The Door in the Fog

We were dri­ving home from a week­end… eh hem… adven­ture¹, my house­mate behind the wheel. I was doz­ing in the pas­sen­ger seat. Seventy-five miles per hour on the high­way, two a.m. The music on the stereo was barely audi­ble over the sum­mer breeze pour­ing through the cracked win­dows, still warm in the mid­dle of the night. I opened my eyes and the car was enveloped in fog. We were hurtling down the high­way, unseen, unsee­ing. And then, I did see it. Right in the mid­dle of the road. A door. Not one hun­dred yards from the wind­shield. Stand­ing upright, like some por­tal to another dimen­sion. Assum­ming no one else in the car had seen it (we were still mov­ing fast, all set to smash right into it), I pointed and blurted out, “DOOR!!”

I opened my eyes and my house­mate and our friend in the back seat were laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally. “Dude, you just said ‘door’!” The road was clear. No fog. We were home a few hours later.

The next week. Two a.m. I was dri­ving back from another… uh… adven­ture². My friend (who had sat in the back of the car the week before) was doz­ing in the pas­sen­ger seat. It’s lovely to drive long stretches of mid­west­ern inter­state in the mid­dle of the night. The traf­fic is light. You thoughts can wan­der and expand. The roads are straight and flat and easy to nav­i­gate even in the thick­est of fog. And then I real­ized where I was. Hurtling down the high­way, unseen, unsee­ing. I exhaled and put my foot to the brake. The fog was so thick, I wouldn’t have seen any­thing more than a car-length ahead of me any­way. The brakes squealed as we came to a sud­den stop. My friend jumped up, star­tled awake by the sud­den change in momentum.

The deer was so close to the nose of the car that I could see his bar­rel chest rais­ing and falling in the head­lights. It was one of those moments when every­thing was hap­pen­ing in slow motion and com­plete silence. He looked at us quizzi­cally for a moment before saun­ter­ing through the low clouds across the high­way and bound­ing into the woods.

My friend uttered some words³. My knuck­les were white on the steer­ing wheel, try­ing to find my breath, “It wasn’t a door,” I whispered.

I must have got­ten the vow­els mixed up in trans­la­tion. I hate it when that happens.

***

“It’s not going to hap­pen the way you think it will.” The uni­verse told me this morn­ing as I opened my eyes. Some­times she whis­pers lit­tle things like that to me. Often when I’m mostly asleep. It’s very incon­ve­nient, in my opin­ion, but I’m at least grate­ful we’re still on speak­ing terms, so I take what I can get.

Notice the Uni­verse didn’t say “It’s not going to happen”.

One of the biggest prob­lems that we have with the Uni­verse is that we don’t speak the same lan­guage. And by that, I mean that our thoughts are lim­ited by how we can wran­gle them into words with mean­ing inside our heads. And the Uni­verse? Nei­ther thoughts or words can con­tain her. Just like the door and the deer in the road, I often find I get my psy­chic sig­nals crossed. Sure, it hap­pens, but def­i­nitely not in a way I would expect or do pre­dict. And this is a com­mon expe­ri­ence too. We know things will work out, for exam­ple. We say that like we believe it. We just don’t know how, exactly. And con­tinue to be sur­prised when ulti­mately, it does.

I think about my door/deer quite often. It comes up in con­ver­sa­tion with old friends — who still find it funny or unnerv­ing⁴.

I used to think that expe­ri­ence made me a very lousy psy­chic. After all, in this cir­cum­stance, I was totally wrong.

But now I won­der if I did pass through that door on that night. If per­haps my inci­dent in the fog didn’t mean I was a ter­ri­ble psy­chic at all, but rather, quite the aver­age psy­chic… And by ‘quite the aver­age psy­chic’, I mean just like every­one else on earth.

Have you had any sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences? Get tripped up by the sta­tic on your intu­itive chan­nel? I invite you to share your thoughts!