For me sometimes, it's many different qualities that signal something "important to me" is going on. Those qualities of Importance are also different for each person. Here's some examples:
- Me noticing myself musing over what "sticks out" as a logical fallacy or "not fitting." I find my mind has jumped over to a completely daydreaming type track of thought, despite the attraction of real life.
- Perhaps a sense of effortlessness, as if I've just forgotten to feel bad in the last recent period of time where something that I had just been doing makes me happy, because it has completely absorbed my attention.
- * It does sometimes happen fast, in a "flash." The quality of my attention suddenly jumps to attention that makes time artificially slow down into a focal point. This happens in movies when the script writer wants the audience to notice an important point in the plot line. (Usually accompanied in movies with a curious sucking sound or whiplash sound effect! But such sounds don't happen in real life.)
- * Sometimes I only notice something was important in hindsight, after a calamity where I "should have known" to pay attention to a clue I was given, but it went over my head at the time. An example of this came for me in a flash of intuitive prediction where I didn't know I was getting a self-preservation warning message until after the (fortunately minor) accident had happened. I had to think back what made that predictive thought different from any other paranoia...so I could recognize it and be certain enough to act on it to become for me the useful intuitive warning it was.
Apparently, listing more of these from other people would be useful. Because I've talked about this very subject in dinnertime conversations as one of my favorite Dialogue subjects to trot out in polite conversation. The results of doing it quite often over the course of my life are that these qualities that help people recognize intuitive messages are completely unique to each person.
What have you noticed?
