This. On February 28, 1983, I was staying at my parents’ home because my father was terminally ill. He wanted to die at home, and he had slipped into a coma earlier that evening. The hospice worker told us he could last a couple hours or a couple of days, no way to know. My mother and I stayed up late that night, talking and comforting each other. At 11:45 p.m., we finally went to bed. I was sleeping in the “guest room” which was really my father’s study with a fold-out bed in it. I had barely closed my eyes when I “saw” my father standing at the foot of the bed, looking at me. Then he walked over to his desk and gently, randomly touched at few items on the desk, including the painted rock paperweight I had made for him many years before. I was frozen in place, scared and confused at how he could be there when I knew he couldn’t get out of bed by himself. Then there was a gentle tap on the door. My father disappeared. My mother came in to tell me that he had died five minutes before.
Classic example of sleep paralysis.
I was playing with this idea myself! Glad to find a name for it, maybe now I can learn more.
I was wondering about this too. Maybe our current world is the “least worst” case our time traveling descendants can manage, and they’re keeping things that way by influencing things behind the scenes.
I’m searching for a polite way to say this, but I think if you’re going to be skeptical and proclaim your skepticism, you have to be just as skeptical of your own experiences as you are of everybody else’s. It’s easy to dismiss a kook who talks about ghosts and flashing lights and tougher to be objective and do the same when you’ve felt the emotions involved with these kinds of things- but that doesn’t mean your perceptions are any more accurate. All of us get fooled sometimes by our senses and memories.
Marley,
Sure. It made me go “Hmm” for a bit but it’s not like I’m going to be playing Ouija or speaking in tongues. If anypony has an explanation for deja vu, I’d love to hear it.
The human brain is a bizarre and fantastic machine, but it ain’t no computer. Memories are organic and change over time. Senses definitely aren’t always reliable.
There are definitely some fantastic things that I’ve experienced. But when I think about probability, and that someone in their thirties has been alive for more than 1 billion seconds, it doesn’t seem that odd that there would be some unusual events that occur. The natural tendency though is definitely to think “WOW, that was incredible and inexplicable,” rather than to think about the other nine hundred and ninenty nine million times that nothing interesting happened at all.
I’ve definitely had deja vu before, but I know it just isn’t possible. To me, deja vu is simply proof of the fallibility of our own minds.