Recount a Surreal Experience

In My Humble Opinion
21

My watch melted!

OK, not really, but one time I looked at my watch to see what time it was, and the glass just fell out, followed by the hands. I had had that watch for about thirty years, and up to this point it told the time well, but it eventually just disintegrated, for no apparent reason.

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One night I was out for a walk and came across an old, rotted hollow tree stump. I was reminded of a fairly obscure poem (this one) that I happened to know because I had been given it to read and analyze once, years before, in a college English class (but had never come across anywhere else). Phrases from the poem were running in my head for the rest of my walk. When I got back home, I immediately switched on the radio. It was tuned to BBC Radio 4, and someone was in the middle of reciting the very same poem! (I have never heard it being recited on the radio, or anywhere else, at any other time. When I switched the radio on I had no expectation of hearing poetry, let alone that poem.)

Some time after this incident, I told my father about it. He was a retired high school English teacher, and had for many years been chief examiner for our region of the GCSE English exam. Amongst other things, this involved him in occasional meetings with examiners from other regions about grading policies and the exam contents. He asked me who the author of the poem was. I told him. He said “Ah yes, I know him. He was a GCSE examiner too, and I sat next to him once at one of our meetings.”

22

I can remember playing ping pong with a friends as a kid. My friend slams the ball on the table causing it to go way up into the air, I didn’t see where the ball went so I’m looking around on the floor. I said to my friend “Where’d the ball go?” No sooner than I said that, the ball landed in the palm of my hand that I had mindlessly outstretched in the confusion.

Another one: Back when I was married, it’s the middle of the night. My wife and I are fast asleep. For some reason, I just happen to wake up. When I did, I see my then 4yo son standing next to the bed, he’s looking very intently at his sleeping mother.

I asked him “Buddy, you okay?” He slowly turned his gaze towards me, stares at me with wide eyes for a couple of seconds, does an about face and proceeds to walk out of the bedroom with out saying a word.

And to make things even more creepy, the whole time, he was standing there holding a teddy bear with one of the eyes missing.

23

Around 1985 a girlfriend and I decided to take a trip to Santa Fe NM. Neither of us had ever been there before. We flew into Albuquerque, took the bus, and checked into our motel (Garrett’s Desert Inn). Then we started walking around. We came to a corner and before we turned the corner, suddenly I remembered that I had dreamed about this place. I stopped and said to her, “When we turn that corner, there will be a stand selling fresh fruit juice.” We turned the corner and sure enough, there was a fruit juice stand called “Sol Source.”

24

I was a passenger in a car, and I saw a van with some kind of slogan on it that I thought was funny (I don’t remember what it was); as I watched and looked more carefully, I saw the letters on the van re-arrange themselves into the actual slogan on the truck. What a vivid demonstration of how very subjective what we see is! We think our eyes don’t deceive us, but they do - regularly.

25

I just remembered one:

One New Year’s Eve my roommates and I were having a small party, and playing CDs on the stereo. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon was playing. We counted down to midnight, like you do, and just when it struck 12, Time came on, with its cacaphony of clock sounds. I mean just at midnight. We were all like, “whoa”.

26

Small children being still and silent can be oddly unsettling–maybe because they are so seldom encountered in such a state. :slight_smile:

If you ever want to fictionalize it a bit to crank up the creepy, add that you got up to check on him and found him safely asleep, snuggling his teddy bear, and went back to bed. Just as you drifted off, you realized that the bear he was snuggling had both eyes. :smiley:

27

No doubt. What color do your aardvarks usually paint your Lenin busts?

:wink:

28

I have these memories of being a little girl, in the house in Jackson MS with the big backyard that my mother owned back in the early 1990s. I remember one night wandering into the bathroom attached to my mother’s bedroom. She was asleep in her queen-sized bed that seemed to fill most of her room. I stood in her bathroom and all around me there was this whirling, moaning sound; it called to me somehow, and I turned in circles, around and around, expecting to see the phantom that was calling to me, expecting to see some face, some mouth, creating that unearthly moan. But no face appeared – but the moaning went on until I finally went back to my bedroom.

This happened twice that I remember.

I also remember that when my aunts and uncles and cousins would come stay for Christmas, everyone would be so packed in that there was no room for tiny me, not in a bed or on a couch or anywhere, so I would have to sleep on a pallet on the floor next to my mother’s bathroom. And every time, my mother would shake me awake, angrily demanding to know why I was crying. I was sobbing in my sleep; I couldn’t explain why. There was a sadness in me at those times that I had no words for. I have never before and never since woken crying, only on those rare nights camped out on the floor next to that bathroom, in that house with the big backyard.

29

Not surreal, just kinda neat -

I am nocturnal, have been since puberty… I very rarely see a sunrise.
I did moderately high-stress work and would like to take a week off and get a room in a motel in the Mojave desert.
One morning, for no discernible reason, I woke before sunrise. I could take another sleeping pill, which would completely screw up things, or I could get an early start on checking out something called a ghost town nearby.

Well, the ghost town was a disappointment - a few structures with wooden roofs over adobe walls.

But, in the pure stillness of the desert, pure blackness of the night: down came big, wet snowflakes - melting as soon as they hit the windshield - white dots appearing and disappearing.Snow in a desert - who knew?

Something to remember, like driving in freezing rain out of Chicago - the interstate’s shoulders were bumper-to-bumper semis on both sides (one had tried to drive through it and ended up in a ditch for its effort). I saw one other vehicle on the road between South Bend and Lafayette (or beyond) - a State Police car traveling north. Bizarre.

30

I was taking a subway (U-Bahn) in Berlin from the area where I lived to the center of town.

Got off at my station, all was normal, and walked up the stairs to the street and was in the middle of a full-fledged riot - police, thousands of demonstrators, bullhorns - absolute chaos.

I quickly went back down to the subway, went one station further and got out and it was a normal scene and you wouldn’t have known there was some kind of huge ass riot happening one stop away.

31

Don’t know if this is surreal to others.

I was heading a small manufacturing unit that our company set up in a almost rural area to avail tax breaks.

I closed the unit after second shift at midnight , and was walking home to my residence about a mile away.

Road was empty and dark except for a few street lights. There were no sounds except my footsteps. As I walked about 500 meters, I saw a horse mounted person in the middle of the road. They were both illuminated by the street light. I have never seen anyone travelling on a horse in that place. I was stunned, but decided to keep walking. As I approached them, the scene became clearer, and they were doing rounds and the rider was wearing some sort regal clothing. And a second horse appeared mounted by another person.Only sounds were that of the horse.

It was eerie and the scene looked to me straight out of a movie. In the middle of a empty road, a man and his horse illuminated by sodium vapor lamp, around midnight, is not a regular sight. It was like a movie being projected onto a 1000 square feet canvas with accompanying sound of rhythmic steps. My heart was racing, but I kept walking towards them.

Then I got close to them and realised that they were cops. The local police had a horse mounted division also(somewhat rare). They were on the night beat.

:smack:

32

I have been associated with the same deer-hunting camp for over 20 years now. There’s a “sighting” that several of the guys have seen, but they’re pretty quiet about it.

There’s a really long dirt road thru thick woods leading to the camp, and I was driving it late one night. I turned a corner and the truck’s lights caught what appeared to be a large black panther crossing the road. Considerably larger than normal for the bobcats we see in the area. After arriving I sat by some of the oldsters at the campfire nursing a beer. I finally mentioned I’d seen something weird on the way in and one of them said, “D’you see the panther?”. It turns out there have been occasional sightings for over a decade of this unusually large cat. My glimpse was of something larger than any cat I’ve ever seen (in the US), and the other guys confirmed this. Only a few of us have seen it, and then only a quick flash across our headlights.

On a pre-season scouting trip, I had one of those weird something-is-watching-me feelings that I couldn’t shake off. I finally grew so uncomfortable I headed back to the truck, and found this beside the driver’s door. There were several that were laid on top of my earlier boot prints.

If I stop posting for no apparent reason during November, you’ll all know what happened to me. :eek:

33

I had a few things like this happen when I was younger - and for a while, I was convinced there was something paranormal about it (I’m pretty much over that now); here’s an example:

(This one was 30+ years ago) I had a vivid dream in which someone had invented a kind of heat-sensitive paint. In my dream, there was a woman who had the stuff painted on every bit of bare skin - all over her arms, hands, face and neck and she was dancing with sinuous, sort of Asian-style arm movements.
The following evening, on the BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World, there was a short feature on a new kind of heat-sensitive pigment that could be used in various kinds of paints - it was the last segment in the show, and as the closing music and titles played, there was a female dancer painted all over with the heat-sensitive paint, dancing the same kind of dance I had seen in my dream.

There’s no way I could have seen this in a preview or anything - the programme was always broadcast live.

34

Well I’ll share mine, since some of you have shared things that have a paranormal slant to them.

I’m also aware that most don’t believe in anything even slightly along those lines… SerafinaPekala, I’m like you, I almost wish I could post this anonymously… so here goes…

As I’ve stated in numerous other threads, my son died last year. For 3 or 4 months before that I had started having nightmares and well… what I would call visits during my dreams from spirits or beings for lack of a better word telling me to prepare, that someone was going to die.

Of course, given that my son had gotten out of jail right before Christmas and seemed to be doing okay as far as I felt he wasn’t doing drugs, I still was quite freaked because he seemed depressed to me.

About a week before he passed, I was driving to town and saw an old friend of mine. Except she had been dead for a little over a year. I saw her sitting in the passenger side of her vehicle we used to go places in when she was alive. My immediate thought was I’m imagining this… so I slowed down and stopped. ( She was just sitting in her vehicle , it was parked.) I sat looking at her and she just smiled at me with such a serene smile. I could not get up the nerve to get out and go speak. I don’t know why.

Fast forward, I came home and told my Mom. My Mom is super religious and frankly it feels like her religion is almost “cultish” so when I told her and she said it was impossible because of some such nonsense about what the bible says about the dead, I just wished I hadn’t even told her.

Then a friend from high school called me who I had not talked to for years two nights before my son passed away and we were talking about our kids. She had lost a brother also around the time my friend mentioned above passed from cancer. She told me she had had a dream that she opened a paper and it had as the headlines his name and death. Again, she’s another very religious person so I had avoided too much contact with her over the years, but this caught my attention and I told her I had been having dreams and signs that my son was going to die.

Two days later he did. To me, that was a very surreal TIME in my life. I actually thought that my dreams might have been warning me of my brother who passed two weeks before my son, but as I was telling my friend that night while talking, I didn’t feel like that it was over after my brother passed, that I still felt someone was going to die and I kept feeling it was son.

In fact, I was disturbed by unusual events to numerous to go into and dreams, I told my sis in law about them too. We were/are close and she also usually blows things like this off, but ever since she’s asked me repeatedly have I had more dreams. In fact, they did start back a few months ago and lasted a few months then went away, followed by my sis in laws own son getting in trouble and her being alarmed by it…

So it leaves me feeling weird and a bit crazy to boot… It’s just a surreal thing I can’t logically explain…

35

Summer of 2008:
I used to have trouble sleeping. Combine that with jet lag and travelling to faraway lands and me not being able to sleep well at all away from home, and the result equalled me having stayed up all night for 3 out of the past 4 nights.
After the last of those sleepless nights, I travelled from Prague to Austria with my orchestra friends on the bus. We were somewhere in the Czech Republic, along the highway, near the Austrian border, and we stopped off at a place on the highway. This place was really weird-looking, and contained a giant blue globe and an airplane that apparently had a restaurant inside it. It would’ve looked odd enough had I not been exhausted, but seen through the lens of tiredness, it seemed like a delirious hallucination.

36

Was it in Escanaba? :smiley:

37

There is an airport parking facility I’ve been in the habit of using whenever I go out of town; I’d been parking there for several years. all then logos, signage and shuttle buses were dark green and black.

After not having used it a for a couple of months, I drive there one day to find that it had changed owners. The facility was the same location and still a car park, but now all the logos, signage and shuttle buses buses had changed, with the theme colors now red and White. All perfectly reasonable, but it left this odd feeling in me, as though I’d stepped into some parallel universe.

At least once I was the source of someone else’s surreal experience. I was standing by a roadside near Ft. Collins, CO when I was attacked by some sort of giant biting fly. I was spinning around, frantically trying to wave it off with my hands, and to people in the cars going by I must have looked like I was having some sort of fit. A couple of them slowed down and made snarky comments as they drove by.

Oh, and my ex-girlfriend had a Lenin bust and it was painted fluorescent yellow.

38

Years ago I was camping in the desert outside of Barstow (Rainbow Basin) on a Sunday night. It was a beautiful evening and I had the entire campground to myself. Just after sundown, I spotted headlights coming up the long approach road. Oh great, some local teens out to party, I though…there goes my peace and quiet.

As the vehicle approached, I could see there was something weird–the “car” looked like something out of a Mad Max movie…it was a huge motorized stagecoach! It pulled into a campsite and 5 guys climbed out, set up a campfire, and started fixing dinner (no partying kids, they were in their 40s and weren’t noisy at all).

I wandered over to get a closer look and found out that the driver of the “Superchaged Coach” was Greg Parker, who owned a local towing and repair shop. He had a hobby of building Mad Max-type vehicles and liked to take friends out for rides in the desert. His creations were also featured in local parades. He and his buddies were just out for the evening, they had a quiet dinner around the campfire, packed up, and were gone within a couple of hours, leaving me alone again empty campground…wondering if I might have imagined the whole thing.

Greg passed away in 2005, but you can still see a few of his Mad Max-mobiles across the street from the Barstow Drive In.

39

Not creepy/ spooky, just kind of funny…a few years back, we all were on a family vacation in the Caribbean. We (sis-in-law, brother, sister & I) were driving back from the beach in our very small rental car. My s-i-l was driving, took a turn a bit too wide and the rear passenger wheel went into the ditch on the side of the road. With out a word, my sister, brother & I got out of the car, picked the back corner of the car out of the ditch, put it on the road, got back into the car and we drove off, all in compleat silence. About 3 minutes later we all burst into laughter.

40

I once saw a car vanish. I have no explanation for it.

It was an early weekend morning, far enough back that this meant there was no traffic on the downtown interchanges. A red Porsche and I went into a long, deep, straight and slightly concave stretch with no on- or off-ramps… basically, for a good quarter mile it’s like being in a tunnel with no roof. The Porsche was behind me in an adjacent lane, slowly pulled up until I glimpsed it from the side, drifted back and… disappeared. It startled me so much I took my foot off the throttle and slowed to about 30 in the middle of this long, empty highway valley, but I was completely alone, except for some closing traffic maybe a thousand feet back.

I’m sure I missed something or had some sort of deja vu flash or something, but every time I drove that route again I looked for a place the car could have gotten off, stopped, or in any way hidden from me. Never did figure it out.