Most of us have heard of the “11:11 phenomenon.” What does it mean to keep seeing “11:11” everywhere?

I came to my own conclusion about it rather dramatically, but it’s simple. I decided that the purported meaning of 11:11, if there is one, doesn’t matter… because for me, the only significance of 11:11 is that it’s just plain weird when you start seeing it repeatedly. I don’t feel the need to venture past that superficial level, and I wouldn’t normally even think to blog about it if it wasn’t for the bizarre set of days – five, to be exact – that just passed.

In the five-day period, my eyes happened to land on digital clock displays at exactly at 11:11 every day, sometimes more than once a day. When I say “happened to,” I mean, I wasn’t looking at the clock already, and I wasn’t thinking about the time. My eyes just naturally gravitated toward the clock exactly when the time read “11:11.” (Twice in that period, I saw 1:11, as well; I also saw, twice, 2:22. One of the 2:22s was the change on my receipt at Trader Joe’s, so I was a few days into the repeating digits bonanza and already sensitive to them.)

Like this.

The weirdest of my recent 11:11 sightings occurred in California on Saturday night. What happened on Saturday night was actually beyond your normal, garden-variety weird, and I’m going to tell you about it.

It happened when Callaghan and I were lying in bed in my childhood bedroom in San Jose. The nighttime darkness in that room is complete, thanks to the window covering. We’d been in bed for about 20 minutes when a small, bright light suddenly flashed on in the darkness. Imagine it – total darkness, and then, blink! Illumination. We lifted our heads and looked around. The light was coming from the far corner of the room.

It was coming from my phone, which was lying on the dresser.

“That’s weird! Why would my phone just light up like that all of a sudden?” I asked. It had made no sound. Callaghan was already getting out of bed to investigate.

“OH MY GOD,” he said when he got there. He held up the phone and came over with its screen facing me. I looked.

11:11.

The screen of my cell phone actually lit up, which I’ve never seen it do spontaneously, at exactly 11:11.

11:11 couldn’t draw more blatant attention to itself if it burst into the room clashing pots and pans together while kicking a metal garbage can against the wall. It clearly wanted to be seen.

Callaghan has the exact same phone, and his settings and mine are set the same way. HIS phone didn’t light up. Only mine did. Why? It made me wonder in spite of my generally non-superstitious self.

And I’d thought the previous day had been weird when my eyes landed on 11:11 twice during our road trip! The first time occurred as we were driving out of Arizona, and it happened again when we crossed the California border into the next time zone, causing a second 11:11 to appear an hour later. (This was two days before daylight savings moved California forward to the same time as Arizona. Arizona refuses to observe daylight savings… another bonus of living in Arizona, if you ask me.)

The weirdness of my eyes being drawn to the clock at 11:11 twice in 60 minutes in two different time zones didn’t even compare to my phone eerily, silently, inexplicably lighting up in the dark, across the room, at 11:11. But it was the reason why Callaghan was so startled when he got up to look at my phone. When the double time zone 11:11 sightings occurred, I’d been incredulous enough to tell him about the proliferation of 11:11 everywhere in my vision field recently. He was aware.

Anyway, that was apparently 11:11’s grand finale in this chapter of let’s mess with Kristi’s mind! – because I haven’t seen it again since. The five days* of 11:11 (and 1:11, and 2:22) ended there, in the quiet dark of my childhood bedroom in San Jose.

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*I’m disregarding the fact that five is my lucky number. Coincidence, right?