Ask Lemmy

I saw a BMW, an Audi and a Tesla all use their turn signal in traffic, not once but every time they changed lanes! I swear it happened!

I once plugged a usb plug in on the first try

2016-2022

When my kid was around 2 or 3 years old, I was making him some food and told him that whatever he didn't eat, I'd put it in a plastic baggie for later. He suddenly started crying out of nowhere and asked him what was wrong.

"No plastic baggie!!!" he wailed. I asked him why not and he said "My old mommy, she put a plastic baggie over my head and I died!!"

Then he suddenly stopped crying, went to play with his cars like nothing had happened. I tried to get him to repeat what he had just said, but it was like he didn't even remember saying it or even crying just moments ago.

Now.. I'm not one to ever jump to conclusions on things like that, but this made me feel something in that moment. It was wildly out of character for him. I still think about it sometimes.

No. Anything that actually happens can't be paranormal by definition.

Even if it's ghosts. If ghosts were real, they'd just be normal.

I don't know about paranormal, but maybe just access to the savant part of my brain. A friend was counting a ziploc full of pennies and was about 10% of the way. I blurted out a number without thinking, and I was correct in the end. Not a small number either...something like 879.

I was at a friend's house. We were both in the living room talking and her baby was asleep in a rocker about 5ft in front of us in the open. We were talking about ghosts and weird stuff and she mentioned that her baby would sometimes stare into the distance and start laughing. Her theory was it was her grandfather, who was a very fun and funny person, visiting the baby. He unfortunately passed away right before the baby was born.

After she was done telling me about this, the rocker STARTED ROCKING. We both immediately looked at eachother and said "Did you see that!?" We were looking at the baby the whole time and he didn't move an inch so he couldn't have rocked it. The AC wasn't on, there wasn't an earthquake, and it wasn't prank. We couldn't find an explanation for it.

A relative of mine is into supernatural stuff. Like, ALL of it. Always offering crystals and essential oils to fix pretty much anything. I'm skeptical, but I listen, and when I think something is bullshit (which is almost every time), I politely say so.

This same relative teaches classes on how to communicate with spirits from beyond, and offered to do an automatic writing class just for the family. I'm curious, so myself and about 4 others agree to try. I'm expecting absolutely nothing out of this, but I will go in open-minded and see what happens.

If you don't know, automatic writing consists of a bit of meditation and you hold a pen to paper. You think your questions, and the "spirits" move your hand to write the answers.

I'm thinking about questions and my hand kind of drifts into random squiggles. I assume it's just natural fatigue, or fidgeting. After half an hour or so of pretty much nothing, I think "ok, let's reset, clear my mind, relax, and focus on one simple question." Most importantly, a question I can verify right here, right now.

How many pieces of fruit are in the fruit bowl?

I know there's a fruit bowl in the kitchen. I didn't buy the fruit, I haven't eaten the fruit, I have no possible way of already knowing the answer to the question, but I can find out very easily. Perfect.

How many pieces of fruit are in the fruit bowl?

I focus on this question and my hand moves a bit faster than it had up until this point. It slides to the right about 2 inches, and then down. It's a 7. I'm thinking pretty simple number to draw, could be coincidence that my hand just moved that way.

I stand up, walk over the bowl, and I count the fruit. And wouldn't you know... 7 pieces of fruit.

I'm skeptical, but I asked for something very specific and I got it, so I can't call it debunked.

After this experience, I attended another one of her classes, and actually got two more impressive answers. One being another "how many x are in y?" And when I asked if I would get a promotion that I thought was a sure thing, I got "no". So, I asked if I even wanted the promotion and I got "nononononono" I called bullshit at the time because, of course I want a promotion, and I thought I was the clear choice. But sure enough, I did not get that position, and a month later, somebody quit unexpectedly at an office that's 30 miles closer to where I lived and because I DIDN'T get the first promotion, I was eligible for this one, which I did get.

I don't know.

If you tell me you saw a ghost or an alien, I'm going to find 100 logical reasons why you probably didn't. Im not going to say that I channeled my dead grandpa to uncover secrets from the future, but something happened there and I don't know how or why, but it did.

We did some acid with my then boyfriend. When we went to sleep that morning, he couldn't sleep. He tossed and turned, still nothing. Then he had a sudden sort of "vision" of his friend in an unfamiliar room. He called him and described the room, turns out the friend was at his childhood home, visiting his parents. He described the room pretty clearly and his friend was flabbergasted - if thats the correct word. This is the one thing I could not explain, although had some theories on how acid might enhance the "receiver" part of the brain. There's not enough research done so that stayed as a theory. We did acid a bunch of times later, couple times just to experience something similar, but it never did.

I went from a state of none existence to scribbling small symbols on dried slices of plant because other monkeys who are supposedly in charge expect me to share a part of the colored bills i was rewarded in rerurn for being complacent in following orders by yet other monkeys who supposedly own my work space because symbols on a slice of dried plant prooves they they do.

Oh and i am also constantly overwhelmed by weird phenomena called emotions and i need to drag a meat suit with me to care for cause if i dont i will experience negative effects before ending up back at non existence which no matter how hard i try i will one day end up regardless.

Better question would be is there annything normal about our existence at all?

Yeah. A few years ago when very stoned I had a bizarre sense of divine communication (especially weird as an Agnostic), where I was playing a video game and had a moment where I felt like a confirmation dialogue would appear soon and if I said 'yes,' it would actually be answering a bigger question of if I agreed to have the mysteries of reality revealed. Soon a dialog appeared and I of course clicked yes.

I'd generally have written it off as just being stoned other than that in the years since quite a lot of the rabbit hole it prompted me looking into has checked out in some wild ways, including eventually literal details about the 'mysteries' of antiquity, and the attribution by Atrapanus of Alexandria that the initial teacher of the mysteries was Moses (makes more sense in light of recent discovery of Aegean Iron Age presence in the Southern Levant).

Which in turn tied back into cannabis use. It was just a few months after this experience that it turned out the earliest confirmed religious use of weed was in the holiest of holies of an 8th century BCE Judahite temple in Tel Arad which certainly recontextualizes divine communication through a burning bush, particularly with going into a tent after anointing oil where a cloud appears at the door during subsequent communication, very similar to the description of the Scythian anointing and tent hotboxing in Herodotus.

There's a Promethean quality to weed's psychoactive effects being gated behind heating up, and while I'm generally a skeptic about most things, I try to remain skeptical of my skepticism as well, so who knows if there really is something to how a stoned brain processes the world such that it might be revelatory in some capacity.

In any case, the conclusions it ultimately led me to were pretty dope and has me now largely believing that the nature of my reality is in line with the wildest hopes and dreams I had for it in my childhood.

So my recommendation if ever posed the question of having mysteries revealed is to say 'yes' - it can get pretty weird, but overall for me ended up being rather cool.

Nope

I've had experiences that some people would call "paranormal": lured into the woods and almost to my death by a will-o'-the-wisp; doors opening and closing, even locking and unlocking on their own, miraculous healing. I don't find these hard to explain, personally.

No.

Honestly, can't say that I have. It seems like almost every person I know has something in their life they'd describe that way though. To be real, I'd love to see something paranormal at some point. I feel like I'm out of a club or something. Ha

Yes, but still cant believe it. I brush shit off as sleep paralysis, or just plain seeing things, or my very active imagination, I dont really think it can be real. It just cant.