seeing part of cityboy’s conversation with iwln, and how closely it resembles cold reading, makes me even more skeptical of cityboy’s claims of being able to astrally project.
first, he says that he saw lots of little bottles. i assume that iwln keeps her bottle collection inside of the house, but cityboy then claims that he didnt look inside at all, so how could he have seen them? answer: he didnt, he did a cold reading.
i also assume that iwln’s bottles are not kept full (i’ve seen many bottle collections before, and in almost all cases they’re empty), but cityboy makes comments suggesting that they were full of something that could have been perfume or home remedies.
to top it all off, he leaves himself an out by asking if it means anything, as if he was not sure whether he saw the correct house or not. before, he made assurances that he could find the right house just by thinking of the name of the person he wanted to see.
he promised to be specific and absolute with the descriptions he gave of items he saw, but i see absolutely nothing specific or absolute about any of the descriptions of iwln’s house.
Hey, my cat’s name was Kujo. That’s only four letters away from a “G” and two letters short of being the same length. I’m already impressed…:rolleyes:
Scout’s honor. Cityboy916, will you double check to make sure I didn’t leave anything out?
Well he didn’t say he viewed it. He said he dreamed about it. I already had doubt about him viewing it. I already brought up coincidence.
He did say a bottle collection, which I have. That’s different than a few perfume bottles. Cityboy, describe my bottle collection please.
There’s a difference between green and blue/green. Guys don’t usually know that though. But when they’re awake they usually know which is the front of their house. I hadn’t really noticed before, but my front porch has 4X4 rain gutter around the front door and to a sleepy traveler it could look like a post.(there, how’s that for information distorting?)
You did notice that I told him it wasn’t my house, didn’t you. I find the notion entertaining.
No I’ve never been on a cold reading thread. I’m very good at cold reading myself. It’s how you get people to open up and talk about themselves and feel heard and connected. They think it’s uncanny how well a stranger can know them. Duh.
Okay, Musicat; I don’t need to be saved from Cityboy’s evil scam. At no time did I say I bought into this. I said this wasn’t proof. I said it could be a huge co-incidence. I even said he doesn’t live that far away from me. I said it was funny. I didn’t believe it was supernatural. I used the word absurd. I don’t think your descriptions of your house and bottles matched as well as mine did, though. What I can’t say, is that it’s not true. How would I really know? I wil admit that my main motivation in bringing this up was to poke you a little for your sarcasm. If those were just guesses from Cityboy, he gets credit for coming so close. When on the first try, you describe a house just about closely enough for a stranger to find it, that’s pretty good. So what information do you think I gave him other than saying there were not weight bearing posts. I confirmed the part about the bottles and I’m sure he already knew I was older from previous conversations. I have a serious question, not in the form of a challenge. I seldom find it necessary to dis-believe anything, but in reverse, don’t believe these things either. Why is it so important to “de-bunk” this type of thing as opposed to being neutral? I’m not talking about the cases where someone claims a conclusion or thinks it should count as proven fact. Just the run of the mill situation like this post. I do enjoy it when you do. It makes me think, but why do you do it?
“The test conditions are rediculously lose – there are a million ways to glean the target information that do not require any special powers.”
I had already acknowledged the flaws in the original post, so felt this was not a helpful contribution.
I will grant that a ‘friend’ of myself or David B. could mess this test up (but to me that’s the same category as David or I doing it).
I object to your sole remaining idea that discovering things about me would somehow discover what the object was.
Do explain how knowing e.g. my employer’s name will help any doper name the object on my desk.
No they were not guesses! I saw a house in a dream! Guess that’s already been addressed (gosh the people on this board are quick) but I needed to reiterate. Not a guess!!!
Fair enough.
Right. The dream was not that specific. Two possibilities came to mind (and I should have said that they were bottles that may have once held fragrances or home remedy type stuff - they’re that kind of bottle, small, some are brown glass, maybe some are green). Dreams are rarely very specific. There is always something that the dream is unclear on.
Fair enough.
What kind of green? Apple green? Mint green? Sea green? Day-glo chartreuse? Not all men are completely ignorant of color (some of us had crayons when we were kids) and the place in my dream I’d describe as aqua, somewhere between mint green and turquoise, and kind of light but not quite a pastel.
Fair enough. Had I said that the place I dreamt of had windows all around, not just on one side, then it apparently would not match your house.
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There is one load-bearing post outside on one porch. Not two, but maybe his vision was blurred by something, but his following sentence…gives him an out. He isn’t really saying it as fact, just bringing it up “in case it means anything.” So if you find a match, he gets the credit. If you don’t, it was just something thrown out there.
[quote]
Maybe it was relevant and maybe it wasn’t. It was worth a try to follow my WAG and ask. Sure enough, there was some similarity that made my effort worthwhile.
Yeah right! The :rolleyes: smiley is getting paid overtime. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Eh, you got a point there. Come to think about it, my house has a small porch/entryway, one 4x4 white painted wooden post holding up the porch roof, door in the corner (not screen though). I also hesitate to say which way is front and which way is side, although the layout of surrounding buildings can establish that fairly well. There’s even a window in front around the corner from the door. The layout of my porch resembles a mirror image of the house in my dream, and my house is white cinderblock. Perhaps a drawing would have been better.
No I did not guess.
I will not be running for a position in public office. (I know I know I have trouble confusing them too.)
I’ll see what I can do. The Pass of Grant doesn’t have much in the way of libraries.
When did I ever claim that? :eek: In my dream I was in the house visiting the woman who lived there!
Should have been clearer on that one. my bad.
Dreams are spontaneous. I never tried to dream of IWLN’s house. At the time of the dream I didn’t even know who IWLN was. It was a while ago; possibly before she registered with the Dope. Whereas with this AP experiment, the intention is specific: to go to glee’s house and identify exactly the objects on the desk. See the difference?
Again, there’s a difference between spontaneously dreaming of a place and willfully astral-projecting there.
After your email where you said “nope not my house” I replied:
To which you replied:
Okay, what I saw in the dream was a lot of little bottles, maybe 100 of them or more. They’re small, averaging around 3" (8cm) in height and between 1-1¾" (2.5-4.5cm) wide. Some are circular in cross section and some are square in cross section. Some or all of them were empty. Note that I’m trying to recall a dream from a few months ago so it’s very possible I’m being influenced by the conversation on the thread, but I do specifically remember seeing empty bottles so at least some of them were. The majority of them are made of brown glass, some a lighter brown than others, but there are green and clear bottles too. Most of them do not have labels but a small fraction of them do.
These are, in my experience, the types of bottles that fragrances and home remedies come in. I’ve been in health food stores where the shelves are full of essential oils, plant extracts, and the like. Those are the kinds of bottles that I saw in the dream.
Ouch.
[url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=4345209#post4345209]I’ve never been to the area where you live.
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At least not in ordinary waking day-to-day life.
Describing a dream is not cold reading nor does it relate to AP, but you should be skeptical.
Yes they are in the house and as he said, he never denied being in the house.
There are actually about 100 little liquor bottles, some really old. None ever opened. The bottles are mostly green and brown. I also have a set of about 30 essential oils and those bottles are brown. The liquor bottles are displayed in my china hutch.
I’m glad he worded it the way he did. If he just insisted that he saw my house, I would have been kind of “weirded out”.
I don’t agree. The color of the house alone, not to mention many other things are good descriptions. They don’t prove anything
To be more specific, some of these bottles are so old the labels have fallen off. Some are full, some are empty due to evaporation or something since the lids are still sealed. There are all different shapes, but all fairly small, like you would get on an airline.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to nick you with that bullet.
I have been to your town, but did not bring my house with me.
I haven’t been on an airline but it sounds like I was close. If my dreams are this accurate, I must assume my projections will be right-on.
That’s okay. It took me a minute to realize that there’s another way to interpret that. :smack:
Just FTR, Somnambulist, I was looking something up in my dictionary (Webster’s American edition, 1978) and noticed that it uses the phrase “conclusive evidence” so it is very likely I have seen the phrase before, and I am definitely not the first to use it.
Okay I have to play devil’s advocate here. This assumes that you can project, can project at will and can project with geographical accuracy. That is a lot of “cans”. Just because I don’t automatically disbelieve it, doesn’t mean I believe it either. I do hope it works though.
Okay, this was the real reason I answered this post. Somnambulist was not disputing that there was such a thing as “conclusive evidence”. He was disagreeing with your application of it. Conclusive evidence would be obtained in a very controlled setting and typically would be repeatable; otherwise it’s still only in the anecdotal “evidence”(and I use evidence very loosely here) stage. He is right about the terminology nitpick. Gotta keep you honest.
glee, please don’t think I’m just posting here to piss all over your thread, I’m just saying what I think should be said.
I forget now where your desk is, is it at your home, or at your place of work? Certainly, it is not deep in some bunker where you, and only you, have access to.
You have referred to your cleaning lady as the only other person with access to your desk, do you think if I arrived at your office (or home, if that’s where your desk is), and sweet-talked her a bit, maybe give her some BS about some game we are playing, or even bung her a tenner, that it is possible she would spill the beans.
Now, please don’t object to this objection on the grounds that cityboy916 would have to go a long way to do this, because a) crazier things have happened, and b) I know people in cities all over the world, I might know someone who works just around the corner from you, or even in the same office building, hey! I might even know someone who works in your office.
Cityboy said he was still working on his ability. He said it might take him up to a year. (The object(s) can stay on my desk that long, because I want to see how this test goes!)
So how does it feel to know that Cityboy could be hovering over your desk at any time? You’d better not be doing anything embarrassing when he drops in.
I only mentioned it because, if astral projection were real, it would have huge spying possibilities. If a person who could look anywhere on the planet fell into the wrong hands…
Cityboy, I think your supposed talent has military applications. No intelligence agency on Earth could match your information. If you do succeed in proving your claims, you should plan on being contacted by your government. Hell, they might even declare you a national security threat and lock you up somewhere for testing.
Take my advice, if this thing works out for you, keep it quiet. Hook up with me and we’ll make a fortune. Screw science, this is America! Let’s exploit your paranormal abilities for financial gain!
