The sense of a “presence” is very common in many near-death experiences, as well as religious conversions & revelations.

A friend of mine in college served in Vietnam and was shot, but recovered. Before his family heard from the authorities, his aunt called his mom and said “Charlie has been shot, but he’s going to be okay.” She said she had had a vision of it. After his recovery, Charlie asked his aunt about the vision, and he said she described the scene very accurately, in great detail — the terrain, a hole he fell into, etc.

My mom told the story of the time she started singing a song out of the blue, a jingle for a root-beer place she and my dad had frequented years before, something like J. Hungerford. She didn’t think much of it until my dad got home and told her guess where I went for lunch! J. Hungerford, turns out there still is one! The song came to her mind at the same time he visited the place.

Apparently a lot of cultures have the belief that when you are about to die, someone from your past who is already dead will often show up to guide you. My brother experienced a sort of variation on this when my mom died — he didn’t know she was dying (although she was in a nursing home) but about an hour before he got the call that she had died, he had a sort of visitation from my late father. My brother doesn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that, but he said it was much stronger than a memory, it seemed like a real presence, my dad just sort of checking in to see how he was doing. Quite as if he had stopped by to check on my brother on the way to pick up my mom.

Seriously, thanks for the insights into the phenomenon of Love at First Sight and its corollaries.

AesopSpouse’s dad knew the first day he saw that cute girl in middle school that they would get married, which they did in 1946. Lasted 70 years!
Plus a couple more Upstairs since they have both passed on.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/08/27/you-stepped-into-my-life/

Sudden love was the topic that Neo homed in on. At the time I had thought, no that never happened to me. But… there was this girl in college that I had dated a few times. Ultimately, a relationship that was not meant to be.

I remember her and the basics of those encounters reasonably well, but I think I had nearly blotted out the fact that when I had first met her I was smitten in 15 seconds. That memory came drifting back to me very recently. A Jewish girl from NYC. Shorter with wild hair and amazing penetrating eyes and a lovely voice. Oh my. What a pity. Now my memory of sudden love is quite vivid.

I’ve been spending my extra time at Karoke recently, so yet another reason for much less time for blog posting. More time IRL (in real life).
I’m fine to excellent on 60s – 80s songs that were big hits, but here’s a newish one from Fool’s Garden, which my wife also likes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQYoGyEtDs
Lemon Tree – a small hit. Last Saturday I found out it was originally a German song, quite a surprise.

The first time I met my wife, the Love of My Life, I did tell her this great pick up line (NOT!) “You look like somebody I used to be in love with”. And while I thought there was something similar, most would think it was not so much in looks, as in the smile & sparkle in the eyes. Also Smart, plus medical Doctor (students), and very sweet, tho not at all weak.

I think there some “soul mates”, who were meant only for each other. Love at first sight. I think of “duprass”, the two-person tribe version of “karass”:

“They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/852012-they-were-lovebirds-they-entertained-each-other-endlessly-with-little
Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (only 14 books? Yet I haven’t read them all)

Sometimes I think the nice but somewhat lonely singles are some of those who never quite met their own “love at first sight” / soul mate.

But most times I think that most folk have a range of potential life-long love mates in a wide range of compatibility, with quite low annoying habits requiring adjustment and no “deal-breakers”. But, from experience, keeping the sparks going in a relationship requires both reason-based commitment and day after day effort; sometimes real work.

On the deal-breaking, instead of merely adjustable habit, I suspect too many singles confuse them; and too many couples include one who refuses to adjust (enough).

—
How fast can your eye see? Maybe more than 60 fps.
https://caseguard.com/articles/how-many-frames-per-second-can-the-human-eye-see/

A wild thought – what if time, and life, is digital? Not a nanosecond, nor zeptosecond, but Planck time.
“The Planck time is the time it would take a photon of light travelling at c to move a distance equal to one Planck length. This is therefore the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning. Roughly 5.39 × 10^ {?44} seconds”

So time might be like a film with 5.39 * 10^44 “frames” per second. What’s in between those frames?
Ghosts? God? a non-digital analog reality that we can’t sense? Or some alternate digital reality?

With respect to our 5 senses, some might have a sense of magnetic fields, which it seems that some animals have.

Now back to music, er, Panic! at the Disco (a singer sang one of their songs I didn’t know; can’t have that!)

Along these lines, I am intrigued by the fact that if you stare at a person from behind, they will often sense it and turn around.

Some physicists believe there are more than three dimensions, so maybe there is something to a greater-than-3-dimensional universe.

Somewhat analogous to this story – in the sense that it really defies all logic and science – are the stories you read about someone waking up in the middle of the night and seeing ( an apparition ) of a loved one standing in their bedroom, and the person that awoke just knew that the loved one had just died; and they did. More bizarre is that the person that had died lived hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Or the stories about near death experiences. What’s weird about these – actually all of it is weird – is that the experiences described by the dead, then un-dead person; regardless of the ethnicity or race or nationality or where on earth they live, have somewhat similar descriptions of what they experienced.
Maybe it’s a natural response ( physiological ?) of the human brain when a person is near-death; who knows.

IIRC, there was a Harvard prof. who set out to prove near death experiences were all bunk, but changed his mind after interviewing many people who had experienced this phenomenon. I do not recall the professor’s name.
But here is an interesting article on this:

https://www.the-sun.com/news/5074177/near-death-experience-afterlife-see-before-dying/

How do you explain these really bizarre events?
Apparently, the science / biology / physiology is not settled, unlike…..well, you know.

Robin Gibb “Love Hurts” – Top of the Pops – https://youtu.be/E2ngtsdS4tc