E.S.P. or coincidence? You decide.
Twenty minutes ago I was helping my 6-year-old son Dietrich get ready for bed. On his way upstairs, he stopped in the guest room to bid good night to his 17-year-old brother, who is recuperating downstairs with a broken leg that leaves him unable to get up to his bedroom. Playing on the television was an episode of “Family Guy” that featured a disembodied head sitting on a chair. It made me think of a comic book I’d read a couple hours earlier where the zombified head of Deadpool that was still biting people from inside a birdcage. Nobody else had read this comic, so I didn’t say anything.
As we started walking into the kitchen to get water for his bedside, Dietrich started talking to me about Deadpool. In other words, about what I had just been thinking about.
“What made you think about that?” I asked him.
He couldn’t say. It just came to his mind.
Now, Deadpool is a relatively obscure character. Still, I started wracking my brain for where else the kid could have gotten the idea of bringing this up. I wasn’t sure that he’d seen the image on television that I had, and I knew he hadn’t read that comic. We did watch a cartoon where Deadpool’s arm got cut off and he just stuck it back on, but that was weeks ago and it was an arm, not a head. This was the head of an old man sitting on a lawn chair. Associating that with Deadpool seemed like an awful stretch — except that I had just made that precise same stretch.
Then slightly later I remembered there’s a scene late in the Wolverine movie where Deadpool’s head is cut off.
So:
Both of us making the same connection: coincidence? Or Extra Sensory Perception? (Some form of which my wife and some close friends have said for years I have.) Am I “sending out” thought waves and my son’s picking them up?
May 11th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Ah, you forgot the obvious: “Great minds think alike!”