Surreal story of the day. I was browsing at a local bookstore during lunch today and see two Asian (most likely Japanese) men looking at a Time Life book about WW2 with big headlines that said something like “Triumph of the US” in bold letters on it. Both of the men were talking. I could only imagine that they were saying, “Look how callous and war happy these gaijin are. They are happy to set off nuclear bombs and kill people. My grandmother and I were the only ones in my family not in Hiroshima at the time and now I am an orphan.” It was oddly spooky. Then a homeless person went up to one of the crying men and asked them for money.
Well, there was that day when it seemed like I was invisible. People kept bumping into me, or running into me. This happened all day. The event that made me think it was surreal was when the sliding doors at the grocery store wouldn’t open. I thought of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart sells his soul and the sliding doors won’t open for him at the Kwik-E-Mart.
Once I spent six days doing some research for an Indian tribe and was staying as a guest of the Chief in his double-wide. Each night, after I went to bed, I could hear something crawling around underneath the trailer, directly underneath me. It made this curious scratching noise, and while I wasn’t particularly scared about it, I did begin to find it vaguely annoying.
After a couple of days I mentioned it to the Chief, and he said it was probably a raccoon. Late that night, after I went to sleep to the rustling of my nocturnal house-mate, it snowed. The next morning, as I was headed out the front door I happened to glance over to my window, and noticed some scrabbling in the snow just underneath my window. I walked over to see if I could identify what kind of critter it was by its footprints.
The creature in question did a good job of messing up its tracks, but around the corner of the house I could clearly see what it was: a bare-footed human of adult size. I followed the footprints into the forest behind the trailer, and the footprints disappeared at the shallow creek which ran through there. They didn’t appear on the other side, either, so my admiring friend must have followed the freezing creek far enough downstream so that I wouldn’t be able to pick up the trail again.
I didn’t try, didn’t tell the Chief, and my guest didn’t return that night, either. There are just some things best kept to one’s self. That must have been one of them.
She and I used to sit and read stories to each other. We had a big poster on the wall showing an Apollo photograph of the Earth seen from space. One day I was reading aloud from Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories. As I was reading the long story “The Deathbird” — exactly at the point where the Deathbird destroys the Planet Earth — we heard a crash.
Our Earth poster had detached itself from the wall and fallen to the floor.
Ever get that eerie, chilling feeling?
This is constantly happening to me and I find myself VERY worried that the rapture has occured and I was left behind…
sigh
Iam not Sherlock Holmes but let me try:
Fact: Black Sabbath Concert (Iam a fan!)
Fact: Missing time
it sounds like DRUGS may have been involved
Sorry for rapid posting here but I LOVE this thread.
There is something about events like this that make me feel part of the cosmos. Things that just happen and appear surreal but give you a sense that they may be a giant truth that we are just to small to see.
story 1: My 2 young daughters, 10 and 8 at the time of this story, were always playing and screaming about spiders. “DADDY come kill it its huge” When I would come running the spider would be ant sized. I would pick it up and throw it outside. One day the whole family ended up in the back of the house one by one in the main bed-room. (My wife, 2 girls and myself.) Gathering dirty clothes for the laundry. Anyway the youngest daughter came back last helped out for a second and then said: “Oh daddy there is a spider in the hallway” Thinking it was a similiar situation as before I sort of brushed it off finished with the clothes then came to look at the creature. It was huge. It was at least 7 inches in diameter, big brown and fuzzy. On the backdoor about 4 feet off the ground, in the hall way. Blocking the entire family’s path out of the house. The whole thing was slow motion to me and I actually was terrified. Iam 6’3" about 300 punds and I felt like a 9 year old girl then. My arm tingled my heart pounded this spider scared me deeply. From laundry to a beast right there. Anyway it all seemed so wierd to me that My daughter would be frightened of small spiders but this one she was not… (We made it out of the house eventually)
story 2: A few years ago we had 2 neighbor woman one on each side of us that had the same birthday as my wife. All 3 woman were born on Nov 8.
story 3: On my 12th birthday, Feb 2 1989, my Mom took me to a Harlem Globtrotter’s Game the ticket had the string of numbers 020272 in the serial. (Born in 72) Alas Ive since lost the ticket!! Whats even more surreal is the Globetrotters lost that game… hehehe
story 4: An ex-coworker of mine was reroofing a house, had a 4’ X 8’ particle board sheet in his arms whilst on the roof and became a human kite, during a sudden gust of wind for 30 or so feet in the air then landed safely.
Correction: Story 4
OMG the straight dope and I made a math error It was Feb 2 1984!!
Queen of surreal experiences, checking in… (and yet another really LONG post from hedra…)
Prologue: When I was seven, I had a series of dreams where I hung out with the three boys who would be my sons when I grew up. We rode bikes around the neighborhood, mostly. I was miffed when I woke up each time, because I already knew I only wanted 2 kids, and I had brothers so certainly didn’t want BOYS. But I was also proud of them, they were good kids, and I had a strange maternal feeling for them, even though in the dreams they were older than I was. Over time, I simply accepted 2 ‘facts’ as real - 1) I would live long enough to grow up and be a mom (I was severely depressed and suicidal at the time, after a sexual assault), and 2) I’d have three sons, the younger two slightly closer in age than the oldest and second.
So, now for the surreal stuff.
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The day I found out I was pregnant for sure, my best friend called me to tell me that I was pregnant. She didn’t know we were trying, but had an intense dream where she met my son. She described him as having blue eyes, and definitely a boy. I shrugged it off - I expected boys, anyway, but was open to the real chance of being wrong. But it was harder to shrug off when she called me again at 8 months pregnant to say that he’d ‘called’ her again to say that he was hungry, and I wasn’t eating enough protein. I ate a bit more protien, on the off-chance… and then three weeks later, my blood pressure started to shoot up (without any pre-eclamptic signs other than that). My midwives immediately assessed my diet. Sure enough, I wasn’t eating NEARLY enough protien. :eek: (Oh, and he has blue eyes.)
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When I was three months pregnant, I was lying in bed listening to epeepunk showering. I glanced down at the foot of the bed, and there was an about-3-year-old boy sitting there, running a red truck over the folds of the carpet in absolute silence. I saw his smooth golden-reddish hair, and his solid build. He didn’t look up from the truck. A moment later, the bedroom door opened and he vanished. When Gabe (the boy I was pregnant with) was 3, he looked exactly like that (I wrote the description down at the time, so I could check, later). My hair is dark, but has also been ash-blonde as a kid. epeepunk’s hair is black. The hair color was not at all what one would expect.
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The first time I took Gabe to a public park/garden, every wild animal we met came up to him (including non-social waterfowl), paused near the foot of the stroller, and then walked off. For some reason I didn’t freak out when the great blue heron approached - I wouldn’t consider it exactly a safe bird. A wild duck once brought her ducklings up to him. Butterflies and dragonflies land on him (and spiders drop on him). We once caught him calling a songbird in the yard, and the bird was not only coming to him, but was chirping in a nesting manner, not song. At a zoo, we went down a line of cages and every animal came up to the fence to look at him (including getting up from the back of the pen), and at the end of the row, the bald eagle chirped at him. Strangers have commented on this peculiar pattern, so it isn’t just me. There are more of those ones, but I tend to forget them in the mishmash - too many.
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When Gabe was about 2 1/2 (and highly verbal), he pointed with glee to a bunch of trees in a wooded area we were driving through. Tree! he said. I told him that a bunch of trees together were called a forest. To illustrate the term, I told him that I’d played in a place we called ‘apache forest’ when I was a kid. He got really excited, and told me he used to play there, too. With me. Only he was big, and I was a little girl. He repeated that part in confusion - “I big, you a little girl. I big, you a little girl! I play in apachee forest, wif you, I DID!” Then he turned white and clamped his mouth shut and refused to talk further. Remember those dreams when I was little? In the dreams, the oldest boy (about 12 to my 7) used to take us on our bikes to that forest to play.
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The day I started to miscarry the second time, I went to pick up Gabe from preschool. We had carefully hidden the idea of the pregnancy from him, since I’d miscarried before, using the term ‘the blueberry’ as the only coded reference. But I’d started bleeding that day, and they couldn’t find a heartbeat. They only found an early loss fetus, basically a speherical sac with a cluster of cells in it. I wondered if I should tell him about it, but before I could decide, Gabe piped up (at all of almost 3 years old): “Mommy, are you sad because the round thing with the eggs in it is gone?”
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When we started trying again after that second miscarriage, about a month later, five different people told me on the same day to stop until the new year. Two by email (one of them out of the country), two by phone, and one in person. Two of them were nearly panicked in their response, and said they couldn’t tell why it was important, only it was REALLY important - one who is almost peculiarly polite all the time was actually rude about it, she was so upset. They each gave different terms for how long to wait - ‘next year’, ‘three months’, ‘after the holidays’… but when I put them together, they were all the same date to restart. The last person said that she felt that the soul I kept miscarrying wasn’t supposed to be my child, just was supposed to be ‘with’ Gabe. I figured a few months rest wouldn’t be a bad thing, so I waited, just in case (remembering the protien thing from the first pregnancy). One night in late December, Gabe wouldn’t go to sleep until he talked to me (on the phone - I was out at a friend’s house, he was with his dad). 11 PM, and he still had to talk to me before going to sleep, enough so that epeepunk actually called me. I got on the phone, and Gabe told me all about a girl who wasn’t a grownup anymore, she was a baby, and how she had been born at a special hospital, but she was okay, and how puzzling it was that she didn’t have earrings anymore, because she was a baby, but she really liked earrings… he also told me that he was going to meet her when he was all grown up, not before then. And told me where he’d meet her. After that, it felt safe to try to concieve again. She’d gone where she was supposed to go. He doesn’t remember that conversation at all, though he does remember ‘her’ (by name). Because of earlier weirdness events, I was very careful not to use leading questions - it was his terms, his wording, me only saying ‘is there anything else you want to tell me?’ I wonder if his future wife or best female friend will love earrings…
There are so many more of those, it would take weeks to list them all. I’ve skipped a few, too, like the events around the first miscarriage. Way beyond surreal, and so intense it is hard to describe.
Well I certainly can’t compete with anything that’s been said here!
That being said, two of the most surreal experiences I have had have involved cats.
Cat Story #1.
When I was 16, I went to the SF Zoo with my mom, sisters, and uncle. When we got to the large cat area, it was feeding time, so the cats were all inside. One of the cats, a light orange tiger with green eyes, started staring at me when I passed her cage. I looked back. We looked into each other’s eyes for a good 5 minutes. My mom commented that she’d never seen a large cat do that with anybody before. Then, one of the keepers called the cat over. “C’mere, Emily,” the keeper said. The cat gave me another long look and turned toward the keeper. My name is Emily, and my eyes are the same color as the cat’s.
Cat Story #2.
I’ve been known to have semi-prophetic dreams, but this one takes the cake. Last fall, my roommate’s cat ran away. She was not an outside cat (she’s fat, lazy, and declawed), and nobody could figure out how she’d gotten out of the apartment. My roommate was very worried about her kitty and looked everywhere for her, put up signs, etc. No cat. The roommate had planned a trip and couldn’t really cancel it, though she didn’t want to go because she was so worried about the cat. She went, the cat stayed away. About two weeks after the cat had disappeared, I had a dream. I dreamt that I woke up in the morning and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. I opened a cupboard that hadn’t been opened in a long time, and there was the cat! She was skinny and weak, but otherwise OK. When I woke up from the dream, I thought it was a strange dream, but didn’t think much more of it. I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and of course I opened that cupboard, just to see, but the cat wasn’t there. Just then, I got this feeling that I needed to look out the back window. I did, and at the bottom of the back steps was the cat! She’d lost a pound or so, but she came right to me when I called her.
My roommate was very happy when she got home.
Well I certainly can’t compete with anything that’s been said here!
That being said, two of the most surreal experiences I have had have involved cats.
Cat Story #1.
When I was 16, I went to the SF Zoo with my mom, sisters, and uncle. When we got to the large cat area, it was feeding time, so the cats were all inside. One of the cats, a light orange tiger with green eyes, started staring at me when I passed her cage. I looked back. We looked into each other’s eyes for a good 5 minutes. My mom commented that she’d never seen a large cat do that with anybody before. Then, one of the keepers called the cat over. “C’mere, Emily,” the keeper said. The cat gave me another long look and turned toward the keeper. My name is Emily, and my eyes are the same color as the cat’s.
Cat Story #2.
I’ve been known to have semi-prophetic dreams, but this one takes the cake. Last fall, my roommate’s cat ran away. She was not an outside cat (she’s fat, lazy, and declawed), and nobody could figure out how she’d gotten out of the apartment. My roommate was very worried about her kitty and looked everywhere for her, put up signs, etc. No cat. The roommate had planned a trip and couldn’t really cancel it, though she didn’t want to go because she was so worried about the cat. She went, the cat stayed away. About two weeks after the cat had disappeared, I had a dream. I dreamt that I woke up in the morning and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. I opened a cupboard that hadn’t been opened in a long time, and there was the cat! She was skinny and weak, but otherwise OK. When I woke up from the dream, I thought it was a strange dream, but didn’t think much more of it. I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and of course I opened that cupboard, just to see, but the cat wasn’t there. Just then, I got this feeling that I needed to look out the back window. I did, and at the bottom of the back steps was the cat! She’d lost a pound or so, but she came right to me when I called her.
My roommate was very happy when she got home.
I can relate to that one! was Visiting a mate of mine who lives just off picadilly circus in london. now if you know picadilly it’s always buzzing some one is always there, home less or the drunk, or party people. I came out of the Flat and went down stairs out onto the street, at about 5 am sun was rising, and wanted to get to the private car park over past picadilly circus. not noticing anything turned onto the circus. looked up and no-one was there, and a car was sprawled sideways on the road. the next thing I heard was running footsteps, and a voice shouting ‘I’ve got him!!’ turns out I walked into a movie shoot for 29 Days, the flats door was a block inside the cordon and they let the local residents know, but as a visitor, I had no idea!
I have to laugh at that one.
Aw crap, I thought it timed out. Sorry for the double post.
That is just too freaky. Our seven-month-old keeps starting at the same few spots on our cathedral ceiling in the family room. We were jokingly saying he was watching the angels. What is particularly suprising about this is that he gets rapidly bored by the same toy, but he can stare at these spots for 5 or 10 minutes, with a happy, peaceful smile. There are no lights or light/shadow patches on these spots.
When we take him up to bed now, we say goodnight to all the relatives and grandparents whose pictures are on display, and to the angels on the ceiling.
- Who knows? Never hurts to be polite… *
This just happened to me yesterday. I went to the mall after work to buy a a new pair of shoes. I’m coming out of the shoe store, happily swinging my bag, and I look casually to my left. Vampire Hunter D is coming out of ‘Wicks N Sticks’. No kidding- there was this guy dressed in a cape and a wide-brimmed hat, with long brown hair, wandering around the mall. He was carrying a big Macy’s bag. I was this close to yelling “Hey, Dunpeal!” at him. Bizarre.
One time, a friend and I were coming back from a late movie and we stopped at a gas station/mini-mart to get something to drink. As we’re paying, a girl maybe 15 years old, dressed in shorts and flip-flops runs into the mini-mart, grabs a bag of chips off a rack near the door, and runs back out. There is no other car in the parking lot, and she vanishes into the night. The clerk yells, “Hey! What the fuck!?” He runs out from behind the counter and outside, but the girl has vanished. He looks around for a minute or so, then comes back in to ring us up. He looks at both of us and slowly asks us if we had both seen the girl. When we tell him we had, he just sighs and tells us to have a good night. In retrospect, I guess it’s not so weird, but at the time it seemed completely surreal.
This other time, when I was maybe 19 or so, a guy I was dating and I were driving around in the middle of the night. We used to do this frequently on the weekends since we were both night people and enjoyed going to all-night diners and afterwards just driving aimlessly around talking. We’re driving through quiet suburban streets, when suddenly we hit a ninja. Well, we later decided it must have been a ninja. Because this large black shape slammed into the windshield, went over the hood of the car, and disappeared. We immediately stop and get out. Nothing. No damage to the car, nothing in the road, nothing at all. We’re freaked out. We get flashlights out of the trunk and start looking everything over, but there’s nothing to find. We’re surrounded by houses and lawns, there’s nowhere a person or animal could get to that fast without us seeing it. We even check underneath the car just in case. Nothing. But we hit something- we both saw the shape and felt the impact. We get back in the car, and drive in absolute silence until we get back home. Later we decide we must have hit a ninja on some covert suburban mission.
This just happened to me last week. I was working late one night (1am) and I was finally heading home. Even though there was major construction, I decided to take the highway because I figured that at 1am, there couldn’t be too much traffic.
We’ve been having some rather mild weather here in Chicagoland, and that has been causing some major fog. Well, this night was no different. On my route home, there is a shopping mall to one side of the highway and a large forest preserve on the other. The comstruction crews have all of the traffic pushed to the mall side of the highway. Apparently, to get the project done on time, the construction crews work through the night. They were busy ripping up the concrete road and rebar that was embedded in it with these machines that looked like a backhoe, but instead of a scoop, they have a large claw like thing to pick up the rebar. Most of these machines also had lights on the “arm” of the claw.
So here is the surreal part. I’m driving down the highway with very little traffic around me. The very dense fog is rolling over the trees to my left, and falling on the construction crews. The street lights are very tall and they are illuminating the fog with a amber glow. As I drive along, there is a lone machine with no lights and no support crew right in front of a big pile of rebar. Because of the fog and amber streetlights, it is little more than a yellowish shilloutte. I think to myself, “Hmm, they must not have as many people working at night.” Just as I drive by, the claw rears back slightly and thrusts itself into the pile of rebar, like some kind of mechanical dinosaur feeding on the remains of another. Weird.
Recently I was walking down the hall here at work. My thoughts were mainly on a problem I was having with my project. I barely notice that a woman walks past me. I catch a wiff of her perfume.
Suddenly, I’m a little kid in church, surrounded by old ladies with white hair, wearing perfume. I’m eating Dunkin Donuts Munchkins and have a cup of orange flavored drink in my hand. I hear all of the chatter from these people as I wait for my mom to finish up talking to these people and we can go home.
This all took place in less than a second. The scent of the woman’s perfume was enough to provoke a long forgotten and rather insignificant memory of my childhood. In an instant, the memory surfaced and dived back deep into my brain again. And for that instant, there was no work, there was no project. I was a little kid again, eating the Munchkins, and waiting for my mom. It wasn’t deja vu. It was a real memory. It’s kind of like having your life flash before your eyes, but it was just a small moment in time. But it was enough to make me stop and think to myself, “What the hell was that?”
Wanna hear weird? Check this shit out:
I live in a town of over 300K people within the city limits, well over 1.5M counting the surrounding area. Biggest city anywhere in this end of the state.
There is only one Starbucks here.
1.
(and it’s not even a full-sized one, it’s one of those that gloms onto a Barnes & Noble)
Phonehenge! 
The most surreal thing I’ve ever seen was a horrible ice storm a couple of years ago.
I was standing outside watching it. Everyone else was safely nestled in their dorms. Nobody was out on the slick roads. Soft white noise came from everywhere, the sound of freezing rain coating everything. The only other sound was the occassional sharp crack as a tree, over-burdened with ice, broke apart and fell.
The sky was a dull hazy grey. Shapes were indistinct, even those as close as the other end of the parking lot where I was standing.
Suddenly, half the sky lights up a phosphorescent green. The color permeates the sky, then slowly fades away. There is no sound.
After a few minutes, the grey sky again turns green. This happens a couple more times as I watch.
I later learned that this strange light show was most likely caused by transformers blowing out all around town. At the time, I was too amazed to even wonder what it was.
You just brought back a strange memory for me. This same thing happened to me in the middle of an ice storm once, too. I saw the bright green flash, but I thought it was a lightning strike or something, because I also heard a kind of sizzling noise. The power went out for a few minutes, and while it was dark, my answering machine went nuts, making this strange high-pitched sort of grinding noise, and the cordless phone started ringing. There was no one on the other line, and then the power came back on, and everything returned to normal. Ice storms are surreal anyway, though. Walking out in the morning and finding everything covered in a thin layer of ice is very strange.
ratty, that was probably a power line getting pulled down. We had a huge ice storm here last year, and the power lines getting pulled down made all kinds of pretty colored flashes–blue, pink, green, purple. Kind of cool, but scary, too.