Was it my Ni or my Ne that did it?

I've had a number of RL experiences that have left me wondering whether it was extraverted or introverted intuition that did the magic for me. Since I get so many of them, maybe discerning the difference between the two will help me pin down whether I am Ni or Ne dominant. Here are a few of them:

a. One Christmas, my older sister was excited about a gift she bought me. It was wrapped in Christmas paper and placed under the tree. Without my even peeking, I burst into laughter and told her that her present was staring at me with black beady eyes.

My sister gave me a curious look. "How did you know it had black beady eyes?"

"Because it's a stuffed bear."

And it was. But I never told her I wanted one, but I did.

b. My mother told me the story of a friend, a man who, every year, always received a Christmas gift of cooked noodles from a lady friend. That Christmas, after receiving his gift in a wrapped box, the man placed it in the refrigerator.

At that point in the story, I burst into laughter.

My mom looked at me curiously and asked if she had told me the story already.

She hadn't. "So why are you laughing?" she asked me.

"When you got to the part where the man placed the slippers in the box inside the ref, I laughed."

"How did you know it was a pair of slippers?" she asked me again.

"Because that's what I saw when you were telling me the story."

Well, it was a pair of slippers. And mom said I was creepy.

c. One of the tutors I'd been working with posed me a word riddle. I didn't get the answer immediately, but that night, the answer came to me visually in a dream. The next day, I answered her riddle and she told me that I got the answer right.

d. Long ago, I was taking an algebra exam on systems of linear equations. I was stuck on one problem, and couldn't find the solution set using any of the strategies we were taught.

Then I remembered what another teacher advised me to do whenever I get stuck on an exam item. Close your eyes and the answer will reveal itself. So I closed my eyes and quietly asked for the answer. The answer revealed itself as a single digit number in an aural imagination. I plugged that number into x in the system of equations, and the problem was solved.

e. One morning before going to school, I had a mental image of a blanket with red and blue stripes. A voice in my mind told me, "Take that to school, a classmate of yours will need it." That day in school, one of my classmates asked our class if any of us had a long piece of cloth with stripes. She said she needed it for props.



f. Recently, while I was strolling across the fifth floor of a mall, I suddenly had an imagined vision that as I was going down the escalator, a man ran down and snatched my bag.

I looked around me to see if anyone was looking at me, but there was nobody nearby. So I went down to the fourth floor using the escalator, without incident.

I took the next escalator down to the third floor. I was half-way down the next escalator when I felt a rapid thumping on the escalator. A man was running down the escalator toward me.

Immediately, I jumped off the remaining steps and turned around to look at the running man get off the escalator. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked at the display window of the art gallery in front of the escalator.

So what was the rush going down the escalator, huh?

I backed away slowly, watching him and clutching my bag.

 

Cool. Thanks Morgain. I have so many synchronicity stories like these.

 

Yup. I'll probably be posting there too.

You may have a point there.

But first of all, it's quite possible that it's the whole brain with all the cognitive functions working together that generate these images in my head.

Secondly, I've been reading something on the quantum model that states that whatever might happen in the future of this universe already happened from the point of view of a "mind" that sees everything. The mathematics of the space-time of our universe only comes out right in quantum theory by viewing all future occurrences as something that has already happened. So in a sense, the laws of physics are the mind of such a god. Maybe, "seeing into the future" is God's way of letting us see the past as he has seen it.

It's possible that both cognitive processes and that inexplicable kind of knowing work together. That the whole mind - the brain with all its cognitive powers serves to filter this kind of inexplicable knowing in a way that we can make sense of it - through dreams and visions and premonitions and gut feel.

That was definitely the case when I came up with the single-digit answer to that algebra test item and when I dreamt of the answer to a word riddle.

I have another experience which might have straddled the border between Ni and Ne. More on this in a follow-up post.

 

*slaps forehead*

That's right!

Why am I walking around the forum with a detached head?

*playful grin*

 

Thanks Res! I wonder if there are any more Ni-dominant folks here that would agree with you precisely.