Have you experienced anything unexplainable in your life?

[Maccagirl]

I'll elaborate: When I was a kid, I used to have a very strong reoccurring dream (or nightmare) where I was in a WWII concentration camp and I could smell odors very vividly, feel the cold and understand the languages. It was almost if I was reliving, or channeling a past-life experience, even though I had no idea what that was, or is. My best friend in high school found her lost baby book in the attic of the house she had just moved to, and swore to me that her recently deceased mother had told her in a dream the night before "I've left something for you since we didn't have the chance to say goodbye." Anyone one else have similar stories?

[RedCloud]

1. I can't explain it. But it was not three dimensional.

Weird crap that I could see only sideways. Seemed "oily". Have never seen it? them? again. Not surprising as I recall seeing that batch get "zapped".

[pitohui]

2. yes in fact i had the nightmare you mentioned many times

haven't thought of that in years as it vanished at puberty -- as a child knowing little of metaphysics i supposed that i was a reincarnation of someone who had died in a camp but in older years, having studied more, i realized what you say could be just as true -- it could have been channeled from someone who had passed, it could have been an unknown ancestor, it could have been my brain's way of trying to make sense of a world that seemed too cruel and yet that i heard about so much as a child

many other odd experiences but a bit overwhelmed to try to write them up, my mother used to complain that she was a magnet for the weird and i go thru phases where i am too

one thing i took away from the concentration camp dream, i think, is that i have always hated cruelty and injustice

[pink-o]

3. I knew a guy who thought he was possessed by something evil.

In the most abridged way I've ever told this story, I ended up in the middle of the night with this man, walking down Kensington High st in London during a storm. He had told me this implausible story about demonic possession throughout the night, and no way was I convinced. But then he started freaking out and said in a panic: "God has deserted me! I can't feel him with me anymore." To which I replied: "God doesn't desert us. We desert God, but he's always with us."

And he said: "If that's true and God is with me, then why doesn't he give me a sign?"

Right at this point, his foot hit something metal in the street. It made this kinda "shiiiing" noise and skidded down the pavement. He went after it and picked it up, then turned to show it to me.

It was two pieces of broken scaffolding, forged into the shape of a cross. A perfect cross, like what you'd see around the neck of a priest.

Now, I'm an agnostic. I wasn't as much then, but I am the last person who ever experiences strange phenomena because I don't believe in most of them. So suffice to say, I have no explanation for this event, I'll leave it to the Theologians or the Quantum physicists.

[Rhiannon12866]

17. Wow! That's quite a story!

If we saw that in a movie, we wouldn't believe it... :wow: :hi:

[pink-o]

47. Exactly! I've been trying to write it properly for years, and have been unsucessful.

And I'm a pretty good writer!! But you're absolutely right--if this were fiction no editor would ever publish it. And even worse, the protagonist of the story, a young man from New Zealand, was named Donald--but he called himself Christian. Christian! I kid you not, it was the 70s so he went by the name Christian Kirk, thinking it was clever. Talk about hackneyed--but what can you do if it's true and just a stupid coincidence?

About a year before it happened, I had been hearing all these urban legends about weird phenomena, and I remember saying to my friend: "How come all these fantastic things happen to your brother's friend's cousin's mother or some other distant person, but nobody we know has ever had the weird visit them?" After this experience, I kinda shut up about that.

[likesmountains 52]

4. I have a very strong memory of driving in the rain near a lighthouse, but I have never lived by

a lake or ocean. I also have a vivid memory of standing outside my house watching my mom cook..but our kitchen was in the back of the house and there is no way I could have seen her... the memory is so real that I can feel the emotions I felt "seeing "it. Weird.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

5. Yes- my entire life.

:shrug:

[Tom_Foolery]

33. Bingo! That was my first thought! n/t

[Tuesday Afternoon]

6. my entire life is unexplainable.

sure beats the shit out of me.

[applegrove]

7. I can usually figure things out if given enough time (i'm a sensitive person). One thing I do wonder

about is the writing in the books I dream about. Every so often I'll dream I'm reading something. And I'll try really hard at the end of the dream to memorize what I'm reading cause it was written by my subconscious and I think it will be cool to find out what my subconscious writes. But I can never memorize the writing before I wake up. What is that about?

[Silver Swan]

8. I always notice in dreams

that I cannot read anything very well. The words wriggle and fade away before I can make any sense out of them. (This makes those college dreams in which I am trying to take a test really frustrating...)

And for that reason, I can never complete a phone call in a dream, because I can't make out the numbers on the phone well enough.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

10. I have that phone call dream all the time.

I'm trying to call someone for some really important reason and I have to reach them right now, and I either can't read the numbers or I keep pressing the wrong number, over and over. I hate that dream.

[Brickbat]

16. I read somewhere that almost no one is able to read letters or numbers in dreams. Things such as

books, watches, phones, keyboards and so on never stay as they should in dreams, while other things will.

[Duer 157099]

18. That one fact should be very revealing imho

People who believe that dreams are just our brains way of digesting daily life should try to explain that phenomenon. That detail, about not being able to read, might be a clue that dreams are very much more than believed, that it's some sort of astral projection type thing. Because then the not reading might make sense.

I can close my eyes and visualize the number pad on a phone, or my computer screen, and read the words quite easily, so it isn't that the brain cannot do this.

:shrug:

[hunter]

34. I can read and write just fine in my dreams.

Generally nobody talks in my dreams and I never say anything.

In my dreams spoken language is elusive and distressing. People will be talking to me and I don't understand them and sometimes they get angry at me.

In the real world I usually don't have words in my head unless I'm reading, writing, talking, or trying to listen to someone.

When I'm alone and not reading or writing I don't want words in my head. They make me uncomfortable. That's why I like walking with dogs -- dogs don't expect me to have a conversation. We can just walk.

[Brickbat]

35. As I said, "almost."

I find your experience interesting.

[pitohui]

36. for me it depends on the level of the dream

deep dreams i can't read the writing, these dreams are much more visual other than the writing being indecipherable

however i have read stories ideas concepts etc. in "shallow" restless dreams that i was able to turn and use some of the phrases etc. in real life (this when i was working as a writer)

maybe this is why many professional writers drink coffee/smoke cigarettes which tends to cause shallow, more restless sleep?

[nolabear]

39. I have the phone call dream too. It's one of my two anxiety dreams.

The other has to do with trying to negotiate a staircase that goes all Escher on me or ends in an abyss or whatever.

I replied further down that there's neurobiology involved in the inability to read, and probably with the phone as well. The areas that "dream" aren't well connected with the areas that do things like decode strings of symbols.

[nolabear]

38. I can answer that.

In my various shrink studies I learned that neurologically speaking the areas of the brain that dream and those that process things like reading are separate and pretty far apart. Sometimes the unconscious does fill things in so there's an impression of content but not the sensation of "reading" iykwim.

[applegrove]

40. Thank you. I will give up.

[Lucian]

9. Everything in my life can be explained rationally.

[MilesColtrane]

11. I've had a clairvoyant dream

...also, a WTF experience in the middle of the night that, in retrospect, must have been some kind of dream, and a couple of "haunting" things that have happened to me.

[XemaSab]

43. No details?

:(

Share with the group! :D

[DerekG]

12. Enough to keep me from being an atheist

My dilemma: I've seen enough horrible shit to want to leave the whole "God" thing behind, but I've seen enough weird shit to render this an impossibility.

[iris27]

14. Speaking as an atheist who's seen weird shit, to me it makes more sense to say, "this super-bizarre

crap happened and I don't know why" than, "this super-bizarre crap happened, and therefore, God".

There is a whole hell of a lot we do not know yet, and maybe some of it we never will. Doesn't mean that any of it is evidence of our culturally-held-in-common concept of "God".

[DerekG]

20. It doesn't have to be culturally-held

What I'm saying is that there may be a reality beyond our own, and if this is true, there might be a Higher Consciousness/Power.

[RebelOne]

32. I am also an atheist and I have had many bizarre dreams

and something related to them has always occurred days later. I do believe in clairvoyance, and I do believe that it has nothing to do with "God."

[iris27]

13. One night while driving back to college after Christmas break,

my husband (then-boyfriend) and I saw a whole lot of weird lights in the sky, the sort that would make a lot of other people claim OMGALIENS! No mind-altering substances were involved. We got back to the house we shared at the time, and asked our roommates, but none of them had seen anything. We checked the news and found no reports of it. Still to this day have no idea what the heck it was.

[Brickbat]

15. I have very strong memories of working at industrial sites and had a very moving experience in a

factory in Russia. I don't often talk about it because it sounds so odd.

[struggle4progress]

19. Once about thirty years ago, when I was still busy being studiously counter-cultural,

shunning nice clothes and haircuts and umbrellas and other such bourgeois trivia, I had been in a basement bookstore and came upstairs and outside

There was a fairly large roofed outside patio where I walked out, and there was a really hard pouring rain coming down, so there were a lots of people on the patio, staying dry

Being a studiously counter-cultural jackass (and not having bought a book), I thought I'd show them all I didn't entertain middle-classes worries about pouring rain, so I strolled through the crowd and out from under the roof on my way, expecting (of course) to be drenched

But the instant I stepped out from under the roof, the rain stopped -- completely

And before I could react at all, I heard an loud excited voice behind me: Did you see that! Did you see that! The rain stopped the minute he stepped out into it!

I kept on walking, studiously, in the most natural manner I could muster, thinking: I don't believe that just happened. I guess that happens sometimes. I can't possibly be the only person that ever happened to

[trackfan]

21. I have a strange one of recent vintage.

It doesn't involve any apparitions, or anything like that, but is still quite baffling.

First, a bit of background. I have always been weird with words and language and music; weird, but perfectly mundane. I make up words; call things by odd made up names and permutations of names; mix up real and fake foreign languages, etc. etc. etc.

Now, there is a certain phrase I say - or, to be more accurate, rarely say, but, more often, think of.
It is entirely a product of my odd wordplay mind. It is in a mixture of perhaps real, but in reality made up words in
what sound like different foreign languages. I don't want to write the actual sentence here - but an analogy might be
something like:

Boon dong sieht vuhl mis dogue.

Now here's the weird part. I was thinking of my sentence, and decided to see, via Google, if a couple of the words were, maybe, real words in any language. So I googled, in quotes, just a portion of the sentence. Using the example above, say
it would be "sieht vuhl". I expected there might be some hits in some language. What came back shocked me. Google
returned 2 results, both containing the entire string


Boon dong sieht vuhl mis dogue.

which is a maccaronic nonsense string of words, which I am 99.999% sure I never have typed anywhere, let alone said.
The pages on which it came up were not normal websites, just a bunch of ads and nonsense. The only practical answer is
that I had indeed typed the phrase at one time - but, like I said, I'm almost 100% I haven't.

One more thing - the results no longer come up on google. My maccaronic phrase has now disappeared from the internet.

[Duer 157099]

41. Maybe this will ease your mind

One thing spammers do is to take a phrase entered into Google and on-the-fly incorporate it into their website (there is scripting for this). They do this to get hits on their page, no matter what somebody types into Google.

Search engines are constantly working to keep those things from happening (which is why maybe you don't find it anymore).

Just a thought.

[Broderick]

22. My mom did.

When I was 2. She saw a figure out of the side of her view and got up. The figure she glimpsed went into my bedroom. She got scared but had to investigate and I was in a silent grand mal seizure. Epic because I ended up suffering from four consecutive. At the hospital they said they saved me. And they advised my mother that I would suffer debilitating brain damage that could debilitate me for life. She took me home. I survived. Had maybe one or two real seizures and several questionable instances since. 35 years after my last one, I haven't had one since. I think it was a matter of her conscience and worry about me that brought her to my room when I was suffering.

[pokerfan]

23. When I was very young

I could enter some kind of altered state of consciousness. It was involuntary at first and then around the age of five or so I could control it almost like lucid dreaming. And I lost the ability around the age of 7 or 8. Very hard to describe but extremely weird and a little scary at first.

[astral]

42. You just reminded me of something.

When I was very young, 3 or 4, my mother would take me with her to visit this deaf/mute lady, and they would sit around and talk with pen and paper while they visited. I found this so horribly boring I would do the same thing every time it happened: I would lay face down on the floor with my arms crossed under my eyes, and imagine going slowly down a staircase in the pitch dark, and at the bottom if I concentrated long enough I would see a white light, which I would imagine was arriving down there into a bright 'kitchen,' although all I ever saw was the white light. I did not know what it meant, only that I had to work my mind to get to it, and that it was something that I liked to do.

[pokerfan]

46. I didn't have a light

just a weird feeling of being completely enclosed or encased. Not suffocating, just wrapped in darkness. It's hard to explain.

[AllenVanAllen]

24. When I was working at a power plant in my early 20's

A disembodied voice saved my life. The year was 1989, the power plant was a 125 megawatt plant with one boiler. I was spray-coating the interior of the boiler with a chemical. I had a full body suit so my vision was limited to goggles and I was at the top of the boiler on a scaffold platform. Long story short, I almost stepped through a hole in the floor and fell to my certain death but at the last moment before I stepped, foot in the air, I heard a male's voice say, "Look down." Before I had a chance to think, I looked down and my foot was over the open hole. A cold chill came over me as I pulled my foot back and stepped away from the hole. I would have fallen almost 100 feet and maybe hitting some scaffold supports on the way down. I'd have been a goner! I still don't know what exactly happened to me that day. I don't attribute it to anything mystical, but I am left dumbfounded. I don't know, the brain and subconscious can be pretty powerful.

I am glad I didn't think and just looked down though...

[City of Mills]

25. When I was a kid, I had a dream about digging in my basement

The basement floor was concrete except in one section...I had a dream about digging in that dirt. The next day I went down there (something I seldom did, I always good very bad vibes and feelings of 'pressure' down there) and poked around with a spoon. I found a gold necklace.

There's other instances of weirdness, but that one really stood out.

Also, I had regular encounters with sleep paralysis while living in that house. It stopped immediately after moving out. Saw some very vivid and strange things while unable to move, including a light hovering over my head just past my line of vision, and shadows in human form. Sounds ridiculous to me now but I never forgot those things. BTW that house was well over a hundred years old.

[distantearlywarning]

26. As told to me by my mother, who was not particularly 'woo woo' in any way whatsoever

When I was very little, we lived way out in the country. One fall weekend, when I had just turned 3, my dad was putting in a large wooden rail fence around the property, which involved digging a number of substantial holes for large tree-trunk like fence posts. We were quite poor at the time, and anyway I'm not sure you could even rent augers and the like then, so he had to do each one by hand with a post-hole digger.

My father had been working all afternoon, and my mother decided to take him some lemonade. Not wanting to leave a 3-year-old in the house alone, she took me outside with her. As they were standing there chatting over the hole he was working on, I suddenly said, very forcefully and apropo of nothing they were speaking of, "Look out for the big rock, daddy!" My parents were quite startled and looked all around for what I might be talking about. My father looked down in the hole he was digging, but there was no rock to be seen, just dirt. They chalked it up to 3-year-old imaginary weirdness and my mother took me back inside.

20 minutes later, my father hit a big rock at the bottom of his hole. It was a seriously big rock, being approximately 4'x2', and it took him the entire next day to dig out it of the ground by hand so he could put his fence post in.

True story. (Although I don't remember it at all.)

My mother also claims that when I was a young child she was unable to hide presents or surprises from me, because as soon as she thought of whatever it was, I would suddenly start talking about it, or run off to go look in the closet it was hidden in or whatever. I remember some of these incidents - I never knew there was anything hidden from me, it was more like I just suddenly had an "idea" that I wanted something from that closet, or a "compulsion" to go see what was on that shelf or whatever.

[HopeHoops]

27. One of my ex-girlfriends.

[LibDemAlways]

28. Shortly after my dad died two years ago, I was

standing in the hallway of my home organizing some documents. As I stood there, I felt a hand placed firmly on my back. I thought it was my daughter and turned around to ask what she wanted. No one was there. I can't explain it, but I know what I felt.

[IDemo]

29. Yes

As posted elsewhere a while ago-

I've never relayed this story to anyone, friend or family. This seems like as good a place as any. If the woo factor makes you laugh, I'd probably be the first to join you. Except that it really did happen to me.

When I was about 12, the mother of my best friend across the street from us in Southern California had us experimenting with an Ouija Board-like device. It consisted of an arc of alphabetic characters on a flat board, and a wooden pendant on a thin chain. The intent was to ask "it" a question and allow the device to swing back and forth over letters to spell out a response. Like most everything at that age, it was a source of great fascination, but only for a short while.

My father died that summer and Mom moved us out of state, away from pendant-thing and friends. One day, about a year later, I remembered the device and thought I would attempt to duplicate its effects, even without the blessing of the game's manufacturer. I took a needle and thread, sat at my small bedroom desk, and focused. Sure enough, the needle began moving right and left. I tried to make it move in circles and it did. I then "made" it change direction. I felt an overwhelming sense within me as this was happening, and it wasn't a good feeling. Quite black, as a matter of fact.

Since I had always had an interest in science, I decided at least a bit of scientific method was justified. I taped the thread to the edge of the bookshelf to eliminate the effects of any subtle hand movements on the string. Still, it moved as I willed it to. I then covered my nose with a book to eliminate any possible interference from my breath, and again it moved. By this time I was worried about the effect the whole thing was having on me and didn't make any other attempts for many years.

About ten years later or so, I decided to try again just to see if the ability was still there. Nothing. Sorry I can't post a YouTube for you, but that was long before PC's and wouldn't be particularly convincing in this day and age anyway. I can't begin to explain the effect, how it happened or why.

[Denninmi]

30. Saw "UFO's" twice in the past 2 years, July 2010 and last July.

Orange lights in the sky, both years on a weekend evening in July, moving slowly form SW to NE, in groups of one to three, around 20 total each time, taking about 15 minutes to traverse the sky.

This year, my sister and her husband, who are both pilots, were here when they came, and they agreed with me that these were very unusual, due to the color, a bright amber orange, not like the the lights on any aircraft I'd ever seen.

I am very sure that someone out there, FAA or military, knows exactly what was flying through the Michigan sky in July 2010 and July 2011, I just don't know what it was.

[Tikki]

31. I've posted this here before...it's simply true...

...the company that my husband worked for offered a free family dentist...but it meant driving 75 miles round trip from our Ventura County home down into the San Fernando Valley (the SF Valley covers 464 sq miles and has a population of a million+)

After a trip to the dentist the boys begged me to stop by an In-N-Out for a hamburger...this franchise hadn't made it's way up into our neck of the woods yet, but, there were three or four in the Valley.

Not real familiar with the SF Valley, I wasn't sure but decided that I remembered there might be an In-N-Out a couple blocks over from the dentist's office. I made a couple wrong turns trying to find it..but then I saw the store sign ahead of me. As I was heading down Van Nuys Blvd my oldest son yelled..."STOP MOM, TURN AROUND, GO BACK...that's uncle Larry walking back there."

Larry isn't actually his uncle, but my son remembered him as someone close to the family. We had completely lost touch with Larry. It had been over four years since we had heard from him and we had finally quit asking other's if they knew where to contact him.

I told my son that it just couldn't possibly be Larry, it must be someone who looks like him and that the odds of us seeing Larry walking down the street on this day in huge San Fernando Valley were astronomical.

"If you won't turn back then let me out of the car and I'll walk back there and get my uncle Larry" my son said. So I drove back by... and I guess you know you what was what...

We have never lost touch with him since.

Tikki

[Pied Piper]

37. Couple of things

When I was in college, lamp posts used to turn off (or on) when I walked past. During my undergrad years, I would walk home to the dorm late at night. There was this one particular lamp post - every time I walked past it, it would turn off or on, depending upon its current condition. At first you don't notice these things, but then they become a pattern. After I left that school, it didn't happen for awhile. When I moved to a new city, it started happening again, although not with the same frequency.

My roommate and I had a pact about not smoking in the apartment, but we had a back porch that was ok. One winter I went out to the back porch, but it was covered in snow and I was in stocking feet, so I opened the door and hunkered down in the hallway for a smoke. When I was finished, I reached out to shut the screen door (which swung outwards), and it magically came towards me and closed. No wind.

The same roommate had three cats. They were HERS, and they knew it - they would only sleep in my room if she was out of town. The little boy cat, however, took a shine on me, and would occasionally hop up on my bed in the middle of the night to hold inspection. He never stayed long, only checking things out. Years later, she was no longer my roommate, and all three cats had crossed the rainbow bridge. I was living on my own, but every so once in awhile at night I could feel him jump onto my bed to check up on me. He hasn't come back to see me now that I have two cats of my own. I like to think that he just wanted to make sure that there was a feline presence in my life!

[XemaSab]

44. When I was little (like 7)

I had 4 or 5 dreams about the jungle in southeast Asia.

There were poor people living in rusty shacks, and there were scary animals and scarier people in the jungle. :scared:

I know it was Vietnam, but I don't know how I know that.

[Ikonoklast]

45. In my early teens, I could predict what song was going to be played next on the radio.

Not every time could I do more than one or two, but once in a while I could go on streak and do four or five in a row.

I thought that it was because that there was a set play-list, and that the songs were played by the DJ in the same order every time, and I had somehow subliminally memorized the order but that wasn't the case, as the order was never the same.

I would get a 'feel' that the next song just had to be the one I thought it was, it was very definite, and very clear.

One time I was at a friend's house with a few other people over, I ran off five in a row correctly, and seriously freaked out one of the kids that was there.

He started crying, I think I scared him.

[frogmarch]

48. I’m an atheist who

also doesn’t believe that Jesus ever existed. However, during an episode of sleep paralysis, Jesus appeared (some people see aliens) and told me he was going to cut out my brain. I gradually fell back into a deep sleep, and when I woke, the paralysis was gone, and so was Jesus. My brain seemed intact. I got a big kick out of analyzing that hallucination, dream, or whatever it was.