My friend was discussing psychic perception and writers.

“I was talking with another playwright the other day and we got onto the topic of how when your writing is in full flow you feel like something outside of yourself is actually doing the writing, and at the same time you can get frequent “psychic ” events– like premonitions,  predictive dreaming, synchronicity events. It’s  like going to an unconnected event and someone who is an expert in the field you are writing about just happens to be there. We wonder if playwrights in general are more psychic than the normal population? So I said I’d ask here and check if any of you have had similar experiences.”  Margaret McSeveney to ICWP connect list.

As it turned out, several of the playwrights responded that they had. One had called it fate’s intervention, like writing a psychic book and then meeting a psychic at the grocery store … similar occurences. The universe’s way of saying, “This was supposed to happen.”

In Psychology, there is a syndrome where we can feel like a “Participant” and “Observer” at the

same time. The observer watches the participant. The observer, the other worldly judge, and the participant, the person moving through the action. An example would be when you went to a party you didn’t want to attend. You moved through the party watching the people, maybe not participating in a conversation at first, just observing those around you. Then you interact with a fellow party goer, maybe someone you know. But you have stepped back, into a world of observing, half-attentive, and you can watch the people around you, take in their conversation while you are talking. It’s like angels picked you up and carried you in their arms above those speaking, away from you and your guest, but you are still interacting with the person speaking directly to you. At the same time you have a sense, a perception that you should leave. That all is not well somewhere, or the party may have trouble, or the world is going to shake. You leave. You find out later that someone in the party initiated a brawl that seriously hurt other party person.

Is that similar to the other-worldliness of the writer? Is that any different then the gas station attendant, the English teacher, the worker bee in any field that is working in full flow …  and feel like something outside themselves is actually helping with their work and, at the same time, receiving a “psychic ” flash, like going to party and something outside of themselves tells them to leave?

I believe it is part of the human condition, a natural part of us that we are in the process of understanding.