After I had recovered from my shock over the convincing nature of my experiences in 2017 I ventured out of curiosity in 2019 to set the phenomenon another challenge again making the probability of success as small as I possibly could. However, if one accepts that psychical phenomena do exist then there is a well-known problem in such research called the experimenter effect which distorts any experiment of this kind. Far from being an independent observer the experimenter may psychically guide the experiment towards their desired result. In my case my future emotional response to the challenge being overcome against all the odds was likely to influence me into unwittingly setting the challenge in a way that that success was assured. The basic problem is that if the phenomenon exists at all it is apparently always active and cannot be invoked or suppressed at will.
The account of my challenge is in the following document, which contains around 2000 words over three pages. An unbiased sceptic may be impressed by the result but one detail to notice is that I included in the search criteria a relatively irrational free will choice of the word “aphantasia”. It is possible that this was in fact a souvenir from my future reaction to the success in overcoming the challenge as there was no clear reason for my choice although at the time I contrived one to justify it to myself. I find it intriguing that in my effort to find an anachronistic influence on my novel writing I also created yet another example of the phenomenon still being active in 2019. The search cannot be repeated with the same result now because many more references to aphantasia have appeared since 2019. The phenomenon appears to guide not just what we do but when we do it.
In order to accept the way that this phenomenon works outside of time I have to abandon the idea of events being linked as causes and effects and instead think of them as simply being mutually consistent and supportive. There is no point in debating whether the chicken or egg came “first”; that is just chronological thinking.