Recount a Surreal Experience

In My Humble Opinion
61

I had a surreal Sherlock Holmes-like moment right after I graduated from law school. I was at a party after one night’s bar Exam Prep session when I met a student from another law school. She was a year behind us, and was interning with a local firm.

Anyway, I chatted with her for a while and discovered she was from a small town near Raleigh and had transferred back to a local college (Atlantic Christian College in Wilson, NC.) As soon as she said that, I KNEW she had married her high school sweetheart, gone back home, and gotten divorced after graduation. So, I asked her if I was right and she said it was. Then she avoided me for the rest of the night, which I can understand now.

Just a freaky intuitive flash.

62

It happened at around 10pm at night. My family had been probably watching TV or something in the living room when suddenly we heard this loud noise at our front door. Luckily we have a metal screen door that locks so the person couldn’t get in, but it was a young to middle aged man yanking at the door knob and pounding on the door screaming to let us in. He was shouting something like “They’re going to beat me up!” over and over. Of course my dad, being already paranoid about people, wasn’t about to let him in, but we did end up calling the cops to help. We told him we called and to stick around, and he did so for a few minutes but eventually left. We never heard from him again and to this day I don’t know if we screwed an innocent man or he was faking it in order to rob us.

63

I was living in Mendocino County in a sweet little house in the woods by myself. In the middle of the night, I woke up thirsty so I got up and walked through the small hallway, past the bathroom and into the kitchen for a drink. The kitchen was pretty large, maybe 15 feet across diagonally, with a straight shot from the hall doorway to the sink.

I was half asleep and it was dark, so I know I didn’t see anything. All of a sudden, I found myself seated on the kitchen counter about 8 feet away, butt naked in the dark. I was right next to the light switch and flipped it on, wondering what had happened. There, in the middle of what would have been my path, was this fucking huge, horrible spider. Now, I hate spiders and want no truck with them. I don’t know if some magical spidey sense tingled and levitated me away from that thing or what, but it was definitely surreal.

I was still thirsty and wasn’t going to spend the night bare-assed on the counter, so once my heart stopped pounding, I casually introduced my visitor to my worn copy of the Joy of Cooking. “Here, catch!”

64

I was working at an office in the city one summer. I was coming in to work early on a Saturday morning and the walk from the train station was quiet- eerily so. No people, no cars, nothing. It was like a scene from a post apocalyptic movie. As I rounded a corner, I saw a car had jumped the curb and smashed into a building. No one in it, no one around it, just a crumpled car resting in a bed of shattered glass. I picked up a crumb of safety glass for a souvenir and went to work.

65

At an office I used to work at we had a hallway between buildings that was all glass on one side and blank wall (no doors) on the other.

More than once I’ve seen someone enter the hallway just a few feet ahead of me and when I get to the corner, no one’s there.

I know the logical explanations for this, but every time it happened it was creepy.
I used to drive through the mojave desert at night and I’ve seen more than my share of strange lights out there. Things rotating and moving and the size of a car.

I did not stop to investigate and I did have a loaded gun in the car. There’s some things you just don’t want to know.

66

Having done astronomy in the great outdoors, I’ve seen things in the night sky that gave me the heebie-jeebies. The darker it is, the more you see.

Another bizarre experience: When I was a grad student in Milwaukee, I worked for a while at a bookstore whose manager was a gen-u-wine born-again Christian.

Fast forward to Moscow in 2003.

The week after Christmas, I’m alone in my apartment at one in the morning, reading with Euronews on in the background. There’s a report about Americans being killed in a hospital in Lebanon, and I hear the name of my former boss. I don’t look up in time to see the photo they show, so I wait another hour or so until the stories recycle. Sure enough, I’m looking into the face of someone I last saw fifteen years earlier.

The only reason I can think of for her to have ended up working at a medical facility in the Middle East is that she must have been doing missionary work, only to get blown away by a terrorist. No good deed…

Yet another, even more bizarre incident: A few days after I arrive in Toronto back in October 2009, I go to an exchange bureau to buy some Canadian dollars. I exit the building and walk to the metro entrance less than fifty feet away.

I go down the stairs and pass somebody in the pedestrian tunnel. A guy going in the other direction says “You have something on you,” but I don’t pay much attention.

I get into line to buy a TTC pass, and the woman ahead of me turns around in disgust; about the same time, I notice that something stinks like shit. I look over my shoulder and see there’s liquid crap speckled all over my pants and Army field jacket! The inescapable conclusion: in the thirty seconds between leaving the exchange bureau and entering the tunnel, someone on the street flung dung at me!

All I could do was wipe as much as I could off in the public lavatory and take the bus to where I know there’s a dry cleaners. By this time, my daughter has come back from shopping; we get on the bus together and, oh yeah, we had the back of it all to ourselves—the smell was still unbearable.

I drop off my jacket to be dry cleaned and go in the back to wash some more. While there, I take advantage of their having a fairly large sink and wash my pants; my underwear goes into a plastic bag. The only good thing is that it’s a fairly warm and windy day and my cotton pants dry quickly once we’re outside.

So, what I’d still like to know is: on that day, who flung dung? :dubious:

67

I lived in a quiet residential section of SF (inner sunset, for those who know). One Thanksgiving, I was walking around the neighborhood. Much of the housing is med student (UCSF is just up the hill) and the rest a either transplants of old family.
No traffic, not even pedestrians. I was walking east on Lincoln and saw something going on on 10th at Irving, so I turn up 10th.
There are 4 cars:
1 bright red econobox
1 white econobox
2 black & whites.

Somehow, the only 2 cars in the entire neighborhood, and highly visible ones at that, had managed a collision with enough force that one was knocked up onto the sidewalk.

Every once in a while, I wish I carried a camera as a routine thing.

68

Years ago my Dad and I were on a road trip to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. We found this little village called “Burkittsville” on the way there so we decided to check it out. There was nobody there. There were houses, cars, a couple of shops I think, but no people anywhere. There was even a car at the side of the road with it’s passenger door wide open. We drove up and down the main street wondering what the hell then got thoroughly creeped out and left. (Or, as my Dad said at the time, “This is creepy. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”) It was really strange.

69

You don’t carry a phone with a camera? I understand they’re quite the rage.

Not sure if this is meant to be a *Blair Witch *reference, but that could have easily been my hometown in Nebraska on a typical Sunday afternoon. It is indeed eerie to walk through a more-or-less fully developed town and not see a blessed soul.

70

What about damned ones? :smiley:

71

No, it for real happened. After “Blair Witch” came out my dad called and said “Hey guess what the name of the town in “Blair Witch” is.”

72

I want to preface this by saying that I’m not wifty or New Age-y, really I’m not. But there have been occasions in my life in which the Universe seemed to be trying to tell me something, and it’s always the same thing.

This first example isn’t particularly surreal, but it sort of lays the foundation. In my Boy Scout days, I went to camp one summer, and you do one overnight hike. After we set up camp it started raining and I was miserable… I ended up at one point squatting on a rock by the edge of a pond, in my poncho, feeling very sorry for myself. Then I suddenly had the thought “If I had to, I could stay right here like this till morning.” And all at once I wasn’t miserable anymore and I realized that the scene was actually quite pretty.

Fast forward to early adulthood. I took a Memorial Day weekend camping trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which sounds pretty pleasant, right? But it was gray, damp, and raw the whole weekend, and once again, I was feeling sorry for myself. I woke up early on the morning of the last day and lay there in the tent awhile thinking, and came to the conclusion that feeling miserable was accomplishing absolutely nothing, so I might as well drop the attitude. I looked out the tent flap towards the ocean and there, way out on the horizon, was a line of bright blue… and within an hour or two the cloud cover had blown completely inland and we got a gorgeous last day.

Some years later I’m on a solo backpacking trip in New Hampshire. It’s almost time to turn in and I’m lying on my back looking at the stars. My thoughts turn to the same basic theme, of accepting what you can’t change, and I start playing a Laurie Anderson song in my head, “Let X = X”, which I take to mean “let things be what they are”. It has sort of tautological lyrics: “It’s a sky-blue sky… satellites are out tonight… let X = X.” And at the exact moment that the words “let X = X” go through my head, a huge shooting star flashes directly across my field of vision.

(Another related incident was when I decided to go to the beach on a gorgeous early summer day. When I got there after about a 2-hour drive, there was a band of dense fog all along the shoreline, which at first pissed me off. But then I realized that it was really quite spectacular. The beach was very broad and flat, and of course, utterly deserted… in fact, it was a wildlife refuge. I walked along it for about a mile and back… it was an extremely dreamlike feeling, being absolutely enveloped by the fog, with nothing but endless flat sand, the water’s edge, and a steady breeze. It provided me with a memory I’ve always carried with me, which would never have happened if it had simply been one more nice beach day.)

This has already gone on very long, but I’ll mention one other, unrelated incident that struck me as surreal. It happened when I was a kid, on my way to church with my folks. There was this old water tower that was on the way, and this one Sunday, I looked up at it as we passed, and the top of it was on fire. No fire trucks or anything, just an old water tower with flames coming off the top. I distinctly remember thinking, “That can’t really be happening, can it?”

73

They left town long ago. Headed to some fancy place called Las Vegas. Or Salt Lake city - one of the two.

74

Its not spooky or paranormal but it was kind of surreal.

I’m pretty sure Senator Chuck Schumer crashed my law school graduation. He wasn’t on the program, and when he walked on the stage all the professors looked confused, there was awkward shuffling to find the Senator a chair, etc. He gave a fairly generic speech (not on the program either).

It occurred to me there might be another law school wondering where the hell he was.

75

Some pretty spooky stuff here. What I’ve got, I don’t know if it’s quite surreal, but it’s definitely odd.

Smoking a spliff at Wreck beach while a plainclothes (yes, clothes) cop wrote me a ticket for the gram of hash I was sitting beside. 50-50 hash tobacco mix with the “filter” end being pure tobacco. This guy walks up to me and grabs the spliff, tries to take it from me. I say “the fuck you doing?” He flashes his badge and says, “what’s this?” More polite now, I say, “It’s a cigarette, help yourself.” He shines his flashlight on it - and gives it back. Then he sees the gram beside me and sits down and proceeds to write me a summons.

I sit there and take deep drags, give him my name, address etc. while he writes me up, and I pass my bottle of goof to my friend who was there with me. We pass the bottle (but not the spliff) back and forth, cop writes us up and leaves.

Another time, I’m on the bus, in Calgary, on my way to work. Daydreaming, I miss my stop. And I realize that if I can’t get off this bus right now I’ll be faced with a 15-minute walk, and I’ll arrive late for work and drenched with snow. So I walk up to the driver and I say, as if I had the right, “Just pull over here.” He pulls over, I get off, and I’m totally pleased with myself!

As I’m congratulating myself and the bus is pulling away, I notice that I’m so close that I could reach out and touch it, there being no sidewalk where I’m standing, just the curb. I think to myself, "the road’s icy, snow’s coming down…if I had a brain in my head I’d step back from the curb and look to the left where the traffic’s coming from. So I step back, look at the traffic, and see this idiot (with no snow tires in Calgary winter!) mount the curb and toss three people into the air. Right where I would have been standing if I’d gotten off when I should have. He slides back onto the road and then off again, hitting the curb, mounting the curb and sliding straight toward me. I had to run about five metres. It was damn close.

I run to where the people have been hit. There are three teenaged girls on the ground, an old lady is tending to one of them, and she says to the girl. “do you want me to hold your hand?” The girl looks at her like, “are you stone insane?” Then proceeds to cry out, “this is a dream, I know it, I know it!!! So where’s my mom?!”

Some broken bones, no life-threatening injuries thank xenu. If I had gotten off where I should have I would have been the first to be hit, I would have been first in line.

76

Picture a large, freshly plowed field set in open, gently rolling country. Near the centre of the paddock is a low hillock with an outcrop of big granite boulders, around the base of which is a large rabbit warren.

I was camping with a friend and we had headed over to shoot a few rabbits for dinner (we were on another friends farm) and each of us set up with .223 rifles about 100 metres away and maybe 90 degress apart from each other on a low rise. The locations allowed us to see the majority of the warren and see all the approaches to the boulders.

After about 1/2 an hour, I figure I must have been day-dreaming because I looked at the rocks and there was a large black dog standing next to them! I settled down behind the (9x) scope to have a look at it and there was no way it was one of the farmers dogs. I knew what all of them looked like and he didn’t have any large, black, shaggy german-sheperd looking critters and, given the distance we were from any other farm it had to have been a feral animal.

I reached out, closed the rifle bolt and damn if this dog didn’t look straight at me and then slowly walk around behind the boulders out of my sight.

I never saw it again. When my friend & I met up again I asked him why he hadn’t taken a shot at the dog:

“What dog?”

He hadn’t seen it near the boulders and certainly hadn’t seen it leave. We checked the area and couldn’t find any place it could have hidden or left without us seeing it. :eek:

77

I was walking on the shopping mall eating a pretzel. Almost bumped into a lady, apologised and she proceeded to steal my pretzel and eat it all.

78

One time I was visiting Toronto for a day and I was walking along Yonge St. in the pouring rain so I was looking down at the sidewalk. It was crowded and I literally bumped into someone. I looked up and said “Sorry” and they looked down and said “Sorry”…and it was my friend who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We went for coffee and had a really nice catch-up visit.

79

I’d love to hear more details about these.

80

Eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant one day with co-workers. We were discussing the fact that two of the instruments in different areas failed on the same day with the same problem. Although the problems were apparently unrelated, we were wondering aloud if there might be a link. Why, I asked, would two unrelated devices develop the same problem on the same day?

As I was speaking, I broke open my fortune cookie. It read “There are coincidences.”