The Psychic Sibling Connection
As a child I was fascinated by shows such as Kolchak, The Night Stalker, The Twilight Zone, Dark Shadows and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. One of the Night Gallery segments was a series called The Sixth Sense in which the actor Gary Collins portrayed a character called Dr. Rhodes. Dr. Rhodes was a psychologist who was also a psychic. He would help people deal with different issues that were troubling them such as hauntings, possession and the like. He would utilize hypnotherapy and past-life regression sessions and what not to explore the mysteries that were troubling these people. It usually involved uncovering some sort of crime or past abuse and helping his patients overcome their fears or obstacles, putting troubled spirits to rest and even solving crimes in the process. My sister and I were both huge fans of the show and as a result of this, I believe, we both became interested in psychic phenomena. We used to play a game where we would sit back to back, close our eyes and think of an object, person, place, color, number, etc. We found that we had over a 50% success rate in guessing the other’s item. In other words, in 20 tries, we were successful in guessing the other’s item more than 10 times. Not great, I know. But at the time, we were impressed with the results of our experiment. At some point our game evolved into using playing cards. Again, we would sit cross-legged, back to back on the floor. We would take turns holding the cards. The one with the cards, “the reader” would pull one from the deck, look at it briefly and place it back in the deck. Both of us would close our eyes and meditate, emptying our minds, concentrating only on the other’s thoughts, applying extreme focus. When we are accurate, it was 70% or better and other times it was as little as 20-30%. To ensure that neither one of was cheating in “the game”, we evolved the rules once again and moved the players to separate rooms. One of us would be in the living room perhaps and the other in the kitchen. The same methods of focus were applied, at times for as long as 5 minutes or more and when “the seer” was ready, he or she would yell their answer such as “5 of diamonds!” to the reader located in another room. Again, we noted much of the time, a more than 70% success rate, sometimes as high as 80%. That’s 8 out of 10 or 16 out of 20. To us, our results were quite impressive. But we took it in stride. I believe our abilities faded as we got older or reached puberty, or perhaps we became interested in other things as teenagers inevitably do and simply became bored with it and our playtime together became less frequent as we drifted apart. Only several years ago during a family get together and a fun yet, competitive game of Trivial Pursuit with my siblings, I became stumped on a question. After a moment or two, I was able to come up with the correct answer. My sister stated that she telepathically delivered the answer to me. But I have my doubts. I’d like to think that I am well read enough and was able to come up with the answer on my own! At any rate, I do believe that children are more likely to discover some form of psychic ability at an early age and that siblings may share bonds that can’t always be explained away to superstition and coincidence. I also think that these “gifts” fade away with age, perhaps at reaching puberty or may dissipate if not continually used, as in atrophy of a muscle that is not regularly exercised.
