Paranormal experiences of a sceptical atheist.

[MacabreMagpie]

Hey everyone. I’ve been a member for years but have never really posted much so I thought I’d share some of my experiences with you as someone who considers himself quite rational. I’ve kept them short so feel free to ask for elaboration if anything doesn’t quite track.


The ‘unreliable memories’ category

A couple of things that happened when I was a kid which I’m sure have been built up in my mind to the point I no longer believe they happened as I remember them, but I know I believed them to have been real at the time:

• Saw a character from ‘Guess Who?’ in real life. As in, I saw a 2D illustrated character animated in real life and peeping at me from behind a wall. As a side note, a friend I will talk about later who has shared some experiences with me also claims to have met a fictional character (Wurzel Gummidge) in the flesh when she was a child.
• I saw a flash of light in my childhood bedroom, kind of like a spark in midair and a small toy that I had lost (the kind you’d get in a Kinder Egg) dropped down from where the spark appeared.

The ‘shit goes missing and then impossibly reappears’ category

This is by far the most common phenomenon I have experienced and it always happened in my bedroom/studio space (I’ve worked from home as an artist for most of my adult life). I am, however, convinced that it is possible to look for something and get temporary item blindness so I have limited this to three examples that I feel defy that explanation. I have thought about taking photographs of a searched area when something disappears like this to prove it wasn’t there before when it reappears but, wouldn’t you believe it, it then stopped happening…!

• A sketchbook I needed went missing, searched my shelves, drawers and bookcases for 30 minutes with my mum before giving up, only to turn around and see the sketchbook on the floor in the middle of the room where we could not possibly have missed it.
• A bright orange set of stencils went missing from atop a solid black table. I went out and bought a new one only to find it there when I got back. There was nobody who could have borrowed or moved it and I don’t believe I would have had that “temporary item blindness” with a bright orange rectangle on a black table.
• Something went missing whilst I was in the midst of grieving the loss of a beloved pet and I broke down into tears of both grief and frustration whilst on the floor searching everywhere for it. When I opened my eyes it was on the chair right in front of me, as if “something” had taken pity on me and returned it. I could have simply dropped it there and not noticed but that seemed unlikely.

The ‘psychic friend’ category

I have a friend (who I met and have predominantly known online) who used to tell me that she would regularly get visions of something that was about to happen in the near future. I always sort of accepted it without necessarily believing her but there are two things that have occurred with her that I feel worth mentioning:

• I was in a deep depressive episode when she called me out of the blue and asked if I was OK because she said she had sensed something was wrong.
• She swears blind that she has seen a black shadowy figure in a hat in my bedroom, where most of what I’m describing happened, without apparently being aware that that type of entity is a thing.

The ‘night entity’ category

For most of my life I have experienced lots of strange noises in my bedroom when I’ve gone to bed. This has ranged from what sounds like tapping around the room to heavy objects falling over, only for there to seemingly be nothing out of place when I’ve turned the light on. The former has been heard by an ex-girlfriend, though she was aware of it beforehand so that could be confirmation bias. On two occasions I opened my eyes in the dead of night to see a black figure in my room when I was not experiencing any paralysis but may be explained by a dream bleeding through to waking life:

• A black spider, sort of the size of Rocky from ‘Project Hail Mary’ (though many years before the book) above my window which then crawled across the ceiling towards me before vanishing. This one terrified me so much that I scrambled to the other side of my bed and my heart was racing.
• Something I can only describe as the smoke monster from ‘Lost’ emerging from the far wall of my room, floating past me and then disappearing through the closed door.

So those are my experiences. What’s interesting is that they have basically stopped for the last 4 years or so and I honestly don’t feel like anything is “here” anymore, if it ever was. I never felt too scared of it and I would quite often react to noises in the night by turning over and saying “go away!” or (in the moments I did get a little freaked out) by visualising a gold light emanating from my mind and filling the room to chase it out. But I think the experience when I was grieving might have been the last thing that happened.



BONUS UFO EXPERIENCE!

Last year I was staying in a cottage in Y Felinheli where my room had a skylight. I got up sometime in the night, looked out and saw a silent bright light moving in a very angular fashion in the sky directly above me. It did a few right angles and then zoomed off diagonally before fading out, however I’m sure this was probably some form of experimental military craft as we were near an RAF base and were hearing stuff that we couldn’t see whizzing around all day every day.

 

[Burnt State]

The ‘shit goes missing and then impossibly reappears’ category

I'll address this and see if you buy into it or not as it's something that has happened to me so many times that I thought I was going senile. The thing you've lost you go looking for all over the house only to return to the place you started looking and there it is right in front of you, and usually where you thought it was supposed to be.

I got so freaked out by this that I ended up researching some neuroscience pieces around sight and vision and this answered a lot of things for me and made me feel like it was all just part of the basic human experience due to our limited sensory apparatus.

Explanation: human sight is not a one to one reality. You looking around a room is not something the brain is busy relaying in perfect detail as you see it. In fact 90% of what we look at is a prerecorded reality that our brain has stored from previous viewings. The fovea centralis - that narrow bit of focus our pupil gives us is the other 10%.

This gets combined with the fact that if we could hook our eyeballs up to a video monitor you would be seeing reality as Swiss cheese - lots of holes everywhere. The perfect 4D ultra hi def vision we get is a total construction that takes place in our brains. It's just basic biology.

So, my reasoning was that whole busy scanning for said object I was just missing it. I wasn't letting my brain focus on the specifics but busy scanning the room and I was getting prerecorded playback which that "missing object" was not part of so my brain tells me it's not there when it is. It's most common when it's a black remote control on a black coffee table, but I've also had this happen with high contrast images like a set of keys, or a cooking implement.

I know that this is hard to believe with such a high contrast image of orange on black, but let me tell you it happens all the time to people - it's just a minor hallucination. And I think it makes a lot more sense then items disappearing and reappearing like magic, or that your house has a trickster that's trying to fuck with you. Now when things go missing I slowly scan areas with specific focus. I lose a lot less stuff as a consequence.

 

[MacabreMagpie]

That’s exactly why I wanted to start photographing areas when I felt like something was inexplicably missing because I know my mental processing of the environment isn’t 1/1 accuracy and I think there have been one or two cases where I have been able to take photos but then the item has turned up in more of a “oh, that makes sense” location than, say, the sketchbook which turned up on an otherwise empty floor in the middle of the room (and missed/witnessed by a second set of eyes).

 

[Burnt State]

The ‘unreliable memories’ category

This is a very interesting category that I'm sure many also share in. 13-17% of kids between the ages of 9-12 experience visual and auditory hallucinations. I can name a number of them, though my favourite being the prolonged image of a neon Chinese dragon swirling and breathing fire at the end of my parents' bed while I was undergoing some high end fevers. The lights were on and I could see it clear as day, and I still remember the freaked out look on my father's face as I pointed wildly at what was for him an empty wall.

Childhood is a grand time of imaginings, distortions of reality and all manner of weird memories of what may have been real or a dream. However, the vision of that neon dragon and the pair of UFO's I saw four or five years later are etched into the memory files with great clarity. I would say that all the various extreme physical and emotional moments in my life involving near death events, the rare paranormal event and hallucinatory visions, are all remembered with as much precision as my eroding brain can muster. They certainly stand out much more than the mundanities of life.

I wouldn't trade them for anything.

 

[Red]

Hey everyone. I’ve been a member for years but have never really posted much so I thought I’d share some of my experiences with you as someone who considers himself quite rational. I’ve kept them short so feel free to ask for elaboration if anything doesn’t quite track.


The ‘unreliable memories’ category

A couple of things that happened when I was a kid which I’m sure have been built up in my mind to the point I no longer believe they happened as I remember them, but I know I believed them to have been real at the time:

• Saw a character from ‘Guess Who?’ in real life. As in, I saw a 2D illustrated character animated in real life and peeping at me from behind a wall. As a side note, a friend I will talk about later who has shared some experiences with me also claims to have met a fictional character (Wurzel Gummidge) in the flesh when she was a child.
• I saw a flash of light in my childhood bedroom, kind of like a spark in midair and a small toy that I had lost (the kind you’d get in a Kinder Egg) dropped down from where the spark appeared.

The ‘shit goes missing and then impossibly reappears’ category

This is by far the most common phenomenon I have experienced and it always happened in my bedroom/studio space (I’ve worked from home as an artist for most of my adult life). I am, however, convinced that it is possible to look for something and get temporary item blindness so I have limited this to three examples that I feel defy that explanation. I have thought about taking photographs of a searched area when something disappears like this to prove it wasn’t there before when it reappears but, wouldn’t you believe it, it then stopped happening…!

• A sketchbook I needed went missing, searched my shelves, drawers and bookcases for 30 minutes with my mum before giving up, only to turn around and see the sketchbook on the floor in the middle of the room where we could not possibly have missed it.
• A bright orange set of stencils went missing from atop a solid black table. I went out and bought a new one only to find it there when I got back. There was nobody who could have borrowed or moved it and I don’t believe I would have had that “temporary item blindness” with a bright orange rectangle on a black table.
• Something went missing whilst I was in the midst of grieving the loss of a beloved pet and I broke down into tears of both grief and frustration whilst on the floor searching everywhere for it. When I opened my eyes it was on the chair right in front of me, as if “something” had taken pity on me and returned it. I could have simply dropped it there and not noticed but that seemed unlikely.

The ‘psychic friend’ category

I have a friend (who I met and have predominantly known online) who used to tell me that she would regularly get visions of something that was about to happen in the near future. I always sort of accepted it without necessarily believing her but there are two things that have occurred with her that I feel worth mentioning:

• I was in a deep depressive episode when she called me out of the blue and asked if I was OK because she said she had sensed something was wrong.
• She swears blind that she has seen a black shadowy figure in a hat in my bedroom, where most of what I’m describing happened, without apparently being aware that that type of entity is a thing.

The ‘night entity’ category

For most of my life I have experienced lots of strange noises in my bedroom when I’ve gone to bed. This has ranged from what sounds like tapping around the room to heavy objects falling over, only for there to seemingly be nothing out of place when I’ve turned the light on. The former has been heard by an ex-girlfriend, though she was aware of it beforehand so that could be confirmation bias. On two occasions I opened my eyes in the dead of night to see a black figure in my room when I was not experiencing any paralysis but may be explained by a dream bleeding through to waking life:

• A black spider, sort of the size of Rocky from ‘Project Hail Mary’ (though many years before the book) above my window which then crawled across the ceiling towards me before vanishing. This one terrified me so much that I scrambled to the other side of my bed and my heart was racing.
• Something I can only describe as the smoke monster from ‘Lost’ emerging from the far wall of my room, floating past me and then disappearing through the closed door.

So those are my experiences. What’s interesting is that they have basically stopped for the last 4 years or so and I honestly don’t feel like anything is “here” anymore, if it ever was. I never felt too scared of it and I would quite often react to noises in the night by turning over and saying “go away!” or (in the moments I did get a little freaked out) by visualising a gold light emanating from my mind and filling the room to chase it out. But I think the experience when I was grieving might have been the last thing that happened.



BONUS UFO EXPERIENCE!

Last year I was staying in a cottage in Y Felinheli where my room had a skylight. I got up sometime in the night, looked out and saw a silent bright light moving in a very angular fashion in the sky directly above me. It did a few right angles and then zoomed off diagonally before fading out, however I’m sure this was probably some form of experimental military craft as we were near an RAF base and were hearing stuff that we couldn’t see whizzing around all day every day.

I've had a couple of time compression incidents, a couple of prophetic dreams, and I've seen a couple of UFOs. So welcome to the forum from another experiencer of weird stuff. FYI, I think Michael Talbot talked about having a similar experience to your kinder egg toy experience in his book, The Holographic Universe.

 

[Burnt State]

So welcome to the forum from another experiencer of weird stuff.

Experiencers appear to have our own incredible spectrum of character types from full on religious believers to the ultra skeptical. I fall into that more skeptical framework, but also know that paranormal events are a deep part of human history, as evidenced in our folklore and ongoing mysterious engagements. It's been a part of my reality so I know how jaw dropping it must be for experiencers who undergo deep intimate traumas with para-physical interdimensional terrestrials (Norio Hayakawa 's descriptor). Can you imagine being part of the Coombs family during the Ripperston Farm UFO incident in 1977?



For me personally, the UFO experience is what tipped the scales. It's caused me to read so many damn science articles in so many disciplines to try to both better understand the biologically fallible, and limited sensory perceiver that is the human being, as well as understand what is behind the curtain, being perceived, and how that interplay between something para-physical, (as I recently heard Norio Hayakawa describe the origin of these paranormal NHI) and our perceptions create the paranormal event experience.

A black spider, sort of the size of Rocky from ‘Project Hail Mary’ (though many years before the book) above my window which then crawled across the ceiling towards me before vanishing. This one terrified me so much that I scrambled to the other side of my bed and my heart was racing.

This so reminded me of Dennis Wheatley's short story, The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Your experience sounds utterly terrifying. It immediately brought to mind the descriptions of the spider hauntings in his black magic tayle.