When I was at university - I didn't know this at the time, it's only by reading the stories I wrote and comparing them to real events since - I evidently went into some kind of trance state by playing music, but it was loud, bouncy folk/world music rather than meditative "new age" music. Whilst in this kind of trance I drew comic stories - hundreds and hundreds of pages of them - which have subsequently come true (if of course you see them as allegorical, though specific details such as dates, physical characteristics and names of the characters, and so on, link the allegories to real life).
I always feel happiest and at my most confident when my emotions feed off happy, lively music; and through folk and world music I have seen many songs begin to reflect real life. I am most interested in political divination, so songs of knights and kings and princesses have fuelled this strange kind of synchronicity. Whether I am merely receiving divination of future events or creating them - of course folklore is full of tales of artists who are able to paint things and see them come to life, though they usually end up as morality tales when the artist gets too greedy for material possessions! - is dependent on whether you believe the future is fixed or mutable, but I have seen enough to understand that divination seems to work by showing you pictures of the future before it happens, and thus although it may the events, particularly in politics, seem incredible at the time, I do tend towards the pre-determination and "future echoes" concept rather than seeing myself as creating the future through my drawings in a trance state.
What is interesting that a lot of my comic strip artwork and narrative has been created over a cup of coffee in a cafe in the middle of a city or town (when I am working I tend to leave the house early enough to buy myself breakfast outside the house so I have time to "wake up" properly!) without going into any kind of trance state.
While drawing I normally like to have something on in the background, usually a good TV documentary or comedy. Looking back at some artwork I've done, there are one or two pieces where I can still remember what I was watching at the time. One piece I remembered was done while watching a documentary on the Lodz ghetto in wartime Poland; a few years later I actually ended up living in Lodz on the site of the former ghetto. The page was one of the prescient ones regarding recent politics in the UK.
And thinking back, the earliest drawing I ever did which still exists - a picture of a circus scribbled on the lid of my mother's tupperware sewing box at the age of three with a red biro (and I remember doing it so I know for definite it was a circus!) - seems to be an anticipation of a cartoon I cut from a newspaper several years ago, which suggests that the art of political divination in the United Kingdom is alive, well and pointing towards the same conclusions. (I also found psychics from the 1970s who have predicted the name of the next prime minister over here, although given that the person who time's arrow is pointing to was not known and hadn't even entered politics at that time, the name is wrong; however the named person has a very similar name, so I suspect the psychic, having received the information, applied it to the wrong person, since the actual person was not prominent or active and unknown to her. Concerning other political figures, her predictions were spot on, so I know she was "kosher"; the book itself was published in 1977 and the person concerned didn't enter parliament until 1983, so he could not have been known as a celebrity to her.)
Since at the age of three I didn't know anything much when I drew that picture other than it was definitely a circus (we found the box a while ago and although it had faded with time, I could still categorically remember doing it, I feel quite strongly that as long as you are open to the idea of divination being possible and are able to have enough of an open mind to harness it and expand your ideas of it, then it is possible without going into a trance state, though indeed it does help.
I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, though, which I think blurs the border enough between the "real life" and "fantasy" (as it would appear to my parents), so like the "idiot savant" of "Rain Man", I might have started from an acceptance of divinatory abilities than having to work at developing them by going into a trance state. I have developed a numerological technique based around the number 47 (a prime number which kept cropping up for some reason, and lately has been almost battering me over the head!), whereby if I have a divinatory thought and look around the immediate environment, then if the number appears either as itself or in some other permutation, say 227 (2+2=4, 7), or even say 53 (100-47=53; 53 is also a prime number; with time I subtract from 60, so the corresponding number is 13 rather than 53) then I can know that that thought was indeed a clairvoyant idea.
It works so far with trivial things, though making predictions about politics always involves a time lapse; it is also this time lapse which makes me seem mad to my colleagues but usually has them beating a path to my door when they realise I was right all along! I am awaiting the outcome of my predictions with baited breath as the ultimate "I told you so" will be of cosmic proportions...!!!
