I had a very odd experience more than thirty years ago that still puzzles me.
I was driving my 1968 VW 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.
Back as a teen, I was game-mastering an RPG (Gangbusters, remember that one?) with a bunch of friends. One of the players wanted to attempt an outlandishly stupid stunt to defeat the arch villain in the adventure.
“Drop your gun!” said the villain, who had the jump on our player.
The player says to me, “My gun is cocked with a hair trigger. I drop it onto the ground, so that the hair trigger will fire from the impact, hopefully hitting the villain.” He picks up the dice to roll against his agility skill…
After much arguing with me, he insisted it should be possible. I finally gave him a 0.01% chance of success at pulling off the stunt, just to shut him up.
“So 0-0-0-1 on a ten-sided, right?” He says.
“Yep”.
There, with a total confident gleam in his eye in front of everyone, he rolled 0-0-0-1.
Science can explain it of course, but it was still cool
Yes.
It couldn’t have been a coincidence, as it involved very specific events, people and two seperate dangerous situations. I knew the outcome for the next half minute of the first event before it played out, because I experienced it six months earlier in a very vivid dream, from which I awoke exhausted and drenched. The big problem was that the dream had a bigger tradgedy later on. I got home and my heart and soul fell to the ground, because I knew the next part of the dream was true. My uncle had been in a coal dust explosion, and dad started for me as soon as he saw me come home. I new that he was going to tell me about my uncle being horribly burnt. Other occurances left doubts for a while, this cinched it for me.
I can’t tell you how it happened but in the dream I saw these events exactly as I eventually experienced them later on. Be it quarks and quantium mechanics or whatever this event I foresaw six months earlier. Too bad I wasn’t convinced before this, or I would have tried to stop my uncle somehow. I always felt guilty about this and told nobody, because the only person that will believe it, is somebody that has experienced it.
More seriously, everything that I might mention is all stuff that files under “subjective experience foo”, which is a much lesser mystery than the fact that I appear to have a sense of “I” with which to contemplate things like ‘was that a precognitive experience’ or ‘is that what a god sounds like’.
I also think that ‘supernatural’ is a fancy way of saying ‘imaginary’. Even the esoteric shit I’m into in the wondrous weirdness of my own implausible cognition isn’t stuff I consider ‘supernatural’ – if it exists at all, a matter on which I am largely agnotic, it ain’t supernatural, it’s right there.
This is starting to wander into metaphysical territory, I’m afraid, but what we experience as a moment in time is really nothing more than a (probably) unique combination of events. Events are interactions between things; although it’s beyond our ability to recreate every event that makes up a given moment, we can still repeat and test many particular events.
i don’t know if i’d use the term supernatural… but a couple of things happen to me that used to weird me out.
i can’t wear watches. doesn’t matter what type or brand, or if i wear it or carry it in my purse. any watch i own goes skippy within a week or so. they slow down and then speed up, stop and then start, run backwards and then forwards. i’ve changed batteries… doesn’t matter. clocks seem to be safe, although my computer, phone, and camera lose the time about once a month and have to be reset. my partner always used to wear a watch, within a month of her moving in with me the same thing started to happen to her… and the three watches she’s bought since then did the same thing. she wears them on her right wrist… which is always the arm that’s wrapped around me. she gave up and now just looks at her phone to see what time it is.
the other thing is mostly lights, but other electrical stuff too. street lights go out when i drive under them about 25% of the time. when i’m upset or angry it’s almost guaranteed to happen. we go through a ton of lightbulbs too… they don’t live more than a month or so in my house. it’s been like that all my life. other things happen too, but it’s not as common as the lights. the day my father died, i got to his house and saw his body. i called home to let my partner know i was there safe and not doing well… and while i was on the phone with her the cable boxes (2 of 4), the computer monitor (where she was sitting), and the light in the bedroom all blew out at once. scared her actually… the boxes and monitor had a weird noise first. later at my moms when my son asked where grandpa was my mother’s microwave, stove, computer and television all stopped working and didn’t start working until the next day after i left.
with both of these things i had decided that i was nuts… that it happens to everyone and i just think it’s me. my partner asked me one day “have you ever noticed that lights go out around you?” and i started laughing. three’s follow me too but that’s another whacked out topic i think… i’m sure i’m crazy about that one! :smack:
i’ve never claimed to be sane, so i don’t mind if y’all think i’m crazy. maybe there is an explanation… people do have energy so maybe some people have more than others or something like that. i’d love to find out there’s other people who think they affect lights. i found this one website once but they had all been abducted by aliens and i’m just not that special. on that subject… my mother claims she saw a ufo floating over grandma’s house once but i think it was the vodka
sorry if the lack of caps bugs anyone… same goes for run on sentences, horrible punctuation and grammar, and using ‘…’ way too much. i suck
evil chrissy For about three years I caused any radio or tv I got within a couple feet of to turn into pure static. Thank god for remotes and presets, it’s a bit hard to tune in static. I was able to kill radios without external antenas up to about twenty feet away.
Likewise. It’s the type of thing I generally keep to myself. The last thing I need is people thinking I’m crazier than I am :D.
But like many have said, these things being unprovable now has little to do with might be found out in the future. There was a time when people thought all illnesses were caused by angry gods. To those people, the idea of a virus was insane. Does that mean that way back when viruses didn’t exist? Well, that would just be silly. Current scientific ignorance is certainly going to color our present opinions, but that does not mean that such rhetoric is going to always be right. Change is the inherently within the nature of science.
Q.E.D., it’s late, so the only examples of the (presently) unprovable that I can think of would be the metaphysical. The high end physics stuff that I really have no understanding of, but I’ve read about on this great message board I frequent. (Random example that may or may not actually be law- hell if my Poli Sci studying ass knows): What about universe expansion? I mean, we can hypothesize, we can make lil’ models in labs, but until we can prove everything conclusively, we have theories, not laws. Does that mean the universe isn’t expanding? I dunno. But it also means that the universe might just be expanding. We don’t know now, but we might be able to make that theory a law someday.
Telepathy, psychic visions, auras, spirits, whatever- - sure we don’t know now, but maybe someday we will. I have always thought that with the large amounts of energy in this universe, it’s kind of odd to think that such things might not be concentrated into whatever “psychic” phenomena. Just my own personal lil, nutty hypothesis. Am I wrong? Maybe. But hey, maybe I’m right. That’s the magic of stuff that isn’t a law yet.
And when I say “ignorance” I mean it in the sense that science really doesn’t have much conclusive proof here or there. If they did, we’d have “The Law that Nutty People Say They See Auras Because They Are Attention Whores.”
THE ODD DREAM
About 1985, at the age of 15, I had one of my most vivid dreams ever. I dreamed that I was a US soldier, at war with Afghanistan, walking with a machine gun near a railroad in Afghanistan . The dream was so vivid, I went to school and felt compelled to tell my friends, “I predict the US will go to war with Afghanistan.”
I knew nothing of the politics of that region at the time other than a vague notion that the USSR had a hard time in Afghanistan.
However, I have had other vivid dreams that have never come true, unfortunately.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE
At about age 4, I threw a metal toy truck, about the size of a can of soda, straight up in the air very hard. I looked up immediately, saw the toy headed straight up, and instantly figured out that it would land on my head if I stood there. I sprinted several steps away and kept running across the lawn. Having gone about half way across the lawn, it landed on my head.
Yep. Even stuff that I’d probably argue against if said by another person.
Reiki-type stuff twice. The first time I was in a group-cuddle at college (I was 23, maybe 24) watching a movie. This one girl was a Wiccan, into Reiki and all that stuff. She was always full of energy to the point of hyperactive. Anyway, she reached over to me with her closed hand as if to drop something into my palm and said “Here, you look tired, take this.” I reached out, she opened her hand and I felt an electric charge hit my hand, go up my arm and into my body. I’ve been hit by a full house electrical current, and this didn’t feel like it at all. It wasn’t extremely strong, but very noticeable, and it actually felt like it travelled inch-by-inch up my arm. I immediately felt awake and a little freaked out. I shook my hand, stared at her in shock, and she just smiled and turned back to the movie. We scrogged that night and it was pretty darn good, but no electric shocks twixt the sheets, unfortunately.
A couple years later I was in a JKD/Kali class and had my shoulder torqued way out of whack. I somehow tore some muscles/tissues underneath the shoulder blade. While almost crying in pain on the ground, one of the other students came over and put his hand under my shoulder and his other hand a few inches above it. I thought he would pull or massage or ??? it, but he just sat there for a while and did nothing. About 20 seconds later the pain had lessened dramatically. I asked him “WTF?” and he said that his mother studied Reiki and taught him some. My shoulder was messed up and it was immobilized by the docs for a few weeks, but the searing pain was gone.
Strange stuff. I can only guess that science hasn’t gotten around to explaining everything yet, or somehow my perceptions were altered by ???
I may have had an experience or two that I personally could not explain, but I am not a scientist and therefore not qualified to declare that said event could not have been explained by science.
The layman’s cry of “that’s unexplainable” can only be translated as “I can’t explain that!”
Can’t say as I have experienced anything too remarkable. Closest I’ve ever come is the few times I’ve experienced hypnagogic hallucinations thanks to the ol’ narcolepsy. I can see how someone who didn’t know what was going on could perceive that as something “supernatural” or whatever word you wish to use. (In fact, some psychologists believe that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens were actually experiencing these kinds of hallucinations.)
Despite my lack of strange experiences in life, I still believe that there are plenty of phenomena in this world that we don’t have explanations for yet. I don’t see why some people feel the need to come in here and look down their noses at those who have had such experiences. Sure, it might be a trick of the brain. Or maybe it isn’t. Is it really any skin off your nose?
I’ve never experienced anything that can’t be explained by science and I don’t believe anyone else has either. You may not always know the explanation for something but that doesn’t make it rational to say it must have been magic.
You use these words as if they have any kind of legitimate scientific meaning. They don’t. These are all essentially meaningless words from a scientific standpoint and there isn’t a shred of evidence that any of these popular conceptions represent real phenomena.
There is no more evidence for such thing as “psychics” or “ghosts” than there are for leprechauns or goblins. Science is about explaining observed phenomena. Positing the “paranormal” is another way of saying “it was MAGIC.” It’s just as silly, irrational and scientifically unjustified as hypothesizing that elves moved your shoes while you were sleeping.
What I see in this thread is a lot of coincidence and confirmation bas.
I’ve had a few experiences that have stuck with me over the years. They’re most definitely coincidences, but they’re pretty cool regardless. The two that spring immediately to mind have to do with 9/11.
Back in late August/early September of 2001, I wrote a little fantasy story where a group of people went to war with another group, and used phoenixes as weapons. In the dream, the phoenixes landed on a castle and burst into flames, causing the castle to burn and eventually collapse. A short time later, 9/11 happened.
My other experience was a dream. This one isn’t as interesting, but the obscurity of it has stayed with me. In my dream, I was in a collapsing building with the cast of “Frasier.” The building was burning, and we were all trying to work together to find a way out of the disaster. Awhile later, after 9/11, I read somewhere that one of the producers of “Frasier” had been in one of the planes. Weird.
This is incredibly mundane, but I have had two Purse Mysteries. One occurred years ago. I was sleeping over at someone’s house, and took off all my jewelry, including my watch, at bedtime, placing it all in my purse. In the morning it was all there, except my watch. I dumped the purse. No watch. Searched the vicinity of my purse. No watch. A couple days later, I was in my car and looked in my purse. There’s the watch, on top of the other contents.
Second Purse Mystery. Last week I took my son to the doctor, and was given Rx samples, as well as a written perscription, in case he still needed the medicine after the samples were gone. I put the paper in my purse in the zippered pocket, for safekeeping. There it stayed for several days. After Mass on Sunday, I went to the pharmacy to get it filled and … no perscription. Same routine: purse dump. No paper. Back to the doctor Monday, he re-writes the perscription … but lo and behold, what’s in the zippered pocket?
I think I just buy evil purses that have it in for me.
I think the same applies to gods, but whenever I point that out, I get yelled at. Even by otherwise intelligent people. It boggles my mind, quite frankly.
My one and only unexplained thing: when i was about 15, the family was sitting at the dinner table. I remember my father, myself, and 2 brothers. There was a bottle of Hunt’s ketchup in the center of the table-all of a sudden, the cap flew off the bottle, and moved in a perfect arc-and alnded near the edge of the table-a distance, i’d say, of more than 3 feet. I still can’t explain it-gas buildup inside the bottle?
