http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x173543Oh my.
HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 11:22 AM
Original message
Have you ever had an inexplicably "supernatural" experience? If so, please share
It doesn't matter whether it was a religious or non-religious experience, I'm just curious. Perhaps this should be in the skeptics forum, but somehow I don't think it would be well received there.
As a generally skeptical person, there are certain life experiences I've had that I can't explain in any rational way that make me leave open the likelihood that there are things that not only can't science explain right now, but that won't be explained in our current scientific framework (although at the fringes, I think we're heading in a direction that will explain these things).
Anyway, when I was about 12, I was playing a game with my sister who was 3 years older than me. I don't know how this came up, but it was a warm summer night and we were playing on our front stoop. We have a very close relationship, and did at the time, but with the addition of that kind of love/hate you have with your siblings.
Any way, the game was that I would think of a number from 1 to 9 and she would try to guess what I was thinking.
This particular night she guessed 78 out of 80 times correctly. At first it was funny, but then it became scary. At first, she thought I was playing a trick on her by telling her she was right when she wasn't, but as I started getting serious, she realiized I was telling the truth. Moreover, her subjective experience was convincing her something strange was going on: she said she could just see the number carved into the side of my head as though it were a haircut. We started going faster and faster and it became kind of compulsive -- as though we couldn't stop, even though it was getting creepy.
The only two she got wrong were both times confusing a 6 for a 9 or vice versa. Eventually, we got scared and stopped and were never able to replicate that experience.
I've had some very, very weird experiences with indigenous religion in West Africa (ju-ju, or Voo Doo in the Western Hemishpere) but that's maybe for another post.
Catch22Dem (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 11:24 AM
Response to Original message
1. My cousin and I caught a voice on a cassette recording
We were kids and just fooling around with the cassette recorder, and when we listened back there was a barely audible, and very strange voice in the background. Don't know what to make of it.
HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 12:18 PM
Response to Reply #1
9. Holy "Sixth Sense" Batman!
The thing that's weird about that is you had physical evidence of something strange.
When I was in grad school, once, I had a few beers and was lying down listening to my stereo. When the record ended, I just was lying there with nothing playing. Suddenly I heard this voice -- like a southern African American voice talking through the speakers. It freaked me the hell out.
A few years later, I was home for the summer and the same thing happened, and I called my sister over and we listened to the voice coming through the speaker of my stereo.
Then we realized that somehow my stereo was picking up taxi cab to base transmissions. This was in the day before cell phones when cabs had these really strong radios that somehow could be picked up by stereos even when the receiver part was off. I have no idea how, but it used to happen. I realized that that was what had happened the year before.
Not that I'm saying that's what happened with your tape.
katmondoo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 11:47 AM
Response to Original message
3. Yes It was many years ago during my first marrage
My husband at the time was an alcoholic and I knew one day he would have an accident. It was about 10:00 o'clock at night I was working on a project not thinking of him just concentrating on my work when suddenly I dropped my paint brush (doing art work here) and said to myself "it happened". I became agitated and thought I should drive around and see if I could find him. I passed some bars and was about to give up when I felt just one more road and then that is it. I came to a police barracade and sure enough there was his car totaled, I tried to explain to the police why I was there but it was too wierd. Fortunately I had the registration to his car in my wallet or they would not have believed me. He was taken to a hospital and survived.
I have had several other weird experiences that can never be explained. Not lately though, these things only happen on occasion without warning.
ayeshahaqqiqa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 11:51 AM
Response to Original message
4. I've had several throughout my life
I've had precognitive dreams. I've had visions and senses of the underlying unity of everything (none under the influence of drugs; I have never used illegal drugs). The most interesting of these I feel are the tactile sensations I've had, such as the feeling of someone placing their hands in mine when no one was there. One occurred in a lit room with others around but not near enough to me to have touched me, much less hold my hands. The verbal message that accompanied this incident was rather interesting, as it said, "Something wonderful is going to happen. Nur."
Two days later I went to a retreat. One of the retreatants was a Sufi named Nur who was there to initiate people into his order. I had never heard of him before, and obviously didn't know he was going to be there. Oh, and another wonderful thing happened at that retreat. I met my husband to be. It was love at first sight, and we have been together ever since.
angrycarpenter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 11:58 AM
Response to Original message
6. my cousin lived with us for a while back in the 70s. She was having severe pain one night and claimed that her twin sister, whom she hadn't seen or talked to in a year, was having a baby. We all were skeptical until she showed up with her new baby a couple of weeks later.
I believe that under the right circumstances siblings can hear each others thoughts.
Th1onein Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 12:22 PM
Response to Original message
10. My son and I had a pact that he would come back and let me know, if he died (he had cystic fibrosis), that he was okay. He didn't come back to me, but he appeared to my boyfriend, who knew nothing about the pact, and told him to tell me that he loves me and that he is okay.
I don't know why he came to my boyfriend, but I am very analytical, and I would have taken this experience apart, bit by bit, until I didn't believe it anymore, if he had come to me. As it was, my boyfriend experienced this and his entire life changed; the way he treated people, the way he interacted with them, and his beliefs changed, because of this experience. He told me that he knew, because of it, that, without a doubt, there was a heaven.
ayeshahaqqiqa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 01:45 PM
Response to Reply #10
21. That is very neat
Interesting, isn't it, how that works. I had a pact with my grandmother that she would try and communicate with me after her passing. It happened, sort of--she came to me and didn't realize she had died. I had to tell her. She had the most wonderful expression on her face-amazement and joy at the same time. Only time I know that I was out of my body--came back into it with a thump. Something like that hasn't happened since, though I've sensed loved ones attending their own funeral and watching the proceedings.
HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 01:53 PM
Response to Reply #21
23. That's so true!
Shortly after my parents died, and I was regularly dreaming about them, one aspect of it was that they seemed confused that they were dead.
That is a central part of some indigenous African religions -- that the recently deceased probably will be confused about whether they are dead or alive, and in those religions, this is often a source of danger to the living.
Among the Tswana (iirc), if a virile young man dies before marriage, a kind of fetish object is erected on the road into the village, and that is to make the deceased believe that the object is his wife, so he will not trouble the women of the village.
kestrel91316 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 12:23 PM
Response to Original message
11. At work my employees have occasionally accused me of being psychic because I frequently predict exactly what one client or another is going to do or say and when, in advance of when they actually do it. I think it might just mean I have got some people totally figured out, but have to admit I am so accurate it is downright weird sometimes.
My niece used to always say who was calling on the phone and what they were calling for as soon as the phone rang (this was in the days before caller ID, lol). She did this until she was 6 or 7 and then I think the weird looks she got for being correct began to inhibit her.
The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was in 1994 when my very first cat died (euthanized for kidney failure). A few nights later I clearly felt HER jump onto the bed not long after I went to bed in the same way she always had. I even felt her walk briskly up toward my head. When I looked in disbelief, she of course wasn't "there". But I know she was there; I know what I felt; I wasn't even close to sleeping yet.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that my educated guesses about what is wrong with a patient as soon as I see them in the exam room are so often right on the money. Is it "diagnostic skill" based on education and clinical experience, or is there something else going on? When I get second opinion cases I often wonder why the heck the other vet couldn't figure out what is immediately obvious to me......
I dunno.
franksolich is deaf, and so doesn't hear anything.
But I've oftentimes impressed friends by replying as if I really know what the other person is saying.
Like it's a script in front of me, or something.
Actually, all it is, is that people are predictable, and life experiences discern patterns of how they're going to act, what they're going to say, nothing more than that.
aquart (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 12:26 PM
Response to Original message
12. Kennedy's assassination. Rattled me for years.
I have friends who flat out tell me I'm remembering it wrong. But I've never told it differently. And I've never understood it. I'm not a bit psychic.
My senior year of high school, I had early lunch and a long afternoon. My first class after lunch was history. Eating made me sleepy, and I put my head on my desk as I had many times before. While sort of awake and not, I saw an image of the Lincoln dream, which I had learned about weeks ago. That's where Lincoln comes to the Rotunda and sees a body lying in state and asks who it is. The guards says, "The President." It is said he had it some weeks before he was killed. I saw a Kennedy brother standing in the doorway of the Rotunda, with the light behind him so I couldn't see who...and he was looking at a coffin lying in state.
While that image was flashing thru my head, my teacher was speaking. The only part I heard of his sentence was "Kennedy was..." And a thought jolted thru my mind: "Something's happened to the President and nobody's told me?" which was just weird and disorienting, especially because that was the moment my teacher had had enough and threw me out of the classroom, to spend the rest of the period in woozy confusion in the department office. Then typing. Then...I was leaving typing heading to the far stairwell to go to earth science when the hallway erupted starting from the far end. A girl name Joan was grabbing people, shouting at them, and moving on to grab and shout at someone else, and the place was going insane with noise.
Finally Joan grabbed me and shouted "Kennedy's shot in the head and Johnson's shot in the arm!" and moved on to the next. As she was still holding me, though, my thought was very high school: "She's read my mind and she's making fun of me." Because it was CRAZY that a thought in my head had become true. But when I got upstairs and saw my teacher's face, I knew it was true.
My sister's explanation (SHE is the one this sort of thing would have been natural to) is that the shock reaction was so strong in Dallas that waves emanated out and I got hit by one. I'd happily buy that, except I sat down one day and figured out that my history class began a full hour before the actual assassination took place. Oh, and some months later I asked my teacher why he said "Kennedy was..." and he said he never mentioned Kennedy during that class.
HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Jun-01-08 12:41 PM
Response to Reply #12
14. I had an inflammatory experience like that I've never shared
For months before 9/11, I had this intense, intense recurring dream that Arab terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the Israeli Knesset. I must have had that dream 50 times.
A few weeks later I was in lower Manhattan when the 9/11 attacks occurred.
Obviously there are differences -- the Knesset isn't the WTC, and in my dream the terrorists were based in Sudan, not the U.S.
I have no explanation and accept it could just be coincidence.
franksolich has had a dream too, in fact twice, and it's described here in the DUmpster.
It's a big bonfire, and an eerily captivating one.
