Ever have a "paranormal" experience?

In My Humble Opinion
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MODS- Feel free to repost as you see fit…

This thread is based on a skeptical point of view. I have a technical and scientific back ground, yet I have have had experiences that “seemed” paranormal. (MY own judgement on them is still out, as the only “evidence” I had was coincidendental or subjective).

When I was 8 yrs old, I woke up sobbing for my grand mother, I had a dream she was trying to tell me something, but kept slurring her speech. (It was the slurring of speech (in the dream) that scared me… she was a woman that spoke clearly, loudly and boisterously). She had had a serious stroke and was left with very badly slurred speech on the same evening.

I remember seeing a funeral pass in front of my house when I was 10. I called my mom to ask what was going on, and when she got there, nothing was there. (just an ordinary street scene) We lived in a residential area that was not on a main route that had (to the best of my memory)never had a funeral procession drive past. The next day, our nieghbour died while mowing the lawn (heart attack).

As I said, I am a skeptic; but these two memories stand out as “non normal”. The first one (Grandma’s stroke) might have been a coincidence, , although I was not a child subject to nightmares, the second still bothers me, as what I saw (the funeral prcession) was “real”; I actually saw what I saw… while awake.

So what are your paranormal experiences that you can not explain?

Regards
FML

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So, In My Humble Opinion, what has happened to me that seemed paranormal? I can’t think of anything.

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I believe that certain kinds of paranormal phenomena, in particular things like precognition/ clairvoyance/ telepathy between close individuals, will eventually be found to be more accurately called “unexplained” than “paranormal”. In other words, I think the mechanisms at work in some of these thing are simply things that we do not yet understand. If we can’t falsify a theory or reproduce an event under controlled conditions, I think it’s hasty (and a little bit of hubris) to insist that we can be certain that it is impossible, or a load of crap.Surely we have not completely exhausted the list of things we have yet to know about reality, nor invented every apparatus that will ever be possible with which to detect these things.

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I once shared a dream with someone.

Or so it appeared to us when it occurred. I don’t have a completely satisfying explanation for it, but I don’t really think it was anything beyond known science.

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There have been a few things in my life I couldn’t explain. The one that had me scratching my head the most was a dream in which I was watching a plane towing a space shuttle take off. When the plane got into the air, it started to struggle, and I thought “OMG, it’s too heavy towing the shuttle and it’s going to crash.” Sure enough, the plane did this weird roll in the air and started coming down. Then my attention shifted to the shuttle, which burst into flames and hit the ground. The astronauts came running out the door.

Within a week or two of this dream, an overloaded commuter flight crashed in North Carolina on January 9, 2003. I watched an animated graphic on the evening news that showed a flipping motion exactly like what I’d seen in my dream.

That was kind of freaky, but I have lots of weird dreams that I remember, so I chalked it up to coincidence. Then the space shuttle Columbia broke up and burned on re-entry less than a month later on February 1, 2003. Hmmm. In my dream, the shuttle was behind the plane (being towed). In real life, the space shuttle crash came right after the plane crash. Was the physical positioning of the two in my dream symbolic of the positioning of the two events in time?

What are the odds that it was all a coincidence? Was the dream some kind of premonition? But even very unlikely things can happen by chance, and I’ve had plenty of dreams about disasters that never occurred.

There is so much that we don’t know that I think there is a possibility we will find that some things like this aren’t just coincidence–that there is some kind of understandable mechanism. At the same time, I’m skeptical of 99.9% of what is claimed to be paranormal. It’s fun to think about, though–except when someone insists there is a paranormal explanation when there is plenty of solid evidence to the contrary. Then I just roll my eyes.

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One time I was walking down the street and I turned into a drugstore. Freaked me out!

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In my younger years I had many experiences that could be called paranormal, but I was going through a diffecult time in my life and I think my brain was just helping me survive, some were coincidences. On thing was: that if I was reading something the words would change. Some I think were just hallucinations.

Monavis

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Once I was driving down a winding logging road with a car full of people and, approaching one of the hundreds of blind corners, I had a sudden sense of impending major fuck up. I pulled over to the side of the road and seconds later a dickhead in an SUV came round the corner on the wrong side of the road.

I was so shocked that we just sat at the side of the road for a while and tried to work out why I had stopped. Of course we had no answer.

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Neither can I, except this one time I was driving down Le Street in Le Car and almost ran over Le Cat.

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The paranormal thing that first popped into my head didn’t happen to me, but I was the one to provide the reality that made it paranormal.

My mom died January of last year. Before she died, she and I were discussing my wedding. She knew our interests and told me that it would be really cool to have the reception on a sailing yacht in the Outer Banks or something. We really liked the idea and thought we’d go with it.

Fast forward to after she died. My niece (who is my same age and really close to me) said she had a dream about my mom about a week after she died. I’d never told me niece about the wedding plans because initially, she didn’t totally approve of my relationship, but told me that in her dream, she was at our wedding on a sailing yacht. And that my mom called her on her cell phone at the reception and wanted to make sure that the wedding was nice and that there were no snags in getting the yacht and that the reception was going smoothly.

So then, I’m all like, “Dude…my mom SO told me we should have our reception on a yacht.”

Was it paranormal for my niece? Absolutely. kind of specific for a coincidence…but it’s not to say that maybe she just put two and two together, my boyfriend and I love sailboats and each other…bada bing, bada boom.

Still eerie though.

*and yes…I DO believe there is Verizon in Heaven.

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I’ve shared this before. In '05 I had some health issues and things were touch and go. As I lay in the hospital bed after the operation, I told my mother that Dad was there with some friends. (I pointed to the corner of the room.) Mom reminded me that Dad had passed. No matter how many times I fell asleep, when I woke up I told her that Dad was there.

Now, I know as well as anyone what pain meds can do to the brain, but all my other hallucinations were transitory and would go away when I went to sleep. This was the only one that continued no matter how many times I drifted off.

In any case, it is nice to think Dad still watches over me.

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I should mention my all time favourite. Roy Masters used to be a Rugby League coach, he is now a journalist.

He told a story once about his coaching days. He was talking to one of the young guys in the reserve grade team and suddenly this guy in his early 20s said, “I’m off to see my dad now.”

He fell down dead at Roy’s feet. His father had died two weeks previously.

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I was having dinner with my parents and my father jumped as if he were shpcked. He said he had a sudden vision of someone having been there, and suddenly being gone.

Then his brother called to tell him their father had died.

If my wife and I hadn’t seen it ourselves I would never believe it.

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One Sunday in July, 1992, the Wife, Kid and I were going to get my mom and do some shopping. The Kid at the time was 6, and was playing in her room when my mom called. Dad was “sick” she had called the paramedics and could I come over?

I went over and saw my dad, who was diabetic, an amputee and who had already had a couple mini-strokes which impaired his speech - lying on his bed in some sort of convulsive state, and unconscious. Paramedics rushed him away and I went home to get the girls and head to the hospital - more or less fearing the worst.

I got home where the wife was sitting on the front step waiting. I just shook my head, mumbled “this is bad, let’s get her and go”. I walked into her bedroom where the Kid was sitting on the floor tying her shoes. I told her we wouldn’t be going shopping, we have to go to the hospital to see grandpa, because he’s sick and he would want to see her.

Side note: They were exceptionally close. Besides being the first grandkid, he had spent most of the last few months being her daytime companion/daycare. To this day, on her MySpace page, she calls him her best friend. As in NOW, he’s her best friend.

So, I tell her that, and she says “It’s ok dad, we don’t have to hurry, grandpa came by here just after you left to tell me goodbye, and that he’s not sick anymore.”

Then she went on to tell me he was wearing that t-shirt with ‘the mexican guy and the bad words on it’ when he came by, and that he didn’t talk funny anymore.

Yeah, that’s the shirt he was wearing when I saw him.

Cool as a cucumber, she said that. When we got to the hospital and saw him totally brain dead, she wouldn’t even acknowledge it was him. During the three days before he finally died, when we’d be in his room, a couple times I caught her looking into the corner of the room and giggling at something like someone was there.

Eight years later, I was giving the commencement speech to her 8th grade class, where she graduated from the Jr. High in town that was named for him (22 years as president of the local school board), and right as I finished, three white feathers fell from the ceiling of the gym, one landed right near her. We made eye contact, and she lost it. When I sat down, I looked up. No birds.

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I had a dream about Cozy Powell, which was weird enough; as my interest in him is/was minimal. But the next morning I found out he’d died in a motorcycle accident.

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I think this is more appropriate for IMHO than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

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I don’t really have a good one to add, but my mom told me of a time when she was dating somebody from New York city. She had spent the night in his apartment and they heard a blood curdling scream, but were too far away to do anything about it if there was an issue.
So they both go to sleep, and both of them have the exact same nightmare- they both dreamed that they entered a purple bathroom and found a woman hanging by a rope from the ceiling. Even as a skeptical person that sort of thing freaks me out.

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This happened in 1974. I was driving my Volkswagen Beetle from San Antonio, Texas back home to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My passenger was a friend who also lived in Tulsa. The trip went smoothly, with nothing remarkable except this one incident.

After having left the road to get gasoline, I sped up the on-ramp to re-enter the Interstate. I thought I had a clear path to merge into the highway, but just as I began to merge, a large blue sedan changed lanes and was headed right toward me. I looked in my mirror, and that car was literally right at my rear bumper. Then I felt a strange internal vibrating sensation, and suddenly the blue car was in front of me. It was as if it had passed clear through my car and my body. I would have chalked this up to imagination if my friend hadn’t turned to me, white as a sheet, and said “Did you see that? Did you feel that?” I am still baffled by the experience. Both my friend and I perceived this in the same way: the car, rather than swerving around us, went through us. I have no idea what really happened. Perhaps it was a shared hallucination. In any case, I doubt that I will ever stop mulling it over in my mind.

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The one that immediately comes to mind happened back in high school. I remember being in my second period economics class, and feeling that something was…wrong. Very wrong. The night before, I had had a very vivid and disturbing dream that a helicopter had crashed in front of the school campus, and the dream cast a strange pall on my day. I had shared it with a friend seated next to me in class.

I got up to give my teacher something, and when I turned from his desk I looked up at the clock and something…snapped? The weird feeling became almost sharp, if you could call it that. It affected me so much that when I sat down, my friend asked, “Are you okay?” My response was just: “Something is very, very wrong.”

Turns out, that morning–theoretically, that moment (it was 9-something AM, I remember, and the time reported in the paper was within a minute or two from what I’d seen on the clock in 2nd period) a fellow student was killed in a helicopter crash. He was taking a flight lesson, and his 'copter crashed into one with Kirk Douglas in it (remember that? back in 1991?). Douglas was injured, and the kid was killed.

I didn’t know the student, but the dream and the “weird” feeling really stuck with me. My friend recalled my reaction the next day in class–she’d thought of me immediately upon hearing about the killed student. She said she thought it was “pretty cool;” me, not so much.

I have several other similar ones, but RuffLlama is demanding Mama put away the laptop. Great thread, though!

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My aunt tells a similar story. She was washing dishes when she saw her father in the doorway. She was surprised because he lived far enough away that he didn’t drop in unannounced. She turned to stop her chore and dry her hands and when she turned around again he was gone. He had passed away that evening.