To ask if anyone has had any paranormal encounters/experiences

[HowlingBitch]

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

BeerTricksPotter Thanks for that, I've just had a read up on hypnagogia and it was very interesting. I have suffered from sleep paralysis when tired/ill, I also get the snatches of voices, images and "pub chatter" as I drift off to sleep which I assumed everyone gets. It's nice to know what it's called now anyway!

BeerTricksPotter I also suffer from sleep paralysis, would be interested to hear what happens with you during it? (slight hijack op, apologies but I've not shared this experience before!)

With me, it can happen anytime. I cannot pin it down to being ill, stressed, or because Ive eaten xyz, no pattern at all. It happens (now) about twice a year. Not often granted but scary enough when it does as I'm sure you'll empathise with. I also KNOW whether it's going to be "one of those nights" as soon as I drift off to sleep. I feel, what I can only describe as, a wave coming over me. Then it's a sinking feeling and BANG I'm in the depths of it. I am conscious of my surroundings, the date/time/year but cannot even flicker an eyelid. There's a whoosing noise in my ears. I don;t know how long it lasts but I have an internal conversation along the lines of "right, let's TRY and move toes/fingers etc. To no avail. Eventually the grip releases and I can move. Then it happens again. And again. And goes on ALL night. In and out, in and out and I am powerless to stop it.

I've even got up, had a cuppa, read a little, gone back to bed and it carries on! That's the bit i can't understand as I feel like I've "briken the night's cycle" changed mindset yet it still happens!

Would love to know if your experience of it is similar and if you've managed to identify when and why etc etc

SORRY! My post is to SeymoreButts

I have.

In our old flat (1940's built) the CD player would turn on randomly, even if the power was switched off at the wall.

We recently moved to a big house a mile or so away and things got worse.

About three weeks ago DH and I were watching a DVD and there was a knock at the door around 10pm. Nobody there. The letterbox then rammed. Nobody there.

DH was at the pub a week or so later and the front door handle started going up and down like someone was trying to get in (it was locked). I got so scared I called DH home.

The worst one was when DH and I were watching a film and there was runninh upstairs. We both went to check on DD1 and her lamp was off, her bedroom door wide open but she was absolutely zonked out horizontal on the bed. We came downstairs to find the back door to our completely enclosed garden wide open. This was around 11pm.

DH had a few paranormal experiences at another house he lived in with his exGF

...continued - where he would hear tapping on his patio doors every night. He'd later find that the house was built on an old graveyard.

At my parents house after my Mum died I remember hearing my Mum's voice call my name. I walked downstairs and before I even told my best friend anything she asked me if I'd heard her voice.

Thanks for your really interesting reply, archie. Great point about the voices of the gods!

LSD, back in the day, was an eye- and mind-opening experience, wasn't it?! I was too young and fucked-up then to understand my trips as I do now but, later on, they've greatly enhanced my insight into myself and, more generally, the psychologies of perception. It would be lovely if I could always see every glowing shade of green in a tree, without chemical assistance - but still nice to know I'm capable of it! Oh, and seeing music! Am quite envious of synaesthetics.

My question about clairvoyance came from this: If time is linear, as it's assumed to be (below the speed of light, anyway) then it's impossible to know what will happen in the future - unless you accept pre-ordination, which I can't do. Scientists aren't sure time is linear, though; it might be flowing, with whorls and eddies, or it might not actually exist other than as a useful concept. If there are eddies in time, or there is no time (everything's always happening at once) then clairvoyance could be possible. Not that I care much, tbh; it's just interesting.

LauLauLemon - sounds like you & DH surprised a sneak thief! Did you tell the cops?

... just realised my post reads as if I still do acid. I don't, I meant looking back on the trips I had in my twenties

No, there was noone there. We went upstairs as soon as we heard running so there would be no way to get downstairs without us seeing them and the bavk garden is enclosed on all sides by 40ft walls and six other gardens which is blocked in again at the end of the sixth garden.

I have had a few, the most recent was this week. My work place had a team building day, a tour of a stately home and lunch after. On arrival the guide told us were we ready to meet ghosts, I always feel tourist attractions big stuff like this up for tourists so I told her I would let her know, don't tell me anything. I felt very cold, watched and a little nauseous in one of the bedrooms. I didnt want to enter the next room as the feeling was so bad. I said it's these rooms isn't it, she told me I was spot on. For me it is something I don't enjoy at all and I do not encourage it, also people can be mean saying your weird etc, which is what some of my colleagues said.

I was at a wedding once in a very old castle in Scotland. My bf parents were in one of the better rooms in the oldest bit of the castle. The wedding went well and we all went to bed. My bf mum sat at her dressing table in her room taking make up off etc All fine. In the morning she woke up to find a really horrid picture of an old scary looking woman wearing a black hooded cloak next to the dressing table. It WAS NOT there the night before. It was a awful picture, really creepy. Not what you would use decoratively in a hotel room and we would have seen it. It was right next to the bathroom door so very obvious spot.

We all saw it that morning and were totally freaked. On checking out the receptionist told us the room was haunted and jewellery etc often went missing from that room She wouldn't tell us before as quite rightly no one would want to sleep in that room.

garlicnutter

I should stay off conventional physics and look at vibrational medicine etc if I were you.

However I can't continue this thread as I have just had some devastating news that my wife's smear test
came back as bad as it can be and she is going into hospital.

She reminded me that after our baby was born (she is one on 1st July) she told me how she was convinced
she wouldn't see her grow up. I had never mentioned her clairvoyance to anyone before, and I'm thinking it was
unwise now. A silly coincidence perhaps? Irrational thought I know but I am too upset/distracted to continue this conversation

Best wishes.

Will do, archie. I am so sorry to hear about your wife's diagnosis. Very best wishes to all of you.

shakey1500 your experience sounds very similar to mine. Being very tired or ill is usually what sets me off. It used to happen a lot when the DCs were small and I was tired from night feeds, or suffering from insomnia (which used to happen before DCs) or had the flu. It actually happened last night, I went to bed much earlier than usual then woke up for a few hours and it happened when I was finally starting to drift off again. I get the rushing noise in my ears too. I'm usually stuck staring into one corner of the room, it seems like I am breathing very heavily and fast and I hope that that will alert my husband to the fact that something's wrong, but I'm probably breathing normally and just imagining the heavy breathing. I get the inner dialogue too, I'll think to myself "right, if I can just move this hand that will wake me up enough to stop this" I can actually feel and hear my hand moving over the sheets but I'm looking at it and it's doing nothing. Part of my brain is definitely still in sleep mode! Sometimes it feels like there is someone else in the part of the room that I can't see, that used to terrify me but I know what's going on now so can tell myself there's no one there. I feel sorry for the people who actually see their imagined "other person" during sleep paralysis. It sometimes feels like it's going on for ages and I will be trapped in a paralysed body forever, but in reality it probably lasts for a few seconds, if that.
Does anyone else in your family suffer from it? It happens to my Dad, but no one else as far as I know.

seymorebutts thanks for replying. I'm going to start a thread in the health section and will reply in full. Just thinking so as not to deviate from this great thread and may get other experiences also iyswim?

archie- my best wishes also to you and yours also

garlicnutter - what an insightful post. I don't think time is linear but have never been able to express what I mean by that. Thank you for describing it in such a clear way.

3 weird experiences here, directly and indirectly!

1. Up until I was 9 our family lived in a large, old Victorian house. My Mum and oldest brother frequently used to hear a baby crying from a certain part of the house, even though we had no baby, and when they went to run and look each time, the crying stopped. My Mum used to be a ghost sceptic, until one night when my Dad was out for the evening, and us kids were in bed, she got into her own bed at about 10pm, turned the light out, and was lying on her back, when she suddenly felt a huge pressure on her shoulders like someone was pushing her down the bed. She still says now that she has never since been as scared as she was then, and lay frozen with fear for nearly an hour until she finally fell asleep on her own- and my Mum is not a lady easily scared! Also, apparently one night when I was 5 (I don't remember this), I went to wake my Mum in the middle of the night to ask her to take me to the loo as I often did (Large house with bathroom far away, my room next door to my parents). My Mum woke up to see me in the doorway with a figure standing behind me. They had friends staying over that night, and my mum thought for some reason that one of said friends had woken/i'd woken them and had taken me to her. She was about to say "Thanks" when the figured stepped into the back wall of the hallway and dissapeared and definitely wasn't a shadow- again my Mum said she was terrified but had to keep it together for me! We since found after moving that there was a fire there in the 1930s and a nanny and baby died. Still gives me goose bumps when I think about it! Very glad we moved before I was old enough to be left alone in that place! We had 4 cats whilst living there, and one in particular used to get freaked out in certain parts of the house.

1. ...Talking of cats. When we moved into our next house, which didn't appear to be haunted, nervous cat changed mood almost overnight and became muched more relaxed. However, when my Grandad died 10 years ago, for a couple of months afterwards, this cat, and one of our other ones wouldn't go past a certain spot at the top of the stairs on the landing- they either sat at the bottom of the steps yowling and staring at this spot, or if upstairs would yowl and stare before shooting downstairs only when pretty much forced- really unnerved us for a bit, but I do wonder if it was something to do with my Grandad. Suddenly they were fine again, very weird...

1. DS is 20 weeks, and my Nan died suddenly and unexpectedly 4 days before he was born. When DS was 8 weeks me and my mum went to Brighton and I was feeding DS overlooking the sea when Mum suddenly said she got a waft of my Nan's house (VERY distinct, nice smell). I didn't smell it, and thought my Mum was sort of wanting to smell it (obviously didn't say this to her). A few days later, DS was lying chattering away in his cot one morning whilst I was doing my make up in his room, totally thinking about something else, when I got a huge waft of my nan's house (couldn't have come from anywhere obvious), and DS stopped chattering, and just froze and stared for a few seconds before carrying on wiggling and chattering- really freaked me out but in a nice way!

Apologies for the appalling spelling and grammar in that last post!

Gosh, thanks, Loretta!

Dunno if you like reading this sort of thing; just in case -
philosophical examination of time
physics (string theory, m-theory)

I just remembered a weird thing that happened. Dd2 was about 1 year old and dd1 (aged 3) had tutors in the house every day (she has autism). Our tutors got to know both children well, which is what happens when you have an intensive programme running in the house.

Where we were living there were no babies next door and the windows were shut. One day our programme consultant was working with dd1 when dd2 started crying upstairs having woken from her nap...........or so I thought. As a baby dd2 had a very distinctive cry - like a cough. I was about to go up to her when I relaised that actually she was up and playing in the kitchen. Dd1's consultant said to me 'that was definitely dd2 crying'. As I went to open the door and go upstairs the crying stopped. Very very odd. I have three children and know all of their cries wherever they are, and they are all different.

Up until the age of 4 i stayed many nights at my nanas house. My mum had very bad back problems and my nana used to watch me to give her a break. I would sleep in beside my nana. She would put me to bed first and then jump in bedside me later on. I would always wake when she got in. She would pull the covers back gently, slip in beside me, tuck in close behind me and sshh me back to sleep. Even when I got older, if I ever stayed over I would share her bed.

She died when I was 19. I had been living with an abusive partner at the time of her death. My mum was with her on her death bed and she asked my nana to watch over me. A few months later I ended that relationship and moved back home. The first night at home, I went to bed. About half an hour later, I felt the covers being pulled back gently, and my nana getting in beside me. She put her arm round me and told me she loved me and that I was going to be ok.

I'm 36 now but when I think about this experience, it's like it happened yesterday.

K999 - that's made me well up!

Hey vicar. I lived in Lancashire about 40 mins from york in 1982 and I think I may have seen a similar thing. We lived next to a resevoir and I remember being in the car and seeing two orange light above our house. They must have been there about ten seconds then they went.
I remember knowing that they were not street lamps or anything as there was no road behind our house.
I never said anything to anybody at the time but just innocently dismissed it.
It may have been a similar thing.

I also distinctly remember to this day going to bed one night and hearing something whizzing around in my bedside table.
I never opened it.

Also another time I used to dogsit for my parents friends. They lived in an old vicarage in lancashire. I was about 18 at the time and one night we left the dogs in the house while we went to the pub. When we came back they had pretty much dragged clothes from one room to another and chewed lots of things they shouldn't.
On the corner of one of the beds amidst all the chaos was a grey, marl coloured mans shirt. It had long pointed collars and it was folded perfectly, symmetrically on the corner of the bed.
A friend and I had been there 2 weeks and it didn't belong to us.
When the home owners came home they also said it didn't belong to them.

Lots of strange things happened there. A large mirror fell off the wall and took a wedge out of the skirting board. No broken glass and all fixings still in place on the wall and the mirror.
Kettle boiled when the electricity wasn't turned on, stereo going on during the night etc etc.

garlicnutter
Sorry I sent you off in the wrong direction. Upset yesterday.
What I really should have said is look at Tom Lethbridge on Pendulums.
Try and get hold of Colin Wilson's Mysteries. The titles/subjects do sound flaky, I admit, but look through them, approach rationally and critically and with your interests I think you will be fascinated by what you find about the nature of time/levels of existance etc. I won't pontificate as I think the only knowledge of true value is through experience and if you can't get that, read about it ;)
I hope you can get hold of copies. If you do and if you read them, PM me as I would be interested to hear your conclusions.
Through Wilson I came across Gurdjieff - who changed my life from being a drunken, drifting loser to following my dreams and realising them one after the other after the other-but that is a different story altogether!
Don't worry he isn't some self help Guru. Imo the greatest thinker and DOER of the last few hundred years