways, so my sister directed her as best she could to get her home from downtown in Houston.  All of my mother's friends were working the next day and since she can't drive on freeways, she was worried she couldn't get my sister to the doctor about the sudden double vision she was having.  I told her to give me fifteen minutes and hung up.  I called a friend I'd hadn't spoken to in several months, who didn't even know I moved away to Abilene, and explained the situation going on.  She told me point blank the only reason she'd do it was because it was me, because she'd only my mom once and she'd never met my sister before.  I thanked her, then called my mom back and explained about my friend coming to give my sister a ride.

So the next day she did take my sister, and after several hours and a couple of errands that my friend drove for my sister as she stayed at the hospital, they found out my sister had a brain tumor.  Everyone was devastated.  As soon as she informed me, I took a leave from my job and left Abilene with my father and was back in Houston within a day.  It was a Wednesday and being that they were having a hard time finding exactly where the tumor was in her head, they were going to open her up and do some exploratory surgery on Friday.

So we go back and forth a couple of days from staying with my mother to the hospital downtown, and that Friday, we're in her room.  There's a lot of people there and in the waiting room to see my sister.  

My sister and I are very different.  We went through a lot of experiences as children, and for her, it made her a stronger Christian.  For me, well, I'd be more prone to call myself Pagan.  We kind of argued a lot about it when we first got out of school, but over the years, we reached a more unspoken understanding of one another.  

As they prepared her for her surgery, we waited in her room with her.  Friends of hers, through college and church, had flown in from literally all over the states to come see her.  It surprised me a lot, because they behaved as if they were coming to pay their last respects to a dying woman.  I didn't realize the scope or severity of what was about to go down, how very wrong exploratory surgery can go, especially on the brain.  

At one point, one of her friends literally stood up and yelled, "I can't stand this! How can you both sit there so calmly right before you're about to have brain surgery?"  She was beside herself with worry for my sister.

My sister looked at her.  My sister turned and looked at me.  And still looking at me, she began to speak to her friend.  And this is what she said.

"If I die today, there's nothing I can do about it.  If God chooses me to go, I'm gonna go.  I can't stop that.  But...everything has happened so perfectly at this point that I just don't think that it's my time to go."  Then she shrugged.

I know what she meant though.  There I'd been, more than seven hours away, suddenly calling my mother to figure out how to solve a problem I was nowhere near.  Because something in my heart of hearts told me that there was something amiss in the Universe that needed correction, that more specifically needed my action.  And I acted on that gut feeling.

They wheeled in my sister, cut open the side of her head and, lo and behold! The tumor was right there on the surface.  They cut it off, put her back together, and wheeled her back out.  No exploration needed.  They told her how lucky she was and how much pressure was on her brain.  The tumor was the size of a golf ball.

If asked about it, my mom agrees that this was a miracle.  My sister can't weigh in on it anymore, as she succumbed to the cancer in 2011.  But it doesn't matter who can validate my story.  I know what happened.  And although a bigger incident in my life, it's one of many incidents that make me believe that there is so much more that is unseen.  

Whether or not you want to refer to it as 'magic' is up to you.  I call it that for lack of a better definition.  Because it's a name we give things that we can't explain.  Like the word 'supernatural'.  I hate that word.  It infers that there is something 'super' beyond nature.  It's all natural.  We just haven't figured it out yet.  And if elaborate ritual and dance reinforces those links in our minds and makes it easier for us to tune into them, so be it.