A look at psychic readings

[Fake Messiah]

I wanted to take a look at the psychic readings and analyze them how psychic they really are, but the only ones I have are from celebrities. So I looked into a few autobiographies and analyzed those. Now, of course, you can give your opinion about my analysis or some other comment.

The main problem is that those are not objective recordings but an interpretation by the person relaying the story, but we can still try at least for entertainment purposes.

Testimonies are under the hide tags so that the post doesn't look too bloated.


Michael Crichton was in London making the movie "Great Train Robbery" (1979) when he decided to visit a slew of psychics.

---

She saw me working in a room like a laundry, with huge white baskets, and there were black snakes coiling in the baskets, except that they weren’t snakes. And she heard this terrible sound, repeated over and over again, a kind of Whaaaa-whoooo, whoooo-whaaaa, and she saw pictures going forward and backward, forward and backward. And something about hats, or high hats, or old-style fashion.

This was what she couldn’t put together. And she found it unpleasant, these sounds and snakes and things. She said, “You are the most peculiar person.”

I, of course, knew exactly what she was seeing. She was seeing the place I had been virtually living in for the last two weeks, the editing room where we ran the film back and forth to the accompaniment of those hideous sounds. The film was The Great Train Robbery and the actors all wore high hats.

There was absolutely no way this little blind lady with swollen ankles could have known about that. No matter how I might have failed to control my body movement, my verbalizations and grunts, no matter how much she might have feigned blindness as she did a “cold reading” on me, I knew damned well I couldn’t have conveyed to her images of what an editing room looked like—images she would misconstrue as a laundry with snakes. I hadn’t tipped her off about that. It wasn’t possible.

So where had she gotten the information?

I could think of two possibilities. One was that she had been informed. I had made my appointment by phone under a different name, but when I walked in the building, I might conceivably have been recognized by someone at the desk, and this person might have somehow told the woman who I was, that I had something to do with movies. There wasn’t any phone in the psychic’s room that I could see, but you never knew. Being informed would explain everything.

The other possibility was that she was psychic, and the phenomenon was real.

---

Crichton is trying to rationalize how the psychic could know all that stuff about him, but she gave such a metaphorical reading that it could apply to almost anyone. She said that he works in a room with black snakes in baskets, that there are strange noises, that there are pictures going around, and that there are old hats, and that it looks like a laundry room. So Crichton took it to mean a film editing room: black snakes are film roles, there is strange noise, pictures are pictures of the movie being projected with people wearing old hats, and apparently it all looks like a laundry room.

But many people work in a place with strange noise. Black snakes can also be all sorts of cables (computer or TV or those that hold lamps from a ceiling), or if you work in a clothes store, they can be ties or socks, etc. Old hats—maybe someone has photos of people with old hats or who wear "strange" hats in the workplace (as many people do). Pictures going forward and backward—if they have a TV in the office or workplace, that would also work or maybe they have a calendar with pictures that they change or in the classroom they have things that project pictures and text on the blackboard, etc.

The second psychic Crichton went to. This time he had to give the psychic his watch to hold and read from it

---

“Do you believe in spiritualism?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Was your grandfather a soldier?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see, you’re one of those who say the same thing all the time, are you? Don’t want to give me any help, is that it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was following my plan, but it seemed stupid.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Please yourself. I see your grandfather riding on a horse; he looks like a soldier. I see your grandfather working with stone. I see chips of stone on the ground; he works with stone.”

My grandfather died in the army, in the influenza epidemic of 1919, before my father was born. My grandfather had worked as a gravestone cutter. I had seen photographs.

“Your father is dead,” the psychic said. “Recently passed over?”

My father had died eight months before. “Yes,” I said.

“He’s all right. Your mother is grieving too much. You should tell her that your father is all right and he wants her to stop grieving so much. Will you tell your mother that?”

“Yes.” Thinking, Oh brother, sure. I’m going to call my mother up and say, Some obnoxious little creep held my watch and said that Dad is on the Other Side and everything is fine, Mom. Sure I am.

And also thinking this was a stock situation. Once this guy had guessed that my father had recently died, then he could say, without much fear of contradiction, that my mother was grieving too much and that I should tell her Dad was okay. It was a stock situation and it didn’t mean anything.

“Your father did some good things and some bad things.”

Another stock comment. Applicable to any dead person. I was unimpressed.

“Your father feels bad about what he did to you.”

I said nothing.

“Your father did the best he could with you, but you see, he had no father of his own to teach him.”

That was true. And not easy to guess.

“Your father didn’t know how to behave around you, and you of course intimidated him. So you and he had difficulties. But he knows he injured you, and now he feels bad about it. He wants you to know that. He wants to help you now.”

I said nothing.

“Often at night you walk in the city. At those times your father is close to you, and he wishes to help you.”

In London, I had been seeing a woman who lived near my hotel. I would often walk home at night, enjoying the cool air and the light London fog, and during those times I would think of my father.

“I get that your sister is a lawyer,” he said suddenly. “But she is American. Why is she in England?”

My sister and her husband were at that moment on vacation in England. Somewhere—I hadn’t seen them yet, and wouldn’t until they arrived in London at the end of the month.

---

So this time a psychic guessed that Crichton's granddad was a soldier—which is not so hard to guess. He also said that he worked with stone, which is also not far-fetched for people living at the beginning of the 20th century.

Then he guessed that Crichton's dad is dead—to which even Crichton is not that impressed. Indeed, he asked him if his dad is dead, to which he said, "Yes."

What fascinated Crichton was that he guessed that Crichton's grandfather wasn't there for Crichton's dad and that Crichton felt like his dad wasn't there for him. But that is not only not fascinating, it's also a trope. For example, in Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Fight Club," in the prologue or epilogue, Palahniuk writes how he discovered that almost every guy feels like his father let him down and that even his own father feels like his father let him down.

Then he says that Crichton walks around at night. That doesn't seem like a hard guess.

What is perhaps most fascinating is that he guessed that his sister is a lawyer and is currently in England. But then again, we don't have the objective transcript, and how could he have known that or if she's really a lawyer or something related to it, or maybe she is a law school dropout.