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Most of us carry a small private collection of moments we never quite explained. The shiver that crossed the shoulders at a graveside. The song that came on in the car at exactly the right moment. The friend who phoned an hour after we dreamed about them. We usually file these under coincidence, partly because it is the polite thing to do and partly because nobody ever handed us another folder to put them in.
A recent episode of Gabrielle Bernstein’s Dear Gabby show, featuring evidential medium Travis Holp, offers six such folders. Their premise is simple: these moments are not random noise but a form of communication from guides, from loved ones who have died, or from whatever larger intelligence you prefer to name. This article walks through those six signs, adds the context the conversation leaves out, and suggests a way of holding them that stays open without becoming gullible.
Why “Just a Coincidence” Never Quite Settles It
Carl Jung spent decades scratching this exact itch. He coined the term synchronicity for events that line up meaningfully in time yet show no visible causal thread between them, and he developed the idea in conversation with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Skeptics reply that probability guarantees a steady supply of striking coincidences, and that our minds are wired to remember the hits and forget the misses. Both positions deserve a fair hearing.
Sign One: A Rush Through the Body With No Ordinary Trigger
The first sign is physical. Goosebumps on a warm afternoon, a tingle across the scalp, a light pressure at the back of the head, a wave of warmth through the chest, or hands that suddenly feel heavy or numb. Holp describes this as our own energy field overlapping with a presence nearby, so the body registers the contact before the mind has words for it. Mediums often notice it arriving at emotionally charged moments: in grief, in worry, or in a burst of happiness.
Holp shares something especially useful for anyone prone to anxiety. For years he read tightness in his chest and throat as nerves, until a mentor suggested that some of those episodes were sensitivity rather than panic. The takeaway is not that anxiety is secretly psychic. It is that the body speaks in more than one dialect, and learning to tell them apart takes patient attention.
There is a well-studied everyday version of this experience. Researchers call it frisson, the shiver response triggered by moving music, beauty, a powerful speech or a sudden emotional peak, and it involves the brain’s reward circuitry and the sympathetic nervous system. Knowing this does not cancel the spiritual reading. It gives you a baseline. If the chill comes when nothing outside you has stirred it, while your thoughts happen to be resting on someone you have lost, that context is worth noting.
Sign Two: Electronics That Seem to Speak Up
Lights that flicker as you walk into a room, a radio that switches stations by itself, a smart speaker that suddenly plays the one song that matters, a phone that rings with nobody on the line. Of all the signs, this is the one people describe with the most delighted disbelief, and both hosts trade stories of devices behaving as though someone on the other side had picked up the remote.
The usual mediumship explanation is that consciousness without a body is still energy, and energy can nudge electrical systems. Treat that as a working belief rather than settled physics. Science history even has its own curious parallel. The so-called Pauli effect was a running joke among physicists that laboratory equipment broke down whenever Wolfgang Pauli was nearby, and Pauli himself took it seriously enough to discuss it with Jung.
On the practical side, ageing wiring, overnight software updates and voice assistants mishearing a word explain a great deal. What tends to separate a meaningful glitch from a mundane one is timing and content. A device misfiring is ordinary. A device producing precisely the word, song or name you were longing for, at the moment you were longing for it, is the kind of event worth writing down.
Sign Three: Waking in the Small Hours
The third sign is waking abruptly at 2:22, 3:33 or some other oddly patterned time, wide awake for no obvious reason. The explanation offered in the episode is that sleep lowers our usual mental defences, so guidance slips through more easily while the analytical mind is offline.
Sleep science does show that the night is not uniform. The Sleep Foundation’s overview of sleep stages explains that deep slow-wave sleep dominates early in the night, while REM periods, when dreaming is most vivid, grow longer in the second half. That is part of why the hours before dawn feel so porous: you are hovering close to the border between dreaming and waking.
Both hosts are sensible about this one. Stress, hormones, a full bladder or plain hunger can all wake you. Their suggested approach is to pause before reaching for the phone, take a long slow breath, and quietly ask whether there is anything you are meant to know. Keep a notebook beside the bed and jot down whatever arrives, even fragments. If nothing comes, roll over and sleep without disappointment. The point is availability, not interrogation.
Sign Four: Thinking of Someone Just Before They Appear
You think of an old friend, and that evening their name lights up your screen. A cousin you have not spoken to in years crosses your mind, and someone from that side of the family gets in touch the same week. Sometimes the person who drops into your thoughts has already died, and their arrival feels less like memory and more like a visit.
This is one of the few signs that has been tested under controlled conditions. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake ran experiments on what he calls telephone telepathy, in which participants guessed which of several randomly selected callers was ringing before they answered. He reports hit rates well above chance, especially between people with close emotional bonds, although at least one independent replication found nothing beyond chance. The question remains genuinely open, which is a more interesting place to stand than either blanket belief or reflexive dismissal.
The episode adds a practical twist worth adopting: when a name pops up uninvited, act on it. Call, send a message, follow the thread. Sometimes the other person needed to hear from you. Sometimes they hold the next piece of your own puzzle. At worst, you have reached out to someone you care about, which is never wasted effort.
Sign Five: Sparks and Shimmer at the Edge of Sight
Small points of light, a brief flash in the corner of the eye, a shimmer like heat haze around someone’s head, or now and then a soft coloured glow. Many sensitive people report perceiving spirit this way rather than as the full-bodied apparitions of the movies. Holp’s view is that light is closer to our true nature than the body ever was, so a spark may be the most honest image a presence can offer. Bernstein connects these moments to her long study of A Course in Miracles, which speaks of light experiences along the spiritual path.
This sign needs a grounded caveat. The visual system can produce light all by itself; these flashes are called phosphenes, and they can come from pressure on the eye, standing up too quickly, deep meditation, or sometimes problems with the retina or optic nerve. If you suddenly start seeing new flashes or floaters, especially alongside a shadow or curtain across part of your vision, see an eye doctor promptly. Spirit will wait. A retinal problem will not.
Sign Six: The Sign You Asked For
The final sign is the one people tell stories about over dinner. You quietly ask for a particular symbol, perhaps a blue butterfly, a white feather or a certain bird, and then it turns up somewhere absurd: on a billboard, as a fridge magnet in a drab office, printed on a stranger’s shirt. Bernstein has built a large part of her teaching around this practice of requesting signs.
The detail worth borrowing from the episode is how to ask. Holp frames his requests lightly, as a playful “how fun would it be if…” rather than a demand for proof. He weaves this into a daily journaling habit drawn from the morning pages in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, three pages of unedited longhand writing first thing in the day. The playful framing matters because desperation narrows perception. When you need a sign to prove your life is going to be fine, you either see it everywhere or nowhere. When you ask from curiosity, you are relaxed enough to actually notice what shows up.
Discernment: The Part Most Sign Lists Leave Out
The weakness of any list of signs is that almost anything can be made to fit. A few habits keep the practice honest.
Keep a log. Write down the sign, the date, what you were thinking about, and what followed. Over a few months, patterns either emerge or they do not. Memory on its own is an unreliable witness.
Check your motive. Fear, ego and rigid belief are the main obstacles to the growth of consciousness. Signs hunted out of fear, to confirm a dread or to dodge a decision, tend to mislead. Signs received in openness tend to point somewhere useful.
Rule out the ordinary first. Physical symptoms deserve medical attention. Wiring faults deserve an electrician. Only what remains after the obvious explanations is truly interesting.
Notice the after-effect. Genuine guidance usually leaves you calmer, kinder and clearer about a next step. If a supposed sign leaves you agitated, obsessive or withdrawing from people, set it down. A sudden flood of meaningful coincidences that comes with that kind of agitation is worth talking through with someone you trust or a professional, rather than decoding alone.
A Simple Practice: Sitting in the Power
Holp closes the episode with a practice used widely among mediums, known as sitting in the power. Its aim is less about chasing signs and more about refilling your own reserves, so that you are steady, grounded and receptive. Here is a version you can try in ten to thirty minutes.
Sit or lie comfortably and close your eyes. Take three slow breaths, in through the nose, a brief pause, and a full release through the mouth.
Imagine a column of soft white light entering at the crown, moving down through the body and out through the soles of the feet into the earth, anchoring you. Let any obvious tension in the jaw, shoulders or belly melt away.
Bring your attention to the area just below the breastbone and above the navel. Picture a small point of light there. With each breath, let it grow brighter and wider, filling the torso, then the whole body, then the space around you, without straining.
Now sense a far greater light at the edge of your awareness: Source, God, the universe, the Larger Consciousness System, whichever name sits right with you. Let it meet and blend with your own light. Rest in that combined glow and simply receive, without asking for anything at all.
When you feel ready, draw your light back to a comfortable size around your body, wiggle your fingers and toes, and open your eyes.
Campbell describes a meditative state he calls point-consciousness, in which you stop processing ordinary sense data and become open to information from the larger system. Different vocabulary, a very similar doorway.
Living as if the Conversation Is Already Happening
What the six signs share is not spectacle but attention. Chills, glitches, waking in the night, sudden thoughts of a friend, sparks of light and answered requests are all invitations to notice the moment you are in and the people you are bound to. Whether you read them as messages from guides, as the Larger Consciousness System nudging its players, or as the mind’s genius for finding meaning, the practice looks the same: stay open, test your assumptions, write things down, and act kindly on whatever you receive.
And when a sign does arrive, a quiet thank you costs nothing.
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