Looking for truth in random noise? Or is there meaning for me in this?

By David McElroy · November 3, 2017

Not everything I believe is rational, but most of it is.

Most of my world is solid, material and fairly predictable. Almost everything has an explanation if I look long enough.

But as much as I hate to admit it, there are things which I can’t explain — and I often find hidden meaning in those unexplained things. Some of those inexplicable things have felt holy at times. Others of them have felt evil. Some have felt ambiguous and baffling. (I have a collection of stories which I rarely share.) But something in me looks for meaning in these unexplained experiences.

I know this is a common human trait. (Apophenia is the psychological term.) I’m rational enough to know I might be looking for meaning in things which are really just random and meaningless noise in some quantum field. But I’ve had two experiences this week which leave me feeling as though someone’s trying to tell me something.

Several nights ago, I had a dream which was unlike anything I’ve ever dreamed, but let’s start with something that I know is physically real.

When I left work at 5:15 Friday evening, I found a note under a windshield wiper of my car. It simply read, “Don’t give up on her. Trust me.”

I was the last person left in the building when I left. Only two other cars had been to the building all afternoon — at least to my knowledge — and the drivers of both cars work at the company. I had an immediate thought, but I have no rational explanation. Nobody even knows my thoughts on the subject of this particular “her.”

Two or three nights ago, I dreamed about this woman’s late father. I didn’t tell anyone about the dream, but it’s burned into my brain. I never met him, so I have no way of knowing how similar the man in the dream was to the real man. And I have no idea why he showed up in my dream.

I wish now that I’d written the details down, but there was something in me which resisted writing it out. In a way that I feel silly explaining, it felt too important for me to put it into words. But here’s what I recall.

I was on my way to a house which I knew was my home, but I had never before been there. It was a masterpiece of beautiful and warm modern architecture. It felt like home, even though I had never seen it. There was a small crowd of people waiting. They were milling about talking and eating and drinking. Everyone seemed happy and it felt like a celebratory event.

I knew they were waiting for me — and for a woman who was traveling there separately.

The woman’s father was there and he was with a woman who I presume was a wife or girlfriend. The only other people among the crowd who stood out were two naked women who were behaving in sexually provocative ways. I didn’t know who they were, but I was concerned that the woman who was coming to meet me might think I was attracted to them instead of to her. I wished they weren’t there.

The man greeted me warmly. Even though I never met him in real life, his eyes made a strong impression on me. His eyes were piercing and open, as though nobody would be a stranger to him. He shook my hand and welcomed me. Then he gestured toward food on a nearby table and offered the food to me.

“I’m not hungry right now,” I replied. “I’m not going to eat until she gets here.”

He looked disappointed in me. There was a look of serious disapproval on his face.

“Son, that’s what a little boy would do,” he said. “A real man will eat when it’s offered.”

I remember feeling strongly that I didn’t want to disappoint him, but I declined.

“A real man will do what he thinks he needs to do,” I said, “without being concerned about what someone else thinks he should do.”

The man’s face relaxed and his disapproval disappeared.

“That’s exactly what I hoped you would say,” he said. He had been testing me. “You be your own man, not somebody who gets told what to do. Congratulations.”

And then there was murmuring in the crowd that let me know she had arrived, although she was completely out of my sight. I stood next to this man — his wife or girlfriend on his left and me on his right — and he put his hand on my left shoulder in a fatherly way.

And then the dream was over.

It was just a dream, but something in me finds meaning in it. Wishful thinking? Random firing of neurons? Unconscious mind working through issues? I have no idea. I just know that a little voice in my gut whispers that it’s meaningful.

And now there’s this odd note.

Maybe someone put it onto the wrong car. Maybe it was someone’s idea of a joke. Maybe it was some well-intentioned person who really intended to tell me something but was too vague to make the point.

The rational part of my brain has absolutely no idea.

The voice in my gut — intuition, heart, whatever — whispers, “Pay attention to this. There’s something you need to hear.”

I know there are perfectly reasonable explanations — potential ones that I could find — to explain away these sorts of things. Maybe I just don’t want to. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. There are dozens of maybes.

I just know that the times in my life when I’ve ignored these “strange things” tend to be the times when things get off track for me. (There was the bizarre visit I had from an old woman about eight years ago who called herself Sister Lorena, for instance.) Maybe this is another one. Maybe I’m not supposed to give up on someone. Maybe a man who I never met would have something to say to me. Maybe someone put a message on my car and actually knew what he or she was talking about.

Remember that old poster that Fox Mulder had on the wall of his office — the one showing a UFO and the words, “I want to believe”?

I’m sane. I’m rational. I’m reasonable.

But in so many ways, I want to believe.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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