In my account so far I have I have tried to confine myself to describing the incidents themselves without proposing how they might have come about. In particular I haven’t mentioned quantum processes to any great extent although these are given serious consideration by some psychical researchers. In fact I once attended a talk given at the Society for Psychical Research by Ed May, a key person in the past Stargate Project in the USA tasked with discovering Soviet secrets by using distance viewing psychics, and there I asked him whether he thought that quantum processes were involved and he told me that they definitely weren’t. As he was well versed in quantum physics I had to accept his assertion although I have read elsewhere well informed opinions that some psychical events may be. I will now mention part of my own search as a total layman through the, to me, virtually incomprehensible papers written in connection with such subjects purely as a prelude to yet another unlikely incident.
I had been made aware of the possibility of quantum processes having effects in biological cells some time after completing my novel when I saw in a TV listings magazine mention of a programme about the subject, which reported on unusual activities within birds’ brains that could only be explained by quantum effects. Apparently this was the only explanation for the way that the activities could take place so fast. I don’t recollect even watching the programme but I made a mental note to investigate quantum neuroscience, the actual existence of which up until then I hadn’t even been aware. A key part of the research appeared to be discovering exactly what consciousness is, which has always been a mystery even to anaesthetists whose jobs involve suppressing it in a controlled way. In fact their work seems to be entirely based on past experience in the field rather than a deep understanding of what is involved as I discovered after spending more than an hour discussing the anaesthesia required on myself for a forthcoming operation with the head of the hospital’s group of anaesthetists. Afterwards he told me that he had enjoyed our discussion as much as I had, so I had evidently approached the subject intelligently.
In 2016 I found a relatively new article on quantum cognition written by Matthew Fisher of the University of California late in 2015. He proposed that Posner clusters of calcium phosphate inside cells could act as protective shells within which quantum processes could take place. I understood virtually nothing in the article apart from the basic proposition so I sent a copy to an old school friend Tony, who was a tutor in chemistry at Oxford University, to get his reaction to it. Quite separately I then decided to write a draft chapter, potentially for a sequel novel to my original that I would probably never complete, as I had recently bought a small espresso machine to make decent cups of coffee at home and this had given me an idea for a story set within the Pumpkin building.
In my new chapter Graham the engineer falls off a ladder in the Pumpkin building and recovers to find himself in the past building still under construction. The field generators have all been installed but almost none of the internal fittings are in place yet. Apparently the field generators are being tested and have abducted him just as any other visitors are in his time. He meets the designer’s assistant who is drinking coffee poured from a flask and the man offers him a cup. It is evident to the man who Graham must be and Graham mentions that in his time he has to climb two flights of stairs to get a cup of coffee from the machine in the staff lounge at the top of the building because there isn’t one in his control room below the office levels. They realise that he should not mention details of his life because this might cause changes in it but it is already too late and when he returns to his own time he gets a cup of coffee from the machine in the control room without realising that it has never been there before.
While I was writing this story I received a brief reply from Tony with an attached photo of somewhere quite unlike Oxford, being heavily forested hillsides. He explained that he was travelling around Columbia and I recalled him mentioning some years earlier that he and his colleagues were planning to visit a coffee plantation there in which they had invested when they could. Later I received a longer message from him about the article that I had sent.
It seemed a remarkable coincidence that all because I had bought an espresso machine to get a decent cup of coffee at home, even as I was writing about Graham grumbling about having to make a short journey to get a cup of coffee Tony should be in Columbia on the same mission that he had mentioned planning to me over three years before. The truly remarkable coincidence though was that in my original novel the staff lounge where Graham had to go had over its entrance a sign that read “Welcome to Pumpkin Island, the remotest holiday destination on Earth”, a reference to the building’s ability to take its occupants far beyond their normal reality and time. Tony himself had also travelled to a holiday destination remote from Britain to seek out coffee and his correspondence with me from there had taken place even as I was writing about Graham and his coffee trip, the whole incident having taken a matter of hours.
Despite being obliged to accept that these incidents keep happening they do not cease to amaze me when they do. In this case PMIR could have been an influence because the key elements, i.e. the sign at the lounge entrance in my novel, my decision to buy an espresso machine and write a new story about Graham and my discovery of the article that I decided to send to Tony were all events that I could control in the past and therefore ones that PMIR could influence me to organise so that this coincidence occurred, possibly just because I was so amazed by it that my unconscious mind responded appropriately to make it happen. Whether quantum processes or something else had a hand in it though is beyond my comprehension. Maybe, as those prophetic words that I wrote after the title of my original draft novel stated, this is all “about something else”.