Just One of Those Things
Two researchers, Barrington and Jinks, have documented personal Mandela Effects and reality shifts as “jotts,” “jottles,” and “DOP,” providing well-documented case histories of these events well back into the 1950s, with anecdotal evidence going much further back than that.
This past month, Jeff Mishlove, author and host of the excellent program, Thinking Allowed, asked if I had heard of a book called JOTT written by Mary Rose Barrington. Until Jeff Mishlove mentioned this book, it had not been on my radar at all.
JOTT: When Things Disappear… and Come Back or Relocate–and Why it Really Happens was published in 2018. I love how it normalizes the reality shift or personal Mandela Effect phenomenon as merely being “Just One of Those Things,” or “JOTT.” Author Mary Rose Barrington was born in London in 1926, studied law, and served as Vice President of the Society for Psychical Research.
Excellent documented evidence of MEs back to 1950s
One of my favorite things about JOTT is that it was written by a researcher born in the 1920s who was keenly aware that instances of objects disappearing, reappearing, teleporting, and appearing-out-of-nowhere were matters of common knowledge over a century ago. JOTT references several articles on “Jottles” written by Barrington, going back to the early 1990s; Barrington was clearly fascinated with this topic. Some of the detailed reports included in JOTT occurred as early as the 1950s, and Barrington pointed out that this phenomenon has a history going much farther back even than that. Barrington writes,
“In our time, we seldom hear reports of sensational macro-phenomena said to have taken place during the 100 years starting mid-nineteenth century, when many people believed that such things were possible and that they could be evoked by the human endeavor, usually with input from the supposed spirit world.” [1]
Many of the first-hand reports described in JOTT came from submissions following an article from the magazine, “The Unexplained,” that described what we now recognize as personal Mandela Effects or reality shifts, asking readers to please write in with any of their experiences.
Where have “Jottles” been all my life?
Looking back to the list of references in the back of JOTT, I was stunned to see several articles on “Jottles” written by Barrington all the way back to the early 1990s, documenting what PMH Atwater referred to as “Reality Shifts” in a chapter by that name in 1999 in her book, Future Memory. I did not find Atwater’s work until well after I’d written my book, Reality Shifts, yet Atwater’s take on the subject closely paralleled mine.
Now that I know to look for other terms for reality shifts and personal Mandela Effects, I see there are several articles about “jottles” published by Barrington going back to the 1990s, and a 2016 book about Disappearing Object Phenomenon, also known by the acronym “DOP,” by author Tony Jinks. [2] Jinks apparently was aware of the terms “JOTT” and “jottles,” but apparently not the terms, “reality shift” nor “Mandela Effect.”
Truly we are living in interesting times, when the research about the same topic is being conducted in different niches. Both Barrington and Jinks have apparently been completely unaware of reality shifts as documented by myself and PMH Atwater in our books Reality Shifts and Future Memory, as well as the ever-expanding awareness of the general public of personal Mandela Effects.
Dr. Tony Jinks is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Science and Psychology, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia. Tony is the President, Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research. He has a background in Neuroscience and has published in the field of neuroscience, perception, parapsychology and paranormal belief and experience.
JOTT and Jottles Typology
Barrington’s typology for what we now know as personal Mandela Effects and reality shifts and what she called “Just One of Those Things” or JOTT or jottles includes:
Flyaways – objects vanish
Turn-Ups – objects appear
Windfalls – objects appear that were not previously yours
Comebacks – objects reappear after having disappeared
Walkabout – something comes back, but not where you left it
Trade-Ins – something has been traded for what you’d previously had
Barrington attributes the JOTT phenomenon to being related to Cosmic Mind, and recognizes that these experiences are relatively widespread, and have been around for quite a long time.
DOP Typology
Australian psychology professor and author Dr. Tony Jink’s typology for what we now know as personal Mandela Effects and reality shifts and what he calls Disappearing Object Phenomena (DOP), involving 385 case studies that he finds convincing, trustworthy, and reliable Dr. Tony Jinks gave a 2017 talk in which he specifically rules out that experiencers of Disappearing Object Phenomena are psychologically distinguishable from non-experiencers. That is to say that experiencers are not suffering from such possible psychological issues as: transcience; telescoping; errors of commission (suggestibility, illusionary correlation, confirmation bias); perceptual blindness (ie: inattentional blindness); altered states of consciousness (hallucinations, autohypnosis); encoding errors (“absent mindedness”); memory distortion (pre-existing beliefs); and loose associationism. Typology of DOP includes:
Disappearances – like Barrington’s Flyaways
Appearances – like Barrington’s Turn-Ups and Windfalls
Reappearances – like Barrington’s Comebacks and Walkabouts
Replacement – equivalent to Barrington’s Trade-In
Jinks notes that DOP events are isolated incidents–they are discontinuities. Jinks contemplates possible causes of DOP such as: invisibility; teleportation and/or wormholes; parallel universes; dimensional shifts; external agents; and human-centered causes (such as witnessed in psychokinetic abilities, for example). Jinks’ favored explanation is human-centered causes, unwittingly caused by the experiment themselves, for various obscure subconscious reasons. Jinks recognizes that these DOP incidents are characterized by a quality of Seamlessness, and he therefore likes the idea of conscious observation (by multiple consciousness states) that are responsible for ‘collapsing reality,’ so we have the consensual reality we have now, such that the new situation appears as if it has always been that way.
Reality Shifts & Personal Mandela Effect Typology
Those of us who have been communicating and conversing about personal Mandela Effects and reality shifts note the general categories suggested by Barrington and Jinks. After more than 20 years of collecting hundreds of first-hand reports of reality shifts from around the world on the http://www.realityshifters.com website, we expand the typology to include:
Disappearances – like Barrington’s Flyaways
Appearances – like Barrington’s Turn-Ups and Windfalls, including buildings
Reappearances – like Barrington’s Comebacks and Walkabouts
Transformations – equivalent to Barrington’s Trade-In & Jinks’ Replacement, plus changes in body physiology (hair, eye color) and healing
Changes in experience of Time – time loops, traveling fast, meeting future self
Alive Again – people previously reported deceased are alive
Teleportation/Tunneling – people & objects teleported past or through objects
Synchronicity – events align meaningfully
Well worth note is the observation reality shifts and personal Mandela Effect often go far beyond a simple matter of ‘objects gone missing’ and there is, in fact, an awareness that some large objects–such as buildings, mountains and trees–have been noticed to have disappeared, appeared, reappeared and transformed. Many people are witnessing changes to the human physiology and anatomy–such as repositioning of the heart and kidneys. Some people notice we are now in a different part of the Milky Way galaxy, such as Orion, instead of Sagittarius.
As always, I encourage all of us to keep asking my favorite question, “How good can it get?”
I invite you to watch the companion video to this blog post at:
[1] Barrington, Mary Rose. JOTT: When Things Disappear… and Come Back Or Relocate–and why it Really Happens. Anomalist Books, 2018.
[2] Jinks, Tony. Disappearing object phenomenon: An investigation. McFarland, 2016.
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Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, a Doctor of Divinity, and a second degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won. Cynthia is the founder of RealityShifters, and is president of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia hosts “Living the Quantum Dream” on the DreamVisions7 radio network, and has been featured in numerous shows including Gaia, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, One World with Deepak Chopra, and BBC. Cynthia reminds us to ask in every situation, “How good can it get?” Subscribe to her free monthly ezine at:
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Comments on: "JOTT documentation of early personal Mandela Effects" (8)
About 10 years ago I completed a training with an Inca Shaman teacher. I had many notebooks full of notes. One day I decided to take one of my notebooks in my van so that I could review some of the teachings while I waited to pick up one of my daughters from a bookstore. I arrived home and got busy with making dinner and completing other tasks for the evening. The next morning I remembered the notes that I wanted to review. So I began to look for the notebook and couldn’t find it anywhere in the house. I then thought about checking the van. The notebook was not to be found in the van or in the house. After a couple of days of looking for it I gave up and just assumed I lost it.
Four months went by and one day the notebook was on top of my kitchen counter. I asked my husband if he knew how the notebook got there. He said he found it in the van on the tray in between the driver and passenger seats. We had been in and out of the van at least 80 times since I lost the notebook.
Wow, thanks so much for sharing your experience with your disappearing / reappearing notebook, that vanished one day about 10 years ago, and returned several months after you’d been in that van 80 or more times.
Do you happen to recall what thoughts and feelings you had in mind at the time your notebook originally went missing? Or do you recall your core feelings about the notebook? The types of feelings I’m most interested if you recall would be your most subconscious feelings about the notebook–such as how you felt about others seeing it, etc.
Hi Cynthia, I just saw your reply. I wasn’t worried about others seeing my notes. I was deeply saddened that I would not be able to refer to them again because I felt I needed them to guide me in my unfolding in doimg Shamanic energy work. I may have been using it as a crutch instead of trusting my own unique connection to the Realms of Light, Unconditional Love and all possibilities.
When I did receive the notebook, I didn’t feel I needed to refer to my notes anymore.
That’s a great observation with regard to there being a benefit of not relying so heavily on your notes–that there may have been some advantage from having them disappear. I’m glad you were able to see it that way, and “find the silver lining.” We know that “delayed choice” is a reality in quantum physics, and John Archibald Wheeler’s idea has been tested experimentally and found to be true–which might well mean that all of us have the ability to have retrocausal influence over events in the past. And possibly there are times that we’d like to make sure we don’t get lazy or depend on things that could become like crutches.
The sub-reddit r/gitm has scores of anecdotes,and if sorted mathmetically,might reveal a genuine pattern.
Thank you! I’ve also discovered, much to my joy and delight, that the more than 20 years of first-hand reports I’ve received and edited for quality and content for RealityShifters is a very good fit for the typologies established by Mary Rose Barrington and Tony Jinks–so now I just have a few thousand of these to tabulate, and we’ll have an exceptionally strong body of evidence.
Well,just experienced a time jump.Moments ago it was 9:45 and now it’s 10:10.
One thing is for sure that these RS don’t happen often.People whom i have coaxed to cooperate will say it’s odd or seriously odd,they can’t care if that’s a statement or understatement.They have to carry on the routine without a snigger or doubts to their sanity from totally uninitiated associates.