To ask if anyone has had any paranormal encounters/experiences

[HowlingBitch]

Or do we all need another ? I just find it all fascinating.

Chinese lanterns leave a trail of light then disappear as the fuel cell burns out.
They appear orange or white/yellow, dependent on whether you're seeing them from the side (orange) or below (looking at the flame).
They appear to fly in formation and scatter, as they're being transported on air currents.
They seem to be going fast because they're not as far away as you think.
Some party organisers tie them to a bamboo frame to make a particualr pattern.

I'm sorry about this - but not all that sorry; they're magical in their own right, though obviously not if they're set off near dry vegetation!

They are very popular in coastal areas of Australia.

It could be, who knows? But seeker do you honestly think we are the only life in the universe?..........I saw it on a programme - there was footage of a bright orange formation which changed into various specific shapes - it is the only UFO thing which has stuck in my mind because it was so distinctive.

We all know that governments around the world are involved in projects we know nothing about though, I do agree with that.

"But seeker do you honestly think we are the only life in the universe?..........I"

I don;t know. But I do know that I've never come across a UFO sighting that didn;t ahve an very humdrum explanation. Sad, that. I'd like there to be real ones!

Good explanation Garlic but I'm still not convinced...

I have seen chinese lanterns drift and float and the lights I saw looked more purposeful... Also when they were darting around they were travelling in straight lines and then suddenly stopping and then darting off another way and then coming back to original point. And they left a very definite streak of light when they finally departed, not like a candle being extinguished...

They just didn't look like chinese lanterns or how they move although I guess I could be wrong...!

Ah, who knows for sure, Booty?

Garlic I guess I want to believe

I know there are always going to be skeptics but I think you should consider the fact that some of these experiences mean something to other people and that they are very sure of what they experienced. There is a logical theory for all of these situations if you try hard enough but a logical thinker IMO must be open to the fact that there is (even the smallest in their mind) chance of these things being real.

To simply say "nonsense" when you were not there at the time of the event happened is a little pig headed IMO and this thread wasn't really asking "Do you think these events are real" it was asking if you have experienced anything .

I am (believe it or not :o) a very sensible person but I am not so closed minded to say "Nope I don't believe that is true and you are a silly peasant for doing so "

but what i saw wasnt just orange lights in the sky. i saw a large,bright orange (size of a plane) silent, hovering triangular craft, with a solid column down the middle, and a sort of X shape off either side of the solid column, it hovered over some trees before twisting away over the trees at speed, it seemed to just stop dead, hover, then go, but it never made any noise at all, and i could clearly see the shape of it.....

i realise i am making myself sound like a loon and am opening myself up to derision etc, but i was 10 years old, no drink or drugs involved!

and it was independently seen by the workmen who reported it in the centre of York, i saw it in a village just outside York, unless anyone has made a chinese lantern that is the size of a small plane, that can stop and hover, then move again i dont think what i saw was a chinese lantern....

i had a google yesterday and it seems some other people have seen the same thing, i keep trying to find pictures of it but i cant. i drew it, for my mum the next day, and kept it. I cant quite describe it properly in words but it wasnt solid, the out line was, but there was then this solid column that ran from the tip of the triangle to the bottom, with the two other solid bits off either side, the rest was just open.

do i sound completely mad? but it wasnt a chinese lantern!

No, Vicar, you don't sound completely mad! (not completely, anyway )
There definitely are things we can't explain. I tend to fall into the camp that says "I can't explain it just now, but all will become clear if I can get hold of the real-world facts."

Others prefer some magic & mystery in their lives: nothing wrong with that, and I wouldn't get into an argument about it unless there were going to be damaging consequences. In precisely the same vein, I'm an atheist but I do recognise the value of religion to its adherents.

I can only sense spirits mainly, have seen orbs and the odd figure in the corner of my eye but those were in old pubs I used to live in.

I get a tinglely sensation running from my left side of my head down to my left shoulder and upper arm, anyone else get this??

I have also started to get spirits visit me just as im nodding of to sleep, I can only hear "pub chatter" i,e, loads of conversations happening at once and can't disinguish (sp) actual words. Also a man and woman i've never seen before come to me but couldn't hear what they were saying. Anyone else had this?

the only spirits i see are whisky, gin, vodka, brandy....

DH and I were wandering around some ruins near Cirencester. It was a lovely sunny day, long meadow grass underfoot, no one else there.

I saw him stop and turn to look behind him - where there was no one.
He looked very surprised. He said something tapped his shoulder - not lightly but quite firmly.
He said, 'like Mum does if I walk past her without seeing her at the supermarket.'

We haven't told anyone else about it, as there was nothing else much to say. But it was very real, I saw him look surprised.

We weren't talking about ghosts, though I had related a bit of Roman history. We were talking about my new long dress.

We agreed if it happened again he would say 'Do that again.' out loud, to see what happened, but nothing else happened.

My DP is clairvoyant and telepathic. She was picked in communist times to go to a special scientific school for such kids but she didn't like it.
It used to freak me a bit in the early years even though I have studied esoterica very deeply. Now I just accept it.

archie- tell us what impact this has on her life and how she explains life and death..... please

Difficult to say (of course) Well it made her sadder, more sensitive (although who could say whether she would have been that way anyway?) It made her less trusting of people and more intuitive (and she is often right about people though not always)
I don't know if that is the sort of answer you were looking for. Often answers to such questions are ineffably dull.
To give an example Personally I don't believe in an afterlife as almost all people would think it to be. I am only saying this because all those who have "spoken from beyond" be it ghosts, through mediums etc etc have absolutely nothing interesting to say about the afterlife or life's big questions.
However I stray. Being telepathic and clairvoyant has no relevance to how she explains life and death. There is no connection.
The answers to those questions are a cosmogeny (I think that is the word) - which we all have, independent of any special sensitivities we might have as individuals
If you ask a more specific question, you might get an interesting answer.
Sorry if it was boring.

HairyBeaver Thu 23-Jun-11 18:22:31
I can only sense spirits mainly, have seen orbs and the odd figure in the corner of my eye but those were in old pubs I used to live in.

I get a tinglely sensation running from my left side of my head down to my left shoulder and upper arm, anyone else get this??

I have also started to get spirits visit me just as im nodding of to sleep, I can only hear "pub chatter" i,e, loads of conversations happening at once and can't disinguish (sp) actual words. Also a man and woman i've never seen before come to me but couldn't hear what they were saying. Anyone else had this?

I honestly can't tell if you're having a laugh here. Just sounds like you were having a few too many drinks in the pub. If so, that's pretty good satire.

OK archie
What evidence is there that 'spirits' who contact us are actually that? What purpose would it serve? How do we ascertain that the communication is from some kind of sentient being or life/death force, rather than interference between dimensions?

I've just taken a sleeping tablet, so I ain't got long. I don't think any of these questions have anything at all to do with telepathy or clairvoyance.
And I think you know that.
From my research and imho to answer your first question, very little (being generous) if any at all. Most evidence points to internal sources such as Jungian archetypes. Jaynes, Breakdown of the Bicameral mind is fascinating on this. Second question answered in first answer, ie if spirits don't exist, contact would be impossible and therefore purposeless.
If you believe as I do that such communication does not originate from outside a sentient human, then the need to ascertain its origin as being from "outside" is irrelevant.
Interference between dimensions? I think you'll have to clarify that point for me.
But I can feel the tablet kicking in now. The screen is going fuzzy. Is that a bottle in front of me or a frontal lobotome.....

Actually lobotomes in such research are fascinating don't you think?

God don't you just love Hypnagogia?
As one gets older and busier one has less and less time to indulge.
Mind you I am in a bit of a routine now and manage to get 5-10 minutes in at about 8 when baby and chores are finished and I can pull out a book

Oddly enough my wife did have some frightening experiences just as described (that pub chatter stuff) and would wake me up to see if I could hear them. We lived in Bayswater at the time. Maybe over an old cemetary.
Come to think of it there was a ley line running across Hyde Park, maybe it went under our house. We moved right next to a cemetary next but the problem never recurred.
Really rambling now, tablet is taking me off. Goodnight.

archie - good morning if you come back here! Congratulations on some very engaging posts

I agree with you about Jungian archetypes; that's what I think the Shadow Men are. I even think the popular choice of name for them reflects a pre-conscious understanding that they're manifestations of our own 'shadow' selves. I only worked this out after reading more about them, yesterday, when I posted about my own such experience. I was only 17 at the time and was, I now realise, mildly schizophrenic. It's common in young adults.

IME, Bayswater is an excellent source of incomprehensible, random chatter, floating on the breeze at any time of day or night. It's all those foreign students, temporary residents and carousing media types!

Would your (or your girlfriend's) idea of clairvoyance involve something like things happening in parallel, as it were, rather than 'seeing' into a linear future?

Hope that was specific enough.

Am loving this thread

A couple of posters have mentioned big cats, animals. Hopefully my story will shed some light...

It was quite a few years ago, when my family kept horses. We had a spate of the horses that were kept out in the fields getting injured. The injuries were scratch marks in three lines on the skin hard enough to make them bleed. They were in weird places like the flanks or back end on theses horse (which were all over 15hh).

So, couldn't figure out what was happening, it was actually pretty scary as we concluded it had to be a human with a knife (even though the marks didn't look like knife marks IYSWIM) there was no other logical explanation.

Through a very good friend, it was mentioned in the pub to a manager (someone high up I can't remember who exactly) of a zoo, he said he had two workers who were interested in big cat legends and who come out and see the horses (who were injured).

Anyhoo, they came and saw the horses. They proposed they would spend the night with their equipment and see if they could see anything. BTW We didn't live on the yard.

Next morning we arrive and men are gone. Phone call confirms that they saw nothing. They were no more 'attacks' after that though.

Zoo manager(?) was in pub on a later date and admitted when pissed that the reason the workers came out is because in his words 'animals do escape you know, we just don't publicise it' he wouldn't confess if the men that night caught anything. I know what I think.

Hopefully that makes sense, although details may be a bit vauge it is 100% true and very odd all round.

vague

Shadow men? Are they superheroes?

Yes I went through the madness and drug stuff 20 years ago. Certainly does open the doors of perception! Now I am an arch rationalist. Not by choice, it is just the way I am. It is quite obvious on an extremely simple level that if you take LSD, those experiences are not ?out there? but inside.

I think the turning point for me when so many ?mysteries? became clear was when I read someone?s idea that I think about 5-10,000 years ago man?s consciousness changed. In Homeric epics for example the hero ?hears voices from the gods? and these would tell him what to do/how to behave etc. At some point however man realised that these voices were his own subconscious entering the conscious. You know that old Greek saying: ?those that the gods would kill they first send mad? ? this by turning up that internal monologue (or dialogue in the case of Schizophrenia) or in old mythology, the Erinyes or Furies.
A superficial form of this nowadays is the negative scripts we run: ?I am fat? ?everyone hates me? 100 times a day. Just stops us being little gods, if I can say that much, or perhaps at least it stops us reaching our potential.

?IME, Bayswater is an excellent source of incomprehensible, random chatter, floating on the breeze at any time of day or night. It's all those foreign students, temporary residents and carousing media types!?

Possibly ;) but of course sensitivity to environment or inability to control what is within, is not dependent on time and space. I am particularly interested in standing stones, my wife isn?t. We used to visit them but she always gets a headache and TWICE in different places, she tripped climbing over a fence and nearly speared herself on a hidden metal spike. She never has ?accidents? Doesn?t mean anything really but my point is that a ?busy? environment has no more influence on a sensitive than a ?quiet? one.

My wife?s clairvoyance:
We no longer talk about it as we don?t find it interesting. When younger such things are inherently interesting but later they are just a little bit of a burden.
For example, would you really like to know when you will die or would you like to be ignorant of it. It would be a burden ? knowing. Some would use that knowledge to achieve great things, some would sink into despondency.
Without fully understanding your point, I think it is linear. Ie she sees something happening, and it happens