Telepathy?

I must have been about, what, oh... 10 or 11... or was it later, was I around 12 or 13? In any case, when I was much younger than I am now, I retired to my bedroom at a certain pre-arranged hour of the evening and for the next five minutes or so I picked a shape, and concentrated on it. The following day I met my friend Fiona at school and we discussed the results of our experiment. I had considered two shapes before settling on a third to concentrate on. She had tentatively picked up on one of the two before getting a "sense" of the third one as the final choice. She in turn had "transmitted" and I remember trying to convince ourselves that I'd "felt" her choice too. We were starting to get into science-fiction, starting to wonder about what was beyond our understanding of the world, and we would dearly have loved to believe in telepathy. I remember spending ages at my desk willing different people to look at me. It often worked, but I'm convinced that it was more a case of them being aware of my staring, rather than anything paranormal!

Flash forward to the present...

I think that one of the things that can make a relationship work well is if both partners think in a similar way, because it means that you will both be approaching things from the same perspective, and are more likely to find yourselves on the same side of the fence, rather than opposite sides of an argument.

I also recognise that after knowing somebody well for a long time, it must be possible to have an idea of what their reactions would be to a given event, thus to be able to guess at their thoughts to a certain extent.

Dragon Dada and I have been together for over 13 years now, and I remember even in the early days of dating, we'd frequently find ourselves in the situation of one of us saying something that the other was about to say. We've all had that happen, I imagine. With us, it happens a lot. After thirteen years it's got quite striking, in some ways, and I'm almost wondering whether there is anything to the idea of being able to read someone else's thoughts.

Let me give you an example: we both enjoy watching Stargate SG-1 and recently started watching series 8. In this series, one of the main characters, who has had a shaven head throughout, suddenly has hair. We had anticipated this and laughed about it and were duly unsettled at watching the first episode of the series where he suddenly had hair on his head. However, a few episodes in, we sat watching the opening credits, which show a shot of each character in the present, followed by a montage of action sequences of them from previous episodes. Of course, for this particular character the present shot had the hair, the flashbacks did not. It suddenly struck me that I had become so quickly accustomed to his new appearance that it was the old sequences which now jarred. No sooner had I thought this than Dragon Dada voiced the exact same thought.

Now I realise that this could be coincidence, or could be the inevitable result of having the same experiences, but to have the same thought at the same time...

And as I said, although this is only one example, it happens a lot. At least weekly. And not just when watching Stargate SG-1!

So, is it empathy? Telepathy? A sign that we are soulmates? Or just the inevitable consequence of knowing somebody that well? Whatever it is, it's certainly amusing.