Saturday, November 19, 2011

Timeslips at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

These two occurrences took place about 45 minutes from where I live. The first happened to a friend of mine, and the second to a friend of hers:

First story:
Two years ago, my friend Josie, a bio-medical science major at UMHB, was in the Science Building lab. She ran into a friend of hers, whom I will refer to as Todd. She and Todd had a chat during which he mentioned having just bought a new car which the seat covers he had recently purchased for his former car did not fit. So now he was stuck with fairly new seat covers he couldn't use.

This wouldn't have been such a memorable conversation had not Josie run into Todd a few hours later, this time along with several other people. She walked up to the conversation and overheard Todd telling the other people that he had just bought new seat covers for his car. "Oh," she chimed in, "Did you go ahead and buy seat covers for your Impala?"

Todd looked confused. "I drive a Honda."

Now Josie was confused, but she reminded him of their ealier conversation. He had no recollection of the conversation. In his "world" it hadn't happened. She was correct that he had bought new seat covers for his current car, but he had not bought a new car. He admitted he'd been thinking about it.

Everyone overhearing this conversation, including one professor, looked at Josie like she was crazy. She felt very self-conscious about it and dropped it.

When she told me this story, she mentioned that, now she thought about it, things had been unusually quiet in the lab when she had had this first conversation. There was a silence that she never notices in that area, as there are always people around. I asked Josie if she was aware that time slips are often preceded by a sort of "vacuum" of silence. She wasn't. However, at the time, I was leaning more toward a reality shift than a time slip. Half of her information was correct, but in other "reality" Todd had bought a new car.

To bring this story full circle, Todd bought a new car this year -- the very car he had told Josie two years ago that he had bought. His seat covers for his Honda did not fit, and, as a memento of her odd experience, he gave her one of them. I'm not sure exactly how to classify her experience, but it was definitely odd.

Second story:
In the same building at UMHB, in the same hallway, Josie happened upon a friend of hers I'll call Sarah. Sarah was in a conversation with another person and appeared very freaked out.

When Josie asked what was wrong, Sarah said that she had just had a conversation that had already taken place earlier in the day and that Josie had, as now, walked up to her during that same conversation. A few hours before, Sarah had run across a friend who had just taken an algebra test and knew she had failed it.

According to Sarah, this same student had just now crossed her path again, and in the conversation Sarah had mentioned the failed test. Confused, the student asked what test Sarah was referring to. "Your College Algebra test," Sarah said. "But I just now came from taking that test," the friend replied. Apparently, Josie had walked up to the "first" conversation as she just now had. (Now, what Josie said that first time could not have been what she said this time, but I haven't gotten those details yet.)

Josie told Sarah about her own odd experience from two years before in the very same hallway. Sarah had never heard that story before, so it wasn't as if she could anticipate something like that happening by suggestion.

So those are the stories. It makes me wonder if UMHB doesn't have some portal that causes time/reality shifts.