I have already mentioned how adept the phenomenon appears to be at manipulating dates, so here I will describe even stranger date manipulations related to my novel. First I will mention the relevant parts of that story before describing what came later in real life.
I previously mentioned that my unruly original novel started with the words “THE END” and the full opening sentence was actually “THE END – that was it, the only end possible to this story.” Very soon after Lucine was described as wearing a tightly clinging black nightdress that her boyfriend bought for her which she had never worn before. I revised that first chapter in December 2013 but these elements of it remained the same then. Later in the revised chapter she referred to the tightness of the garment again saying “I’m sure even sausages must be more comfortable in their skins than this.”
When she and Graham ended up on HMS Frismersk, the time capsule that had lost its connection with reality, and spent several weeks together there he explained to her that when they returned to reality she would think that it had all been a dream or even maybe not even remember what had happened. Also he couldn’t approach her in reality himself because she was from six years in his future, so only a fourteen year old schoolgirl in his time rather than age twenty. To prove that she hadn’t been dreaming he told her something that she didn’t already know, the exact date of the Battle of Hastings. If she knew that back in her reality she would know that she hadn’t just been dreaming. When she awoke back in her real bed she didn’t remember him but had in her mind the sequence of numbers fourteen, ten, sixty-six. Somehow being age fourteen seemed important but she was twenty, so added another ten to the numbers, which made fourteen, ten, ten sixty-six, which she then remembered Graham telling her was the date of the Battle of Hastings and all the rest of her memories of him also came flooding back.
Shortly before Christmas in 2014 my wife did something quite spontaneously that surprised me. A long time previously I had bought her a beautiful flowing black negligee which she had worn many times in the past but with it had come a nightdress that neither of us liked particularly, so that had disappeared into the bottom of one of her drawers. On this occasion she found that nightdress, about which I had forgotten, and put it on to wear to bed but complained that it was as tight as a sausage skin just as Lucine had in that rewritten chapter of my novel a year earlier. She wore it just that one night just as Lucine had worn hers just once. She has never read any of my novel, so wouldn’t have known its exact contents or the precise words that I’d used in it.
Sceptics claim that people make postdictions by seeing coincidences in contrived ways to suit their needs but in this case the reverse was true. The way that Lucine had obtained her significant date in the novel was truly contrived but it had signalled to me that manipulating her ages could be a key to finding a coincidence in reality and of course her two ages mentioned in the story were twenty and fourteen, so no contrivance at all was necessary to connect my wife’s actions in 2014 with hers. The only question remaining was why this coincidence had happened so near to the end of that year as just a few weeks later it would have been 2015 and that connection would have been invalid. One possibility was that it was a year after I revised that chapter to include her words about a sausage skin but another may have been those opening words to the chapter “THE END - that was it,” and I won’t hazard a guess at whether that was it or the first explanation was as the precise date in December 2014 when the incident occurred is now unknown, so it is time to put this incident to bed.