Paranormal encounters

[sr71plt]

Closest I can think of coming to a paranormal moment is that about the moment my wife's father died 250 miles away--at about 3 a.m.--a tall wooden bookshelf he had made fell forward into our living room, tossing books everywhere but landing just where it would have to land without breaking any furniture.

 

[redzinger]

If the sleep paralysis you're talking about is when you wake up, or semi wake up, but your muscles are still semi paralyzed, then I've had two episodes.

That's the puppy. Or pony. Big pony. With scary teeth and eyes.


Nah, I don't really dream of actual night mares. Or demons. My sleep paralysis 'experiences' are of the presence type (my last Halloween entry was based on it https://www.literotica.com/s/the-night-time-visitors ).

As I said above, I'm a pragmatist. I have little truck with the airy-fairy stuff like star signs, fortune telling, or religious dogma, but I understand that some people follow and need it. I'm agnostic, purely because I think there may be things in this world that science has yet to get a handle on, or even acknowledge. If they can't explain exactly how paracetamol (acetaminophen, aka Tylenol - which wouldn't get approval following modern protocols) works, I'm sure there's a lot more they have to discover.

 

[NotWise]

What is paranormal, anyway?

While walking with my kids in the forest along the river we encountered a distracted, bearded man in a filthy dress. He was deeply involved in a conversation with someone I could not see. He described the disappointing reaction he got when he gave good advice to the swallows who nested under the bridge. We let him pass by and as near as I could tell he never recognized our presence.

I saw the same man lying on the sidewalk beside a busy street at rush hour, engrossed in a friendly conversation with the ants who nested in the cracks. And (an indelible memory) I saw him one morning on the top of an overpass over the grey ruins of the rail yard. It was as a winter storm swept over the mountains at the edge of the city. He stood with his arms extended, and the wind whipped his dress and his tattered coat. He spun about with his head tipped back, screaming at the top of his lungs at all the mighty forces that played out around him.

Was he having paranormal experiences? Clinically, he was probably schizophrenic. Or he could he have been a man who perceived the world in ways that most of us do not, possibly experiencing things that most of us can't .

 

[Asbel]

Was he having paranormal experiences? Clinically, he was probably schizophrenic. Or he could he have been a man who perceived the world in ways that most of us do not, possibly experiencing things that most of us can't .

Clinically, I think he was on some really good drugs. Or really bad drugs. Next time you see him, ask for his dealer.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

"I had occasion to teach some students how to use the old CR Oscilloscopes (Goldstar if I remember right). (FYI, the old analogs work better than the digitals if anyone is of a mind to try.)

One of the things we did right at the beginning was to have the students take the probes in their own hands (not THAT kind of probe, Hypoxia) and get a reading of their own electromagnetic field. Partially to illustrate why it is not a good idea to handle electronics components with your bare hands ungrounded."

The digital electronics world also exhibits some peculiarities and strangely enough, they also have to do with electromagnetics (IE 'spin polarity') and data transfer by this means.

To be blunt about it, despite their attempts to sound rational, those people with these firm solid and confident opnions about 'nothing outside of,' sound psychologically reaching to me.

Like, what are they trying to run from? Like I mean, so what if there are aliens, dead people coming back or being 'elsewhere?' That kind of thing. So what, really... There are a lot of people who say they have experiences of unusual things, very few claim to have an Alladin's Cave which spontaneously manufactures gold! This, would be something I would required proof and evidence for if someone wished to impress upon me the reality of such a claim.

And if I myself possessed such a Cave, I would not tell anyone!!!

Except maybe in riddles on account of not being able to bottle it in 100%.

The 'steady state' condition of HUMAN existence, appears to me, to be something to do with people being able to solve puzzles themselves, mostly of a moral nature.

Do I think 'human existence' is the only kind of existence that there is? I do not.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

I don't believe in paranormal events. And some of you are telling absurd stories of repeatable phenomena that would have made paranormal investigation a real thing if you'd bothered to use a video camera or invited a pack of independent observers into your home - and given what the stakes are if paranormal events are real, you should have. Seeing through a wall? Vinyl records that play themselves every morning at the same time? I'm reminded that this is a site with authors of fiction.

That said, I can report 3 events I know of that I don't have an explanation for.

1. In high school I had a friend, average intelligence, not a believer in paranormal stuff, Christian and took it seriously, no occult interests, no drug use, and very much not a liar or attention seeker. She told everyone that one night she woke up convinced her grandfather had just died. She had the presence of mind to look at a clock, and to tell her parents.

They got the phone call the next morning. She'd had the time right to the minute; his death hadn't been expected for another month or more.

2. At one time I lived in a certain apartment. I'm not prone to sleep disturbances, drugs or alcohol, weird dreams, no interest horror movies, or television in general. I'm about as un-suggestible as they come. I haven't dreamed about monster since I was maybe 10.

One night I awoke very suddenly; and very quickly became fully awake, because something glowing and insubstantial was moving along the side of my bed. It paused to bend over me and there was the distinct appearance of a unpleasant, leering face.

I was terrified out of my mind and had no idea what to do. After a couple seconds I put my first through the face. I didn't feel anything substantial there, and simply left my first there in the air, inside it. Over a full second, it faded away silently. A few seconds later I lowered my fist because nothing else happened.

The few times I'd woken from a nightmare I'd be like "wow, that was a weird/scary dream," and two minutes later I'd be asleep again. This time I was awake for a half hour, shaking, a near bed-wetting experience. I had clear recall of what I'd seen, felt and done (unlike dreams, that for me fall to tatters in a few minutes).

My favorite experience at the time was that lights from a car's headlight had shone through the window and cast a moving pattern of lights on the wall. The apparition's movement was smooth like that. But the experience of putting my first INTO it, AFTER I'd been awake for a couple seconds, made it obvious I hadn't seen a two dimensional projection. The next morning I did a lot of messing around with the window and angle to the parking lot and road. A car headlight couldn't have accounted for it, and someone with a flashlight would have had to have been sprinting. And that wouldn't have woken me up in any case.

My favorite theory now revolves around the fact that some people do wake from dreams and into full consciousness without a sharp boundary - I'd never heard of that at the time, but I researched it years later and it's a thing. So I assume that's what it was, even though it happened exactly once to me.

I'm ok with that theory, except... 3. I didn't tell anyone that account at the time. A month later a friend visited the apartment. We were going out so she hit the bathroom to brush out her hair. I sat around the corner to wait, and had a weird moment of lassitude and inattention - a major veg-out moment where I literally lost a minute or so of conscious remembrance. It ended when my friend came back, whitefaced, with a "I better tell you this..."

In the mirror of the bathroom she'd seen herself, the open door behind her and the wall of a hallway beyond that, plain white with a circular piece of abstract art on the wall. But there was a person standing in the hallway, impassive faced and wordless, partially blocking the view of the object d' art. She made eye contact in the mirror. She turned around and it was gone; she looked in the mirror again and it was still gone.

The apartment door was still locked and we'd have presumably heard anyone coming in. I'd been sitting the one place in the apartment where I couldn't possibly have seen the place her visitor had been standing, but she hadn't known that when she stepped out to find me. Anywhere else in that apartment and I'd have been it. Her visitor looked real and solid, not glowing, not threatening, just grimly expressionless.

She didn't believe in ghosts (still does not) and wasn't prone to seeing things. Based on shared beliefs our best working hypothesis was "angel", but it absolutely didn't match any account of angelic behaviour (traditionally, if they are going to show up, it's to deliver a message, not to silently appear and then vanish without a single word.) I stared at the wall and hallway where she'd seen it - nothing there could have possibly been mistaken for a human figure. The wall hanging was maybe two feet across and nothing in it remotely suggested a face or torso.

I have no idea what to do with any of these experiences. I don't draw conclusions from freak events. My religion demands I believe in a continued existence after death, but the nature of that belief is that the dead simply go static until a much later date, they don't run around playing meaningless tricks. The experiences don't fit my beliefs and haven't changed my beliefs, but my beliefs do allow me to think that there's stuff we do not know or understand about death.

Make of it all whatever you want. I haven't made anything of it, and all three of these events can be explained by a mixture of a delusion and coincidence. But if I were going to pick three people who were somehow prone to seeing or fantasizing things, these aren't the three I'd pick.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I never actually saw through any walls - what was happening was that it was really quiet of a place, really dry too, and the static electricity 'feeling' seemed, well, in fact it DID extend to quite a distance and you could 'feel' through your hands wherever there was a person out in the hall THROUGH the walls. People sitting at the reading tables, standing up, walking around - you could 'feel' all of it through your fingers, and 'know' their exact location.

A few scientists have told me that this is not an implausible phenomenon and different people can have different levels of sensation or depths of effects.

After about six or seven hours upon having left the building, the effects wore off - but they were not confined just to the location and the building; they were felt in your hands, and basically, all around your body.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I totally agree that repeatable phenomenon ought to be filmed and these days, almost everyone has access to an intelligent mobile phone and so on on which to record things.

But back then, when I worked at this place, they didn't even have closed circuit tv's operating widely - they had one or two but only on the downstairs reception desk and I think, entry way and rear exit.

As far as scientists seriously checking things out, I have been involved in areas of official science research and study, and it has been my own experience that people are not too seriously interested in anything as soon as someone says 'woo-woo' or 'paranormal' or any word along those lines. There are already enough avenues of mainstream research and science down which amazing phenomena are studied and most science researchers I have ever met are contented to stick to these accepted pathways. Anyone who comes to them and suggests looking at some 'oddity' or 'odd' phenomenon gets pretty cold treatment. At least, that is what I have observed. To make matter worse, I used to run a commercial science products company and I was pretty much one of those who steered well clear of anything 'weird' or potentially weird!

One thing that strikes me as a little odd is that all of these 'little gray aliens' who visit people at night seem not to turn up to anyone with their hand near an iPhone!

God knows Youtube is filled with iPhone video clips of truly fake or shakey images of a whole lot of nonsense!! Genuine-looking stuff, not so much.

I personally accept there are some things that may be called paranormal that are genuine, but rather than 'para'-normal, to me these are probably effects that will have scientific explanations and causes even though some of them are still a long way off from anything known to currently existing levels of science comprehension. I am not someone who believes 'science' is anywhere even close to complete understandings of matter and reality and I find the present day pop attitudes of 'rationalists' highly arrogant and based on largely individual psychological reactions to upbringing and exposure to nutty religions or religious fanatics and overly controlling families and social groups. Most Americans I find are largely unaware that the American social culture is among the MOST religioso in the world and filled with bizarre attitudes which inevitably are bound to make many people steer well over to the reverse side, and often, in just as stilted a fashion but all dressed up as 'scientific rationalism;' it isn't that at all - it is grandiose self-opinionated nonsense that wishes to grab the high ground of science factual authority. In other words, it's all about 'authority,' and not about facts or factual thinking at all.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

https://xkcd.com/1235/

I'll repeat the assertion - if you have repeatable phenomena happening - a record that plays itself every morning - you get witnesses. A friend to start, then a news reporter. Science will take care of itself at that point.

This never happens, because there are no such repeatable phenomena. If paranormal activity was repeatable, it would lose the para- prefix and get studied. But that never happens, which is proof enough that any story claiming otherwise is complete bullshit.

I'm not going to go as far as demanding that nothing paranormal happens. My religion more or less demands I believe in a reality I can't perceive, and once you accept that, the fact that unusual experiences might be rooted in effects from an otherwise imperceptible reality becomes at least plausible. We don't know enough to state a categorical no, and the known universe keeps turning out to be stranger than we expect.

But there's more than enough evidence of tricksters, mental glitches, coincidence and apophenia, and just plain unknown phenomena out there to demand a great deal of skepticism.

There's also the problem, pointed out by believers, that paranormal activity is shy. There are vodou practitioners in Haiti who hate Christian missionaries, because, as they will swear blind, their powers stop working when one is present, *even if they don't know the person is a missionary*. I heard this claim repeated more than once in Haiti, and there are sacred trees in some places that visitors are never supposed to approach because the townsfolk get hostile if they think you might be a missionary and planning to screw with the local spirits. There are, of course, easy mundane explanations for things like this - if you have white skin and you are in Haiti, but in a poor area, you're 99% likely to be a missionary. And when a vodouist's tricks fail it's nice to have an excuse handy.

But that only gives reason to demand that any repeatable phenomena be debunked or proven. Nobody needs to put up with con artists and putting them out of business is a public service.

 

[Carnal_Flower]

There was a reputed haunted dorm in my college. I heard many stories from people who lived there. It was featured on an episode of "School Spirits" on Investigation Discovery (therefore it must be true!).

Animals were attracted to the building. Deer and owls would randomly come inside. Lights on and off, etc.

I convinced someone I know to write a story about it as a feature in the Sunday section for the local paper. He was the biggest skeptic on the planet. Thought it was all "horseshit." Absolute unbeliever. Nevertheless he agreed to do it.

So I'd ask him "How's it going?" He'd grumble about "fools" and "hysterical students" for the first few weeks. Thought it was all made up. "How's it going?" "Bunch of nonsense." But after about a month he changed. He "didn't want to talk about it."

By the time he wrote it he had come around to "I don't know."

He said what convinced him something "odd" was going on was that he interviewed two women who'd been cleaning the place for 20 years. He didn't want only the perspective of the suggestible students so he found these two. Asked them if they'd ever heard about it being "haunted." They said No, not at all . . . but Wait a minute.

Turns out for years each thought the other was "secretly" helping the other out. One lady would come in and the floors would be cleaned and mopped, the laundry washed and dried and folded on the table. They always thought the other one was doing it, until they asked. That was something they "could not explain."

Also, it WAS on an old Indian Burial Ground lol. Seriously. And across the way, it faced an apartment building which I also heard of several really freakin' weird things happening.

I think it's all horseshit, too, yet, it's fun to think about

 

[Hypoxia]

I have a little rant on a subset of 'paranormal' activity: prophesy, divination, forecasting by means including (but not limited to) water-witching, gambling, mind-reading, dream or auspice interpretation, etc.

Consider water-witching, dowsing for liquids or minerals. I note that greedy capitalists do not hesitate to exploit anything that works. If dousing worked, greedy capitalists running petroleum and mineral companies would fund schools of witching instead of hiring those damn expensive geologists, paying for fancy detection equipment and dry bores.

Compare with psychology. A century and a half ago, psychology was woo-woo stuff pursued by a few crackpots. Then, after the advent of offset lithography and cheap color printing, advertisers found that psychologists could more-or-less 1) predict what people would buy, and 2) manipulate people's desires. Mass-market companies funded schools of psychology, which went from paranormal woo-woo to mainstream -- because it worked, more or less. Enough, anyway.

I'll again point out that human consciousness is infinitely complex. And our perceptions filter through our memories and expectations -- we can never be absolutely *certain* that what we think we have experienced occurred in reality, not unless a device is recording events. Alas, paranormal events always seem to be *just* beyond range...

 

[beachbum1958]

I have a little rant on a subset of 'paranormal' activity: prophesy, divination, forecasting by means including (but not limited to) water-witching, gambling, mind-reading, dream or auspice interpretation, etc.

Consider water-witching, dowsing for liquids or minerals. I note that greedy capitalists do not hesitate to exploit anything that works. If dousing worked, greedy capitalists running petroleum and mineral companies would fund schools of witching instead of hiring those damn expensive geologists, paying for fancy detection equipment and dry bores.

Compare with psychology. A century and a half ago, psychology was woo-woo stuff pursued by a few crackpots. Then, after the advent of offset lithography and cheap color printing, advertisers found that psychologists could more-or-less 1) predict what people would buy, and 2) manipulate people's desires. Mass-market companies funded schools of psychology, which went from paranormal woo-woo to mainstream -- because it worked, more or less. Enough, anyway.

I'll again point out that human consciousness is infinitely complex. And our perceptions filter through our memories and expectations -- we can never be absolutely *certain* that what we think we have experienced occurred in reality, not unless a device is recording events. Alas, paranormal events always seem to be *just* beyond range...

I agree, in the main, with what you're saying, with a caveat of my own; just because no obvious mechanism exists to explain a given phenomenon, it doesn't mean there isn't one, simply that it's not yet been divined; 90 years ago, the idea of continental drift found zero support in academia, because no obvious mechanism existed when Wegener first proposed it; today, we know the mechanism, so continental drift is now an established fact, not a theory that assembles a few facts and observations to synthesise a whole.

Carl Sagan used exactly this approach to address Astrology; while his belief (and mine) was that there was no correlation between the positions of stars and causally related observations implied as the basis for Astrology, it still wasn't good science to infer that no correlation in fact existed.
Astrology works by implying causal relationships where none apparently exist; just because the mechanism to identify and explain the implied relationships isn't apparent, it still doesn't mean that none exists, but rather that we haven't found one yet.

My own belief is that Astrology is bunk; I don't believe a 100-million mile wide ball of flaming gas 400 billion miles away has any bearing whatsoever on whether or not I was born left-handed and would marry a dark-haired girl and have three children, but too many people do believe exactly that for me to openly mock it; all I ask is that they don't force their delusions on me, I have enough problems dealing with real reality without wading through theirs.

I do believe most 'paranormal' events can be explained in terms of electrodynamics and thermodynamics, the effects of strong electrical and magnetic fields on the brain, especially the visual cortex, superstition, mental or physical illness, brain tumors, extreme suggestibility, and out and out fakery and manipulation. There are some events that defy current scientific explanation, but my contention is that they're not inexplicable, but rather that the means by which they can be explained is not yet within our grasp (see above).

Currently I tend toward the need to have repeatability; if a phenomenon, event, or experience is not repeatable, it's not testable; if it's not testable, its existence is not scientifically provable; subjective evidence is not the same as proof, after all, and until a working mechanism is devised so that those phenomena can be tested and repeated to order, said phenomena should only be considered highly subjective and not a description of a real-world event. Sorry.

 

[49greg]

Four Horsemen, bitches.


The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On leather steeds they ride
They've come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the Four Horsemen ride
Or choose your fate and die

I guess my ghost rider horse comparison/description was some sort of transference. Looking at t he lyrics it is the steers that are described in the song. Somehow in my mind it's the description of the horses the doomed cowboys are riding that I thought the description was about:

Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel
Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel
A bolt of fear went through him as they thundered through the sky
For he saw the riders comin hard and he heard their mournful cries

As a kid I had this image of a smoking horse with gleaming steel hooves that breathed fire. Guess it was just cows after all. I still have that horse image thought when I think of the Night Mare.

 

[Hypoxia]

How do paranormal encounters, ecstatic mystical visions, and insanity differ?

... just because no obvious mechanism exists to explain a given phenomenon, it doesn't mean there isn't one, simply that it's not yet been divined...

Yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- but it's a strong hint. Paranormal claims have been investigated with more or less rigor for a centuries now without notable gain.

Mechanisms seem unlikely. We know of four basic forces: EMF, gravity, and strong and weak atomic forces. The physics of claimed mental phenomena doesn't work -- what physically undetectable forces could effect telepathy, clairvoyance, remote-sensing, communing with spirits, etc? How can brains detect such forces when the most sensitive instruments cannot?

Ah, astrology. I recall a report from decades ago of a French mathematician analyzing (via computers of that era) many possible astrological systems. (Many cultures have astrologies quite unlike our Babylonian-based system uncorrected for polar regression.) His model dataset contained personal data on many prominent people. Finding statistically significant correlations needed something like 60 zodiacal signs. Damn, he'll never get a newspaper column that way.

As a kid I had this image of a smoking horse with gleaming steel hooves that breathed fire. Guess it was just cows after all. I still have that horse image thought when I think of the Night Mare.

Ghost riders on demonic mounts chasing the Devil's herd, oh fuck, what an image! That spooked my childhood dreams too. Couple that with COOL WATER and we have a vision of the West as Hell. A great setting for zombi cowboys, vampire cowgirls, chupacabras, skinwalkers, and Things In The Night. (Among the spookiest stories I've ever read was Anthony Boucher's THEY BITE. Yow.)

 

[TxRad]

Navajo and Hopi folklore is some of the spookiest stuff around. Add in some Apache death spirits and you have full on Armageddon.

Something I've always wondered about. The lore of the southern Indian nations see the levels of creation as ascending. The northern tribes, especially the tribes of the northeast, see them as descending. Same ideas, different directions.

 

[Hypoxia]

Re: Northern vs Southern tribes -- note that Apaches and Navahos are Athabaskans whose migration from the far northern Mackenzie River drainage brought them to the SouthWest not long before the Spanish arrived.

Meanwhile, I've cited THE BIRTH OF THE GODS by Guy E. Swanson (U. Michigan) for a long time. The author surveyed studies of 50 'primitive' (little touched by Western civilization) peoples including a number of North American tribes. He was looking for commonalities of religious belief. He found... disarray. Some peoples recognize gods and/or ghosts and/or sorcerers and/or divination, and some don't. He found social connections to polytheism and witchcraft and such -- societies with multiple power centers have multiple gods, and societies that don't deal well with neighbors have witches -- but correlations with most other factors are weak.

Which just means that people do or don't believe all sortsa shit. Fun fun fun.

 

[TamLin01]

One thing that strikes me as a little odd is that all of these 'little gray aliens' who visit people at night seem not to turn up to anyone with their hand near an iPhone!

You notice how nobody ever witnesses an alien abduction?

You'll find oodles of people who, if you buy them a beer and ask once, will tell you all about the time they woke up in the middle of the night and saw a giant ball of light outside their bedroom window, then felt themselves float up into the air and be drawn right out the house and inside of the craft.

But you will never find someone who can tell you the story about the time they woke up and saw a giant ball of light outside of their neighbor Bob's window, and how they saw their neighbor Bob float up into the air and out the house and into the light. Not one.

Odd, isn't it? You'd think that's the kind of thing at least one other person in the neighborhood would notice from time to time. The credulous may argue, oh, well, the aliens make sure everyone else stays asleep or doesn't remember what they saw. But if that's so, why do they not do the same for the abductee?

And that's the problem with these kinds of stories; they're fun, and you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they never even stand up to Occam's Razor. I think everybody's got a ghost story or two, but most of these stories provide a perfectly innocuous explanation all on their own. A case from this very thread:

I don't sleepwalk. Never have. But, yet, somehow every night I would fall asleep in dark silence and every morning I would wake up to the television on the news and this playing from a VINYL ALBUM on my stereo. An album that was carefully put away each morning and not pulled out by me.

The simplest explanation for this would just be sleepwalking. Ewobbit says he was never a sleepwalker, and I'm sure that's true. But he was probably never haunted before either. So no matter what, at least one unprecedented thing is happening in this scenario. Of the two, which is the more plausible?

 

[Hypoxia]

You notice how nobody ever witnesses an alien abduction?

I do wish I could witness an abduction. Just down the road from here. That groady obnoxious neighbor -- why won't the fucking aliens lay a tractor beam on him and suck him straight to Uranus? Sooner is better.

The simplest explanation for this would just be sleepwalking.

I hope I had a paranormal experience long ago. Either aliens pissed in the hard plastic chair or I was sleepwalking and missed the toilet.
___

Back to paranormalities. Normal stuff leaves traces. People go places, do things, break and lose stuff, burn and bury stuff, change and fix stuff, shit out debris of what they've eaten, carve and scrawl to deface trees and rocks, leave firepits and paths and foundations and skeletons and plantings. Animals leave paths and skeletons and cropped vegetation and coprolites (ancient turds) and fossils. Paranormalities leave... memories. Kinda soft, eh?

 

[AMoveableBeast]

I have an empirical mind, and in the absence of irrefutable proof, I will general chalk up any paranormal event to logical explanation. Monsters and miracles thrive in the dark and in single person narratives; they wither under lab conditions.

I used to be the caretaker of a cemetery at one point. I've been in crypts during the middle of the night. I know better than most the power of fear and misdirection. If a person is placed under significant strain, he or she WILL general experience something, see something. Perception is malleable and untrustworthy. Any experienced drug user can attest to that. That knowledge can dismiss 95% of all paranormal accounts.

Still, I have an experience that I cannot rationalize. I was going to write about it for my Halloween entry last year. It's even a little sexy. But I lost my nerve. The memory makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe this year.

 

[Hypoxia]

Still, I have an experience that I cannot rationalize. I was going to write about it for my Halloween entry last year. It's even a little sexy. But I lost my nerve. The memory makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe this year.

I look forward to it. Ah, but an experience that leaves no traces but in memory... I think I have a handle on my fantasies vs reality / history. I know I've been in the close presence of certain prominent people. I write stories involving other A-list folks (more or less disguised) and hoi-polloi too; I think I know what I *haven't* done with them but may have dreamed of. And I think I'm aware of outright fantasies and projections.

Is my memorable outré experience real or hoped-for or mis-remembered or what? Is yours?

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

A lot of you wankers sound like the American tourists I used to take by the hand when I was nine or ten to the front of the crowds so that they could film on their brand new Super-8 cameras, the Kali Karthikaya Festival in Penang.

And that would have been the year that Barbara Hutchinson, my mother's besy friend, ran away from Lord Rothschild and had to be put up at my parent's home for a while.

You people, seriously, especially you 'rationalist assholes' wouldn't know if your collective asses were on fire!

You're all big talkers from the relative safety and comfort of the front section of Macca's - which is where, I think, the 'scientists' among you, all hang out.

 

[Hypoxia]

You people, seriously, especially you 'rationalist assholes' wouldn't know if your collective asses were on fire!

You're all big talkers from the relative safety and comfort of the front section of Macca's - which is where, I think, the 'scientists' among you, all hang out.

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Can I sell you a bridge?

 

[JaxRhapsody]

About a million things in your post set off this little alert in the back of my head, and I'm not normally the kind of person to call bullshit on anything, but my friend and I used to tell stories like this to each other all the time, trying to one-up each other with the more crazy happenings in our home. I think it ended with her telling me she was literally transported to an alternate dimension through a mirror on the back of a giant cat made of shadows.

I'm not a huge skeptic. I believe in the possibility of paranormal shit. But... I really have a hard time believing a single thing you wrote just now. Juuuuuust saying.

Mirrors are portals...

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Can I sell you a bridge?

No but can I sell you a coupla tall buildings...

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Oops, I think I already did - said Frank Lowy to the American insurance company.