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.

yes of course people can sob uncontrollably at a stranger's death or misfortune...it's called empathy

Its not strange to pick up on that, its strange to imagine its more than that.

DD2 has just had her DD1 and they have just moved into the house that i grew up in. The little lady is now in the same room my gran died in but i have no fear if shes still there, she passed away in 1962! then I'm sure she'll be a fine presence to have around :)

"? Why would it only have happened in her house?
It makes absolutely no sense. The only explanation is that it was my grandmother."

Surely the question is why did it only happen in her house. Your grandmother's spirit could have visited you anywhere. But her house was the only place so full of memories, sights and sounds and smells of her that your subconscious incorporated her into your thoughts and dreams.

What always puzzles me about claims of woo is the banal things people claim their loved ones come back to do. You have the power to come back after death and visit your relatives, and all you can think of to do is throw stuff around, move furniture or knock on doors? Seriously?

I have a hearing things story.

I went to the GP's earlier this year during a stressful couple of month after hearing things, nothing exciting just my kids shouting mam when they weren't in the house stuff like that.

I have bi-polar to start with so I was very upset and thought it was psychosis. I'd made arrangement for the DC to stay with family, packed a bag and was prepared to go back voluntarily into the local psch hospital.

Didn't need too. A week worth of sleeping tablets and I was fine. I didn't realise it was so common till then and I have had MH struggles for 15 year.

Miscible I think this too. They can come back, but all they do is sit on a bed?

You’re forgetting the profundity of things that the dead apparently say to mediums, @Miscible. Like that they might be trying to speak to someone whose initial is M and who lives near water, or it might be J and a green area, and the person looking to talk to them is an elderly woman who is watching over them, and says something about a pet, and oh, I’m getting chest pains, or it might be something in the hip...?

I'm not suggesting hearing things mean mental illness either. Mine was stress and lack of sleep nothing to do with my diagnosis.

Bereavement is incredibly stressful not to mention heartbreaking to start of with and the brain can do incredible things.

I believe the Op. I’ve heard my cat miaow a few weeks after he died, my dad, the least woo person on Earth, felt their cat jump on the bed, and a few weeks after my dad himself died, there was a really strong orange smell that came from nowhere then faded away after a few minutes.
By the way, this thread in the Daily Mail. Fucking lazy journalists, and I say that as an ex journalist myself.

@procne you say You’re forgetting the profundity of things that the dead apparently say to mediums, @Miscible. Like that they might be trying to speak to someone whose initial is M and who lives near water, or it might be J and a green area there are going to be mediums who are fake. Where it is real, the information coming from "other" is going to be straightforward speech about comprehensible things, or warnings.

@bertrandrussell it can happen wherever you are, not just in the home where there are sights and smells.

@procne and @twittowoo and @bertrandrussell I asked this upthread and no one responded. Do you ever trust your instincts? Most people I know do, it is common and not seen as woo or a mental illness. Yet there is no "proof". If you don't then I can see why you might find these threads bewildering. But if you do, perhaps you can take that concept to its logical conclusion to understand better. Most of what is being said here is just an extension of trusting your instincts.

In terms of science, your suggestion that the posters on here should volunteer to be guinea pigs - what about their busy lives, families, professions? Not very realistic to think that the average person could justify dropping everything in the interests of "furthering science".

I have just realised that this thread is now on the daily mail. OP it is a complete disgrace

But it hasn't. A random claiming to have premonitions is not the discovery of a new, unimagined way of transmitting information. No one would take this seriously.There is no repeatable, verifiable evidence in such a case. I cant imagine prophetic dreams interesting a physicist: they investigate measurable phenomena to help describe the universe; they do not investigate woo

Er yes.

The point is...if I could accurately predict the future, I could demonstrate it. In fact, that would be the easist thing to demonstrate - far easier than Granny’s ghost is visiting me.

I predict X and X happens. I get it right 100% of the time under controlled conditions. This is “measurable phenomena” which hasn’t been measured to date because it’s bullshit.

Yes, a physicist would be interested in verifed data.

No, such claims have not been taken seriously by science because they come with no evidence whatsoever & run contrary to everything that is already known about how the universe works.

I am trying to make the perfectly logical point that IF a person genuinely believes that they have a “gift” of predicting the future, why wouldn’t they want to make that known to science?

“Oh, well scientists wouldn’t be interested” is absurd and simply an excuse. They would be if there was evidence....but there never is, which accounts for the lack of interest currently.

I agree..some random claiming predictive dreams is not intereresting. Some random claiming predictive dreams WITH EVIDENCE of 100% success rate would be.

(Didn’t know the James Randi thing wasn’t active anymore. Shame).

Believe what you want. My dad had very severe dementia and died of it while I was 7 weeks pregnant with my DS (roughly the same time as DS's heartbeat would have started). He died a few hours before my first scan appointment. I later dreamed that I'd gone to hospital to give birth and Dad was sitting in a corner with my baby on his knee, waiting for me to collect him, as if he'd been looking after him until he was ready to be born. It was beautiful, but I know it was only a dream. My DS was subsequently born on what would have been Dad's birthday. I know it's just coincidences, yet I draw a lot of comfort from it. And why shouldn't I? X

Oh ffs thanks Daily Mail!
Twats!

You're right Twit

And as for
Didn’t know the James Randi thing wasn’t active anymore. Shame

It is a shame. Someone should set up another such prize. Doesn't matter if they have no money... it would never be claimed anyway!

Like I said, I’m aware it was likely sleep paralysis/ a hallucination but it felt so real.
I was upset and posted here because I wanted to talk to someone about it without people IRL thinking I’m crazy.

Thanks for those who have posted kind messages x

I had an experience that was strange.

I'd had flu and it was proper flu, really poorly BIG time. Couldn't get out of bed sort of thing, for days. When I was finally up and about, a few weeks later I passed through the doorway to my kitchen and I 'heard' myself, my voice, saying 'oh my god, oh my god' is desperation. It was my voice when I was ill and had to get up for medication (I live alone) which took a good half hour to get downstairs. Somehow the memory got stored in the house - if that makes sense. ie extreme emotion, memory? It was a strong and tangible experience, I really did 'hear' my voice, clearly. I hadn't been thinking about when I was ill at all, just going about my day, and initially I wondered what on earth it was.

I've had other woo experiences passing through doorways. Perhaps things get lodged into doorways somehow (yy i know this sounds nuts but imo there's a lot we don't understand).

dione and twit

Many, many serious scientists have tested 'paranormal' ideas over the years. For one thing, they weren't that 'out there' to begin with. When the scientific method was first being deployed, the existence of psychics and mediums and ghosts etc. was assumed to be true! They have only become 'out there' and fringe beliefs precisely because, as understanding of all other verifiable natural phenomena increased, they were left behind due to lack of evidence!

Even so, there was, for example, still an ongoing long term experiment into whether human beings could influence a random number generator by thinking about it going on in the Cavendish labs (physics department) in Cambridge in the time I was an undergraduate there (~20 years ago).

You don't need a huge amount of funding to do a pilot study. I'm doing one now on how people make decisions as a function of whether or not they have depression....its being done for free in collaboration with a masters student. It really doesn't take much to get something like you suggest off the ground and many, many people have attempted to do exactly that with psychic abilities. They just don't progress to full funding because they don't produce evidence that supports it.

Further, there are huge numbers of perfectly respectable scientists working to understand exactly how and why the brain generates the experiences that cause people to believe in such things.

It would be unreasonable to assume that the lack of scientific evidence for ability to predict the future is due to a lack of looking!

“procne and @twittowoo and @bertrandrussell I asked this upthread and no one responded. Do you ever trust your instincts”

It depends what you mean by instincts. I think humans are very good at picking up subliminal messages, reading body language, processing things at the edge of heating and in peripheral vision and learning from experience. So we sometimes make correct choices based on what seems like “gut instinct” but which actually have a sound evidence base.

I also think that a lot of “gut instinct” is bollocks. You only have to read a thread on here when somebody has been arrested for something. Loads of posters with “oh, I can always pick a wrong ‘un” then he’s released without charge. And we only remember when we’re right anyway. Selective memory plays a massive part in the paranormal.

I am trying to make the perfectly logical point that IF a person genuinely believes that they have a “gift” of predicting the future, why wouldn’t they want to make that known to science?

But no one has talked about having a gift for predicting the future on here. They have said that they have had some specific premonitions about specific things which have come true, that it is not possible to predict when the premonitions will come, they sometimes come incomplete - they are akin to strong instincts. Do you ever trust your instincts? If you do, why would you, when there is no proof or evidence that you should? And if you do, I am guessing that your immediate thought is not "I must run to a scientist, any scientist, and tell them that I can rely on my instincts and make decisions based on my instincts and so it must be a gift which they must explore"

@m3lon and presumably the fact that full funding is not possible most of the time (all the time?) due to lack of evidence does not necessarily mean that the possibility of premonitions run[s] contrary to everything that is already known about how the universe works as twit has said, as initiatives for research are still discussed.

selective memory, plus a misunderstanding about the nature and frequency of coincidence...

I love some of the 'psychic fail' youtube content because it shows both of these up really really well. Sometimes you think the psychic has actually done quite well, then they point how many 'misses' you have conveniently forgotten...and how many people in the audience could have made the same 'hit'.

The poster saying she is certain a distant acquaintance is in for a very bad time is a great example. She has already tried several different people for a 'hit' before settling on someone less close. Now there is a variable time frame that might mean she could count the premonition a success even if it takes years for the 'something bad' to happen. At the end of the day 'something bad' happens to most people our age at least once in say a 3 year period. For me, looking back over the last 3 years....I've lost a parent and I have suffered a mental health break down. If you add in the potential for divorce, physical illness and redundancy etc. then its hard to find people who definitively haven't had a bad time in a 3 year window.

So what can we say about the feeling that something bad will happen to someone...well mostly that its going to be accurate most of the time. Given that the feeling of premonition is prevalent among humans (I have felt it on several occasions myself), then even much more pinpointed predictions can be expected to come true OFTEN.

The laws of statistics tell us that while most people will have more misses than hits, sheer chance will produce a few people who's wobbly moments almost always come true. That is what science would predict entirely in the absence of supernatural powers.

It depends what you mean by instincts. I think humans are very good at picking up subliminal messages, reading body language, processing things at the edge of heating and in peripheral vision and learning from experience. So we sometimes make correct choices based on what seems like “gut instinct” but which actually have a sound evidence base.

I think it is interesting that you are accepting the idea of picking up subliminal messages, reading body language, processing things processing things at the edge of hearing and in peripheral vision and learning from experience. This is a good start! You say "sound evidence base" but actually I think that if you think about it, you would find it very hard to provide about evidence to a third party, strong enough to mean that they could also rationally rely on your instinct based on evidence.

Do you ever decide not to go somewhere or take a different route and later find out the reason for it - an accident or an event having been cancelled, which you somehow subliminally just knew?

Can you see how people who get premonitions or messages from "other" in fact may just have greater skills in terms of picking up subliminal messages?

big I could propose a test of validity of 'premonitions'. We do a nation wide survey of people who think they have premonitions that come true, and ask them for any pending premonition they have currently.

We then calculate the probability of the predicted event coming true on the basis of everything we know about the world, for each predicted event.

We then record which events occurred and which didn't. And see if over all there was a significant 'value added' by the premonitions.

A prediction like 'someone I know will lose a loved one in the next year' have a probability of almost 1 anyway...at least for anyone that knows a normal number of people. The premonition can't add much value there, regardless of whether it comes true or not.

A prediction like 'my friend Michael Berry will die in a car accident this year.' will have a very low probability of coming true and hence the premonition could add a lot of value.

If you have 10000 people all making 'my friend X will die in a car accident this year' predictions, then there will be a high probability of one or two people getting it right.

The problem is what happens then. The scientists will say that a few hits is exactly what is predicted by chance. The people involved and those determined to believe in such things will say the study contained 9998 normal people and two genuine psychics....

So while you could run this as a pilot project and it wouldn't cost very much at all, it doesn't seem likely that it would ever settle the debate. People while just continue to find the odd lucky/unlucky person who happens to have been right a lot, and hold them up as the 'real deal'.

"Do you ever decide not to go somewhere or take a different route and later find out the reason for it - an accident or an event having been cancelled, which you somehow subliminally just knew?"

No. And neither has anyone else. Because you can only pick up subliminal messages from something you've seen or heard or smelled-not from something completely detached from you. All the stories of people not getting on flights that crashed and so on are either fabrications or post hoc rationalization.

The laws of statistics tell us that while most people will have more misses than hits, sheer chance will produce a few people who's wobbly moments almost always come true. That is what science would predict entirely in the absence of supernatural powers.

In relation to statistics, more misses than hits, it may be that there are a lot of people making unsubstantiated claims or not able to perform on demand. In terms of sheer chance, maybe, or maybe it is because it is using a part of the brain most people are not used to using, or skilled at using. Another factor is that people who report premonitions who are genuine will say that they find it exhausting. It is less easy to "see" things if you are under stress. Just as stress can affect performance in other ways. Neuro science is young - there is very recent groundbreaking peer reviewed research in all sorts of areas.