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.

Not just humans. A short while after my beloved dog died I was busy at work in hospital when I suddenly smelt her very strongly and had an overwhelming sensation of love. This lasted for about a minute or just under.

So not sleep paralysis

@Ginger a relative developed seizures. Not you, a relative. So you have no idea whatsoever what a seizure of any kind feels like. I have tonic, mal and absence seizures. They all feel different and are painful and scary at times. But I know that the seizures are different to “feeling” a relative gas visited. I think it’s really dangerous and stupid to try to link the sensation the OP has described to a seizure. It’s scare mongereing.

Ghosts are defo a thing, Iv seen a man walk past my hall multiple times since I got with DH, also my DD picked a picture up a few weeks back and said Aww Grandad and his dog!! I was like WTF! He died before even I was born! So Iv never mentioned him to her or showed her the picture 🧐

What Procne said. Also, we are pattern recognising animals for good evolutionary reasons. So we turn anything into a pattern we have seen before. That applies to feelings, sounds, everything. It's the explanation behind many paranormal experiences.

I appreciate that it felt very real and that you're convinced you were awake but I would put it down to lucid dreaming. Look up hypnagogia and hypnopompic. There's a lot in between sleep and wakefulness that is distinctly weird. I can operate the snooze on my mobile phone alarm clock half a dozen times without actually recalling doing it, and it's touch screen and therefore requires you to look at whether you're turning it off or snoozing it. Still manage it but when I finally wake up I wonder how the fuck I did.

There are no limits to human understanding.

We're a primate. We're just an ape. There's no teleology behind our evolution. We haven't evolved to understand everything and there's no reason to suppose we are actually capable of it. Our very evolution makes us limited. We can't even process what our eyes see properly once we're travelling at over 20mph. Of course our understanding is limited, in the same way the processor in the computer I'm currently using is limited. It doesn't make it wrong or mean that the scientific method cannot explain everything - I just think as a species we're a bit too thick to. After all, we're destroying this planet without another one within travelling distance. We're just not that bright.

I’d like to think these things are real.
30 years ago my lovely nan gave me a satin hanging heart which had rose buds in it. I had it over my headboard and it smelt lovely. When I moved in with my dh 20 years ago I place the heart over my new headboard and it’s stayed there ever since. The rose fragrance has long gone.
Darling nan died 27 years ago.
Now, this may be my mind playing tricks on me but several times a year (in fact it happened yesterday) I will be laying in bed (often wide awake on my iPad etc) and I will get a huge whiff of rose buds. I take huge comfort in this. I’d like to believe it’s nan just reminding me that she’s here, watching over!
Also, when nan passed away mum and I had the exact same dream about nan. I can still vividly remember that dream 27 years later!

I was my relative's carer when she developed epilepsy. It doesn't make me an expert but I remember more of it than she does. She doesn't remember the tonic-clinics at all, but does remember some other seizures and the sensations they induced including a feeling of being lifted up and seeing her dead brothers enter her room. What I am saying is that it's amazing what the brain can do to people.

I don't think it's seizure activity though, but it doesn't have to be an actual seizure for the brain to do some bizarre things. I often think that I've heard voices when I haven't or sometimes get a fleeting sensation that my late Grandmother is behind a door or feel a rush of air. I do have mental health issues though none that typically cause hallucinations, but I think it's just my brain having a blip. As happens even in people who don't have MH issues.

@bertrandrussell I apologise that my post got personal up thread, I usually try very hard to not get personal, my only excuse is that I was incensed by your posts on these threads as they over and over again suggest that other grown adults don't know their own minds. But I should not have got personal and I apologise.

As to whether there is a limit to human understanding, I think that that depends on the human, and generally the cleverest and best informed humans will be very aware of their own limitations.

Procne, thanks that's interesting and it doesn't surprise me at all that different cultures put it down to different things, depending on their beliefs. The same goes for many "supernatural"-seeming experiences.

But my question is more, why is there that "presence" there to start with, the one that is interpreted in different ways?

whatever presence you hallucinate is with you/watching you/sitting on you during a sleep-paralysis episode depends on your culture of origin

So that means there's generally a sensation of a presence, of an "other". Which is obviously ascribed to different things depending on culture, but it also suggests everyone experiences this "other" as a basic aspect of the sleep paralysis.

That's what I want to know why. Why does the brain do a weird paralysis thing that involves the sensation of being visited/climbed on/hugged by something? That doesn't seem to be explained anywhere, it's just "oh because sleep paralysis."

Again I'm not saying therefore there are ghosts or spirits, but I would like to know if there's a rational explanation of that universal sensation of an "other" .

That's what I want to know why. Why does the brain do a weird paralysis thing that involves the sensation of being visited/climbed on/hugged by something? That doesn't seem to be explained anywhere, it's just "oh because sleep paralysis.

I think it is just certain sets of muscles being switched off during REM sleep, and not kicking on again correctly because someone with a sleep disorder isn't moving smoothly through the normal stages -- and then made worse by the awake-but-paralysed person panicking.

You go into fightor-flight mode but can't move, and get the symptoms of a panic attack tight chest, feeling as though breathing is difficult etc.

OP back in 2014 shortly after my aunt died I had this same thing happen to me exactly as you describe your experience she was like a Mum to me we was very very close & since that day I had the same experience as you, there's been an untold amount of things that could only have been her showing me she's ok & is around us, my daughter was the first person to see her after she died she was at the foot of my daughters bed I've also had the feeling of someone sitting on the end of the bed, I believe your experience was your dad & he was letting you know he's ok & is watching over you, take it as a comfort 😌 Everyone will always have their own opinion on these kind of things some may believe in spirit & the after life & some may not but bare in mind just because you can't prove something to someone doesn't mean it's not true x

We don’t always know. Even those who categorically state that it is this or that don’t actually know.

I’m an atheist in that I absolutely do not believe in a God etc. But I have premonitions. I can’t explain them, I don’t generally relay them and I believe that psychics and the like are generally charlatans out to exploit people for money.

But I have absolute premonitions of things, not always clear, but I can tell you that e.g. something is going to happen. Have had very, very vivid dreams about people when they’re going through a hard time and those dreams have always come true.

It’s odd because I was going to start a thread about this myself recently as I’ve gradually come to the realisation that someone close to me is going to die. Initially the identity of the person wasn’t revealed to me. A family member is terminally ill and i wondered whether it was them, but gradually the picture changed and I wondered whether it was actually me as I am due to have surgery soon. But last night the identity of the person was revealed to me and I am certain that at the very least this person is going through a very,very difficult time and that it’s entirely possible they are not going to come through this. It’s someone I used to be close to but now due to circumstances I no longer am, but if I come to the knowledge that they have passed it will not come as a surprise to me.

It’s not something I wish to have had bestowed on me tbh. Some people see this gift of second sight and what not as a gift. I really, really don’t. I don’t wish to use it in any way shape or form and I don’t wish to learn to channel it. I’d rather not know.

Everything...and I mean EVERYTHING...that we experience is filtered through our brains.

Our fingers can’t feel, our eyes can’t see, our tongues can’t taste - our brains do all of that, and always after the slightest delay. So we are never truly experiencing reality as it happens, but only ever a construct from our brains.

I think you were hallucinating. I know it won’t feel to you like you were, but if it did it wouldn’t have been a hallucination because, by definition, they feel completely real. And, lying in bed before getting up means you were probably engaging in microsleeps. Insomniacs who swear blind they’ve been 100% awake all night are nearly always found (when tested) to have been dipping into microsleeps all through the night, but they weren’t aware of it.

We have millions upon millions of examples of people hallucinating for many reasons, so we know that it’s something human brains do. But we have precisely zero examples, properly evidenced, of dead people communicating with living ones. Zero.

And I really wish people would ask themselves why, under these circumstances, the dead have to be so wishy washy with their communications. Why get into bed and cuddle someone rather than say, “Hey, Tiddler....I’ve found out the most amazing thing! Death isn’t the end”!? They can be material enough to affect the environment (making rooms cold, creeping out cats and causing jam jars to fly off shelves) but they can’t find any possible way to communicate the answer to the one question every human has?

I once lay in a hospital bed having had major surgery & still feeling scared and alone. I felt...FELT...someone holding my hand and I had the strongest sense that it was my mother. I felt better for it - but I never truly believed it actually was my mother, who had been dead for 10 years.

Nevertheless, my brain was seeking comfort, found it and it helped me.

So, if you want to feel comforted that it was your Dad, then do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it was almost certainly self-comfort caused by a sleepy brain looking for an explanation for something that couldn’t immediately be explained.

Seriously, if I had premonitions that always came true, I’d find a scientist and share this extraordinary ability that - if demonstrated - could change the way humanity viewed everything. It would alter the face of modern science, particularly physics, in the most astonishing way.

It was surely just an experience of hypnogogic/ hypnopompic hallucination. Its easy to be convinced first thing in the morning that you're awake, but haven't we all woken up at, say, 7 with the alarm, lain awake thinking we should really be getting up, then suddenly realised it's 7.30 and past getting up time? We may even have 'snoozed' the alarm a few times without realising.

I had a few strange and unpleasant experiences alone in bed as a young woman, which involved apparently very real, physical sensations and were terrifying. It confused my sceptical mind for years until my daughter was unwell and told she'd been having sleep hallucinations; and having researched I now realise that is most likely the explanation for what happened to me.

What does it matter anyway if it brought you comfort?

Have had very, very vivid dreams about people when they’re going through a hard time and those dreams have always come true.

Initially the identity of the person wasn’t revealed to me. A family member is terminally ill and i wondered whether it was them, but gradually the picture changed and I wondered whether it was actually me as I am due to have surgery soon. But last night the identity of the person was revealed to me and I am certain that at the very least this person is going through a very,very difficult time and that it’s entirely possible they are not going to come through this.

How was it 'revealed'? You seem to be saying on the one hand that you have precognitive dreams which always come true, then that you 'knew' someone close to you was going to die, but then it sounds more like you were idly wondering about someone you used to know and have decided it's them, only they might not die, they might just be ill or unhappy. Isn't it just the case that you are worried about your terminally ill family member, and understandably worried about your ow surgery, and are over-interpreting a dream about an old friend which has got mixed up with those anxieties?

Complete cynic here.
You say you were drowsy. I reckon your OH climbed into bed and gave you a cuddle, you drifted back to sleep feeling warm and cosy. Time passes. OH quietly manages to extract himself without waking you. Next you hear the door open which wakes you. Your back is now chilly so feels strange.

Our fingers can’t feel, our eyes can’t see, our tongues can’t taste - our brains do all of that, and always after the slightest delay. So we are never truly experiencing reality as it happens, but only ever a construct from our brains.

We can feel without the brain processing anything, although the nervous system does. Reflex actions are so quick because they're not processed by the brain. It's also how animals who lack brains as such function. Yes, all our understanding of sensory information comes from the brain, but we can feel without them.

Nobody can say for sure what it definitely is or isn't.

We don't know all there is to known in this world and I doubt we ever will.

I don't believe in god, I'm not religious, but I would struggle to say it's absolutely not true, I can't know that and it would be very arrogant to say so.

Who are any of us to say it wasn't your dad?!

What if it was? Really hope it was him OP. Take comfort from that. He could be still be there loving you all. I'd love to think our loved ones still live on personally.

I've had this happen three times in very similar circumstances - not all when I was drowsy. I don't know if those were the deceased visiting me or not, but I do agree with PP's priest.

Sorry for the loss of your dear dad

The night my dd was murdered I was in bed sleeping. I heard her come up the stairs and she came and sat on my bed, I could feel the weight of her sitting down. I was pregnant with Dd2 and she told me she knew what I was having.
I got up to look for her. I told DH she was in the house during the night.
I phoned her, couldn't get an answer I was getting ready to go to her flat when the police came.

I told the police she had been here the night before it was only when they checked CCTV they told me it wasn't possible for her to be in the house during the night.
I will never understand what happened it felt so REAL.

Cali Reflex actions are not “feeling” - they are a reponse.

parkhead paradise so sorry for your loss