Memory, coincidence, and the eerie

I had a very odd experience this morning. I was doing an errand before teaching Thomas Nagel’s extremely interesting book Mind and Cosmos (this is for the class that the Daily Caller tried to get cancelled earlier this semester because it’s all leftist propaganda). I was driving down a fairly steep hill when a very large raptor — probably an eagle, although I’m no expert — flew out of the vegetation next to the road right in front of my car. I started to brake — I must have been going about 50 — and the eagle pulled up above the top of my windshield maybe five feet before the bird would have collided with it. I got the distinct impression that it would have collided with the windshield if I hadn’t slowed down quite a bit for a second or two beforehand.

This would have been a startling incident under any circumstances — it was a gigantic and beautiful bird, and I was very relieved not to have hit it — but the circumstances turned out to be exceedingly strange to me.

Besides the inherent strangeness of almost colliding with an eagle, which is something that, to the best of my recollection (see below) had never happened to me before, this incident had another dimension. Just a couple or three days ago, I was driving about a mile from this same spot, and I saw two things at almost the same moment: A bird that I took to be an eagle — it may well have been the same bird of course — swooping over a reservoir, evidently hunting for fish, and a dead beaver by the side of the road, apparently a victim of a collision with a car. I don’t think I’d ever seen a dead beaver before, so I slowed down to make sure it was what it looked to be, and then I stopped and strapped it to the roof of my car and sure enough it was.

The eagle swooping nearby as I passed the ex-beaver triggered the following thought: I wondered how often large birds like that collide with a a car because they swoop in front of it too closely and misjudge the car’s speed? Now again, nothing like that had ever happened to me as far as I can recall, so the thought was apparently random, although no doubt related to the striking sight of the late beaver.

Then two or three days later, approximately, this thing that I had imagined vividly but had never seen — or at least I have no memory of anything like that — happened almost exactly as I had imagined it happening, except I just missed hitting the eagle.

Now what’s going on here? Some possibilities:

(1) This is all just totally coincidental and means nothing beyond that.

(2) My memory is faulty in one of two ways. Either I have almost hit an eagle before, and just have no memory of it, so this collocation of events isn’t as freakish as it seems (this seems very unlikely to me; I can’t imagine not remembering something like that), or my present memory of what I was thinking a few days ago is to some extent some sort of confabulation. This would make the link between that memory and what actually happened this morning seem much tighter than the link between the thoughts I actually had when I drove past the eagle and the beaver that had ceased to be. This is disturbing to consider, but seems far less implausible than the former hypothesis.

(3) The thoughts I had a few days ago and the incident this morning are connected in some way that isn’t readily explicable by ordinary reasoning. In other words, the eerie sensation that this series of events produced in me isn’t just a product of either sheer random chance, or some combination of faulty memory and confabulation.

Anyone who happens to have read Mind and Cosmos will recognize how such an experience would be especially thought-provoking in the context of a driver who was on his way to talk about the book to the youth of Athens.

Make of this what you will.