five things i don't admit i've seen

Niece's books arrived. SGA S3 arrived (stolen by Child almost before box was opened). Had long, surreal discussion with coworker about precognition, dream interpretation, and waking sleep.

This is always a problem for me personally, because I tend to live anecdotally--this is why you will rarely hear me talk about aliens, ghosts, predicting the future, or weird coincidence outside fic. It's hideously uncomfortable because it's unquantifiable. I don't mind my religion being unquantifiable or unprovable--that's kind of the point--but when dragging out how one's baby sister apparently had a discussion with Grandpa a couple of hours after he died is one of those things that I feel requires some amount of alcohol, a very late night, and someone having lost deeply at poker.

I miss big holidays with my family when it was extended. Those were good times. And if you were very small and hid outside the dining room, you would learn far more about Uncle Bob after his demise than you ever wanted to know.



Like I said, hideously uncomfortable.

1.) Alien ship. Three, actually, but two I can't be sure of due to age, so I tend to only claim one.

It was late, and we lived in the country, and it was night, which already proves I'm totally right because X-Files taught us all that if you are going ot be kidnapped and you are not Scully, these are the requirements.

It was late one night, as nights do, and I was at my bedroom window. from there I could see the road that intersected with my street about an eighth of a mile to teh west. I was a sulky teenager and having that thing where I stared at the window at odd hours and hated everything. I'm fairly sure I had Bon Jovi playing in teh background.

Anyway, I watched a pair of whitish headlights come down the road. Nothing new. In fact, if I'd stood up at any time before the last moment, I never would have known anything had been odd. What made it odd was about--hmm, one hundred feet from the intersection, the lights took flight.

I have never claimed to be quick on the uptake. I watched the dark line of the road and went through every possibilty, up to and including the very real possibility I was asleep. Except I wasn't, and my stereo played on and nothing changed in the five seconds that lapsed between the moment I saw what I'd seen and the now except for everything.

Except nothing did.

I also never, ever discuss this after nine at night. And never when I'm in the country. Or when I'm sober. I am blaming the Wendy's breakfast food. It was intoxicating.

2.) Ghosts - I've never seen one in whole, and I'm not sure that's even the word for what I see. I don't even claim I can be sure they're ghosts--from nine at night until around seven in the morning, they *arent'*, because I live in my head and my head and I don't want to deal with that. But sometimes, there's a flicker on the edge of vision, like watching a pond ripple when a fish touches the surface. It's so ignorable, and so easy to pretend it's anything else. My vision's bad, it's been a long night, I'm tired, I'm moody, it's the wind, it's the air conditioning, it's a million thing but this one thing that I always know when I see it, recognize when I feel it. It's not cold and it's not dark, and I don't think it even knows I'm there, or if it does, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't scare me until after, when I turn on all my lights and worry I'll see it again.

I don't know why that scares me, except for the fact it doesn't scare me at all.

3.) Precogntion and Deja Vu - my coworker and I were discussing theories of de ja vu and my most weirdly frequent dream-theme, which is repeating the same action over and over until I get a differnet response. No, seriously. I don't always remember what they are--I rarely do, but I remember stopping during the dream and saying, no. Not this way.

It's an insane dream, always, with like dragons and vampires and people with improbable eighties hairstyles--but I'll stop halfway through and say, no, do it again. And I'll start from Point A, trying this time to see if I can change it, what I can alter to make the outcome what I want. It's been hours of dream-time or sometimes years that I'll walk the same path and try every fork, going as far as I can before I turn back because I know that I have to find another way, this one, this one's wrong, and sometimes, I don't know why it's wrong. I don't even know what the outcome is supposed to be. And most of the time, I'll wake up exhausted and grumpy and wondering what happened, just knowing that I must have found it, whatever it was.

I'd say it has a lot to do with my deep seated desire to control everything coupled with laziness that tends to make me seek out people who will do it for me while I prod.

Except for this.

I'll read a book. Start a conversation. Step onto a plane. Walk into a room, a building, a park. And there's a second of vertigo and something like euphoria, and I think, now. I've done this, said this, and I don't know if it ever shows on my face or in my voice, but I know you'll say this, I know that if I do this, this happens. I know and I think I've been waiting for it, and then five seconds, five minutes, it's over and I have no idea what just happened. And sometimes, I won't even believe it did. I don't even remember why I cared, if I smiled and said hi. Nothing ever comes of it--I didn't meet my soulmate, gain a fortune, save the world, helped an angel get its wings. I kind of think once I actually sprained a toe during my Great Moment of Have Done This, and I have no tolerance for pain, so really.

But I never stop feeling something did.

And it's deja vu, of course it is, except....I wonder if I've done it before, in a dream, dress rehearsaled my life, this moment that I never knew was signficant, worked it over and over until the outcome matched, until the events lead to this insignificant moment that was so hugely important that my own mind made me go through it a hundred times to get it right, ground it into me so thoroughly that I lived five second or five minutes by roat and reflex becuase it was so important I couldn't be trusted to do it right otherwise.

Or conversely, after, I blink and wonder if the point was this was my last chance to change it.

4.) I used to talk to myself a lot. I still do, but most of teh conversations I'd carry on in my head, because one looks a lot less insane that way. But there's this point in my life where I think I used to have someone talking back to me.

I can't even prove that one, not even in my memories. Like my claustrophobia, my fear of heights, it's this feeling that I missed something, something big enough to fingerprint me and never feel it.

5.) Coincidence is random serendipity, I know this. In a chaotic universe, it happens. It's never huge and magical and strange and it's always ordinary and I never wonder until I do.

I don't have examples, because it's commonplace and it never matters until one day, it does. Sometimes its coffee and cookies and sometimes its class and sometimes, someone calls and asks me a question that I just read, wants a book I have. Sometimes, we're at my grandmother's and need a left handed woman's golf club that she picked up at a garage sale last wek in a box of books that include three Anne McCaffrey I hadn't read before.

I don't even know what to say about that one.

6.) BONUS ROUND: this isn't even supernatural, but it's odd.

Every once in a while, when I'm reading, when I'm writing, when I'm crocheting, talking, laughing, I'm cold sober and suddenly I'm euphoric. It's more intense than any drug I've ever taken, and this is up to and including the magnificent stuff they gave me at the hospital during that thing where they stuck the camera down my throat and I fell deeply in love with the universe.

Sometimes it lasts for minutes or hours--when I'm writing, I can keep it going for nearly a day if I don't eat and keep the caffeine. I know it's physiological in some way, my body doing something new and hormonally strange and I have no objections, because it's rare and it's good and I have never objected to such gifts.

Euphoria. I've done it on vicadin and ephedrine, I can induce it with ritalin but don't because I need it for it's *purpose* and I won't screw that up; I can do it with alcohol and I did it a few times with pot and once with LSD before that thing with paranoia and tasting colors hit me so hard that to this day, I do think i'd probably try to jump off something very high rather than live one hour that way again. But it's nothing like that at all. It's soft and warm and bright and I'm absolutely certain, sure, there's no doubt that everything is okay, that it will be, and I---I don't want to just feel it. I want to share it. I wnat to do things, like clean a house or write a novel or crochet a blanket, talk to a friend and tell them what I am absolutely certain that all this time they have needed to hear, buy gifts and go running, make sure that this second isn't wasted.

There are others, but they delve far into the things-that-have-happened-when-I'm-not-really-sure-they-happened-or-I-did-imagine-them.



It's still so--I keep reading back and thinking about how I feel as if I should be reporting to Area 51 clubs.

So. Wanna share?

Comments

[goffelluv.livejournal.com]

I love reading about all of the "odd" things that happen to other people because their accounts usually give my memory a little jumpstart when it comes to strange things that's happened to me. I've never had any aliens experience (suburban gal here) or an experience of knowing what was going to happen but I've had the odd deja-vu moment where a new place looked entirely too familiar for comfort. I was going to babysit some young kids down the street when I was 13 or so and had never been in their house before, but when I stepped into the little girl's bedroom I instantly recognized the bed and all of the furniture's position in the room. I don't remember exactly what the colors of the room were now - everything has that kind of ghostly foggy non-color thing in my memory - but I remember the feeling of "this is familiar and creepy" and the bed even now.
I've also had the out-of-body experience a couple of times both when I was actually passed-out and when I was trying to in order to prove some point on astral-projection or something. Passing out and coming "back" into your body convinced that the doctors are actually giant carrots is really freaky.
But I think the weirdest incidences of something "else" happening was in a bunch of people. I was doing a spring vacation workshop/school thing on, well, various methods of fortune-telling when the physics teacher who was holding it got around to reading my tarot (I'm not very good at it). This other guy, Foris, who was a sort-of friend of mine was also there along with a bunch of other people from the class. Everything was really unexceptional until the card representing my current problems was turned over - Foris had been bugging me for the entire day about something that I don't remember now and we had had a large fight over something earlier too and now he was pestering us about the "realities" of tarot reading, generally being a pain in the ass - the card was the page of cups or something but the picture in the particular deck McGarie was using was of a blonde boy in a vivid green tunic. Foris was blonde, wearing his customary green sweatshirt and my current problem, that shut him up for a few hours.

[lexstar29.livejournal.com]

Intriguing subject this, I will wake up in the night sometimes to get a drink and as I leave my room I catch sight of myself still lying in bed, then I get a weird feeling of being light then I'm just standing there and there's no weird bed echo anymore! Also I used to see odd things like you mention, apparently when I was a kid, about 4, we were standing outside a house my parents were going to buy, they opened the front door and I told them someone was hanging there and we wouldn't be happy in the house. They didn't buy it as I wouldn't go in. Years later I met a girl who had a very tragic and unhappy family life, I went to a sleepover at her house, couldn't settle and was cold as ice, so my mum came to pick me up, that's when she told me the story. Yep, it was the same house I'd said was an unhappy place.

I dont know what I think, I just let it be what it is, things like that still happen to me now sometimes. I don't really mind any of it, though on New Years Eve I dreamt about someone I knew dying in a car wreck and they did so that night the exact way I dreamt it, so that freaked me out. It's an interesting subject, I'm not afraid of it or ashamed but yeah, I wouldn't talk about it with most people.

[twistedchick]

1. Possibly. I am not sure. I *know* that in 1973, in the winter, I saw something with a specific pattern of lights following the car I was in, on the main road between Watertown and Potsdam, NY, very late at night. It sped up, it slowed down, it got farther away and closer, and then it took off at a weird angle, sort of diagonally (can't quite describe it.) I have been told that it might have been an experimental helicopter from Plattsburgh AFB, and it's possible. However, I can't account for the fact that it made absolutely NO noise or that it took off at an angle that I've never seen any human-made aircraft take.

2. Yep. A lot. As in, whenever I'm near a battlefield (which are all over this Civil War-obsessed area.) And at the Vietnam War memorial on the Mall, where there are a lot of Rangers standing around, hanging out, as if keeping watch at the Wall. I'm not the only one who has seen them. The Rangers don't react to other people, which is probably good.

3. Yes. Too many examples to list. Mostly mundane, but for some reason those feel important.

4. Definitely. And I don't just mean in the "I'm talking to the muse that's helping me with this story" way. For about two and a half years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had a kind of mental contact that I can't easily explain with someone in another city (could have been Toronto or Seattle, there was definitely a Skylon-type tower visible at times out the window.) Sometimes he was in my head watching, sometimes I was apparently able to see him somehow or hear his thoughts. I can't explain. We didn't really converse that much, but I was aware of him until I got a flash of him having dinner with a woman and saying, "I used to have this weird thing where there was this woman I felt like I was talking to, but I got over it." And since then, nothing. A blank in that space.

Also, the morning my aunt died, when I had to work the night before and couldn't get to the city where she was, I was awakened by her calling my name. I found out later that she had been moving in and out of lucidity and looking to see who was there.

5. Yes. And the cats get involved too. I am thinking of something, and one of them will walk past the thing I'm looking for and look at it.

6. Yes. I think it's a gift; most often it has happened for me either just after or just before something that was horribly difficult, and the memory/experience helped me get through. But sometimes it just happens.

[druidspell.livejournal.com]

I get deja vu and recurring dreams so often that I sometimes feel like I'm living my life through the lens of a film I saw a thousand times ten years ago. I get premonitions, too--bad feelings, times when I know that this needs to happen or that never will, and sometimes I can change things from what I saw, and sometimes I can't, but there are a lot of things that I know are going to happen before they do.

I've never seen a ghost that I remember, but I know that I used to have conversations (to all appearances with myself) and someone outside of my head would answer.

There are some things that I've no right or reason to know, and know anyway, and if I concentrate a little harder than normal, I can read people like books. And if I'm not actively thinking about not seeing them, I can see people's auras, can tell what they're feeling by the way the air moves around them.

[scarletts-awry.livejournal.com]

Number two happens to me all the time.

[justascream.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, man. I could tell you...so many many many stories and then leave and remember more that I forgot to tell. I'll just tell the longest one though... I'll have to post it in two parts.

Before I moved to where I live now, I lived most of my childhood/adolescence in a house in the middle of nowhere, west Texas. The people who had sold us the house were the grandchildren of the couple that had lived there last. I don't feel comfortable sharing their surname, but the couple's first names were Virginia and John. Virginia had been a semi-successful cosmetician and hair stylist in the middle of nowhere, as much as one can be successful in a land where nobody has money and everybody owes more money than they'll have in their lifetime. Her salon was right next to the house, cinder-block bricks and cheap wood paneling, built after they'd gotten the house. It was a perfect square and only 10 feet by 10 feet. Practically a storage shed rather than a salon, but it worked for her business, since customers came by so casually.

After their children moved out, John got sick. It was one of those diseases that old people get a lot, something that made him weak, warped his legs in some way, and he ended up wheelchair bound. Virginia was still very healthy and lively though, and kept up her business.

One day -- and nobody's really certain on the details -- one of John and Virginia's sons came by to check on them because nobody had been answering the phone for two days. What he found was John lying on the floor, his wheelchair having apparently been tipped over, and crying when he saw his son. In the next room was Virginia, her head bashed to pieces by some large object that they never found. Whatever had happened had happened early the day before, and John had apparently been lying next to his tipped wheelchair ever since. He never spoke again, and they took him to live with one of his sons, bulldozed down Virginia's salon, and nearly a decade later sold the house to us. Nothing was ever figured out in the whole case, no evidence whatsoever except an apparently thoroughly traumatized, disabled old man and a bloodstained carpet. No fingerprints, nothing.

We didn't get to hear this whole story when we bought the house and fields surrounding it to add the property to my grandfather's expansive cotton field collection. They hadn't replaced the carpet Virginia died on, but rather only cut out a huge section of it that had been bloodstained and patched it with a piece of a different carpet. We were rather poor then ourselves, and so didn't replace this "ugly patchwork carpet" either. As country kids are want to do, my siblings and I dug around in the orchard and fields and such around the house a lot, making green plastic Army Men battlegrounds and so forth. We found all sorts of neat bits and baubles over the years, including many hundred-year-or-more-year-old antiques like pocketwatches and china plates and other assorted gadgetry and nonsense. One of the things we found, at the one-year mark of our residence or so, was one of those styrofoam hat-heads. The plain ugly white ones that have very simplified features and no eyes to speak of. It was buried with an old purple lady's Sunday hat that had rotted and we threw out.

The hat head, however, we put on a shelf in the bedroom my sister and I shared, and tossed hats and headbands and that manner of things on it.

[justascream.livejournal.com]

Shortly after that, odd little things started happening. First, it was my sister and I both waking up in the dead of night at the same time and seeing what we would swear up and down (though naturally nobody believed) were a pair of unearthly bright blue eyes across the room in the dark. We'd blink, they'd be gone. My chemically-based insomnia was starting around this time, and so I slept less and less and stared across the room more and more, waiting for blue eyes. I don't know why, but somehow it never once occurred to us that the eyes were exactly where the hat head was when the lights were on.

Then the doors. The front door of the house was a huge heavy wooden thing with a good solid knob and lock. It had good air sealing and such. But it started to open itself and then SLAM shut. It took us a while to notice that this only seemed to happen when only two people were home and one was in the kitchen while the other was in the next room, the den/living room. In west Texas, there is naturally phenomenal winds, so we tried to explain it off on that despite knowing the door was locked, knowing the air seal was good.

Then my baby sister, then very very small and young, started having conversations with the mirror in the back bathroom of the house. We would ask who she was talking to, and she'd just grin that little-girl grin and say something about "she's helping me with my hair". We assumed she was playing make-believe, as all of us were very actively imaginative kids who liked to play such games with one another still.

And then she named the "she" helping her with her hair. Virginia.

There was a repeated, bizarre incident with a closet in the back room adjoined to that bathroom as well. We would hear a bird singing, hear beating wings, and trace it to that closet. We would open the closet, and out would fly a bright yellow canary. We caught it with butterfly nets to release or shooed it out the window. Wild canaries are not unheard of in west Texas, but they're still very rare. So when this happened three times, and each time we could never figure out how they got into the closet, it started to prove worrisome.

Theorizing that perhaps there was some fault with the back room that we were unaware of, my grandfather got in touch with the family that had sold us the house. Grandpa was unaware of all the weird things that had been happening at the house, and unaware that my baby sister had named a make-believe woman Virginia, but he had idle conversation with the sons in the manner of middle-of-nowhere Texan farmers, just prattering on about families and their stories and such. One of their stories, of course, was that of Virginia.

Grandpa repeated the story to us next time he was over for dinner, and then said he'd have someone by to check out the back room for us. We kept our mouths shut about the weird things and the make-believe woman still.

[justascream.livejournal.com]

(Okay fine, three parts.)

That night, my baby sister woke me up and said Virginia was in a bad mood. My siblings often came to me with nightmares, so that wasn't too new, but...she hadn't heard the story earlier that day. I let her into my bed and she went right to sleep, but I kept waking up restless, and seeing blue eyes across the room.

In the morning, my mother asked us who had been slamming the door at four AM, my brother complained that there was another bird in the closet, and my second sister claimed she'd seen blue eyes across the room during the night even without me having told her that I had as well. My baby sister was oblivious to how freaked out we all were, back to a good mood.

The next day, I skipped out of school early and biked home and Mama and I went to the home improvement store over an hour away from where we lived. We got sanders and everything you'd need to make a wood floor, and by the time my siblings got home from school, we'd ripped up the carpet in the den, where Virginia had died. We found a huge section of the wood floor under the patchwork part to be stained a sickly rotted-like color. But oddly, by the end of the day and only a little sanding, it was completely gone. It took us two months of non-stop work to get the wood floors all finished throughout the house. My mother gave the hat head to a farmhand that had worked for my grandfather since she was little, and he did some odd ritualistic burning thing with it that I suppose is something you'd see in very rural and superstitious portions of old Mexico.

We went digging through the pile of rocks that had been dumped on top of the foundations of Virginia's bulldozed salon. We found over two dozen fancy hats, many of them purple. They were in surprisingly good condition, apparently protected by all the rocks from the elements somehow. We boxed them up and sent them to John's sons, and they called to let us know they'd given them to John and he seemed very happy to see them.

John died one week later. The door stopped slamming, the canaries left the closet, and the blue eyes stopped burning into our skulls from across a dark room.

My baby sister kept having conversations with Virginia when she was alone in the back bathroom for one more year, and then it was as if she'd entirely forgotten Virginia ever existed.

Nobody in the family talks about it, and if someone does, everyone quickly changes the subject. I think I like to remember it.

[an-kayoh.livejournal.com]

I've had frightening accurate dreams before, but I think I've managed to rationalize them.

See, I have a lot of "empty" time: time while I wait to go to sleep, time while I knit, while I'm walking to class or the grocery store, when I eat in the cafeteria alone. And I send that time thinking "Okay, so what if I do this and say this to her? And then she says such and I respond with this. What if such ever happened? What would I do first? What would be the most improtant thing to do?" and so on and so forth.

I think I spend so much time doing this that it isn't surprising for it to seep into my dreams. Also, I rarely have weird, otherworldly, trees are orange and the sky's red dreams. Most of my dreams are of myself living my life, with one major difference. Sometimes I win the lottery. Sometimes someone has died. I actually be sad for up to a half hour after I wake after that one, before I realize that so-and-so id still alive.

[fyrdrakken]

Coming a week late to this conversation, but this is pretty much where I am, too: I spend a lot of time in my head, and then tend to have dreams that are either banal or that sneak the weirdnesses in so that they're no more bizarre than things that I see happening IRL, so that I really do sometimes have that moment of disconnect later in the day realizing that, "Oh, that didn't really happen..."

[niqaeli]

I'm not drunk and I'm talking about this publically where people I haven't sussed out can see it. Huh.

Anyway! First things first: I am energetically sensitive or whatever the hell you want to call it. I can work with energy and set up constructs; mostly I use it professional as a massage therapist and I'll tell muscles on a cellular level to chill out and relax as *well* as doing the regular massage strokes and therapy.

Okay, so, I met this girl at a con, once, and she was kind of cute and seemed pretty neat and in the back of my head alarm bells were ringing but I ignored them because, what the fuck she was nice and... okay, not normal, but she was interesting, right? And there was no clear *reason* for those alarm bells.

Then she wanted to mentor me in energy-work and the alarms went off again some more, especially as she started talking about how a Dark Mage was out to get her and that she'd had a Traumatic Past Life experience that was killing her slowly--I didn't really follow how the hell that worked and didn't really want to--but I ignored the warning bells some more, and she charged up a ring with said Traumatic Past Life and told me to dump the ring's energy to ground. Which I did easily enough. Then she charged it up with boffer skills (which, um, if you don't know, boffing is fighting with swords and such made of PVC wrapped in foam) and said "Let your shields drop and just let it in!" and I went "...oh, hell no," and drained *it* to ground too because I don't let *anyone at all*--including my fiance--in my shields like that.

So, anyway, the point of this story: the next day, we wander up to her and are hanging out--and yes I really should've known better by this point. Just... I was young and stupid, okay? So, she goes into the fakest looking seizure I have ever seen--and I have seen real seizures in person--and while I am sitting there trying to decide whether to call her on it or go and call for help, she comes out of it, opens her eyes, and says in a bizarrely deep voice "Oh, when will [girl's name here] stop playing little bits?" and apparently I was said 'little bit'.

At which point I said, "Yeah, I need to go find my other friend, KTHXBAINOW," and left the room post-haste. And then walked down the hallway at a damn brisk pace. And instead of waiting for the elevator, I took the stairs and *ran* down them as she followed me, and proceeded to put half the hotel between her and me.

To this day I have no idea if she got her ass possessed by a dark Mage (whatever the fuck that is) or if she was MPD and crazy or if she was just pulling shit on me. I... kind of didn't want to find out for sure either way! And thus I avoided her the rest of the convention.

And this is how I learned that you never ignore the warning alarms that are going off in your head even when there is no obvious reason for it. Or especially when there is no immediately obvious reason for it.

[notpoetry.livejournal.com]

I get weird deja-vu, but not about anything important -- I know what people in my classes are going to say, word-for-word, before they say it, or what my roommate will do as soon as she walks in the door. And it's weird, and ordinary, and right before it happens I feel funny. It's usually things that I've dreamed about that I remember right as they start happening and then I can predict what will happen for the next five minutes or so. It's bizarre. I wish it were something exciting and useful, like predicting car crashes and saving people, but, nope. Just lame discussions in class.

[dkwilliams.livejournal.com]

1) Saw a UFO when I was a student at University of Oklahoma - a group of us were waiting outside the campus theater for the police to escort us for bank deposit drops (we did ticket sales) when we saw a bright, still light in the sky, then a smaller light appear and descend below it. Both pulsed for a few moments, then the little one zipped away east and the big one went straight up like zoom! We stared at each other in disbelief.

2) When I was a kid in elementary school, I used to wake in the night to the smell of my grandfather's pipe tobacco. Except he died when I was 3.

3) When I was pregnant with my eldest, I came home one day to a quiet house (my now ex-husband was at work), and decided to take a bath because it had been a long, rough day. I fell asleep in our large jacuzzi tub and only woke when I heard my dad say "Diana! Wake up!". I woke to find only my nose above water. My dad had died six months earlier, the house was still empty, and no TV or radio was on.

4) My daughter was supposed to have been born on July 18th. Instead she was born unexpectedly on July 9 - on the 4th anniversary of my father's death. When she was born, she had his dark brown-almost-black hair (I'm blond and my ex had auburn hair) and his blue eyes - the only one in the family to have that particular ice-blue shade. She also has his independent, quirky personality.

[ceitie.livejournal.com]

I've never seen ghosts or UFOs, and I don't get deja vu very often. I did once have a dream that was so very disturbing that I remember it years later.

In the dream, there was a man sitting down and talking to someone. He had faint scars all over his face, as though he'd been burned but it had healed very well. I can't remember exactly what he was saying, just the sense that he was explaining something very calmly and methodically. And then at some point I realize that whatever he was explaining so reasonably was actually something bad, something horrible and insane, like hearing a Nazi lay out point by point why the Holocaust occurred.

The scene changed to a house with a room that was full of people lying unconscious on the floor, while the house went up in flames around them. The burned man was in the room, the only one not unconscious, and I knew he had set the fire. Another man ran into the burning house and started yelling at the burned man, asking him what he was doing, and the burned man was both euphoric and panicking, and trying to explain.

The dream ended there, and I woke up. I've had much worse nightmares before and since, it was what happened after I woke up that makes it memorable. I was just - frozen with something stronger than fear, with this horror. I couldn't bring myself to roll over and look over my shoulder, because I was dead certain that if I did I would discover that the world had changed. That something had shifted and everything had changed for the worst. Once the feeling faded a little, I got up and everything was fine. But I've always wondered since then if I actually felt something tip, like there were probabilities of the future in the balance or something.

[4amcoffee.livejournal.com]

I get premonitions that are vague enough I should be able to write off, but happen often enough to give me pause. While I'm sure there is a completely logical explanation to this, I have yet to find it.

Now, I know you're going to laugh, because it feels so very Daytime Talk Show, but the thing is, from the moment I meet people as a couple, I know how it's going to end. I met my current roommate, and before I even knew her, or her boyfriend well, I could tell that he would end up leaving her to pursue his career. Sure enough, he did.

My old roommate, Ariel, had barely started dating this guy, I had never met him, bu she had told me about him, and I just *knew* that she was going to make this huge gesture, and he wouldn't be ale to handle it. I *knew* this, and I'd never even spoken to the guy. Sure enough, two weeks after she quit her job and moved 500 miles to live with him, he broke up with her.

My cousin went to Africa to become a missionary and came back pregnant. I'm not terribly close with her or anything, but I could see her whole relationship happening, without even knowing his name. She had the kid, he moved to America, they got married, he couldn't handle it, starts to cheat, and eventually she divorces and he drops out of the picture.

It's just weird, and hard to explain, and I would write it off as being good at reading people, but most of the time I've never even met one of he parties involved. And you have to understand, that except for the time my grandpa died and I knew the second the phone rang, before anyone even picked it up, that that's what had happened, and generally knowing who the phone is for the second it rings, I really *don't believe* in this stuff.

Umm...so, long way of saying that I know what you mean.

And the random serendipity freaks me the fuck out. I mean, it's genuinely creepy how accurate it is. I can have a song stuck in my head, and it'll be the first thing to pop up on my iPod in shuffle mode, or I'll develop a liking for a random small-time actor in something, and a week later I'll pick up a generic movie I've been wanting to see and Random McSecondaryActor will be in it.

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

OH god where to start?
Oddly with an explanation for your flying car.
I used to spend a lot of evenings sitting on a middle of nowhere type station platform - it was immediately behind my school but that was pretty much the end of town. Anyway I'd sit there watching the road that ran alongside, watching the headlights coming toward me and at the same time be watching the reflections of them *apparently* zooming toward me above the level of the school buildings (they were mostly 3 plus storeys) Now's the point where you tell me there were no bushes for the car to have driven behind *g*

I do a very nice line in first sight not often but *shrug* often enough. As husband works night that can sometimes wake me up in a cold sweat which lasts while I try to figure out what kind of dream I've actually just woken from...

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

nd now I have to add to the coincidence list *sighs* - just a small one after you doing this (http://seperis.livejournal.com/517337.html#cutid1) post the other day middle son has since come home with *reams* of work to do on Horror as a genre for media studies...

I mean I could put it down to it being nearly Halloween - maybe his teacher was trying to be seasonal or something :S

[ceares.livejournal.com]

My mother is pretty regular with the ghosties, and my best friend's dreams seem sligthy precog at times. My boss's family apparently has a history of the dreams when they are kids.

There is supposedly a ghost in our office. A girl was murdered there or brought there after her death, but that's where they found the body(I was working in the next office at the time, alone, at night, which is creepy enough). I've never seen her but many employees say they have, and we get the mysteriously unlocking door and various other noises sometimes.

[piplover.livejournal.com]

I've seen space ships and ghosts, and had a waking dream or something like that once.

With the space ships, I was at a camp sitting around the campfire with about 50 other people. A girl and I were both laying back, staring up at the sky when we saw about three stars suddenly start moving. They weren't like satelites that just go in one directions slowly, these suckers were weaving around each other and going every which way. We must have watched them for about ten minutes before they zoomed off.

When I was in Korea the barracks I lived in were completely haunted. Several of the guys said they had their lights turn on and off, the radio turn on and off, and one guy said he saw someone standing at the foot of his bed who vanished when he turned the light on. I woke up one night and there was a guy standing at the foot of my bed, and I thought someone had come into my room. I asked him who he was, and when he didn't answer I kicked him, and my foot went right through him and he vanished. It was actually kind of a relief that it was a ghost, because if it had been a real person I was afraid he would have attacked me. As it was, I think he was just lonely and wanted someone to notice him. I named him Ralph and every now and then he would throw things off the top of our fridge, like a new package of silverware, and make sure they landed on my roomy's head. I think he used to be a soldier because my post was literally at the base of a mountain where there had been a massacre of American soldiers during the war.

I don't know what to call this last one. My cat had got out and was in the neighor's yard, hiding in a bush. I was trying to get him to come out when I looked up and - everything was different. The houses were gone, the fences, everything. I was suddenly in a barren landscape, seeking something I couldn't remember. I don't remember feeling scared, only that something was really wrong, like I couldn't exactly remember who I was. I closed my eyes and thought really hard about how I wanted to be back home, and when I opened them again the houses were back and everything was back to normal. But that was one of the weirdest things I ever experienced.

Oh, I also had to pull guard duty in a haunted building in AZ. Myself and two Sgts were kind of freaked out because the lights kept coming on by themselves and doors kept opening or locking.

Good times.

[suzvoy.livejournal.com]

I like unquantifiable stuff :)

I knew when my sister had been in a car crash. The phone rang, I looked towards it and said, "Sarah's been in an accident." I was somehow absolutely certain. We picked up the phone and I was right.

[lovelokest.livejournal.com]

The house I grew up in, werid stuff happened (but only to me). Growing up, to get to my room, you had to go by the attic door and frequently I would dawdle at the top of the stairs and finally have to run past it because it felt so *wrong* to walk by it, other times I would be in the attic and feel a desperate need to get out. Also in that house my bed would shake when I was in it and one time when I got home (I was about 12) to an empty house, one of the dining room chairs was knocked over and up in my room the mattress of my bed was pulled away from the wall. Oh, and there was the time that I was playing up in the attic alone on one end (with my clock radio up there with me and on, only in the last few years have I been able to fall asleep without music of some sort) and on the other end about 25 feet away a brass urn fell from the middle of a built in cabinet.

After we moved to small town WI, some friends and I were at a rural cemetery doing a seance/meditation type thing and I lay back across a grave. After laying across the grave with my eyes shut, I saw bricks and an ax through a blood red filter and I don't see pictures when I close my eyes. We left very shortly after that.

Senior year, I went to a church retreat in Michigan where had they had laid out a canvas labyrinth identical to the one in Chartres Cathedral, down to the orientation of it. Before walking it, I had taken off my shoes and meditated for a while. Once I started to walk it, my posture changed and I started to walk on the balls of my feet with my hands steepled together and I was overcome with a sense of sadness. That faded after I meditated in the center and started to walk out. Once I was out, a friend and I played energy games with each other (eyes closed and palms facing forward, we would try and see how far apart our hands could get before we couldn't feel the energy. We also gave energy massages to each other. Later, a woman pulled me aside and thanked me, she had been walking the labyrinth behind me and had seen energy coming from my heels down to the floor like a rainbow.

When my palms are up, most of the time I feel a churing in the middle of them that moves down my wrists and if I cup my palms together it turns into a ball. For fun, I sometimes work on getting as much energy as possible going and move my hands as far apart as possible until it fades. I also sometimes ask friends to close their eyes and move my hands over theirs and ask if they can feel them. Usually they can and are really surprised to find that when they open their eyes, my hands are a good 3-5 inches away from theirs.

I can see a white outline around people, usually with a bit taping up over their heads. I can also see energy outlines around powerlines/animals/trees and occasionally when I look at the sky, I see a light beige tube kinda like one of those fingerknit tunnels going to the sky.

For a couple months after we had to put my cat Ruby to sleep, I saw a dark gray blur out of the corner of my eye at home, but that is the only real ghost-like thing I've seen. Most of the time I get feelings about places/people and I sometimes just know how an event will happen.

The first or second night after moving into my parents' business, I had a wave of warmth and welcoming wash over me on the third floor, next to the laundry room door. The pub creeped me late and night out and still creeps me out late at night(though I think that is more psychological thing, big empty room with lots of windows *shivers*).

When I saw my ex for the last time at the airport, I knew I wasn't going to see him again and we were still dating. A friend from school was going to visit me at college, and I couldn't imagine it happening in my head and it never happened. When I looked at our new apartment, I knew it was going to be ours, even though I was the only one viewing it. Ditto for my new car. When my Dad told me on the phone that a cousin had died, I knew which one even though he didn't mention it to me (was waiting for my Mom to get there).

[khyrra.livejournal.com]

An ex-boyfriend of mine saw what he was convinced was a UFO once. Out in the middle of nowhere, some countryside place, he saw a light traveling the sky, and assumed it was a satellite. Until it abruptly turned and sped off in another direction, in a way that human made objects just aren't capable.

I had a similar ghost experience once. I woke up in the middle of the night(I was young, probably no older than 10), with what I thought was my mother standing at the side of my bed. She occasionally woke up in the night to use the bathroom or something, and would stop in to my room and check on me. I didn't have my glasses on, and even at that age my eyesight was pretty bad(now it's atrocious), plus I had that just-woke-up blurry eye thing going on. All I saw was a white person shape blur. My mother was fond of wearing white nightgowns to bed at the time, so I assumed it was her. I opened my arms, anticipating a hug, but the blur didn't move. Seconds ticked by, and I started to get freaked out. When I finally grabbed my glasses from the side of the bed and put them on, the shape was gone! Needless to say, this freaked me out and I got up and ran to my parents' bedroom and woke my mom, asking if she'd been in my room. I was even more freaked out when she told me no! I convinced her to come back to my room with me, but there was nothing there. She convinced me to go back to bed, explaining that it was just light from the window opposite my bed shining past me that I'd seen. I believed her at the time, but later realized that that just didn't quite work, as the light from that window hit the wall over the head board behind me, and the curtains on the other window in the room were closed. The whatever-it-was never came back again. I like to think it felt bad for scaring the crap out of me. :)

omg. really long. ><

[handsomespeck.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting and also very thought-provoking, and I think you've got it perfectly right about why it's difficult to talk about these kinds of things, what with not having the ability to prove it and all. I'm not really comfortable talking about it with people, and I really don't care what peoples' opinion of me is in any situation other than this, basically. It's weird. BUT: it seems like a lot of people do have these kind of odd things going on, so it's not so awkward here.

I get deja-vu a lot (once it persisted for a straight week, during which I didn't dream once. It was physically exhausting, feeling like I'd already done everything I was doing right at the moment, and it stopped when I finally told someone about it). Twice I've been able to recount entire conversations with people before the conversations were finished. The second time I'd written it down and stuck it in my pocket before the conversation was over, and then handed it to my friend, and it was word-for-word. That was a little creepy.

I used to see things in mirrors that weren't there, entire scenes playing out that were completely different. One I recall vividly was at a friend's birthday party, and I was washing my hands in the bathroom and saw two older men talking in a cement room instead of myself in the mirror. It never really scared me after the first few times it happened, and it never lasted long.

I remember nothing of my life before age five, and from ages five until twelve, everything is kind of blurry and indistinct, like a dream. Sometimes there are huge gaps of time that I don't remember anything from. I wouldn't think this was weird, but I'm only eighteen years old. It's not like five through twelve was that long ago. I'm told that there were a lot of bad things going on during that time, so maybe it's just a mental defense mechanism or something. However, I do have really vivid dreams that are sort of like memories, and it's kind of hard to tell the difference, except for the fact that they're evidently memories/dreams of people who aren't me.

I've always had animals, and that, coupled with being fairly poor and living in a rural area for most of my young life, sort of led to my feeling more of a kinship with nature than people (people let me down; my animals never did). I'd spend a lot of time in the woods with my favorite dog, sometimes spending the night under trees because I didn't really want to go back home, and there was a connection between the dog Chewie and the flora and fauna we came across and myself, and I always felt like I belonged out there more than where I lived. It was more than a wanderlust or freedom thing, because it would hit me hard and fairly often that I needed to stay outside, in the woods, with my dog, and the sensations were so strong I started wondering if maybe that was how it was in some other life I'd had previously. I also have a weird knack for not getting killed by wildlife when I probably should have, like I'd catch poisonous spiders and scorpions and snakes and never be bitten even though I'd only used my hand to grab them, even if they were really aggressive with other people. Which I always thought was totally awesome, because I was the only kid in the area who could snatch up a coral snake and walk around with it in her pocket.

[hoshika.livejournal.com]

When I was young, about three or four, I kept seeing a recurring light in the sky at night. It always wiggled around really fast. It was a very sharp pin-like light. So it wasn't a spot-light. I have no idea what it was, because I seriously thought up of everything. It couldn't have been a bug, because it was moving too fast. A weird reflection? Possible, but not certain.


My Deja Vu's are odd, very mundane typical life occurrences, but predicting the future wrongly. For example, I knew that someone was going to ask a stupid question in my math class and something was going to stumble against the cabinets after the question was asked. I waited patiently for it to occur and it didn't happen. It drives me crazy!

My theory for these odd Deja Vu's is that I dreamed of a similar situation and something in my classroom sparked or triggered the neurons in my mind to replay what I dreamed about to substitute for a odd Deja Vu. :shrug:

[monkeypumpkin.livejournal.com]

1) You know the Blackwater incident in Iraq? Not the most recent one, but the one before, the bad one, where they shot the son and mother for no reason. I knew, as soon as I saw the news, that the diplomat involved was my friend K. (I could use her name because it's in the media now, but I'd like to avoid google.) My husband thought I was jumping to conclusion because she hasn't been in Iraq that long, but that's not it. I knew.

2) My grandfather died when I was fifteen, about eleven o'clock at night. My mother was visiting my grandparents at the time. I was in bed, and I got up and told my father that grandpa was gone. Dad said that if anything had happened, Mom would call. Half an hour later, she did, and said that 30 minutes before, grandpa passed.

My grandfather really, really believed in ESP and the unknown capacities of the human mind, and I think he said goodbye to me.

[fyrdrakken]

I adore the stories people tell about ghosts or weird psychic events and what have you. Never had anything like happen to me, though (discounting the dreams that I don't notice are dreams, or the "predictions" that are just down to observation and inference and the subconscious librarian being up on her job).

Well, aside from the most spectacular incident of sleep paralysis I've ever had, involving a hallucinatory figure floating near the ceiling that swooped down and tried to strangle me. It creeped the fuck out of me (especially because I never woke up, so I couldn't classify it as a nightmare), but even at the time I decided it was some sort of hallucination brought on by stress + lack of sleep + a few too many history of vampires/ghosts/werewolves/what-have-you shows airing on the Discovery Channel in the week leading up to the incident. Something of a relief to learn about sleep paralysis years later and be able to actually put a label on the phenomenon. (I still occasionally get the paralysis, but I don't think I've ever had the hallucination or the inability to breathe again.)