Have you ever

[lapsedmodernist]

Have you ever had a paranormal experience? If you have, I'd love to hear about it.

Comments

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing a ghost as a child. I wasn't any older than 8 or so, and my family was staying in a german castle that they'd turned into a hotel. It's so deferred now that I only remember remembering it, but in my memory I briefly saw a kind of greenish ball of light and felt oddly threatened and ran away. But honestly, I think this may be my own elaboration of thinking I'd seen a ghost, subsequently telling the story, and having the story alter my memory.

[amadea.livejournal.com]

oh, you know, that reminds me. I did see fairies once. I woke up and there was a row of seven little orangey lights, three small on each side with a big one in the middle. I was a little kid and yeah, don't know how much the recollection has been altered by re-telling - the way I remember it, I woke up the next morning and they had left a present for me to bring to my friend's birthday party, so I'm not sure how that actually worked. But I do remember that feeling of being sort of paralyzed - not so much afraid as just paused, the way one feels in a silence one is hesitant to break.

I had that same feeling in college, once. I woke up and thought I saw figures standing in my room. I don't remember the night very clearly, but I do remember thinking that I was awake, wondering if I should say something, and then not saying anything, because really, what the hell do you say?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah - that makes me remember. I had a "vision" in college. I was completely sleep-deprived, partied out, etc. and reading dante's vita nuova for a seminar in mccabe, sitting at one of those chairs by the window. I drifted off into a stress/exhaustion nap and swore that all of these people in robes were walking around me and moving porcelain statues about. I got up, dazed, and went to kolhberg for coffee, running into cameron mcphee of all people, who I immediately told, in shocked and excited tones, "I have had a VISION!"

Later that day/week I wrote a dante-inspired 'what did my vision mean' poem, vita nuova style. It was a sonnet, because that was what I was trying to write those days, and I remember that the last line was "o cavalcante, dante, what's this mean?"

[amadea.livejournal.com]

When I was thirteen, I went through a period of having a lot of what I saw at the time as paranormal experiences. Mostly it was stuff like having a song in my head and then hearing it on the radio, that kind of thing, although I did dream once that Cindy Wilson (of the B-52's) was telling me that her brother Ricky Wilson (also of the B-52's) died over Columbus Day Weekend (which, I later discovered, he did). Much of it could have been chalked up to heightened awareness - that human capacity to see coinciding elements everywhere once you start looking. But it was enough to freak me out. Fortunately I had a mentor-caretaker-exbabysitter person around who was very matter-of-fact about the fact that this sort of thing happens to girls around menarche. True enough, it passed within the year.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

this sort of thing happens to girls around menarche

That is really interesting. Did she ever explain why?

Your reply to cataptromancer, about figured in your room at night makes me wonder, do you ever get sleeping paralysis episodes? I've had it since I was very young, and I don't get the really severe hallucinations, but figures around the bed is one of the three or four main visual tropes.

The faeries sound lovely! Do you remember what the present was?

[amadea.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think she did, but it's a trope I've seen since - isn't that sort of central to the Poltergeist movies?

I did have sleep paralysis episodes when I was a kid. Only a few times. Certain kinds of dreams would bring them on - the one I remember most clearly, some friends and I were passing around an x-ray machine that looked like an Etch-A-Sketch. It was fine as long as you only held it up to, like, bones, like leg-bones and stuff, but when I held it up to cartiledge, my nose, I got a weird tingling - and when I held it up to my frizzy hair it sort of "frizzed" me, and I woke up paralyzed and couldn't speak or move or call out for a while.

And then I'd have this recurring dream where I was floating upwards, through various dimensions. At first I was scared and would struggle helplessly. As time went on, though, I got curious about what I'd see up there - so the dream became this weird combination of me struggling and trying not to struggle.

I think the present might have been a game of Hungry Hungry Hippo, though I remember it being shaped like a pitcher and wrapped in sort of swirly Florentine-marbling style lavender paper, which is another thing that doesn't quite fit. Sometimes I wonder if children just interpret the world radically differently. I wouldn't be surprised.

Some 'paranormal' experiences are quite normal

[atallvlad.livejournal.com]

I have had more paranormal experiences than I can count. Some of the more common would be dreaming about something before it happens and even discussing it with others before the actual event occurs. I seem to have an auditory precognition quite often, leading to the most annoying phenomenon I have ever encountered, that of hearing a knock on the door about 2 minutes before anyone knocks on my door. Meaning that I have answered the door twice in a row about a hundred times now- it drives me crazy. When I was at the Defence Language Institute in Monterey California, I saw a ghost actually unlock and open a door in front of me in the middle of the day. The building was at a slant so that the door would naturally swing closed, and I had just exited the room and locked the door. I took two steps and all the hairs went up on my neck. I looked back and clik-clack!! the door unlocked and swung open by itself, after which a man sized figure of cold air turned and walked right thru me and down the hall. There were no air vents anywhere near that door.
Some of the more normal paranormal experiences would be learning Reiki and basically x-raying people by passing my hand over them, anyone can learn that particular talent. I think that being sensitive to entities such as ghosts is merely a matter of fine tuning ones sensitivity to energy fields, biological and electromagnetic.

[ert.livejournal.com]

stuff like having a song in my head and then hearing it on the radio

You know, that has happened to me a lot throughout my life. Got to the point that in college I would play a song on my show and then hear it go into light rotation on commercial radio stations, which for a while I thought meant that the program directors were listening to my little college program, and I really noticed when it happened, but eventually decided that it was unlikely that I was all that popular.

I finally came to the the conclusion that the same forces that brought the song to my mind -- hearing a somehow similar song on the radio, or people humming a couple of bars in the distance that you're not casually aware of -- makes songs end up in my head and on the radio at the same time. And then my pattern-matching brain says 'aha! look at that!' I don't, however, think 'aha! look at that' every time a song comes on and I'm not expecting it. Just Gaia playing with my cortex, methinks. :)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Not really, but the closest:

When I was young - nine? - I woke up one morning to find several voices in my head, babbling in a language I didn't know. The sound was tinny, like a radio. It sounded more like words being played backwards than an actual language. If I turned my head slightly to either direction, the voices ceased; if I turned it back to the initial position, they returned. I listened to them for a few minutes before getting up. They never came back.

Seven years ago, I was alone in Elmina Castle, in Ghana, a nexus for the slave trade, in dungeons in which thousands upon thousands of slaves were held en route to America or the Caribbean. It was May in Ghana - ie goddamn hot - but I suddenly realized I was shivering with cold. I knew the castle's history, though, and the dungeons were pretty spooky, so that could well have been psychosomatic.

A truly inexplicable thing happened to me once at the bagel place at Third Avenue and St. Mark's, ten years ago, but it was so banal and trivial I will probably bore you. Oh, what the heck: It was late at night. I got a bagel and a coffee, sat down at a table, and read the Village Voice. When I looked up I realized that my coffee cup, rather than being one of the vaguely-Egyptian-themed WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU cups ubiquitous at the time, was a Canadian, fully bilingual, Tim Horton's coffee cup. (Tim Horton's is a donut chain in Canada, but it's more than that, it's a cultural icon. Especially to me, for reasons too tedious to get into. At the time it had no American stores.) I went up to check out the place's stack of coffee cups; they were all normal, and the Latino guys behind the counter had no idea (or interest in) where the cup I showed them had come from.

[desirous.livejournal.com]

For about a year, I was living in a rather creepy apartment at the base of the Hollywood Hills. Throughout the duration of my stay there, I often experienced rather benign (in retrospect) paranormal activity. Clocks running fast only when I was around, electronics malfunctioning in illogical ways, foreseeing dreams, and waking out of a dead sleep just a few seconds before an earthquake.

It wasn't until I moved back to the Midwest that I actually saw my first unexplainable object. A group of us were hanging out in my friend's basement, smoking pot, drinking, and carrying on, when I saw a strange orb come into vision from my periphery. It rose up from the floor and swooped by my friend's shoulder, disappearing behind him. Given the nature of our collective mental state, I didn't say anything (out of fear that I had composed this sighting in my own head, or not wanting to freak anybody out). Coincidentally, a few moments later the conversation advanced to a topic where I could comfortably make a joke about seeing a ghost. Only when my friend turned to me and asked if I had seen it too, did the hair on my neck stand on end. I replied "Yes. What did you see??" He explained it perfectly: a small orb (1 foot diameter?) of opaque gray matter, with a significantly more dense core and slight colourisation like car oil in a rainy parking lot. The way it moved suggested it had free will over its own path, and its density ruled out any trick of light/shadow.

I haven't seen anything else since, but I have a feeling it's only a matter of time, really.

[todfox.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid (not sure, let's say 9?) I had a classic sleep paralysis episode where I woke up and saw a 'shadow man' (this is what I have seen it called on the 'net) -- a humanoid figure with empty sockets for eyes, no other discernable features, and overall made of darkness. It had the typical sleep paralysis symptoms where I was afraid but unable to do anything about it, the fear felt much like what someone described earlier, like a heightened sense of fear about breaking a silence.

I've once or twice had experiences where I felt stuck on the border between sleep and waking, unable to open my eyes. This mostly happened while on certain antidepressants. I wasn't on anything of the sort when the first episode occurred.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

You read that review of the alien abduction book in the times, didn't you?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ummm...no...which book?

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

"Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," by Susan Clancy.

[spawnsong.livejournal.com]

um, no.

i think i fell in love on a couple of occasions and then there was this one time i had an out of body experience on god knows how many hits of acid. do any of these count?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

what about this?

[spawnsong.livejournal.com]

atmospheric something or other i'd guess. also, i can't believe you were able to pull that shit up so damned quick!

[spawnsong.livejournal.com]

what the christ is a 'pre-cognitive' episode?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

haven't you seen "Minority Report"? remember, "precogs"?

[twistedcat.livejournal.com]

um, my *life* is a paranormal experience

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

can you please say more?

[twistedcat.livejournal.com]

(1) i'm a trance channel, and even when i'm not in trance, i tend to hear my guides. if they told me to do bad things, i'd go seek help, but it's usually good and valid information that i don't think i would have otherwise.

(2) i do readings professionally. been known to be scarily accurate. even things like "you need to be doing more writing, i keep seeing you writing on a yellow legal pad" and the woman telling me that she journals on a yellow legal pad. i've also had people's guides nd ancestors come through really strongly in sessions, including a ghangis khan like guy on a horse, which, as far as i knew, shouldn't have happened because the guy i was reading for looked more arab than anything. come to find ut, he is actually decended from that lineage.

(3) i am earthquake sensitive. my body reacts to impending earth movement. i also hear them about 2 minutes before they happen, which apparently other people don't. depending on the type of quake, it will sound like anything from somne dragging metal garbage cans across asphalt to a freight train.

(4) a fair amount of my pictures end up having ghosties and stuff in them. not tons, but enough to remark on.

(5) i'm a medical intuitive. i can tell you by looking at you, with no visual clues that i can tell, what's going on in your body.

(6) #5 goes hand-in-hand with being able to do energetic healing


honestly, so much of my life leans over into the woowoo side of things that it's hard for me to tell what's paranormal and what's just normal these days.

and yeah, i know i sound like i need heavy medication, but i've even had mental health professionals and science-types be supportive of me doing this stuff, so apparently i'm not dangerous ;-)

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

http://www.stanleylieber.com/pdf/23.pdf

[goddessspiral.livejournal.com]

wow just finished reading that. my brain can't even process it but for something reason I like it. lol thanks for sharing!

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. :)

[omnia-mutantur.livejournal.com]

well, i've usually decscribed them as hallucinations, mostly for the purposes of not having to defend myself regarding them, but i haven't really bothered deciding what they were.

the first sort of embarasses me now, due to whatever that bad movie was called, but there used to be a really nice lady in the static who would talk to me, particularly when i was upset or when my parents were fighting. i only really strongly remember this happening up until around second grade.

a friend of a friend hung himself in college. i didn't know him well at the time (we'd smoked together, worked a shift at the library), but i spent the summer after his death hanging out with his three closest friends and heard a gazillion stories about him. and i used to see him on the anniversary of his suicide, and actually (and i've never admitted this anywhere before(mostly because it feels tacky or tawdry, like using a real tragedy to legitimize my own fuckedup life) on the day i tried to kill myself. and he was always really, really angry. not hostile towards me, just sort of generally pissed.

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

OK, this is embarrassing, but I used to use a Ouija board in about 6th grade, with one friend of mine. We would do it up seance-like, after school, with pulled shades, etc. This went on for quite a while, and we started asking questions about who was making the Oujia board work. Because it was working. And both of us insisted it wasn't us, and I know it wasn't me. It profiled spirits of people long since dead, and also one time our 2nd grade teacher who had died of cancer. After a while, it told us that we should never use the Ouija board again, with grave warnings, and the plastic thingy flew off the board. I haven't touched one since.

Also, when I visited Actun Tunichil Muknal, a Mayan cave in western Belize, we climbed up on a ledge to see the stelae and sat and listened for a long time to either the river and the wind running through the cave or voices of women and children laughing and talking.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

when I visited Actun Tunichil Muknal

Heh. I heard no voices there, but it was plenty otherworldly.

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I was there in June or July of 2001. I didn't get to eat termites, but I did forget to put one of my roles of film in the dry bag, so a couple of my photos have otherworldly qualities...

[akozorez.livejournal.com]

I've had so many, i wouldn't know where to begin.
Most of them having to have to do with death of my then recently departured grandma, who, i was convinced, continuted to hang around the flat to keep me company when i was alone and at night...
there were a few others too, but perhaps i shall save them for when we meet. We've already extablished the sleep paralysis patterns of similar nature... I guess now we can establish the "paranormal" further yet...

I am, however, rather curious at the moment as to why exactly you had posted this question.

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

I am, however, rather curious at the moment as to why exactly you had posted this question.

As am I.

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

I've had a few things that may qualify:

1) From the ages of 7 to about 20 I dreamt of future events with varying frequency. It always freaked me out when they happened.

2) After my grandmother died I was convinced that her ghost came to live with us.

3) Once my mother and I left the house to run some errands, doors locked. When we returned all of the spices in the kitchen had been neatly assembled on the rear sill of the stove, arranged such that the tallest spices were on the end and the shortest in the middle. They were usually kept on a spice rack mounted to the back of the door to the basement.

4) Television/stereo/computer/etc. would sometimes turn on or off on their own.

5) When sitting downstairs, I would often hear creaks as if someone were going up and down the stairs or walking in the hallway upstairs. The house was reasonably old and all hardwood and the sound of somone moving through the house was usually fairly noisy.

I believe in ghosts.

Off Topic

[fengi.livejournal.com]

As I ask in my recent post: Yulia Latynina, what to make of her?

[dcart.livejournal.com]

I've been part of a drug fueled mass hallucination. Does that count?

I firmly believe my younger sister saw ghosts when she was a child, but she doesn't really talk about it.

[sunshyncat.livejournal.com]

I have had many. I used to know when someone was going to die. I kind of blocked that out because it became too disturbing for me to handle. Perhaps someday I will be ready to tap back into that again....

[sunshyncat.livejournal.com]

Actually, something strange (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sunshyncat/278509.html) happened last night.

[warpsmith.livejournal.com]

My high school French teacher read my mind once.

I was a terrible, terrible french student. I was always utterly lost, and thus kept a very low profile, never asking questions. I just kept my mouth shut and waited for the end of class. The point being: my words or actions could not have been predicted from my past behavior.

In any case, the teacher, Mrs. Remmillard, was pacing up and down the classroom explaining the evening's homework assignment. She was facing away from me when I silently thought to myself "but what page are the exercises on?" At that moment, she swung around, looked me in the eye, and told me the page number. She then chuckled and said to the class something to the effect of "myself and Philip have a psychic rapport."

I mean, for christ's sake, she said this. I'm a pretty skeptical person, but it's hard for me to dismiss out of hand what happened.

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

I occasionally respond to things people haven't actually said out loud. Mostly, because it's with people I know pretty well (housemates, good friends, lovers) it's just accepted as a "we're on the same wavelength thing" and it's only later that we'll notice it. Things that aren't clearly obvious to our recent past, present actions, or future plans. Once in a while people get freaked out, and then I realized they didn't say it out loud and freak out, too.

Actually, it's been about seven or eight years since the last occurance I can remember. Maybe grad school has wiped that function out in me. Oh well.

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

no, i haven't ever had a paranormal experience, but i would like to have. or some other evidence of the supernatural. besides the existence of the universe, i mean.

[netochka.livejournal.com]

this question worked well, didn't it?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yes indeed!

thanks for adding me back!

I love that user icon.

a ha! c'est moi!

[netochka.livejournal.com]

thank you, it is a selfish portrait. i look forward to reading what you cook up, but i must admit to being sadly sporadic with my own updates.

[chelvis.livejournal.com]

the summer b/w 6th and 7th grade, my dad and I went to scotland, and we went to loch ness. We slept in the car overnight, near the Inverness end. Shortly after dawn I looked down to the shore, which was about 15 feet away from the car. The peat and microorganisms that thrive in loch ness make it so cloudy that if you were to put your arm all the way in, you would not be able to see your hand at the end ouf your arm. Looking down at the loch, I saw a large appendage, but not the body that it was attached to, gently slide by, underneath the calm water. Later, looking at a drawing of the extinct pleisiosaur, i thought that the appendage that I saw could only have been the fin, roughly like so.

http://www.gasolinealleyantiques.com/images/Playset%20Page/invicta-swimmer.JPG

I am aware that this sounds preposterous, but I have faith in my own perception.