Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Rose Marie: The Reminder case

Stories about many psychic experiences do not seem particularly meaningful as they get told to others but this one interests me. This is a story about actress Rose Marie. I read about this case some time ago and wrote her and asked some questions.

One of the things in her biography that interested me was that she was the daughter of a suit cutter. Latter, you will see why this interests me. She started in show business by winning an amateur singing contest and got her own radio show. By the time she was six, she was a national celebrity and she started a recording career for Brunswick Label. When she started making personal appearances, people didn't believe that the husky mature voice belonged to such a little girl. She appeared in 1933 movie International House.

As World War II came to end, she married Bobby Guy, who became the first trumpeter of the NBC orchestra. The two had been married for 19 years when he died on May 27, 1964 of any blood infection. He was 48. Her husband's death came as quite a blow. She wrote me, “The first six months I didn't go anywhere at all.”

She was on the Dick Van Dyke show, playing Sally, a breezy writer, whose aggressiveness scared away men. Soon after Bobby’s death she asked Richard Deacon, who also was a regular on the Dick Van Dyke Show, if he wanted to have any of her husband's old clothes. He did mention that he would like Bobby’s tuxedo, but he did not bring it up again. Rose Marie says, “he was very nice to me after my husband died, always trying to get me out and back in the, so called, living world.”

Eight or nine months past.

Then one evening, he was escorting her to an evening at the Playboy Club on the Sunset Strip. They were having a good time and Deac thought it might not be amiss if he mentioned the tuxedo. Finally he took a deep breath and plunged into the conversation while they stood in line at the club’s buffet table.

“Rose, do you remember when you. . . “, he began.

“Deac, are you still interested in . . ." she started at the same time. They were both talking about the same subject at the same time; many months after they had first discussed it.

In order to make sure there was something beyond chance, I asked her, “How formal was the ‘affair?’ What I mean is in everyone else had on tuxedos, then both of you thinking of one, since it didn't have one, would be so hard to understand would it?”

She said, “No, it was not a formal affair. Deac had just called me to take me out for dinner and to hear a new group that was playing there. He was always doing things like that, because he knew I was home and wouldn’t be out of the house, so to speak. No one was wearing tuxedos.”

For this purpose of this discussion we will assume that what happened was of a psyche nature; though it may not be as dramatic as most events I have researched. It interests me because there seems to be a link between her father’s work as a suite cutter and the subject of the psychic experience — as Tuxedo. The psychic activity, in this case does resemble the activity, at least the interest, of a suit-cutter. As we look into the question of “Why do psychic experiences happen?” the psychic events can best be understood if we think of the psychic actions as a special personality within the psychic. This personality that we can see in the psychic events was formed by our early ideas about the nature of the unknown. So the Unknown has a personality. A personality that was formed by early childhood experiences. In this case the personally had an interest in clothes.

Many of our patterns of interest are affected by our parents, psychic events are only one variety.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kleiner, Dick. “The Ghost Who Danced with Kim Novak.” New York: Ace Publishing Corp., 1969. p. 100

Letter from Marie, Rose to author, 15 June 1970

Monday, December 1, 2008

Sensing death

Since the earliest recorded times we have noticed that animals seem to know of coming death and danger. So it is natural that parapsychologists have attempted to bring these animal psychics into the laboratory and test this ability. Could animals have the ability to know of things like death as a result of some basic psychic activity? If so how do we measure this ability for science?

We can look for some significance to the many age-old stories and superstitions that animals know about death. One behavior that people have often noticed was an uneasiness even depression in animal behavior before the death of a companion or themselves.

These sad slow movements of the dog who knows, even before the rest of the family, when his master has died, have been reported too many times the disbelieved. Animals seem to have ability at knowing about death. Undoubtedly it served them well in the wild.

Robert Morris reported an experiment that involved rats. He took a group of rats scheduled to be killed. And let each one run individually in an open change, two minutes. The assumption was that those who were to be killed would not move around as much as those who were not. That is like the dog that stayed in one corner or under the porch when he knew of a death and his family.

Immediately after running, each was taken to a coworker who either destroyed it or returned to its cage. This was done according to a random plan that was not known to the open field scorer. To that open field scorer didn't know which animals were to live and which were to die, and the coworker didn't know how each animal had performed in the open field. After the test, the scores based on how often a given rat had crossed a line in the cage, were compared with record of which one dies. Half of the animals that lived were active enough to leave their original square, but not one of those who died were even that active.

Also animals know what their masters are going to do, especially if that will hurt them. Another experiment was recorded by two scientists who used the pseudonyms of Duval and Montredom. They reported it in 1968. Animals can use psi to protect themselves from harm.

The procedure of the experiment was too randomly give one side of the cage or the other a small electrical shock. The whole procedure was automated so that no experimenter needed to be present. The experiment illustrated that the mice used psi sensations to protect themselves from shock. “Actually,” the report reads, “the mice avoided the shock more than one would expect by chance... (probability < .001). This significant result can be ascribed to psi, for the animals apparently must have used precognition or clairvoyance in order to make these correct choices in responses.”

If the situation is hopeless animals relax and await their fate whereas if they know of approaching danger and take measures to avoid it. The psychological motivations for these psychic flashes of awareness are easy to see.

----
Morris, R.L. 1970 “Psi and animal behavior: a survey.” The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 64:242-260