Something really strange just happened

[InSwamTiddler]

I’ve NC for this as I’m not sure what to make of it and I’m really confused.
Back story - I was raised Catholic, but I’m atheist now. I work in a science based field and for as long as I can remember I have believed in the factual, empirically provable reality of things. I don’t believe in God or the afterlife, or ghosts / paranormal stuff.

Nearly 9 years ago my dad died. He died very suddenly and unexpectedly at a young age in my childhood family home.

Due to some circumstantial things, I’m currently living back in my family home.
My mum has mentioned a few times over the years that she’s felt my dad’s presence here and I’ve always been openly kind to her about it, but thinking “nope. Your imagination is going crazy because you’re grieving”. She’s mentioned she’s felt pressure on the bed as if someone has sat down on it next to her for example.

Anyway, this morning DP has left for work and I was still in bed. I was listening to him brushing his teeth, then popping the kettle on so I was definitely awake, but a little drowsy.

I felt him get back into bed with me and thought “what’s he doing?”... it’s not unusual for him to pop back into the bedroom and give me a hug or kiss before leaving the house.

I felt the heaviness of him pressed against my back and his arms wrapped around me. There was a heat between my shoulder blades I have never felt before but I wasn’t scared but I knew it wasn’t DP then. I heard the front door open so DP was leaving the house. Then my whole back went tingly a bit like pins and needles but not in an unpleasant way.

When it was happened I felt calm and warm but I’m freaking out now and can’t stop crying. Sounds silly but I feel like it may have been my dad.

I was 100% awake, not dreaming. I leant over and flicked the lamp on straight after.

Does anyone believe in this stuff? I never have but now I’m questioning everything.

You can’t deny people’s own personal experience. A couple of years ago after my Mum died, I went to the shop to buy some flowers with my DD to take to the cemetery.
We unlocked the car and my DD and I both said at the same time, “ I can smell Omi” ( German for grandma). The car stunk of her perfume, Tweed. We both smelt it at exactly the same time and there was no way someone could have got in a locked car and sprayed it

deepan our learned friend bertrand has pointed out the need for evidence but has also told us unequivocally that certain things are quite simply "not possible" and said she could provide "rational" explanations for everything and that she feels it is necessary to put people who may believe that there is more out there than we currently understand "right" by telling them she "knows" because "paranormal" just happens to be something she knows "a lot" about. So I was asking - what - what does she know and how.

I don't think we are going to get any answers to all the big questions. Having googled it I see that apparently the US spent 20 million dollars on research on ESP between the 70s and 90s and then suddenly apparently stopped the research. I am beginning to realise why. Thinking about it, if it is a skill we can all learn, we'd be getting dodgy people remotely viewing us in the shower and all sorts. The mind boggles about where it could lead. I am minded to let sleeping dogs lie. After this post I am off to make a nice cup of tea and to forget all about it.

procne I have just googled for updates in research 2018 (very quickly as I shouldn't be on mumsnet right now...) and have come up with an article from March 2018 "Research finds neurofeedback viable therapy option for children with ADHD" I am not saying this is remotely conclusive and it might be out of date, I don't know, but within "psychology today" there are conflicting articles. So who knows what will come.

As I understand it, Bertrand is perfectly prepared to allow for the possibility that she could be wrong, as she's said she's happy to accept anything that is supported by convincing evidence.

Yes. I never understand those who appear to think that those who propose non-supernatural explanations for events perceived by others as supernatural have a fixed position in which they do not want the supernatural to exist. It would be enormously interesting if hard evidence emerged in transparent, reproducible trials to support precognition or the survival of some form of consciousness after death, just as the discovery of intelligent extra-terrestrial life would be (or it discovering us)!

Omg are you lot still arguing 😂

If I have an explanation for an event that fits with our current understanding of the world then I do not need to prove it. If you wish to explain the same event in a way that does not fit our current understanding, or even actually goes against what we already know, then it is up to you to show the evidence and allow it to be tested. That is how scientific progress is made. It would be incredibly exciting if there was some evidence of an afterlife, or if clairvoyance or any other paranormal activity, but so far there just isn't. Anecdote is not evidence. I could tell anecdotes from my own experience which on the face of it look distinctly "woo" (hate that word!). But I knew they weren't, so I looked a bit further and found the rational explanation which I knew would be there.

If I have an explanation for an event that fits with our current understanding of the world then I do not need to prove it I think the issue has now become "what is the current understanding of the world" - and is your "understanding" more reliable or superior to other people's - there is no black and white understanding of the world which everyone agrees on - so you were saying before that you had a good knowledge of the paranormal and you are now implying that you have a good or better than average "understanding of the world" which presumably covers things like science, philosophy, psychology but you probably won't provide any objective justification for that. But, look, it doesn't matter - I don't think we are going to reach an understanding on this and it doesn't matter. Maybe you are going for the double bluff and you know more than you are letting on

big Why would you take evidence of increased brain activity as a sign that something is happening outside of someone's brain? I would take it as evidence that something was happening INSIDE someone's brain.

For example, it is perfectly possible to see the increased brain activity that coincides with an auditory hallucination in a schizophrenic episode. This is NOT taken as a sign that a real event has occurred that is being registered by increased activity in the patients brain. It IS taken as evidence that the brain activity is causing the person to experience a hallucination.

Seeing increased activity in someone's brain while they felt they were being sent messages from the future would be evidence for what was happening in their brain to make them think that was happening...it wouldn't be evidence of messages from the future!

M3lon I would take it as evidence of something happening inside the brain, not outside, like you. eg testing for remote viewing - a subject is asked to give a detail of something in another room and brain scanned as they "see" it remotely, assuming they got it right. Based on idea of premonitions/esp/remote viewing/other are all an advanced form of intuition....

I am fairly sure i have heard of scans being used in relation to subjects to do with enhanced intuition - not sure what the tests were - and the scans showed greater activity in one part of the brain than normal - i would have to look it up as i can't remember which part of the brain, but it may have been something to do with emotions or empathy. I can't remember. Not hallucinations, I don't think. Not much help, really, I know

"there is no black and white understanding of the world which everyone agrees on"

Do you really believe this? That nothing is certain or fixed?

Why should there be any evidence of an afterlife, and why because there isn’t, should it mean there isn’t one.

there is no black and white understanding of the world which everyone agrees on

But there are large areas, particularly in relation to science, where the vast majority of people who know what they're talking about agree on, and no-one sensible seriously believes they are wrong. For example, gravity, the causation of disease by germs, the fact that the earth is flat: yes, there are people who would deny that those things exist or are correct, but it doesn't change the fact that any one denied them would be deluded or very foolish.

In the same way there is a very large degree of scientific understanding that woo things have no basis in fact, based on the lack of any evidence that they are genuine scientific phenomena despite a lot of people trying very hard indeed to find evidence for a very long time. Therefore, on the basis of current knowledge, it would appear that things that appear to be woo are much better explained by alternative rational explanations than by a conclusion that ghosts actually exist.

gravity, the causation of disease by germs, the fact that the earth is flat: yes, there are people who would deny that those things exist or are correct, but it doesn't change the fact that any one denied them would be deluded or very foolish.

You might want to read that back to yourself

Why should there be any evidence of an afterlife, and why because there isn’t, should it mean there isn’t one.

My understanding of stories of ghosts and visions is that some people believe them to be evidence of an afterlife, it's just that this is unverifiable by scientific methods.

But if you look at say, theories of a multiverse, it becomes apparent that there may be things out there for which we currently have no direct evidence but which nonetheless exist, It's just that for me, when it comes to the idea of an afterlife, I feel like I might as well believe in unicorns for all the evidence and likelihood that they too exist.

So it seems to me that in all probability, belief in the afterlife has come about because it's too hard for many humans to believe that death is final. You can see it when people first try to describe death to small children - they soften the blow by saying the loved one is up in heaven, or waiting by the rainbow bridge and that they'll meet them again one day. The idea of an afterlife makes things easier for the living. It doesn't mean it exists.

But if you look at the vast majority of ‘woo’ threads on here, most ‘supernatural events’ are reported as happening in bed, when the person is drowsy or has just woken up, or in poor visibility, or when the person was a child, or a suggestible teenager with an ouija board, or it was reported to them by someone else, so they didn’t actually experience it themselves.

Or it happened in the aftermath of a bereavement, so they were vulnerable and (understandably) wishing for signs in feathers or smells or sounds or rainbows or household things behaving oddly.

Or it was in a situation where they were alone and feeling nervy (home alone at night if not used to it, in a remote part of a building on a night shift, an unfamiliar place, a new house, walking the dog in woods at night) or somewhere they were already primed to think was haunted from colleagues’ stories or local legends.

Or something they were told after the event confirms their sense it was ghostly, or makes them remember something they would otherwise have forgotten — people entirely underestimate the extent to which death at home was entirely normal until very recently, for instance.

I don’t think you need multiverse theories to account for any of this.

I've told this story before, sorry. But when I was about 4, there was a room in our house that used to reduce me to utter terror because of the "green man" in the corner. Nobody else could see it, and the rest of my family became increasingly unsettled and scared too. If my mother had not discovered the rational explanation before we moved, we would have had an excellent bit of anedata about our haunted house. And I would be as convinced as anybody else that ghosts exist and I had seen one. By now everyone else in my family would probably be convinced they'd seen it too. And my parents might well have warned the people who bought the house-and that would have made them uneasy too. And as it was an old, dark, cold house wth an attic and a cellar, they would probably have felt or even seen things that would reinforce the haunted narrative.

What was the ‘green man’, Bertrand? I used to refuse to go to bed aged five and wail piteously about ‘the old woman in the corner who looks at me and only comes in the dark’. This turned out to be my mother’s dressing gown hanging on a peg by its hood and looking witchy by the low light of my nightlight.

My green man was a splash of paint on the wall under a shelf everyone else was too tall to see. One day my mum got down to my level and saw him too.

Interesting article about infrasound - sound that is lower than the normal limit of human hearing. But it can be felt even if not consciously heard. The sections on human reactions and suggested relationship to ghost sightings are worth a read.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

I definately beleive in gjosts...and i study hard core science. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Ghosts even.

What do you think ghosts are maleficient ? do you think tbey are actually real as opposed to tricks of the brain?

"The two aren't mutually exclusive."

Could you say some more?

bertrand and deepan aamongst people who are considered experts in their field there is a fair amount of debate, in almost every area of expertise. So no, not a lot of black and white. There are ongoing investigations into ESP etc by serious science. Obviously there is a very large body of accepted fact such as germs causing disease, but it isn't as clear cut as you think about all questions.

Sorry that probably sounded patronising. I think that there is a great deal which is fairly certain, but there is also much which is not.

I think in fairness also that if you would like to live by the rule that everything can be explained rationally, by reference to facts already known, there may be quite a lot of confirmation bias going on in your thinking.

"There are ongoing investigations into ESP etc by serious science"

And what have been the results?