At a church near my parents house, there is a tree that is directly in front of a window. A streetlight makes the tree cast a shadow on the stained-glass window that looks like the upper part of a human body; looks like a head/neck/torso with outstretched arms, like a crucifixion. Fist time I noticed it while driving, I nearly wrecked!
Only happens during fall/winter when the tree has no leaves.
Years ago, I was driving home to Phoenix from LA on 'WAY too little sleep. (Yes, I know. Stupid. I was younger then.) Anyway, dawn was breaking and I saw a little desert groundhog at the side of the road, standing up on his haunches as they are wont to do. They almost look like people when they do that. However, THIS little groundhog was wearing a bowler hat and a handlebar moustache, and had a little folded black umbrella tucked under his arm.
Of course this was just an hallucination caused by lack of sleep–but I don’t know how much of it, or whether any of it, was real. Was there really a groundhog there for my imagination to dress up, or was he imaginary too?
When I took a bowling class at El Camino College (a “P. E.” course to meet graduation rerquirements), the class was at a local bowling alley and the game had started. At the end of one frame a teammate had knocked down about six pins with two balls. He twisted his body in an odd way, as if using “body english,” after the second ball had passed the pins–and the pins fell down! :eek:
He must have scared the pins to death!! 
When I was 7 I went to my friend’s roller skating birthday party. I always remembered the party because some teenaged guy skated into me and knocked me down, which hurt my arm pretty badly.
Years later, when i was 16 and taking guitar lessons, I happened to get into a conversation with my guitar teacher in which we discovered that not only was he the cousin of that friend (who had moved away years before) but he was in fact the person who skated into me.
I have another, too…the July 18th thing. My birthday is July 18th and I have a weird habit of meeting people who I later find out also have July 18th as a birthday. In my life I’ve known about 10 of them…including my husband, who I had a strange feeling was born on 7/18 before I asked. He’s a year older than me, which makes him born on the exact same day as one of my best friends.
This one isn’t that weird, but the visual was…
I was driving on the interstate in my town and as I was about to pass under a pedestrian/bike trail overpass, I saw a man jogging backwards over it. Not all that strange, people jog backwards a bit all the time, but seeing that just at that moment caused a bit of something like cognitive dissonance and it was freaky…
Fish!
Once I was driving home from work. It was raining cats and dogs and I had to stop at a traffic light in front of a big square. Right in the middle of the square there was a guy showering in the rain. He was completely naked but for a pair of rollerskates, all lathered up, and was just shampooing his hair.
HOLY CRAP
I guess I should have been happy it wasn’t frogs.
I’m at K-Mart, standing in the checkout line, waiting to purchase some triple-A batteries. I’m standing there, head half slumped, watching nothing in particular, zombie-like, and those waiting in line behind me have zombified as well. Some bastard child of elevator music and easy listening is playing over the PA system.
“Next!”
The woman clerk faces me expectantly. My head snaps up, I become animate, alive once more, and take a step forward. I hand her my batteries. She starts to ring them up.
“Excuse me,” she asks, “do you play the piano?”
Immediately I am suspicious. She appears to be around 40, I’m about 18, and I had just been hit on by a 40 year old Christmas elf not too long ago (another story). I sit there, unresponsive for about 10 seconds, and then respond.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve just purchased a keyboard. But I’m still arranging to take lessons, so, officially, no, I don’t yet play the piano.”
The Easy-Listening-Elevator music cooly slides through my brain. Another brief pause in interaction.
“You really should play,” she continues. The cash register dings happily. And then, her whole body jerks, she pivots on one foot to face me, and glances down. “You’ve got the hands for it… you’ve got… the reach.”
Flourescent lighting rains blinkingly upon me, then becomes constant once more. I hand her my money. She gives me change.
“Thank you. I’ll give it my best.”
I leave.
On reflection, it freaks me out that not only did this woman closely observe my hands, but also took the time and mental expenditure to evaluate them, and came to the conclusion that they would be just right for playing the piano with. I could imagine her being the character out of that crappy ‘Goosebumps’ book by R.L. Stine who teaches piano and cuts off people’s hands to keep them if they’re good enough. Surreal.
Short surreal episode of the “did that just really happen?!?” kind.
A week ago I was coming home from a party, had had a few beers but I was more tired than anything else. I´m standing at the crossing waiting for the light to turn green. On the other side I see a young Asian couple (maybe 20) and a small guy in a wheelchair. (that´s not the weird part.)
The light turns green, I begin to cross the street. They begin to run, the guy is pushing the wheelchair, and as they fly past me he screams at me (in English) “no, no! you´re not going to get him!” (the exact wording escapes me.)
I stop on the other side of the street just to see them disappearing into the subway station.
To top it off, in the streetcar on the way home, two guys and a girl (about 18) are happily discussing their school ball from which they were obviously returning, mixed with a (very interested and enthusiastic) discussion of spherical trigonometry (you know, on the surface of a sphere).
I swear, I felt like I was tripping.
A commentator on the local NPR station noticed this one, and called it an “Urban Haiku:” About two blocks from my apartment is a Vietnamese grocer. During the last elections, a “John McCain for President” sign hung prominently in the window. [McCain was a POW in Vam]
Once, while walking to a bar with my friend, about 6 men ran past completely naked. I have lived in my college town for my entire life, I’m used to frat hazing rituals. She is from California, and not. I didn’t even halt my train of conversation due to the screaming nakeds. She stoped me. “Hold it. Did you just see a pack of naked men run past us?” She was seriously concerned that she imagined it.
The house we lived in was situated kinda catty-cornered to a church accross the road. The front of the church had a cross made of those glass bricks and was back lighted with either neon or flourescent light. It lit up with a brilliant white light at night.
One christmas eve Mom let us stay up late to wait for Santa. I was watching out the window for Mr.Clause and when I glanced at the church the cross was not a white light, but glowed with several hues of orange and red. I began to cry (being only about 5 or 6), because I thought it had to do with the death of Santa!
Turns out there was a short in the wiring of the lights and it had actually started a fire in the building.
Still scared the crap outta me!!
Oooh. This is weird that this thread is suddenly here this afternoon.
Just this morning. At the local supermarket. I was doing my weekly grocery shopping and had gotten to the toilet paper aisle. As I picked out my favorite brand, a lady about twenty feet away looked right at me and commented, while holding a package of her favorite brand, “THIS ONE’S on sale with a coupon! Do you have the coupon? I don’t know which coupon they want.”
I ignored her and put the TP in my cart, only to have her follow me through the store for the next ten minutes, every so often stopping to ask me if I knew this or that about a particular product.
Maybe not surreal, but vaguely creepy anyway.
However, the most surreal experience I can remember in my life happened when I was 8 years old. I was living in my grandparent’s house in Massachusetts, right on the water on the south shore of Boston Harbor. It was late May and we were having a whale of a thunderstorm. It was 1967. It was only me and my mom at home at the time. At the height of the thunderstorm, we both witnessed what I now know was St. Elmo’s Fire eminating from every single electrcial outlet in the house. You have to imagine two sets of concentric circles, looking for all the world like shooting targets, eminating, one each, from the upper and lower outlet in each device.
Being the height of the cold war at the time, my mom was completely convinced that we were under nuclear attack and she hustled the two of us into the deepest, darkest room in the basement - just as the lights went out.
It may be that particular incident in my life that has resulted in me not being afraid of too much nowadays.
Just after I posted above, I walkes to the store. On the way back, I stopped at a corner to let a woman on a bike go by. I saw a head of curly hair over her shoulder, and assumed she was just taking the baby for a ride, but as she passed I suddenly realized that the ‘baby’ had four furry limbs sticking straight out. She had a poodle strapped to her back!
Expert maybe, but not an expert typist. :rolleyes:
That’s ‘walked’.
Once, deep in rural Pennsylvania, I stopped at a little gas station to fill up my car. As I was filling the tank, a horse-and-buggy clip-clopped up to the station. I didn’t think anything of it as I went in to pay.
When I came out, there was an Amish guy pumping gas…into the back of the buggy! I assume he was filling a can, but for a split-second I thought he was trying to give his horse some extra go!
Now that you mention it - I am convinced it rained frogs in Schaumburg, Illinois, in the summer of 1980. I did not see frogs coming down from the sky, but I have to assume that’s where the billions of little suckers came from, since the only nearby body of water was a recently manmade lake in our fairly new subdivision. What I do know is that I went outside one afternoon and saw a LOT of small frogs all over the place. When I say “a lot” I mean perhaps four to six in each square foot of ground. As far as the eye could see. What I thought even weirder was that in less than a week, every single one of them was gone.
And now that it’s back in the front of my mind, I’m going to see if I can find some independent verification for this event. Off to Google!
I have a magic birthday–July 7th, 1986. This means that when I turn 21, it will be on 07/07/07. And 7x3=21.
Once, while just sitting and talking with my friends in English class, a wrapped condom came flying through the air above my head. My friend picked it up and put it in his pocket with hardly a break in the conversation. It was most peculiar. I have no idea where the condom came from. Someone must have thrown it, but I looked and there was no one paying any attention to us or laughing or anything.
How about orange-robed Buddhist monks in full traditional clothing, shaved heads and prayer beads and everything, checking out pants in the Ralph Lauren outlet store in Kenosha, Wisconsin?
I still shake my head when I remember that, and it was really long ago.