Storyline: When the Shadow Becomes the Sun
/This storyline for a trick was inspired by an email I received from Oliver Meech. I’ll include that email at the end of this post.
It’s Friday in early February, and I’m meeting up with my friend Alexis to get dinner and hang out.
“What are you doing this weekend?” she asks.
“Oh, that masterclass I’m taking starts tomorrow and goes for eight days. Did I tell you about that?”
“Masterclass?” she says.
“Ah, I thought I told you. So, there are certain magicians who travel around and teach masterclasses on whatever their specialty is. This guy I’m learning from is the guy to go to if you want to learn about predictions. So that’s what I’m going to be taking a deep dive into.”
“In-ter-resting…,” she says, tapping her spoon against the glass ice cream sundae bowl between us. “Like… these are tricks? Or like real predictions?”
“Oh, well… no… not real predictions. But not exactly tricks either. Like you wouldn’t learn this stuff out of magic book or anything. I don’t know how to explain it. Let’s get together soon and I’ll show you something.”
A few days later, I stop by at her place one night after she gets out of work.
“I want to try something from that masterclass I’ve been taking.”
We shuffle up an ESP deck, she deals out as many cards as she wants and then deals them into two piles. She then chooses which cards she wants off of each pile and those cards are turned over until we have five random ESP symbols in front of us.
I point to a piece of paper I put on the table earlier and ask her to turn it over.
She does, and it matches the cards on the table perfectly.
I clap my hands together. “Sweet. I think I’m sort of getting the hang of this.”
I tell her I’ll probably want to meet up again in a couple of day. “We’re supposed to be practicing as much as we can before the masterclass ends.”
The next Friday, I make plans with Alexis to stop by my place. I call her up before we’re going to meet, and I ask her if she has a jar or something where she keeps coins in her apartment. She tells me yes, and I ask her to bring a small handful of change with her when she comes.
When she arrives, we talk for a little bit, and she asks how the class has been going.
“Ehhhhh…,” I say, apprehensively. “I don’t know really. I had the hang of it at first, but now I feel like it’s really over my head. It’s kind of like… I was in advanced math all through school. And it was pretty simple to me. But then when I got to calculus, I lost the plot completely. I just never really got it. That’s what this feels like. I can sort of follow along, but I don’t really ‘get it’ like I did at first. Fortunately, I’m still having good luck in practice. You brought some change, yeah?”
She confirms that she did, and I then make a prediction of all the change in her pocket. She dumps out the change. We count it up, and the prediction matches perfectly.
“That’s some class you’re taking,” she says.
“I know, right?” I respond.
A couple of days later, I text her: “Some interesting developments regarding that masterclass. Can you stop by tonight?”
Later that evening, she comes by. I sit with her on my couch.
“So,” I say, “I was taking that class. And I think I told you last time that I wasn’t following along with it very well. Like it got to the point where I only understood about 30% of it. But still, I was having a lot of luck with the predictions nonetheless. And I think I figured something out. I’ll show you.”
I take a pen and draw something on a piece of paper and fold it in two and place it on the couch between us.
“My ‘prediction,’” I say, and I make air-quotes when I say prediction, as if that’s not exactly what it is.
I take the pen I just used and place it so it hangs part way off the coffee table, but is clearly firmly on the table.
“Watch the pen,” I say.
After half a minute or so, the pen tips over and falls off the table. There’s no reason it should have. The table wasn’t pushed, there was no gust of air, the pen just tipped against gravity and fell over.
“Look,” I say. I pick up the paper I wrote on before. It’s a picture of the pen falling off the table.
“I predicted that… but there’s no way it should have happened.” I look at Alexis, wondering if she’s getting what I’m saying.
“The other day, did you count the change you left the house with or did you just put some in your pocket?”
“I just grabbed a handful and put it in my pocket.”
“So you don’t know how much change you actually left the house with.”
“I mean… I don’t know,” she says. “I guess no.”
“Do you see what I’m saying?” I ask. “This class I’m taking was supposed to be about predicting the future, right? It’s about somehow ‘knowing’ the result of something that’s beyond my influence. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
“I ‘predicted’ the pen would fall off the table, but there’s no reason it should have. And there’s no reason it did. Except for the fact I said it would. Does that make sense? I don’t think I’m sensing the future. I think I’m causing it.”
I let this sink in.
“I’ll show you how I figured it out.”
I give Alexis a red deck of cards and tell her to place it on the floor somewhere. She picks my bedroom.
I grab a glass bowl from the kitchen and tell her to cover the deck, just to completely isolate it.
Back in my living room, I say, “Let’s say I’m planning on doing a simple prediction. I’m going to predict what card someone cuts to.”
I give Alexis a blue deck and have her cut the cards in two packets, placing one portion at an angle on top of the other.
I grab a piece of paper and start drawing a deck that’s been cut in two packets.
“So this is what the prediction would look like. Generally. What card did you cut to, by the way?”
We check and see Alexis cut to the 4 of Spades. I make an adjustment to the drawing.
“So, if I was going to predict what you just did, it would look something like this,” I say.
“You can see how that would be a decent trick if I had drawn this before you cut the deck. But that wouldn’t prove what I’m saying. That would still seem like a prediction.”
I grab a red marker from the end-table and color in the cards in my prediction.
“This drawing wasn’t a prediction of what you would do with this deck. This drawing is going to cause something to happen to that other deck.”
I tell her to take a peek in my bedroom and see if the deck looks any different.
She does and comes back and says, “No, it’s the same.”
“Really?” I say. “I thought it would have happened by now.”
I walk with Alexis back to my bedroom and open the door. On the floor, under the bowl, the deck is now in two packets.
“It wasn’t like that a second ago?” I ask.
“No!” she insists.
“You must have just missed it,” I say.
I remove the bowl and hand her the card the deck cut to.
“What card is it?” I ask.
She turns it over. The 4 of Spades.
So, I didn’t intend to write this out as a specific set of tricks you would do. I just wanted to write it up for you as a storyline you could use for any tricks that would slot into it.
You need a couple of prediction effects. And a couple of effects where something moves or changes in some way without outside influence.
When I did this, the tricks I used were:
Richard Osterlind’s Viewed ESP Prediction
A change prediction with a thumb writer
Banachek’s PK Pen
The Cross-Cut Force
Vertex by Christopher Taylor (an electric haunted deck)
Those were just the ones that I used this time. I may mix it up in the future.
(I have some small variations I’ve made to the Osterlind trick and the standard change prediction that I’ll write up in the upcoming newsletter.)
You can substitute any tricks you like that work within that framework, because the real point of this is the story. The story being: I thought I was predicting events, but it turns out I was causing them.
This idea came from an email from Oliver Meech related to the Creepy Child premise I’ve written about before.
I decided the pacing of the story and the way it unfolds would work better if I was the one doing the “predicting.” (Instead of third party.) And I liked the idea that I was enrolled in some weird prediction “masterclass.” Which gave me a good excuse to meet up with my friend and show her a trick a few times over the course of the week.
Below is Oliver’s original email to me. You may be more interested in the direction he was suggesting.
I read your recent mailbox item about Directed Verdict with a psychic kid's drawing, based in your previously posted idea.
At the same time, I've recently started watching Manifest on Netflix (late to the party) - it's quite silly but fine for semi-mindless mystery. Anyway, there's a creepy kid in it that does drawings of future event. You may well already know and have covered this. Anyway, the reason I mention it is there's an episode in season 1 where the kid is worried that his drawings are causing the events to happen, as opposed to just predicting them. So the grownups suggest an experiment where he draws random things then they wait to show that they don't actually happen (e.g. they mention a vase smashing, and lots of money appearing).
It feels like this could be a nice element to incorporate. So, maybe after the cards are predicted, you say that it's just seeing future events, not causing them. Then you show a drawing of another object, say a pen on the floor, then place a pen on the table and say 'see, it's not magically moving to the floor'. Then the pen suddenly drops (PK pen).
Or, a card turns over, a book falls off the shelf, or whatever you want to set up.—OM