Hi there. I am a huge fan of your books and reading them has brought a lot up to the surface for me. My boyfriend has had things double/duplicate themselves all throughout his life. It started when he was a child and had simple Pokémon cards or a small toy car but now it has grown to become things such as his car keys, a ring, etc. You mentioned something like this in your book, with the letter that duplicates. What is this and how does it happen? Is it something paranormal or universal? Thanks.
This is an excellent question, though like most things in the field of the paranormal I'm afraid that there are no easy answers. How common is this phenomemon of common doubling and repetition, and what causes it? Science has yet to reveal a definite answer, but there are some theories.
Most intriguingly, Freud gives the question some thought in his famous essay on Das Unheimliche:
That fact or which consists in a recurrence of the same situations, things and events... recalls that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams.
...It is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would other-wise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of “chance” only. For instance,we of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on boardship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures.
...It must be explained that we are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character.
More recently, discussions have proliferated online about this and related phenomena, with new suggestions of possible causes and explanations.
But as always in these areas, there is much research left to be done, and currently we have many more questions than answers.
