Here’s a stumper for you. What do you do with the rest of your life after you watch some guy dissolve into a rainbow? I haven’t figured that one out yet but it hasn’t been the rest of my life yet, either. There are bits and pieces that seem to point to something, a metaphorical trail of breadcrumbs so to say. I get hung up on those and maybe my interpretations are off track for a while, and then a while later it turns out that yeah it really does mean that one thing but it also means something else. Whoa, then a year later it also means this third thing! The hits keep coming. You gotta run your own data sets to find out for yourself. I decided to start running more experiments. Here’s one that uses Wordle. I’ve been having a blast with it and it’s been less than a week.

In reading Eric Wargo (Time Loops, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self) I became familiar with the experiments of Daryl Bem, social psychologist and somewhat controversial figure. Bem ran a series of experiments that appeared to contradict the nature of time. In one experiment, subjects were given a word-recall test. Subjects who were then given the list of words and allowed to memorize them after the test it turns out did better at recalling the words before they were given the list, versus the control group who did not memorize the words after the test. There’s a lot of hoopla around the internet around whether any of this is bunk. You be the judge. I thought about my obsession with Wordle lately, and wondered if I could use this as an opportunity for exploration.

Here is the gist of the “experiment” I’ve been running. When I sit down to do the Wordle I contemplate that in just a short while I am going to know the answer, and I visualize myself reflecting upon that word periodically throughout the rest of my day. In a few days I have had mixed results but they’ve been interesting. This morning I solved the puzzle at my first guess. Yesterday I didn’t solve the puzzle at all. That experience shaped my attitude to this morning’s puzzle.

I tried yesterday’s puzzle on my morning break at work. Sitting on my tool box with my thermos of black tea and my phone in hand, I looked at the blank Wordle screen and contemplated that in a short amount of time I would have solved the puzzle and know the answer. I pictured myself at the end of the work day, sitting in my work van, still in the drive way of the job site, contemplating this morning’s Wordle and “sending” the answer back to myself. It’s important to make these visualizations as concrete and detailed as possible, to make them VIVID as it were, which it turns out was the answer to yesterday’s puzzle. I couldn’t solve the puzzle in six tries, and as I sat on my tool box trying to imagine my future self knowing the answer, I came up blank. I also did not sit in my van in the driveway at the end of my workday and contemplate the day’s answer for even a moment. Hmm.

Somewhere between that moment and this morning I supposed that my failure to follow through with my visualization in effect “broke the circuit” and prevented me from getting the answer. I don’t wanna get hung up on causality here because that really isn’t the point of any of this. I do wanna relate that, as I sat down with my phone this morning, the sun barely coming in through drawn blinds, I was deliberate in my visualization and determination. I imagined myself walking around the block with mug of tea in hand just after sunrise, as I often do, and pictured that at that time I would know the answer to the puzzle. I was also firm in my determination that this would be my course of action. I would do the puzzle, make my tea, and walk around the block, quickly, in order that I could get out the door shortly after sunrise.

I pulled up the Wordle on my phone and without even thinking the first word that came to mind was SPILL. I typed it in and lo! There was the answer, Wordle in one! As soon as I solved the puzzle my phone also did a weird glitchy thing that would be an entirely other blog post. Suffice it to say this stuff goes layers deep, and I’ve noticed certain patterns playing out for a while. That moment noted, I put the kettle on boil and got about the rest of my plan. Despite February temperatures in Milwaukee I hit the sidewalk in my slippers and hoodie, no winter coat, making sure that I could get around the block while the sun was still early in the sky, just as I had visualized, mug in hand. Around halfway around the block I recalled that I was supposed to be contemplating the word SPILL. I read stop signs and street signs instead saying the word SPILL out loud. I noted a frozen puddle of ice on the sidewalk and said SPILL. I got to the sidewalk across the street from Meg and Adam’s house and saw that Adam was waving to me from inside his living room window. I raised my mug in return, at the same time trying not to slip on a patch of ice, and spilled my tea on the sidewalk in doing so. Satisfied that I’d now accomplished at least one impossible thing before breakfast, I finished my walk.

The previous Wordles of this week also led to many interesting associations. I won’t go into them here because, like my dreams, the associations don’t really mean anything to anyone else and they would take up too much time to explain. The point of all of this isn’t so much to “prove” anything as much as it is to observe and notice all of the little correlations and discrepancies that make life interesting. Our lives are meaningful because we assign them meaning. In a sense, that is what all this precognitive work reveals. It isn’t random or hocus-pocus and it also isn’t likely to help you figure out tomorrow’s lottery numbers, but if you wanna give that a shot knock yourself out. Maybe if I can solve six Wordles in a row I’ll set my sights higher.