Tibor Dreams or Remote Viewing: You Tell Me

It's been almost seven months since Tibor, my city bike, was stolen during a brief visit to Northern Liberties.  Since then, I've moved through the seven phases of grief pretty quickly, lingering on anger for the longest (and most creatively, as I had caught and forced penance upon the thief many times over and in many different ways in the perfect justice system of my mind), but given enough time and a dirt cheap replacement bike, I've gotten over it.  The theft didn't really hit me in the pocket, just in my bike heart.  Tibor was a bit of a Frankenbike, having been fixed up and decorated over the years, not a financial investment.  If anything, it was an emotional theft, as I'd been riding him for over a decade.  The hardest part for me to get over was the fact that he is likely sitting in a scrap yard currently, as even a pawn shop would have trouble moving him (he has a crank arm that falls off every ten miles that I was eventually going to fix but it was fine for my needs and I usually just carried a 10mm hex wrench to fix it on the go).

What kind of Kenzo junkie monster would steal that bike?

Months had gone by, life had settled back into place, and Tibor thoughts had faded into the background.  I had finally settled into the Seventh Phase.  Good for me.  And then last week I had a freakin' dream that I found Tibor just leaning unlocked against a bike rack in the city.  Actually, I think it was down on Kelly Drive, just west of the Falls Bridge, except in the dream the Falls Bridge was in the city.  I grabbed Tibor and rode off reunited into a sunny day, but then I woke up and Tibor was gone again.  It was an unexpected dream, but I shrugged it off.  Dreamland is where the subconscious deals with the deals that are still undealt with, so I clearly had some unresolved feelings buried beneath the topsoil of my mind even if I couldn't see them under the vegetation.  If anything, that was probably the dream that would clear my mind of the remaining Tibor cobwebs that still hung in the corners.  Cool.  Not the best dream, but not the worst.  When I was little I had a dream that a large fish kept leaping up from the ground and trying to swallow my arm whole.  I'd shake it off and it would keep leaping back up, its mouth sliding all the way up to my shoulder.  That dream is still the worst.  Close second is the one where the big orange monster from Looney Toons was chasing me around my house.

Figuring my Tibor trauma had finally been resolved, I was surprised to then have another Tibor dream only a few days later (a few days ago).  What was going on?  I hadn't given a single conscious thought to Tibor (other than the ones prompted by the previous dream) for months.  Why was I having another dream about him?  I was flummoxed and looking up pro bono therapists when I stumbled upon a possible answer.  

There's a podcast I listen to now and again called Astonishing Legends.  I love supernatural tales, especially when told in a non-fiction format, as this allows me to properly suspend my disbelief.  A suspension which has provided plenty of terror over the years.  Thanks, Fire in the Sky.  Don't let children watch that movie.  And don't let them listen to Whitley Strieber's Majestic on cassette in the middle of the night at Boy Scout Camp.  I still don't know how I've never been abducted by aliens.

Anyway, Astonishing Legends did an episode back in April about Remote Viewing, and I finally got around to listening to it just the other day.  I listen to a lot of podcasts and it had slipped down the priority list, so the delay wasn't a reflection of interest level.  Remote Viewing is a fairly hip paranormal phenomenon that has found its way into pop culture whether you know it or not.  There are books about it, movies based on books, and it's how Eleven spies on Russians (and finds terrifying creatures) in Stranger Things.  Those pop references are mostly based on the Stargate Project, a declassified CIA study in the use of the phenomenon for spying purposes.  Briefly, Remote Viewing is exactly what it sounds like, a way to look places where you're physically incapable of looking, usually over far distances.  This is done while in a meditative or hypnotic state with the help of guiding questions.  While the exact mechanism isn't really understood, it could have something to do with the Jungian Collective Consciousness or just that all matter/energy in the universe is interconnected by way of its humble beginning as an ultra dense mass that exploded outwards making all of us.  Or maybe it's just the result of people wanting to believe in something so much that mind overtook matter.  Or maybe it's all a hoax.

In this episode, the AL guys talk to Lori Williams, a renowned Remote Viewer that teaches classes on Viewing and has done private work for companies all around the world.  While talking about the basics of RV and how it's used to find missing people or understand unexplained events (the episode focused on its use in determining what happened to Flight 19), it occurred to me that maybe my dreams about Tibor weren't actually dreams, but remote views into his current whereabouts.  Hear me out on this...  the gist of RV is that it creates a bridge between your conscious and subconscious, and while bridged your conscious mind can tap into this universal information that the subconscious can always access.  Normally the Collective Consciousness would blow your mind to pieces, so the subconscious acts as a buffer, but in the hypnotic state, the buffer leaks a bit and your conscious mind can sneak some peeks.  Going from there, when else do the conscious and subconscious minds intermingle like that?  Oh, I don't know... maybe when we're asleep?  I don't think it takes too much of a leap of faith to say with complete confidence in science that this clearly points to my dreams being direct visions into the location of my missing bike and has nothing to do with unresolved feelings regarding its theft and the sense of personal invasion and vulnerability that all theft leaves us feeling.

That said, if everyone can just keep their eye out for my bike and when they see it be sure to maybe put up some sort of subconscious red flag for me so I can find it at night while I'm sleeping, that would be just great.  Include as many landmarks as possible in the surrounding area and try to not cloud the memory with symbolic representations of childhood traumas as I will not be able to find that tree from back home in Tennessee where you and your brother hid while your parents fought after pappy drank too much because the factory laid him off (for his drinking) when I'm looking around in Kensington.  Real trees only, no symbolic trees.  Thanks!