| This thesis presents the hypothesis that extraordinary simultaneous experience narratives (ESENs) constitute a category of narrative which may be argued to have existed for many centuries. Emphasis on precise or probable simultaneity between intuitive knowing and a distant crisis, such as death or illness---whether such emphasis is literal or rhetorical in any given version---is a primary, and philosophically important characteristic of these narratives. This characteristic distinguishes them, in many cases, from stories of prophecy and premonition. While Premonition stories often describe human crises envisioned before they come to pass, ESENs emphasize the wonder of synchronicity, between crises and their intuitions elsewhere. As such, ESENs sustain a number of fundamentally different philosophical explanations and beliefs about cauality than do precognition stories. Unlike a premonition, an intuition of a distant simultaneous tragedy cannot be explained by folklorists' concept of "foreknowledge" or what a philosopher might regard, more skeptically, as "backward causation," for it is not the future which appears, so impossibly, to be known. Neither can the fleeting vision of a person dying at that very moment in a distant place be attributed confidently to the agency of any "ghost"---in time, a death has not yet occurred: the beliefs the stories inspire must conform to the stones, temporality.;Distinguishing between such story types on the basis of temporality (along with other general thematic features) allows hybrid versions---for example, a story about an ongoing feeling of nameless fear weeks prior to an unexpected death, culminating in a extraordinary simultaneous dream or vision---to be understood and discussed nor clearly in terms of philosophical arguments and folk beliefs about causality.;While I have found only one passage in the New Testament which matches the ESEN pattern, many New Testament passages demonstrate that beliefs about the holiness of coincidence existed in early Christianity. Narratives of holy simultaneities are more plentiful in medieval collections of exempla and legend, but these texts carry on the conventions of hour notation and envisioning death and suffering as a moment, conventions which we established in the New Testament. The persistence of theme narratives in increasingly secularized contexts for centuries afterward, up to and including 20th-century academic literature and informal North American oral narration, may be explained by the fact that the stories manage to sustain many different interpretations, sacred and secular---psychological and biological ones, alongside the religious and the supernatural.;Over forty informants participated in this study, in St. John's, Newfoundland, and in Amherst, Massachussets. Their explanations draw upon multiple belief paradigms---twin biology, genetics, divine intervention, the psychology of divided consciousness, parapsychological processes, and various understandings of coincidence. Most informants explored or at least considered explanations which proceeded from natural, supernatural and religious premises, rather than limiting themselves to a single line of explanation. For these and other reasons, I present these stories and the speculation they inspire in informal conversation as vernacular forms of philosophy. |
