One day I woke up and then went to the bathroom; standing in front of the mirror I started washing my face. While taking water to my face and having the eyes closed I very clearly saw three numbers: 3, 5 and 8. In this kind of vision the aforementioned numbers appeared in succession, one after the other. They were white and I could see them rise very sharply against a black background. On the right of number 8 there were other digits, but those I could not distinguish, like if they were blurred or out of focus. Feeling surprised I reopened my eyes for a while; then I closed them again, and having done this I saw again a new number. This time it was 22: two 2’s very close to each other, apparently forming one single number.
This was a new experience for me I thought, as it was the very first time in my life I had a vision of any kind, and namely with numbers.
After leaving the bathroom I turned on my pc and started surfing the internet. A few minutes later I got myself in a website and was asked to fill in one of those numbers that we must copy exactly in the same way we see them in screen (I suppose this is some kind of safety procedure). The digits I was asked to copy were 3, 5, 8, 2, 2. That is, exactly the same numbers I had “seen” some minutes before! I was immediately stunned and, I must admit, a bit scared. In order to proceed surfing I started filling in this little box the numbers I had in front of my eyes. I thought to myself, if I’m having a vision again, then the software behind this website won’t accept the number. In the other hand, if the number is correct, then I have something here. I mean, the probability of having a vision with five digits and then actually see them, just a few minutes later, in a website, in a random and totally aleatory safety procedure, is in fact infinitesimal! After typing the five numbers, I pushed down the enter key. As I suspected, the numbers were correct.
Ok, anyone who reads this can still say something like I was dreaming, or that this is some sort of fantasy, and that the whole experience (not merely the first vision of numbers) is delusional, and so on and so on. But if this was the case, nothing could explain the forthcoming coincidence.
All this puzzled me a bit during the weekend and Monday morning I went to work trying not to turn obsessed with such events. Anyway I felt the need to talk about this with some friends. In the afternoon I visited a colleague in a neighbouring office. When I opened the door he had a file over his desk and was by that moment reading it. I started immediately talking about my experience during the weekend with those numbers. This colleague of mine is one of those rational, science biased and atheist type of guys whose life moto could easily be “I only believe in what my eyes can see”, and therefore he replied with some quite trivial reasoning about probabilities and human psyche; while I was looking at him talking and trying to be reasonable again, I intimately realized: “he must think I’m getting insane”.
Soon enough I found myself again in my own office, and as I stood there, still lost and unoriented in the middle of conflicting interpretive lines, someone knocks the door. My colleague was now visiting me. He was silent, had a worried expression in his face, and held in his hands the same file that he was reading at his desk before we started talking, just several minutes earlier. Standing in front of me, he wanted to show me that file’s number. The number was 359/22.
Even if this sequence of numbers was not 358/22, but simply 359/22, the resemblance is notorious. And so we were both stunned, not only with the numbers coincidence in itself, but mainly with its timing and precise circumstances in which it did occur. After all, if I had entered his office to tell him about these numbers just some seconds after, he would no longer have that file opened and would be focusing in a different one, with a completely different number, and thus probably the coincidence would rest unnoticed; and if the actually huge chain of small events that led him to have that exact file over his desk at that exact time had suffered one single change, that file would also not be there at that particular time.
After this new event I started to see 358’s and mainly 22’s everywhere and every time. This still happens to me nowadays. I see those numbers constantly when I look at the time, and in car plates, phone numbers, bar codes… Of course, it is inevitable for things to happen this way, since it is as if my attention is preset and pre-oriented towards these numbers
But here I must add some facts. These numbers started to be part of my day to day experience three months after the most painful and shocking event of my entire life: the death of my boyfriend. I surely do not picture what’s the relation, whatsoever, between one thing and the other. For instance, some months ago I met a guy and soon noticed that his phone number ended in 358. While talking with him about the loss of relatives and beloved ones he told me that he had been through a similar experience, when his brother died, at the age of 22.
More relevantly though, in one night, some weeks ago, I was feeling anxious and having difficulties in falling asleep. My room was dark and I picked up the cell phone to see what time was it. In the cell phone watch I could see these numbers: 0:22. A few minutes after I finally started sleeping but then I suddenly and unexpectedly woke up with the cell phone’s low battery warning. I picked up the phone again to see the time. The watch showed 1:22. I tried to sleep again but spent the whole night restless. In the next morning I received a phone call: someone was telling me that a friend of mine had died in that same night. It had been a sudden death, a heart failure or something. His age was 22.
Magna, Junho 2009
