Is this just a coincidence?

  • Thread starter Alex_Sanders
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In summary, a coincidence led to a sudden interest in a music drama that the singer of the song died two days later.
  • #1
Alex_Sanders
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Last week, I suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt, then I happen to stumble upon "When you believe" and got it rolling again and again.

2 days later, news came out that one of the singer were gone.

Make no mistake here, I had the drive to watch the cartoon movie, not to listen to the song, albeit I failed to find a free stream online I managed to found the u2b video of the theme song.

There was something extraordinary on this one for me: I hate music drama, and never had the slightest appetite for them. I'm an atheist, so I don't have the "vibe" or "ring" for the movie. But I got this really strange drive, not weak enough to let me ignore it as a whole, but not strong enough to let me ignore the song and continue searching for the movie.

And I'm not a fan of soul/R&B/Rap etc., yet I got temporarily addictive to that song.
 
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  • #2


It's just a coincidence. Two days before the singer was gone, I too suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt, then I happen to stumble upon "When you believe" and got it rolling again and again. But I wouldn't make anything of it. I doubt that it you asked anyone else on PF that they too would have had the same experience.
 
  • #3


"""May be there is something unexplainable in this universe, some kinda energetic connection? The link between spirits? Time to drobe a poncho and put on a Pocahontas headband?""

you might check out Carl Jung's "Synchronicity"
 
  • #4
Coincidences happen all the time. People think of someone then they ring, they remember a song and then hear it, they think about an episode turn on the TV and find it etc.

This is just confirmation bias and post-hoc rationalisation. Think of all the times someone was thought of and didn't ring and in this case how many singers haven't died? On top of that this is a pretty big rationalisation you are doing; you had a craving to watch a film and the singers of one of the songs died. So...?
 
  • #5


Alex_Sanders said:
Last week, I suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt, then I happen to stumble upon "When you believe" and got it rolling again and again.

2 days later, news came out that one of the singer were gone.

Make no mistake here, I had the drive to watch the cartoon movie, not to listen to the song, albeit I failed to find a free stream online I managed to found the u2b video of the theme song.

There was something extraordinary on this one for me: I hate music drama, and never had the slightest appetite for them. I'm an atheist, so I don't have the "vibe" or "ring" for the movie. But I got this really strange drive, not weak enough to let me ignore it as a whole, but not strong enough to let me ignore the song and continue searching for the movie.

And I'm not a fan of soul/R&B/Rap etc., yet I got temporarily addictive to that song.May be there is something unexplainable in this universe, some kinda energetic connection? The link between spirits? Time to drobe a poncho and put on a Pocahontas headband?
Here's my spooky singer-death story:

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was involved with a theater group and we were sitting around trying to think of a name for the play we were writing. John Lennon's song, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, came to mind as having the right sort of black humor, and I was trying to think of a title that would put people in mind of it without being a direct quote. I said, "Let's not call it 'Happiness is a Warm Gun', but something like 'The Finger on the Trigger'.

The phone rang and one girl went into the next room to answer it while the rest of us discussed my suggestion.

The girl came rushing back into the room, all hyper, and announced "JOHN LENNON HAS JUST BEEN SHOT!"

True story.
 
  • #6


jim hardy said:
"""May be there is something unexplainable in this universe, some kinda energetic connection? The link between spirits? Time to drobe a poncho and put on a Pocahontas headband?""

you might check out Carl Jung's "Synchronicity"


Oh but our minds are evolved that way! Friction causes heat, fire is hot, then there must be causality between fire and friction, you can imagine how those tribes that failed to be this intuitive failed to survive.

Oh sure some of us might appears to be the lab pigeon of B. F. Skinner, but aren't we all in some way? Or what religion is made from?
 
  • #7
Ryan_m_b said:
Coincidences happen all the time. People think of someone then they ring, they remember a song and then hear it, they think about an episode turn on the TV and find it etc.

This is just confirmation bias and post-hoc rationalisation. Think of all the times someone was thought of and didn't ring and in this case how many singers haven't died? On top of that this is a pretty big rationalisation you are doing; you had a craving to watch a film and the singers of one of the songs died. So...?

So why not another movie, why not another singer?
 
  • #8
Alex_Sanders said:
So why not another movie, why not another singer?
I don't know why you got the craving to see that film. There are other singers in it though aren't there? And you've seen other films and media as well haven't you? Statistically speaking coincidences are guaranteed to happen. Look up cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this therefore because of this), it's a logical fallacy related to your observation.
 
  • #9


Jimmy Snyder said:
It's just a coincidence. Two days before the singer was gone, I too suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt, then I happen to stumble upon "When you believe" and got it rolling again and again. But I wouldn't make anything of it. I doubt that it you asked anyone else on PF that they too would have had the same experience.


Now, seriously, if there are one more PF member confirming the same experience, then it's going to be really freaky and really shouldn't be called a coincidence.

I mean, if more than 2 man in the carriage sensed an unpleasant scent, then there must be someone going on with his silent but deadly business no?
 
  • #10


Alex_Sanders said:
Now, seriously, if there are one more PF member confirming the same experience, then it's going to be really freaky and really shouldn't be called a coincidence.
It wouldn't be really freaky at all. Whitney Houston was a very popular, very successful singer whose songs appeared in a variety of media. I'd wager that you'd be hard pressed to find a single day where no one listened to her. As well as this she has been battling a drug problem for years. It would actually be more of an oddity if no one heard any Whitney songs in any form before she died.
Alex_Sanders said:
I mean, if more than 2 man in the carriage sensed an unpleasant scent, then there must be someone going on with his silent but deadly business no?
Not the same at all for a variety of reasons and again this is an example of logical fallacy.
 
  • #11


Alex_Sanders said:
Now, seriously, if there are one more PF member confirming the same experience, then it's going to be really freaky and really shouldn't be called a coincidence.

why ? if one more pf member has the same experience , does it legitimize or confirm such a thing is true.
 
  • #12
Alex_Sanders said:
So why not another movie, why not another singer?
I think what Ryan is saying is that people get sudden urges to watch movies all the time, and more often than not no one connected with the movie happens to die, so we forget about all these times, and only remember the rare cases when the two things coincide.

Conversely, every time someone famous dies, there must be thousands of people who just thought of them that day because thousands of people think of them every day.

Lastly, Jimmy Snyder was joking.
 
  • #13
there is no creepier coincidence than "wreck of the Titan" and RMS Titanic
 
  • #14
Coincidence.

What people who experience such things (and don't we all!) often forget, is that you experience thousands of things every day. In a year, You can have over a frapillion different experiences, so it is not very surprising that such coincidences occur, and that they occur frequently.

Remember, a frapillion experiences per person * seven billion people = more coincidences than you can count.
 
  • #15
when i was about eight or nine something strange happened to me.

We had a great uncle, a Paul Bunyan type from Idaho, who terrified us kids because he was so boistrous and took great delight in tossing my sister and me up in the air with one hand. We hid in the woods when he came to visit.

One morning i awoke with that hurt empty feeling in my stomach, feeling sad for him. I mentioned it at breakfast and my sister said she awoke with same feeling. We asked ourselves why because we did not feel close to him at all.

Three days later Mom got a letter there'd been a coal mine accident that he did not survive.

I have never since pooh-poohed these kind of reports.

i just don't know.
 
  • #16
jim hardy said:
when i was about eight or nine something strange happened to me.

We had a great uncle, a Paul Bunyan type from Idaho, who terrified us kids because he was so boistrous and took great delight in tossing my sister and me up in the air with one hand. We hid in the woods when he came to visit.

One morning i awoke with that hurt empty feeling in my stomach, feeling sad for him. I mentioned it at breakfast and my sister said she awoke with same feeling. We asked ourselves why because we did not feel close to him at all.

Three days later Mom got a letter there'd been a coal mine accident that he did not survive.

I have never since pooh-poohed these kind of reports.

i just don't know.
True story: last night I had a nightmare where a friend of mine was violently killed for being gay and I woke up quite upset about it. About half an hour ago he sent me a text saying his boyfriend made him breakfast in bed for Valentine's day.

Point being that bad feelings, dreaming/thinking about people, spontaneously watching something etc happen all the time but we forget about the times that we can't rationalise to things that really happen. Regarding more than one person with the same feeling: how many times have you had a different feeling? Again a perfect example of confirmation bias.
 
  • #17
Coincidence. Millions of people have thoughts about famous people every day. Those famous people will eventually die and some people will just happen to be thinking about them at that moment.
 
  • #20
In 2005, I was driving home from a weekend trip with my wife when my sister called to tell me that our mother had passed away. A few minutes after I hung up, the radio station that we were listening to played "Don't Fear the Reaper". That was an odd feeling but again, it was just a coincidence. I'm sure that there were many people who didn't just find out about a relative passing away right before the song played.
 
  • #21
Alex_Sanders said:
Last week, I suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt, then I happen to stumble upon "When you believe" and got it rolling again and again.

2 days later, news came out that one of the singer were gone.

Make no mistake here, I had the drive to watch the cartoon movie, not to listen to the song, albeit I failed to find a free stream online I managed to found the u2b video of the theme song.

There was something extraordinary on this one for me: I hate music drama, and never had the slightest appetite for them. I'm an atheist, so I don't have the "vibe" or "ring" for the movie. But I got this really strange drive, not weak enough to let me ignore it as a whole, but not strong enough to let me ignore the song and continue searching for the movie.

And I'm not a fan of soul/R&B/Rap etc., yet I got temporarily addictive to that song.
It's interesting that, wrt ordinary language, the word "coincidence" connotes a lack of correlation, no particular connection, between two events. But in science the word connotes that there is a correlation.

Wrt your post, my question would be: why do you think that you "suddenly got this drive to watch The Prince of Egypt"? Personally, I've never heard of it, have never had a "drive" to watch it, and have never listened to any of the music in it.

I suspect that there's indeed some sort of significant connection between your history and the (musical or lyrical or both) content of the song.
 
  • #22
Today I experienced the most amazing coincidence of my life. We are on vacation in the outer banks of North Carolina. We had lunch in a seafood restaurant of course. It's called Sugar Shack. After eating we stopped at nearby Tanger Outlets so I could take a nap and my wife could window shop. Then we headed north. I thought we could get to Norfolk by following the island, but that is not the case. The road ends and from that point you can only drive along the beach. However, my car was too shallow and we got stuck in the sand. This was roughly two hours after we had left the restaurant. Fortunately, someone in a huge pickup truck was able to pull us out. While he was pulling my car out, a small group of people came out to watch. Among these people was the Chiropractor who lives a few doors up the street from me in South Jersey. My daughter works for him. He asked me what on Earth I was doing in NC and I asked him the same. It turns out that he's on vacation too. This by itself would be amazing enough. However, it gets coincidencer. He told me that he had seen us in the seafood restaurant but wasn't sure it was us. Later, he called my daughter and asked her if her parents were in NC. By the time he had done this and confirmed that it was us, we had already left the restaurant and so we didn't meet at that time.
 
  • #23
Jimmy Snyder said:
Today I experienced the most amazing coincidence of my life. We are on vacation in the outer banks of North Carolina. We had lunch in a seafood restaurant of course. It's called Sugar Shack. After eating we stopped at nearby Tanger Outlets so I could take a nap and my wife could window shop. Then we headed north. I thought we could get to Norfolk by following the island, but that is not the case. The road ends and from that point you can only drive along the beach. However, my car was too shallow and we got stuck in the sand. This was roughly two hours after we had left the restaurant. Fortunately, someone in a huge pickup truck was able to pull us out. While he was pulling my car out, a small group of people came out to watch. Among these people was the Chiropractor who lives a few doors up the street from me in South Jersey. My daughter works for him. He asked me what on Earth I was doing in NC and I asked him the same. It turns out that he's on vacation too. This by itself would be amazing enough. However, it gets coincidencer. He told me that he had seen us in the seafood restaurant but wasn't sure it was us. Later, he called my daughter and asked her if her parents were in NC. By the time he had done this and confirmed that it was us, we had already left the restaurant and so we didn't meet at that time.
I just don't see what's so coincidental about a seafood restaurant called "The Sugar Shack". In fact that strikes me as downright anti-coincidental. What would have been a better example would have been a seafood restaurant called "The Seafood Restaurant." Even coincidenter, as you say, would be if they served seafood there. If all those things had lined up, that's when I might start wondering if they really were coincidence, and start speculating about paranormal explanations.

Just kidding. I get the coincidence: a big truck happened to come by to help just exactly when your car was stuck.
 
  • #24
Jimmy Snyder said:
Today I experienced the most amazing coincidence of my life. We are on vacation in the outer banks of North Carolina. We had lunch in a seafood restaurant of course. It's called Sugar Shack. After eating we stopped at nearby Tanger Outlets so I could take a nap and my wife could window shop. Then we headed north. I thought we could get to Norfolk by following the island, but that is not the case. The road ends and from that point you can only drive along the beach. However, my car was too shallow and we got stuck in the sand. This was roughly two hours after we had left the restaurant. Fortunately, someone in a huge pickup truck was able to pull us out. While he was pulling my car out, a small group of people came out to watch. Among these people was the Chiropractor who lives a few doors up the street from me in South Jersey. My daughter works for him. He asked me what on Earth I was doing in NC and I asked him the same. It turns out that he's on vacation too. This by itself would be amazing enough. However, it gets coincidencer. He told me that he had seen us in the seafood restaurant but wasn't sure it was us. Later, he called my daughter and asked her if her parents were in NC. By the time he had done this and confirmed that it was us, we had already left the restaurant and so we didn't meet at that time.
Well, imho it's not all that remarkable that two people from the same area who are connected, as you are with the chiropracter, chose to vacation in the same place at the same time. That being the case, then it's also not too remarkable that you happened to eat at the same restaurant and travel on the same road at roughly the same time. It's also not too amazing, to me anyway, that a huge pickup happened by while you were stuck and helped you out. There are lots of huge pickups in North Carolina, and people there generally believe in being good neighbors, afaik.

Was there some subtle point that you were making that I missed? If so, that wouldn't be too amazing either.

The most amazing coincidence that's ever happened to me was when I was making, in Fort Lauderdale, Fl., a Cincinnati (Greek) Chili recipe and on spooning a bit of the stuff into a bowl for testing, while watching a documentary on dolphins, it inexplicably formed a remarkably accurate two-dimensional depiction of downtown Fort Lauderdale circa 1972 -- the same year that the Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins went undefeated. After eating the first spoonful, the chili configuration changed to an unmistakable rendering of the Virgin Mary being presented with a basket of Easter eggs by the Seven Dwarfs. It took me exactly seven spoonfuls to finish my testing of the chili, and what do you think was playing on the radio at the time (I like to multimedia multitask)? I dare not say, for it is too astounding to utter.
 
  • #25
ThomasT said:
Was there some subtle point that you were making that I missed?
You missed the fact that it was the most amazing coincidence of my life. According to your analysis it should happen to me every time I leave the state.
 
  • #26
Jimmy Snyder said:
You missed the fact that it was the most amazing coincidence of my life.
In that case, I would recommend getting into the reproduction and testing of various chili recipes. The possibilites are, as far as I can tell, unlimited.

Jimmy Snyder said:
According to your analysis it should happen to me every time I leave the state.
Not necessarily.
 

1. What is a coincidence?

A coincidence is when two or more events occur at the same time or in a similar manner, but do not have a causal relationship. It is often perceived as being meaningful or having some kind of hidden connection, even though it may just be a random occurrence.

2. How do coincidences happen?

Coincidences can happen due to chance or random probability. Our brains are wired to look for patterns and connections, so we may perceive a coincidence as being more significant than it actually is.

3. Are coincidences just a product of our imagination?

While some coincidences may be products of our imagination, others can be explained by statistics and probability. However, there are also instances where seemingly unlikely coincidences have occurred, leaving us to wonder if there is a deeper underlying meaning.

4. Can coincidences be explained by science?

Yes, coincidences can be explained by science. Studies have shown that our brains are constantly seeking patterns and connections, leading us to perceive coincidences as meaningful. In addition, random chance and probability also play a role in the occurrence of coincidences.

5. Are coincidences just a matter of perspective?

Yes, one's perspective and perception can greatly influence how coincidences are interpreted. Some may see a coincidence as a sign or message, while others may view it as a mere chance occurrence. It ultimately depends on an individual's beliefs and mindset.

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