Okay, all you synaesthetes are Officially Cool. 
I don’t have anything that cool, though I can swear in Esperanto.
I once almost stepped on an giant angry alligator.
I got out of a helicopter into the knee-deep marsh, waded over to the chopper’s other side, and while I was unloading, the pilot turned to me and shouted over the roar of the prop that a 14-foot alligator was on the other side of the helicopter. The side where I had just been.
My first reaction was that he was full of shit. Everyone knows I’m gullible and they’re always kidding around. So I smiled and continued unloading.
But then my assistant, bug-eyed and trembling, confirmed it.
Because the gator was blocking our way to the doors, the pilot had to turn around, which he did by lifting up in the air. When he did, the gator lunged up at the chopper’s floats, kinda like this. He was the Godzilla of alligators, lemme tell you. A real monstrosity.
When we finally lifted up in the air, the thing lunged at us again. His eyes were orange with satanic hatred. I will never forget the heat that radiated from them.
He had to have been four feet away from me, tops, when I first stepped out onto the marsh. If he had attacked me, I wouldn’t have known what hit me.
Can’t everyone?
Nope. Only some people get to experience this… I’m not one of them!
Oh, my word, monstro, that was frightening. I’m shaking.
I’m very, very glad you’re alive and well today!
Damn you. You stole my thunder of doing construction in a former minefield. Or that one time they launched a Patriot over my head without announcing it first. 
Tripler
There was this one time, in band camp tho. . .
Add me to the list of Dopers who’ve died in dreams and lived to tell about it. In fact I’ve had a number of dreams that were worse than death. The worst experience I’d had dreaming was the first time I’d tried Zoloft - I went from remembering one dream a month or so (Which was invariably graphic and violent.) to one night where I had several in the same night.
The worst one was seeing a submarine disaster from four viewpoints. Four different dreams, each one more personal, and disturbing than the prior one. First, I dreamed simply that I heard somewhere that a US sub broke up and sank, all hands lost. Second, my father and I were talking about a news report about the US sub having sunk. Third was watching, from the outside, with a sort of omniscient view, as the forward compartment of the boat broke off, and both halves sank. Fourth was from the inside - I was a junior female officer in an engineering ladder space. There was a shake and a godawful moan from the boat, then the lights flickered, and there was a scent of water in the air - then the water slammed into me and I knew no more.
When I woke up then, I got up and decided I wasn’t going to head back to bed for at least a day. Maybe longer. I didn’t want to know what was coming that would be worse.
At that, those dreams were better than being dead, and aware, in one’s coffin. Or the time I forgot what N A V Y stands for, and I volunteered to visit an alien homeworld. Their transmission method was something that involved disintegrating the body, storing it in a light beam message, then hoping that the recieving end would follow the blueprints properly. The problems with this were: the process was not painless - one felt being disintegrated; worse, like a copy of a copy of a VHS tape transmission artifacts entered into the process after the third or fourth transmission. By the tenth - when I finally woke up - I was more robot than living organism. And still had most of the transmissions to go, yet.
Outside of my head, I know what it’s like to do a first entry survey in a hot, but shut down, reactor compartment. It’s hot and sweaty, and you’re really, really eager to get out of the anti-C’s.
I’ve also gotten to go through the Straits of Messina on a ship, watching from about 75 feet above sea level. Absolutely stunning. Watching the dolphins following the ship through, playing in the wake was great. I’d love to go through again and again. It’s beautiful.
I also know how to determine when one’s livetrap has a weasel in it, rather than the field mouse you intended to trap for surveying purposes. If the trap is jumping about and hissing, it’s usually a good sign that there’s a weasel in there.
I’ve been up to my elbows in blood, walked through tacky puddles of blood, had my hand up inside a live, conscious human many many times.
You get close.( she said, oh, Cyn, I’m so sorry! I said, Hon, we’re closer than that now!)
Cyn, OB/GYN RN
Almost drowning, even in mild waves, is every bit as unpleasant as one might expect. It’s like you know that if you let go you’re going to die, but you also know that holding on isn’t doing much but prolonging the inevitable. Seeing the rescue dude - there’s no elation, too tired to do anything but follow orders.
Coming out of the water your throat is raw and acidic drinks burn, you can hardly walk… even breathing is hard work.
Oh, no. Yours is much worse. You see, I can kick the shit out of my pilot in Hell for all eternity, but you have that eternity of stark realization that yes, you really are that stupid, before you join me so I can taunt you for all time.
I have been in a house that was hit by lightning. They say the sensation is like having every hair on your body stand on end, and that’s exactly what it was. We all recognized it (4 of us) and panicked and left the house in the pouring rain. We were convinced the house would catch on fire, but it didn’t. The lightning hit the flagpole in front of the house, and there was a chain connecting the flagpole to the house.
I know you’ve declined to say in the past, but could you email me the name of your band? I only ask because I live in the Chicago area and I listen to a lot of electronic bands. I could possibly already be listening to you guys.
/hijack over, my apologies.
When you said “up to my elbows in blood” I pictured you wading in blood - from the floor to your elbows. I thought maybe you worked in some sort of slaughterhouse
… for Middlebro it’s pain that has colors. I haven’t heard him use these references in years, but there used to be the blue pain and the yellow pain and the brown pain…
The wiki article says it runs in families. Makes sense, we never really gave it much thought because we’ve got relatives who say things like “dunnow, it needs sharpening” upon tasting the soup and finding it bland. We just used to label it “weird,” huh!
Gotta love this place.
I bailed out of an airplane after a midair collision.
There was a definite sense of watching someone else who was coping with this problem. Parachute worked fine (opening shock caused just a few bruises) and I landed near the front door of a rural house with no injuries (though, I was pretty well pumped up with adrenaline).
And very useful when you’re stressed, too. When I was little I thought everyone did this and was surprised to find out it’s not so.
I passed out from excessive G-forces in a fighter jet.
It was my own damn fault. I pulled too hard on the back end of a loop and instead of 3-4 G’s, we got 8. I was crushed down into the seat, my vision started to gray and tunnel - then the tunnel snapped shut and off to dreamland I went.
Being incapacitated, my hand came off the stick and the G’s unloaded. But we were now in a nose-down dive. No real danger, as we were up at around 14,000 feet. But let me say, nobody should have to wake up from a peaceful nap to find they are in an airplane pointed at the ground. That’s a moment that’s burned into my memory forever.
However, I don’t think I was completely unconcious because I could sort of hear the instructor in the back seat saying, “Pull up! Pull up!” But he sounded as if he were miles away, and it wasn’t very important. He finally took control after realizing I’d gone into GLOC (G-induced loss of conciousness).
Recovering was like re-booting my brain. Although I was able to land the plane a few minutes later, I felt like I had gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. And I was embarasssed because I can usually take G-forces pretty well. But the quickness of my mistake in the loop gave me no time to brace for it.
Jeez, I thought you were going in a whole different direction with that (and I’ve only done that once).
Another synesthesia person here. Definitely each number and letter has its own distinctive color, and it also depends which font is used.
And also music . . . each note has a color, and so does each key. And it’s all affected by the time signature and tempo, and of course which instrument or voice, so it gets really complex. And for some reason, the music of Russian composers seems to be extremely colorful.
The time of day has color. Days of the week have colors, as well as months, years, decades, centuries and millennia.
All words have color, not just the colors of the individual letters. Proper nouns, especially people’s names, are very colorful.
Tastes and fragrances also have colors.
A little clarification: I don’t literally ***see ***the colors. It’s like looking at a black-and-white photo of familiar objects. I just know what color everything is without actually seeing it, and in my mind, I’m picturing it in color. And I cannot force myself to think of something having a “wrong” color. “M” is brown, and any other color is just plain wrong.
I’ve witnessed a complete solar eclipse of Strassbourg, 1999. What nobody told me is that all the birds start singing when it gets light again.
Lightning struck my house too. I saw energy coming out of the walls where electric conduits ran underneath. All electrcal appliances in the house were fried. The insurance company was very nice about it though. I guess they thought you can’t fake lightning.
Me and my fiance willingly chose to buy the apartment below the apartment of my ex. Everybody is happy with the arrangement.
See, here’s the difference: I signed up because I enjoy some of the aforementioned stuff, and in fact, thrive on it. You on the other hand, are literally just along for the ride. :dubious:
Tripler
I kid! I kid!