One night I was eating dinner at the kitchen table when our round clock fell off the wall, landed on the table, and rolled about three feet towards me where it then fell over in my soup bowl.
More coincidental than surreal, but what the heck.
I was vacationing in a very small town around 300 miles from home. I was sitting with the family eating ice cream at a corner soft-serve shop. Suddenly there was a fender bender at the intersection. We watched the aftermath idly as we enjoyed our ice cream.
One week later, back at work. A co-worker is describing to others the accident she was in while on vacation at an intersection in a small town near an ice cream shop. Yep, I had witnessed her accident.
mmm
I have a story, and I don’t even know if it was a dream or not.
When I was little, I used to go to my grandmother’s house and play with the girl next door. We did stuff kids do, etc.
One day, we were out in my grandmother’s yard, unsupervised, and we found some long, rusty metal wires. We started swordfighting with them, being kids. Naturally, someone gets hurt, with me accidentally stabbing this girl in the eye. She runs screaming, with the metal wire still in her eye, back in to her house, while I stand there in pure fright. I run back in to my grandmother’s house, and say nothing.
To this day, I don’t know if this actually happened. I never told anybody, but surely the parents of the girl would come knocking?
Strange, strange stuff.
Once I parked at a shopping mall, and entered through a Dillard’s store. After wandering around for awhile, I found the Dillard’s and went out only to find the landscape disorientingly different. There was no car, and nothing looked right. Then I remembered I had entered through the tv department, so I went back inside and asked where it was. Turns out there was another Dillard’s at the other end of the mall. One or the other of them was new, and they hadn’t completed the move.
I love threads like this. For coincidences, the best one I’ve ever read, which really seems like it has to be made up, is here.
The classic SDMB thread along these lines is Very Vaguely Creepy. My favorite is post 65.
A few years ago I received a notice from an insurance company about legal action being taken against me, stemming from a motor vehicle accident. I had not been involved in an accident called them, and was even more puzzled when they said I had hit a motorcycle in a town in a neighboring state, several months before. I said I had not, they insisted I had. Planning my defense, I looked at my calendar for that day and was SHOCKED to see that I had indeed been in that town on that day, passing through on vacation. We had stopped for gasoline there. I assumed a security camera may have caught my plate and thought I was involved. My insurance company said I had nothing to worry about, it was not a hit and run, and the person at fault had spoken to police and filed a report, so they had the right person’s information on file. Mine is not a common name, although oddly enough there were two of us in the same town because my mother-in-law had the same name, albeit spelled differently. The other insurance company had gotten my address from some other source than the police report, apparently. Soon after that I got a notice from Animal Protection about failing to license two dogs - which I (nor MIL)did not own. I assumed it was the 3rd Ms Jinx.
Sometime after that a coworker contacted me, concerned - and puzzled - about a sexual assault, with the victim’s name the same as mine, but he knew the age was about 15 years off. He was to interview her mother, though, who worked in the same occupation as mine, for a government agency but the next county, so he thought his report was mixed up in some way, and perhaps my daughter had been assaulted. I told him he wasn’t crazy, but there were just too may coincidences, like both of us being 500 miles away in the same place at the same time.
I have one.
It happened when I was dating the woman I eventually married, who lived with her parents at the time.
I was sitting with her, in her room, when her parents were out (okay, we were making out a bit 
). As far as I knew, we were alone in the house …
… when suddenly the door to her room popped open, and a bearded priest - who somewhat resembed Satan - in full robes and regalia jumped in like a jack-in the-box. With an evil grin, he swung a silver wand-like object straight at my face. Out from some holes in the end of this device came squirting a stream of water, which hit me straight in the face.
Without a word, he popped back out again and shut the door behind him.
I was, spluttering wet, all “WTF!!!??”, as you can imagine.
Turned out that this was a yearly occurance at her parent’s house - every year, the priest comes by and blesses the place by sprinkling holy water in every room (her parents are very religious). He has a set schedule for doing this. Knowing they would be out, her parents had told him to let himself in with the key under the mat. This priest was a bit of a joker, and seeing the two of us, could not resist “sprinkling” me with the water.
Until I heard that explaination though, it was pretty damned surreal.
I have had so many experiences but this one is the weirdest. I was 12 years old and living with my dad. His then-girlfriend was over. I was lying in the bathtub with my head under the water. When I got out of the tub I heard the front door slam but thought nothing of it, I figured my dad was just taking her home or something. Then my dad came out of his room acting kind of strange and asked me if I had heard anything. I said no, what was he talking about? Apparently he and his then-girlfriend had a HUGE fight - complete with yelling, screaming, swearing and the door slam I heard was her stomping out of the house. I HEARD NOTHING. His bedroom was right beside the bathroom and the hallway to the front door was right outside the bathroom door. There was no way for me not to hear them. But honestly, I had no idea that something had happened until he told me.
Was it because your head was under the water that you didn’t hear?
Two really weird ones in college:
- I was getting some money from an ATM on campus. When my $5 came out of the machine, there was a pea-sized drop of fresh red blood on the bill. Not smeared–fresh as if it had just bled there, beaded up at the edges. My best guess is that a mouse or something had been killed inside the machine’s works, but to this day I don’t know what caused it.
- Once as I was walking from my dorm to class, I heard a donkey braying right behind me. I turned around: no donkey. But the braying happened again, and I saw a crow sitting in a small tree that I’d just passed, head cocked, staring at me from one orange eye. It brayed again, stared at me, then flew heavily off. The crow must have learned how to bray from some farm nearby: it was exactly the sound of a donkey, a perfect imitation.
This happened like 15 years ago. We were coming home from my friend’s wedding, which had been a lot of fun and we were all still kind of hyper. Very late, maybe 1 or 2 in the morning. It was pretty cold outside and there’d been freezing rain for a while.
So there we are, joking around, driving down the deserted streets to drop people off at home. We stopped at an intersection and I see something move out of the corner of my eye. This ‘something’ turns out to be a totally naked woman who runs up to the side of the car and starts hitting the window, “LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN.”
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. One of my friends was like “LOCK YOUR DOORS! LOCK YOUR DOORS!” and then everyone started to freak out. We locked our doors and sped away.
We drove a little ways further in total silence. WHAT HAD JUST HAPPENED? I didn’t know what to think. Was this chick in desperate need of help? Had she escaped an assault somewhere? It was very cold and rainy outside! What if she was on drugs? Was it some sort of scam where there were accomplices waiting to jack our car? Well, we eventually pulled over and called the cops because we didn’t know what else to do.
For the next few days I checked the police blotter but never found out what the heck that was all about. But (this is totally true) it turned out that we were right next to a mental hospital when this happened. None of my friends likes to talk about that night but it is by far the freakiest thing to ever happen to me.
My most surreal experience was waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, “I wonder if I’ll remember this in the morning?”
Well, obviously I did–but what if I hadn’t, man? What if I hadn’t???
This story reminds me of one I have.
I was really little, like 8 or 9. The phone rang and I was home alone so I answered it. I heard kids crying on the other end and screaming. The kid on the phone was yelling “help me, help me”. I was terrified and I had no idea what was going on. Was it a crank call? Were those kids being beaten and they randomly dialed a number asking for help?
I froze and then panicked and then just hung up the phone. I was home alone and had no idea what to do.
I never told anyone and to this day wonder if I had abandoned some kids who were desperately needing help. It haunts me whenever I think of it.
Twice I’ve gotten calls from really little kids - barely able to speak sentences - snuffling and bleating and saying things like “I need Daddy.” I wasn’t able to get anywhere with them before they hung up. Yes, such things do haunt you.
Maybe it was nothing, right?
Yeah…
You know you called me last night and asked me the same question, right? It was pretty surreal.
Well obviously. The freaky part is that apparently they were yelling really loud right outside the bathroom door and that I stayed underwater the entire time, from start to finish of their argument. I can still hear things (echoes, etc.) when I’m under the bath water - how did I not hear THAT?
A matter of frequencies - perhaps key parts of the voices were masked. A matter of obscuring noise - being underwater has a lot of strange rumbly booming noises from ordinary sources. Maybe - just maybe - an unwillingness on your part to accept that you were hearing loud, angry voices?
One time my (now former) girlfriend and I tried out a Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood that we had never been to before. (I think I had been there, but it had been at least fourteen years.) Everything about the place was odd. The configuration of the place was bizarre, the waitstaff was laughing all the time, and the lighting was awful for a buffet place. Then these large groups of high school students started showing up. Every time the door would open, a blast of arctic air would envelop the place, though no one seemed to notice except for us. None of these things were surreal in isolation, but collectively it seemed like some episode of Tales from the Darkside.
About two months after we broke up, I called my former GF about that night, asking if it was real or if I’d dreamed it. It really was that unusual, and I could not remember where this had happened, so it seemed like it could very well have been some kind of nightmare. She remembered the place and confirmed that it really happened, agreeing that it was a strange night.
Not really surreal, but there was a slightly upscale Chinese (more Asian-blend) place in our town when we moved here. We went there one night and except for a couple that finished up and left about fifteen minutes after we were seated, we had the place to ourselves. Food was okay, prices a little high… but the staff basically stood around the table while we ate. There were three to six of them at any one time, standing close enough to touch, the whole time. They were typically polite to the point of subservience and not otherwise obtrusive, but having every water glass refilled after every sip got a little jarring.
They closed the next week. We found that most of the town had been there… once.