Doug's anomalous experiences

07 - The old man and the little dog

I'd like to take a break in writing accounts of my own anomalous experiences and focus on some of those shared with me by trusted family members and friends. They are extraordinary accounts in their own right, with no one else to pass them on to posterity. I only hope I'll do them justice in the retelling...

The first of these accounts involves an expression of macro-PK, and it was related to me within minutes of its happening on a late afternoon in October, 1996. For one reason or another, I was temporarily back from California and staying with my parents in Las Vegas.

Now my parents had a cute little toy poodle whose presence brought them both a lot of joy. He was a cheerful, intelligent little dog who knew what he had to do to get my stepfather's attention and approval. Sadly, however, the little dog eventually became ill from congenital heart disease. E was warned the dog probably wouldn't survive the next bout of the disease, and would have to be put down to avoid the gruesome death of drowning on the fluids that would rapidly be filling his lungs. That was the situation confronting E on this fateful day in October.

I rode with E to the vet's office, and waved "good-bye" to the dog as the doctor carried him with her into the back room. He had a vacant, forlorn look about him that I can still recall after more than 20 years.

Moments later, the doctor brought the dog's little body out for us to view. It was laid in a cardboard box, which my stepfather declined to take back with us to the house. As the gravedigger for the four previous dogs who used to live in my parents' home. I had changed my mind about pet burials, and now preferred cremation. That's because there was so much concrete-hard caliche* less than a foot beneath the backyard's surface that digging a deep enough hole for the dog would have been a major and exhausting undertaking for me. Thankfully, E sided with me. Therefore, we left the body with the doctor for disposal.  

*Very hard, concrete-like layer of hard subsoil encrusted with calcium-carbonate occurring in arid or semiarid regions.

I loved the little dog too, and was very emotionally distraught by his untimely passing. I was unable to do anything for the pain but cry quietly on the way home. Meanwhile, E fell into fondly recalling many of the dog's cute antics, which only heightened my misery. I told him that he was killing me with his reminiscences so soon after the dog was put to sleep. Mercifully, E understood and quit talking about the dog after that.

In 1996 I  had a computer in my California apartment wired for the Internet, but not so for the one in my bedroom in Las Vegas. All I could do with the computer in Las Vegas was to play games on it or program simulations or calculations to understand some aspects of the games I was earning a living on in California. E was in the same boat as me, using an older computer bequeathed to me by a late friend. E used it to play FreeCell in the "den" (a kind of secluded and cozy room often used for recreational purposes or in which to put up visitors in new American houses of the 1960s and '70s).  

As it happened, When we returned home, E retired to the den to play FreeCell, and I retired to my bedroom to do the same thing. A couple of hours passed, after which I heard soft knocking on my bedroom door. It was E, come to tell me about an incident that had just taken place in the den.

It seems that while E was deeply absorbed in a FreeCell game, the little plastic roof of a round candle jar slipped off its perch on the glass's rim and bounced a couple of times before coming to rest on the carpeting a couple of feet behind my stepfather's computer chair. The candle jar sat on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. Like the other heavy shelving in place, it  was nearly a foot wide throughout its length. After the lid came off candle jar, it bounced on the mantel piece while rolling off it and onto a fireplace brickwork shelf below. From there, it bounced onto the carpet, where E found it after turning around his chair.

To better illustrate what I'm talking about, here's a plain image of a cheap candle jar without any sort of lid. The jar from which the lid bounced off the shelf in the den was decorated on the outside with an Asian motif and the lid was  a loosely fitting round pagoda-top.
The lid was secured by six little cast plastic pins resting on the inside edge of the glass. Each of them reached about 1/8 inch into the glass, deep enough to prevent anything but the most intense shocks or gusts of wind from knocking over the lid. E told me the weather had been calm during his whole time in the den, and I concurred with his assessment, having not noted the sound of blowing wind outside my window. Besides, there had never before been a breeze or shock strong enough to knock knickknacks and the like from the mantelpiece over the fireplace.

As before, with the doorknob incident, I could find absolutely no reason to suspect my stepfather's sincerity in the matter. If he said the plastic lid from the candle jar must have jumped up and over the jar, only to bump along on the brickwork ledge and carpeting below, then that's what must have happened. E was no more a practical joker in October, 1996 than he was in July, 2007, when the doorknob to my bedroom inexplicably fell off the door and into my hand.

I have no questions about the unconscious process that was responsible for the incident. It seems fruitless for anyone to state authoritatively that it belonged to my stepfather, the dog or some collective unconsciousness. I'm content to just be touched and grateful that it was considerate enough to serve in a very constructive capacity vs. a destructive one. I think the voluminous poltergeist literature out there supports such behavior to a great extent. The poltergeist effects pursued during the incidents seem to be related to the agents' primary emotions at the time of the incidents.