AIBU to believe FIL time slip experience?

[elsiesbonnet]

FIL was round yesterday evening for dinner with his wife. We were talking about the Uncanny podcast & recent TV episode then he told us of two experiences he'd had in the same place a number of years apart. After I went & did some research & asked a couple questions today, he's told us of another experience he had in the same place that was similar to one of the other experiences but that happened when he as a child.

I'm quite sceptical about paranormal type events I guess because I've never witnessed anything myself but am generally quite open minded. I don't believe FIL to be the type to make this sort of thing up & he was almost unwilling to tell us in case we thought he was crazy. He's never told anyone before.

AIBU to think what he experienced could've been real? In one of the instances he interacted with people in the past, his recall was quite genuine & he had some significant detail that you couldn't just make up. Has anyone else experienced a time slip or some other paranormal event they couldn't explain? I'm intrigued!

You make me smile @SurprisedWithAHorse .

I'm agreeing with you I'm just talking about why the mind wants us to 'believe in the woo' and saying that that isn't a bad thing.

You seem to be missing my point.

Very much not the implication of your previous posts where every explanation is met with another astonishing coincidence that you've calculated as less likely than it really is, but OK. Who knows what the teapot mice are doing to our brains.

It's no different to religion though is it?

It's not surprising we look for the 'coincidences' in difficult times, it's comforting.

That's why so many remembered coincidences happen at times that loved ones die.

It's the way our brains have been evolved to cope.

Whatever the reason for it it's very very interesting.

I'll share my 'woo' coincidence.

My husband was walking the dog early one Saturday while I was enjoying a lie-in. The phone rang but I didn't get to it in time - 1471 (yes, it was a while ago) revealed it was my PIL's number so I waited till my husband was back and let him know to give them a call

He called, and his dad answered because his mum was out. He usually phoned them once a week but always spoke to his mum as his dad didn't like speaking on the phone and only ever answered it if he was the only one in the house. Both FIL and MIL (when she got back from the shop) were adamant they hadn't called us, so we couldn't explain the call I'd missed earlier.

That evening we got another call - from his mum, to say that his dad had suddenly died of heart failure. He was old, but hadn't been ill.

My husband, who is a Christian, likes to think the missed call was God's way of making sure he spoke to his dad on the day he died.

So many of these "experiences" are so very easily explainable.

Loads of people have stories of thinking of someone they haven't spoken to in a while and then Wow, lo and behold, their phone rings and it's them! At the exact time they are thinking of them, with no rational explanation! Must be something supernatural, right?

Wrong. What neither conciously noticed was a trigger that made both of them think of the other at the same time, a song on the radio station they both had on in the background, a story on the news they both watched half an hour ago, or something in the newspaper they both read. Something that they didn't realise made them each think of the other, and one phones, and voila! Magic.
But not. Not even coincidence.

Similar explanations can be made for many of these. You dreamed someone was going to die and they did but it was out of the blue, a stroke or heart attack? No, your subconcious brain recognised signals your concious brain didnt, or didn't want to register. Your uncncious processing told you there was reason for concern, hence dreams of death, you knew but didn't know there was a reason they might die. And then they do...it wasn't a premonition at all.

Brains are complex. That's the explanation. Not mind reading or the supernatural or woo. Just glorious, complex, woefully misunderstood human brains.

One thing I find interesting is that “time slips” are a fairly modern phenomenon. Why is this? Is it the influence of 19th century writing (doubtful as it is unlikely people will have come across this)? It seems unlikely to be purely psychological as then there would be a much longer history.

is it that this is a well known explanation for phenomena which fits certain criteria?

Is it because the universe is changing in someway which makes time slips more common/possible?

Similar explanations can be made for many of these. You dreamed someone was going to die and they did but it was out of the blue, a stroke or heart attack? No, your subconcious brain recognised signals your concious brain didnt, or didn't want to register. Your uncncious processing told you there was reason for concern, hence dreams of death, you knew but didn't know there was a reason they might die. And then they do...it wasn't a premonition at all.

Brains are complex. That's the explanation. Not mind reading or the supernatural or woo. Just glorious, complex, woefully misunderstood human brains.

Totally agree with this, but see no harm in people wanting to believe in the woo. It's no different to people wanting to believe in religion.

It's comforting and helps process difficult things.

You do know that your “easily explainable” actually translated as many of these stories can fit into theories with my preferred paradigm. It’s not to say it’s what is actually happening - it’s just what you think is happening through your chosen lens. From another perspective something else is happening, this is just as true for them. Both views can be simultaneously true.

Or is it because people now have too much time on their hands and are more self absorbed?

It’s an interesting point, in fact if you look at the occult revival of the 19th century, especially towards the tail end with The Theosophical Society and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn it was very much the preserve of the idle Rich.

But what this doesn’t explain is why peoples minds are become focused on such phenomena. There doesn’t seem to be a causal link.

Aside from anything else, there is something unbearably smug about someone telling you that your complex problem is actually really simple.

It’s a bit like if you have a complex health issue, and only you know about all the ins and outs of it, and what works and what doesn’t… and someone says breezily “Oh just do x, y or z - that’s what I do.” Sometimes that person is even a doctor, with Science on their side (like Naga Munchetty in the news today - being fobbed off by doctors).

Sometimes things are more complex.

It’s not a perfect analogy with what’s happened on this thread, but it’s what sprang to mind for me.

I’m not saying time slips are real, or ghosts are real - or anything like that. I’m just irritated by the breezy smugness of some posters who are so very quick to rubbish the evidence of other people’s eyes and ears.

There comes a point for everyone when we do have to trust our own senses. Not everyone who has experienced something strange is then shown to have a brain issue. Some things you can’t just explain with a “Well, actually it’s very simple…”

And people wonder why there’s bad feeling on threads like this.

Not always experiencing the world completely accurately doesn't mean you have a 'brain issue'. That's the point - all brains make mistakes and fabricate things. It's the default way that perfectly healthy brains work.

I vividly remember flying down the stairs as a child - a very common false memory. I insisted to everyone at primary school that I had once flown down the stairs. Of course I didn't! But if I was going to take my perceptions at face value, I absolutely did fly down those stairs and there's no way to explain it.

Look at the inaccuracies and problems with witness statements after a crime. There's so much research proving we absolutely cannot always trust the evidence of our own eyes and ears. If someone's eyes, ears or memory are telling them something implausible nobody should be so arrogant as to think they're uniquely infallible.

Sorry just catching up on this very interesting thread.

It strikes me that some are very quick to dismiss these unusual experiences. Given that some people, and many animals, can smell Parkinson's, cancer etc., perhaps a woman's body changes slightly according to the sex of her baby. Maybe your son had a very refined sense of smell?

Just a wild guess!

I agree there are sex indicators which aren't 100% but can be picked up on - MW said heart beat were indictor of sex though not reliably and others said way I carried the weight allowed them to correctly guess it is unusual for a toddler to pick these up though but not impossible.

I also agree perfectly normal brains make mistakes and fabricate - I did some undergraduate courses that looked at human brains and systems - researchers are still learning quirks and how things work.

And yet people can & do remember things remarkably accurately every day. Or what about actors committing lines to memory, or politicians & lawyers who can remember large numbers of facts with extraordinary recall?

The same with the argument that we can reproduce an effect by stimulating parts of the brain: yes, but we also get that experience in other ways. For example, the fact someone might get gustatory hallucinations doesn't imply that nobody in the world ever tastes or smells anything normally. That an amputee feels he has a phantom leg doesn't mean he never had that leg, or that nobody in the world has legs.

People pick justifications to support or oppose arguments as they wish. It doesn't imply anything about the truth or otherwise of the topic. Without getting at anyone in particular, I'd say that stating flat out 'There's no such thing as evil' or 'anything woo is rubbish' can be just as much an emotion-based or avoidance-based reaction as believing in woo.

This is interesting, he is autistic and has spd (sensory processing disorder) which includes heightened hearing and heightened sense of smell.

Something upthread reminded me of this: I was once at someone else's house, entertaining a young relative. The TV was on in the background & there was greyhound racing (which seems odd to me anyway). The child asked me which dog would win the next race, so I paused, tried to intuit it so as to make a genuine effort, & said a colour. It won. The child was impressed & asked me about every race as it was about to happen, & I got every one right. Their face was an absolute picture & I was a bit spooked to be honest.

I know, I know. There are only ?6 dogs in a race & only so many races in an afternoon. But the odds against doing it are pretty high, & even without any woo that's pretty damned impressive.😂

(There was a Derren Brown episode in which a woman repeatedly bet on horses & every one won. Then he showed all the people they'd recruited who bet on the same sequence of races & didn't win.)

I think most of us fear inviting ridicule. I have been mocked by my adult DD when I've told her about odd things in my life, so I never share these days.

A few years ago DD was flying overseas for a conference (self funding skint post grad) I gave her some extra money which she tried to refuse, so I said "Just take it, you might break a shoe or something" While she was away she was very glad of the money when the zip broke on her boot and she had to find a cobbler in the centre of Vancouver!

Why did that phrase pop into my head? I had no idea of the state of her footwear, never seen those boots etc. I could have said absolutely anything else.

Fascinating. My grandson has ASD which certainly gives him unexpected perspectives on things!

That an amputee feels he has a phantom leg doesn't mean he never had that leg, or that nobody in the world has legs.

Phantom limbs seems to be the brain* *reorganization after the loss of sensory input.

It's apparently not unknown for people born without limbs to also have phantom limb pain.

The human brain is not fully understood yet and is still being actively researched - perfectly normal brains do things we don't understand fully yet and have odd processing hiccups with certain situations.

http://www.syn.sussex.ac.uk/phantomlimb/1.html#:~:text=Yes%2C%20about%2010%25%20to%2020,known%20to%20experience%20phantom%20limbs.

Yes, but as @ifIwerenotanandroid has gone on to say, we trust our senses almost all the time.

When these odd things happen, we go almost out of our minds turning it over, looking at it from this way and that, speculating etc. The very reason these things stand out is because they’re odd!

I’m not saying I, or anyone else, is uniquely infallible. Im saying that it’s irritating when people try to sweep away something really outstandingly odd with ‘you were mistaken/hallucinated/misremembering.’ Of course those mistakes happen - but they are unlikely to account for all strange phenomena.

But it IS quite simple, most of the time. And you should rarely trust your own eyes and ears, especially with this kind of stuff. Your eyes and ears (well your brain, really) are not at all reliable.

It's just not that complex, and you're not that special. Because lets face it, that's the root issue here: I see ghosts, I'm so special. I predict deaths, I'm so special. I have mad coincdences, I'm so special.

No, we all have untrustworthy senses, weird brains, and see things that aren't there, miss things that are, and make connections and explanations that aren't true. You don't see dead people, and you're not at all special.

I don’t claim to see ghosts or any of the things you’ve mentioned.

I’m not arguing a particular case here.

I’m just observing a trend on this thread. You sort of proved it with your abrasive final sentence.

Out of interest, when do you personally decide when to trust the evidence of your own senses? Can you believe what you see when you do a scientific experiment? Or when you observe something in a lab? If so, how come?

I’m not sure that anyone is claiming to be special - are you sure that’s not projection?

You see an alternative version of this is that for a time an the part of an astral body lingers and the amputation of the physical leg.