The Multiverse and Psychic Abilities in The OA, Sense8, and Everything, Everywhere All At Once

Sense8 is a show that is arguably about “psychic abilities” in the quantum field: the shared mental life of people in clusters of eight located across the world who are born on the same day and are mentally connected until they die. People in a cluster are able to sense and feel the experiences of others in their cluster, although their shared interactions are both voluntary and involuntary and can happen randomly at moments where assistance is desperately needed or a collective goal must be achieved. Members of a cluster are able to inhabit each others’ bodies and share various forms of know-how such as martial arts and fighting abilities, or the knowledge of how to drive vehicles or concoct medications and bombs. Although the sanity of Homo sensorium can be questioned by unknowing human beings, they are also feared for being another species and lobotomized under the malevolent neurografting program of the evil Dr. Milton Brandt, a.k.a. Whispers.

The OA and Sense8 are two shows that were canceled on Netflix after two seasons, and portray extraordinary abilities that one may classify as “psychic”. In the OA, the female main character, whose name stands for “Original Angel,” has vivid dreams that serve as premonitions, and she is able to survive multiple near-death experiences (NDEs) that endow her with mystical knowledge of a higher purpose equipping her with tools needed to survive some difficult, traumatic experiences. NDEs are a documented experience that thousands of people worldwide have claimed to survive. (To learn more, please see the NDERF’s database of testimonies or read the book Heaven is Beautiful by Reverend Peter Panagore.) The OA survives her first NDE, roughly at the age of 4, where her bus on the way to school crashes off a bridge and she nearly drowns, but is left blind by the accident. In the first season, that NDE results in a timeline where OA’s father, a powerful and wealthy Russian oligarch, passes away when she is a young child. OA is convinced that her father is still alive but in hiding, and sending her messages through dreams as she grows up. The OA is adopted by an American couple, and ends up medicated for most of her childhood for displaying thoughts that a child psychiatrist deems psychotic and grandiose. One dream convinces the OA that her father will meet her when she turns 21 years old in New York City. OA runs away from her adopted parents’ home to make the trip, but her father never shows up, and instead she is kidnapped by a sinister medical doctor named HAP who is conducting experiments on her and three, eventually four other NDE survivors in his basement located in a rural mine somewhere in the United States.

Another NDE results from HAP knocking the OA out by hitting her on the head with a shotgun when she tries to run away. The OA and the rest of the NDE survivors become a closely knit group plotting their escape to freedom, although eventually only the OA is abandoned by HAP and she is able to return home to her adopted parents. In the OA’s NDE, she was given the choice to spend eternity with her father, or return to her friends with special knowledge in the form of a white bird made of pure light energy that she swallows. Through this knowledge, the group came up with a system of “movements” that resemble a dance or martial arts and is able to bring back one of their members, Scott, to life after an experiment with HAP goes awry. The movements also have the power to heal physical illnesses such as physical paralysis in the sheriff’s wife. The movements are hijacked by HAP, who watches the group’s activities with cameras, and in the second season, the group is transported to an alternate dimension or timeline where HAP is a respected psychiatrist, Homer is a resident psychiatrist in training, and the rest of the group are psychiatric patients that are diagnosed with collective psychosis under the shared delusion about their former life together in captive under HAP.

Therefore, we might conclude the following. Psychic abilities, whether they include clairvoyance, clairsentience, claircognizance, or empathic telepathy, the general ability to sense and feel another human being’s thoughts and emotions directly from the first-person at a distance (a spooky form of quantum action?), have been portrayed in a number of popular shows and movies. While psychical abilities arguably exist, they elude rationalisation or reductive explanation from a modern scientific or materialist perspective. When psychic abilities clash with modern psychiatry, they can be pathologised as psychosis and delusions and the person with psychic abilities is often wrongly medicated with sedatives even if their visions, dreams, and premonitions have some form of a truth basis in reality, whether this can be non-literal and metaphorical, symbolic, interpretative, or in some cases veridical cases of remote viewing.

The OA has taught five of her new friends the movements when she returns home in the first season. They are able to use these movements to effectively distract a school shooter in the last episode, but unfortunately, one of the bullets fatally strikes the OA, who somehow showed up outside the glass cafeteria where the shooting took place at the exact time it did. The OA dies in that dimension, but in another dimension where the other NDE survivors and HAP are transported, she is also taken to an alternate life where she never had an NDE in Russia, and she lived a socialite life in San Francisco with her father, who never passed away when she was young. This begs the question: is physical death really just the transportation of the soul or “consciousness” to an alternate dimension where you stay alive, supporting the theory of Quantum Immortality?