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October 20, 2007 at 9:01 AM

It could possibly be dismissed as coincidence, but it is happening far too often anymore to go unnoticed.

I'm driving in my car, listening to some music. I get out and go shopping. Or drink coffee. Or hike. Or even turn in for the night.

The next time I get in the car and get ready to turn on the ignition, be it twenty minutes or eight hours later, I subconsciously start humming a tune. I turn on the cd player, and I'm humming the tune exactly where it left off the last time I heard it.

I don't think I could replicate this nifty trick on demand; I'm too absentminded to focus on it for such an extended period. As many things as I forget throughout the day, like orchestra rehearsals and toothpaste, it's hard for me to understand why my brain has chosen, of all things, to carefully dog-ear my music when I put it down.

Emily - be glad you have that gift. At least something is filtering into a registering in your subconscious, and the good news is that it is music.
Emily, when I had a car, exactly the same thing happened to me. If the last thing I had heard before getting out of the car was a song, I would start singing the lyrics, at the point where they had stopped, as I got close to the car again. If the music had no words, as I approached the car, I would hum the piece from the exact spot where it left off when I got out of the car. It's subconscious: If anyone had asked me to do that, I wouldn't have been able to.
Do you mean your CD player starts playing in the middle of a track like a cassette player when you turn it back on, and you're remembering where it's going to start?
Welcome to getting older and the inexplicable.
Nice to know I'm not the only one to do that, Pauline, although I don't know what this has to do with old age.

Jim, that's what I mean.

I've never had a vehicle with a CD player in it. My current "car" is a ruff-n-ready Jeep with just a hole there that looks like it was made with tin snips. But in the house, I've been listening to a track 9 and I remember to push 9 :) I think of it as a musical version of that blonde guy in Da Vinci Code...
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