Once when I was maybe 13, I played a card-guessing game with my father. He would hold up a card and I would guess what it was, then he would show me what it was. For what seemed a very long streak -- like 15-20 cards in a row -- each of my guesses was not the card my father was holding, but the next card he held up, drawing from the top of a face-down deck. Although at the time I was inclined to believe in ESP, I knew this was anecdotal evidence, however bizarrely improbable a coincidence it might seem. In retrospect I wonder why we never repeated the game or tried to specify a hypothesis to test.

A few years ago my brother told me our father was an amateur hypnotist, and that he has memories of being hypnotized by him without his informed consent. I now wonder if he did something similar in this instance -- for instance, using a suggestion to prevent me from noticing that after each guess, he was searching through the deck for the right card to hold up next time.