Help Me Figure This Phenomenon Out

My friends, I’m taking a brief pause from my usual poetry-ish writing to ask for some help solving a mystery, if you feel so inclined to chime in.

I would not be posting this if it weren’t sending my brain into mental gymnastics.

Every day, and by that I mean every. single. day. for the past three months, I glance at the clock at exactly 11:11am and 11:11pm. I check the clock more than that, but not compulsively enough to explain why 11:11 shows up twice daily. Hallucinations? Psychosis? Trust me, I worried about that too. So I did what most of us tend to do when something unusual keeps happening: I pretended like it was normal.

For the first month I sort of waved it off like it had always been happening, I just hadn’t noticed until then. Glance at the clock at 11:11am while I’m dashing to get to work? NBD. Must be connected to my brain’s innate circadian rhythm, I thought, feeling all science-y. Just happen to see 11:11pm as I’m brushing my teeth? My brain is primed like a freaking alarm to look at the clock right now, total coincidence, I’d tell myself.

Then the next month, things went from weird to extra wonky when I started to see 1:11am and 1:11pm too. I’m just looking at the clock WAAAAAY too much, apparently, I’d tell myself, this time scratching my head. So then I consciously did NOT look at the clock except when absolutely necessary (like waking up to the alarm in the morning, or to make sure I ended my therapy sessions on time).

But even when I mindfully veered away from glancing at the clock unless I HAD to, 11:11 and 1:11 still showed up during the few times I did check the clock.

It got to be kind of a hilarious joke for a bit, where I’d roll my eyes and chuckle derisively. Now it’s not funny anymore, it’s like a mystery from Scooby Doo that has gone on forever: someone just needs to pull off the mask already. Then we can have a good forced laugh about it so the episode can finally end.

My Google searching for answers about the mysterious 11:11 sightings ended abruptly when I read the caption beneath a title saying: “1111 means something significant is about to happen”. Then I sort of chickened out because I didn’t want to veer down the path of ominous thinking.

Have you ever experienced this?

And if you have, what did it mean for you?

Coincidence or not?

Clinically insane perhaps? 😉