My Name Embedded in a Hulu Ad???

 A few months ago, my husband Patrick casually mentioned to me, "You know, I was watching TV the other night and there was this ad for Hulu [the cable network] that came on.  They started talking about you!"

"What?" I shouted incredulously.  "What do you mean Hulu was talking about me?  That makes no sense at all!"

 "Yeah," he insisted.  "They did."

"Well, what were they saying?"  I demanded.  "That's impossible!"

"I don't know... something about promoting you or 'presenting Nancy du Tertre...' something like that.  I don't remember.  But they said your name."

"That's ridiculous," I snorted.  "You must have been dreaming... or sleeping.  I've seen plenty of Hulu ads and I've never heard them talk about me!"

"No, not at all!" he insisted.  "I was wide awake.  I heard them play the ad more than once."

This made no sense at all to me.  

"Well, why didn't you call me downstairs so I could hear it?  Didn't it occur to you that that might be something I should hear?"

"I'll let you know if I hear it again." 

A few days later, Patrick came running upstairs breathless and said, "Come on!  Hurry up!  It's the Hulu ad and you're on again!"   

I went running downstairs and into the room where Patrick had put the TV on pause.  He replayed the ad.  I stared hard at the TV.  I heard nothing unusual.  Certainly, not my name.  

"Did you hear the name Nancy or Nancy du Tertre or something else?"  I demanded.

"I heard something like '... now presenting Nancy du Tertre.'"  Patrick sounded confident.  "There... right there!  Don't you hear it?"  He jumped up excitedly pointing at the TV screen.

"No. Play it again."

Anyway, we replayed that Hulu ad more than 40 times.  I knew every word by heart and my name was no where in the ad.  I began to feel sorry for Patrick.  Worse, I began to wonder about his mental health.  I asked if he had seen his doctor recently.  He began sweating profusely.

"Maybe it's time for me to get a brain scan," he conceded nervously.

So I recorded the relevant portion of the Hulu ad on my iphone.  Patrick suggested I try playing it for someone else to see if they could hear what he was hearing.  

One day later, my 18-year-old son wandered through my room and I said, "Hey William.  Could you do me a favor and tell me if you hear anything unusual on this tape?"

I had barely pressed the play button and was trying to listen for the start when suddenly I heard the announcer's voice boom out my full name "Nancy du Tertre."  What the hell!  I was completely shocked.  While Nancy is a relatively common first name, my last name is French and notoriously difficult for Americans to remember or pronounce.  I always joke with radio show hosts that they can call me "Nancy Two Turtles" since no one ever gets my name right.  It was beyond bizarre that this Hulu ad contained my last name with its correct pronunciation!  

 "Did you hear that?"  I asked in amazement.

"Yeah, the guy said your name," said William un-phased. 

After informing Patrick that he was not crazy after all (he canceled his doctor's appointment), I played the tape for several other people who also heard varying degrees of "now presenting Nancy du Tertre."


So what did this mean?  It had the bizarre quality of alien or paranormal electronic interference - and I have heard many such recordings.  Sometimes they are clear and sometimes fuzzy and difficult to decipher.  When I finally heard my name on this Hulu ad embedded in other words, it was unbelievably clear as a bell.  Often, people hear their own name being called out.  It's a kind of auditory pareidolia - like a Rorschach inkblot test onto which one projects one's own thoughts or expectations.  But clearly, I wasn't the person hearing my name in the Hulu ad.  So that didn't make sense.  Should I presume there is some cosmic connection or futuristic clue?  Is this some omen?  I am at a total loss to comprehend this weird glitch.

Clairvoyance and Blindness



The famous Bulgarian blind prophet Baba Vanga

I have always suffered from very poor eyesight since childhood.  I am so myopic (nearsighted) that what I see at 20 feet away is equivalent to what a person with 20/20 vision can see at a distance of two football fields away!  In other words, everything that is more than about two feet away from my eyes becomes blurry.  I'm one of those people who needs my glasses to locate my glasses when I lose them!  By contrast, I have some of the best close-up vision of anyone I know and I can usually beat all the eye charts with the tiniest print with flying colors. I also suffer from a number of other eye issues.  I have glaucoma, cataracts, astigmatisms in both eyes, and some macular degeneration.  Additionally, there are large, distracting floaters that dance across my vision like black, stringy seaweed.  [I learned after writing this blog I have a third eye disease that causes blindness - corneal dystrophy.  The disease, causing progressive destruction of the cornea, is apparently a "genetic" disease although strangely there is no one in my family who ever had eye problems.]

Roughly a decade ago, I had a dream that saved me from early blindness.  I was in the middle of a very ordinary (rather boring) dream in which I had to car pool to pick up my daughter after an away game for soccer at another high school.  I drove there in the car, entered the school building, found my daughter and was all set to leave, when something unexpected happened - my long deceased Swedish maternal grandfather opened the door and walked in the room.  His name was Maurice we used to call him "Puff."  Since I generally have control over my dreams and never "allow" unexpected events to occur with the dreams, I was quite surprised by his appearance. 

I said, "Puff!  What are you doing here?"  He shuffled over to me and opened a number of enormous medical books. 

He said, "You need to read this" and pointed to a page on ophthalmology with a large medical drawing of an eye and its component parts. 

I responded, "Puff, I'm in a dream so I can't read this." 

He then proceeded to explain to me that I needed to see my eye doctor immediately and get my eyes checked.  He and I then said good-bye, hugged each other tightly, and I awoke in my bed sobbing (this had never happened to me in my life) with tears of joy. 

Despite the fact that I had seen my eye doctor about a year earlier for my annual eye exam, everything was normal, I was not experiencing any eye problems at all, and my nearsightedness had stabilized over the last decade or so, I decided to see my ophthalmologist.  It was at that doctor appointment that I learned that I had glaucoma for the first time in my life.  Glaucoma is, in the preliminary stages, a totally symptom-less disease and thus there would have been absolutely no way that my subconscious mind could have delivered this message to me in my dream.  Puff was the only person in my family, on both sides, who wore glasses.  Furthermore, he was a brilliant lawyer and was obsessed with reading (what I considered pedantic and boring) encyclopedias and dictionaries.  He was the perfect person from the spirit world to deliver this news and to this day I believe he saved my eyesight!

Which brings me to my last eye issue.  I also have severe cataracts in both eyes.  Driving a car has become problematic and frightening for me (e.g. headlight beams of oncoming cars create blinding rays of light up to a mile long; traffic lights and street lights are surrounded by enormous five foot halos of soft, shimmering light; can't read signs; etc.).  I can no longer see my large screen TV from my bed.  Colors are increasingly dim and lack contrast. My eye doctor finally said, "So, when do you want me to sign you up for cataract surgery?" I am scheduled for two eye surgeries this coming January.

Impressionism founder Claude Monet suffered from cataracts (diagnosed in 1912) which caused him to paint in yellow, red, brown and muddy hues until his cataract surgery in 1923 (at age 82) where he began to paint in vivid shades of blue and green, some say due to a new ability to see ultraviolet hues.  The two paintings are of the same view of "House with the Rose Garden" - the one on the left was painted before the cataract surgery, the one on the right was painted after his surgery.

Here's the strange thing: more than the fear of losing my eyesight as a result of surgery, I am afraid of losing my identity.  My whole life my sense of "self" has been limited to a zone of about 10 inches off the surface of my body.  Everything "out there" has always been a blur.  My world has always been very close to me so my identity within space is close to my body.  I have always seen the world in the same way Impressionist painter Claude Monet painted his landscapes and waterlilies - a canvas filled with undefinable blobs and swatches of increasingly dull and dim color. People and objects are not distinct entities in my world.  And so I strangely fear being given the "gift" of sight like a deaf person who will hear sounds for the first time in their life...

Fragment from the painting of pointillism painter Georges Seurat entitled "Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy," 1888.

Furthermore, my vision is "pixilated" and appears very much like the above pointillism style of painting by impressionist painter Georges Seurat.  I always thought this was normal until I began asking around to see if anyone else experienced this.  No one knows what I'm talking about... including my eye doctor!  All physical objects within my vision are made of dots of light.  During day and night, I see individual photons of light.  My mental screen of "reality" is constantly shimmering with tiny dots of colored lights. This shimmering quality makes every solid object seem like it is not made of light, not matter.  I am sure this type of vision has affected the way I perceive the world and reality.


The irony is that I am actually worried that if my eyesight is corrected through surgery, enabling me to clearly see objects with all their fine detail, I might lose my sense of inner-vision (call it clairvoyance).  In other words,I will see too much!!  Perhaps there is a reason why the world's best clairvoyants have been blind.  Maybe blindness aids in "seeing" those things that are otherwise "invisible" to the naked eye.  Maybe blindness, acting as a form of sensory deprivation, creates the necessary blank canvas for visions of the future.  I know that physical vision is a "distraction" from clairvoyant vision.  I know this because I prefer to do my psychic readings over the phone (as opposed to Facetime or Skype video).  I find the visual input from my physical eyes to be a huge distraction and causes me to think too much.  My post surgery my challenge will be to learn how to "see" beyond this physical world that will be displayed in new, amazing technicolor for the first time ever!