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!

I see what you mean.

I think we can say with confidence that popular culture does influence some ‘supernatural’ experiences. Sleep paralysis is probably the best example of that (in part because we have good records of the phenomenon going back centuries, and in part because I don’t think many/any still believe these to be real encounters with fantastical beings). The particular creature that people hallucinated seems to have varied by region and time period. The hallucinations and accompanying symptoms seem to be broadly similar, it’s just the creature that changes. I don’t think many would postulate that these were activities that really were carried out by Jinns in Ancient Egypt, only for them to stop and have witches and demons step into their shoes centuries later in Europe, only for Aliens to pick up the baton in recent decades to allow the witches to have a rest.

I strongly suspect the same to be true for time slips and that it’s the popular works of fiction that influence people’s experiences - but obviously I cannot prove that Mark Twain and other early adopters of time travel were not influenced by real instances of time travel that they witnessed or heard about. That said, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence (that I can find) of any reported time slips prior to the trope first appearing in fiction and it does seem to be very much the other way around.

Ironically, the only way to answer this conclusively would be with time travel…

I doubt, from what people have said here, that anyone on this thread is a professional psychic or clairvoyant. So while your feelings about those people may be heartfelt, they're irrelevant on this thread. Please allow us to discuss what interests us, which is apparently not what interests you (which is fine).

The thing about the Scientific Method is that it is great at examining the material, the objective.

What it’s not designed to do is to deal with subjective experiences which a lot of spiritual experiences are. The scientific method does not value such experiences especially in deciding the truth of something.

Of course people have attempted to use the scientific method in the field of the the spiritual. This was particularly popular in the 19th century when the term “spiritual science” was at its height. But this was an ill conceived notion of what the spiritual realm was and eventually moved to a personal spiritual science applying methods of recording and experimentation with the acknowledgment that it was still a personal matter and the results would be personal

Thanks. Did you miss that I have never charged for a tarot reading? That i havent even done a reading for another person that i havent bitterly regretted, either because of the stuff i read but wont tell them or being right about stuff you couldnt possibly know about and the way people then look at you after? If you can do it its a fantastic way to ruin relationships. I won't touch my cards and won't let anyone else either.

No. Because Derren Brown says 🙄🙄🙄🙄

There’s also the linked idea of manifesting, if enough people start paying attention to something does it create these phenomena or make it a stronger force?

You have to ask! You claim psychic this and tarot that, and you have to ask.

Scientists know very very well that they don't know everything. Their entire discipline is based on gathering evidence, testing hypotheses and furthering knowledge. The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing and scientists are more aware of how little we know than lost other people are.

If you could bring a scientist some honest, solid, repeatable evidence of psychic ability or demons or time slips, they'd fucking cream themselves and give you a Nobel Prize. It would be the greatest advance since the wheel. It would be 2001 alien monolith style advancement. You clearly don't realise how seismic it would be.

As it is, though, nobody ever has despite some enormous incentives (James Randall's challenge, for one). And actually, I would say that scientists are usually pretty humble about what they do because they have some knowledge of how much more there is to go. But someone had a dream or guessed right on a 50:50 outcome or experienced a coincidence that actually isn't uncommon at all when you think about the size of the world, and they think they've disproved everything and are in possession of supernatural powers? Yet scientists are the smug know it alls without evidence?

If you think scientists think they know it all, you don't understand the core concept of why they even exist. I can tell you that without a tarot card.

You do understand that the majority of divinations are done for personal purposes by the reader for the reader don’t you? I do one for myself most days. The ones for others are mostly free.

Yes some charge but I don’t think that has arisen anywhere in this thread.

why would you find something interesting you don’t believe in?

In case anyone doesn't know it & weants to check it out, I think James Randall should be James Randi, in the post 2 above this one.

... and weants should be wants😂

Because Derren Brown says 😂😂

I don't know whether Derren Brown has addressed tarot, but am sure he can demonstrate he has that gift AND can lead others to read the cards correctly.

So-called mentalists apply the scientific method in woo-related fields. They study a phenomenon, examine all surrounding circumstances, hypothesise how it happened, and test their hypotheses by experiment, until they're able to replicate it. Once they achieve repeated replications, they have explained the phenomenon.

I was in an audience of hundreds last year, sharing a small time-slip induced by Mr Brown's power of suggestion 😎

Does anyone know the case of a woman who foretold either terrorist activity or major crime (I forget which) by dreaming about incidents before they happened? All I remember is that she dreamed about dogs if it was one of those dreams, & that the authorities used her info & she was physically attacked by someone on the other side of the law, & nearly died.

Ah ok, so you don’t want to enter a discussion?

Well there is no point seeing as Mumsnet delete reasonable posts.

But let any old twaddle remain.

There are earlier time slips - the most famous one is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incident

And I think lots don't get reported, or noticed when they are. The writer Edith Olivier saw a fair in Avebury in Wiltshire during WW1 - something which hadn't happened since Victorian times. But that's buried in an obscure book, and I only noticed it because I was interested in the fair.

I find this very, very difficult to swallow while being unable to deny the theoretical possibility.

It is possible to observe someone experiencing sleep paralysis. While they may see an Alien and describe an abduction encounter (or see some other creature), people observing the person experiencing the encounter just see someone laying in bed. While the causes of sleep paralysis aren’t fully understood, we know that episodes can be reduced or prevented by maintaining better sleep hygiene. A genetic component appears to have been discovered.

But - it is still possible to come up with supernatural explanations (as you could for basically anything - perhaps other than the existence of your own mind, if we’re persuaded by Descartes on that front).

As a child (and on rare occasions as an adult), I used to have frequent nightmares about a sea creature who, unlike his real world counterparts, was capable of flight - including space travel. Sometimes I would wake in apparent pain after dreaming (if I was dreaming) that this creature had bitten my foot. In the dark, I’d also sometime be able to ‘see’ the creature. This thing haunted me.

I thought it was a creature of my own imagination for a long time, only to later realize that the same creature with the same name appeared in an obscure children’s movie that I saw several times as a young child.

Is it possible that this flying sea creature really did regularly visit me at night, undetected by the rest of the world and leaving no evidence behind? I suppose so…..but I can’t say I’ve ever entertained that though for a moment as an adult. I’d assume I just had scary dreams about a scary baddie after seeing a certain movie (one that I can now see that contemporary reviews said would give kids nightmares- thanks mum and dad!)

I do think though, that if I did claim that sometimes ginormous, telepathic sea creatures fly into peoples bedrooms to bite their toes and generally be a bit mean, but that these instances are not perceptible to anyone but the victim, not many (even those who are receptive to claims of the supernatural) would entertain it. Would you?

you called it psychic. If i called it psychic, I'd only be using the term as a shorthand for things we don't yet understand.

Repeatable is the fundamental problem. Many of the things mentioned in my first post were one offs, or repeated one off, not things I have any control over or were predictable. If I knew when and where it was going to happen I would run to my nearest friendly scientist and chuck myself in an MRI & ECG machine . I'm shockingly average at pick 50:50 type tests (don't get any sense of them at all) and have experienced coincidence. Unless youve experinced the two situations, its really hard to explain how profoundly different they are.

NO offence but you seem to have more faith in science than I do. I see plenty of stuff in the world of medicine where the evidence is there to be collected but we just aren't collecting it or breakthrough research has been done but it hasnt been recognised or pursued. Sometimes , and in spite of how much evidence we do collect and see, we still haven't really got a clue (eg non substance caused psychosis). Partly because we are reliant on subjective experience

We can see stuff going wrong with are senses but we can only record what we have current means of testing. If we cant record and test it we cannot study it.

Research at any point in time is very much about what most benefits society (eg alzheimers and cancer) at large.

I've heard doctors tell people something is incurable and noone gets better, knowing full well I recovered from it and know others who have been sucessfully treated. I hear people say stuff is impossible simply because we are told ghosts and timeslips are the product of imagination.

I'vee seen enough arrogance from scientists to say, albeit it very unscientifically, that scientist have a tendency to forget how much we still have absolutely no clue about.

If it was a persons reality I wouldn’t discount it at all. If it’s true to them who am I to discount it? It makes no difference to me either way.

We all operate in our own universes to a greater or lesser extent none of us will have exactly the same experience of the world and for someone that might include a ginormous telepathic sea monster. Who am I to know?

I’m not sure what’s going on there. Maybe it’s not MN at all but unseen forces.

So what points do you want to make? Maybe moderate your own language to be a little more respectful- so posts don’t get zapped?

No, they have explained how the phenomena they are creating works. This could be a totally different thing

One day at work my colleague said her husband was at Epsom races. He was a dedicated racegoer knew the horses parentage, history, stables used to win a lot. Anyway during the lunch hour we looked at the races and tried picking a winner. We each did the first three races and wrote down the winners to see if we could beat him. I picked three names I was drawn to as did she. Neither having a clue what we were doing.

All three of mine won. Now that would have been a happy coincidence if I'd had money on them.

So sometimes things are just a coincidence. Sometimes you just can't explain it . I wouldn't knock anyone for it

Well said, @Maatandosiris. I reported the post. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and their opinion should be respected whether or not others agree with it. However, no one should make personal and derogatory comments about others.

It just makes me laugh that we call Clairvoyants etc charlatans who prey on the vulnerable

Based on the stage of act of a charismatic celebrity who relies on centuries old stage tricks to extract money out of cult like following of "sceptics".

I've seen a two-bit stage hypnotist on a beach bar in Spain induce "shared visions", but i can also say what I saw sounds nothing like the timeslip phenomena in the OP's post. Not least because the absence of a neurolinguistic (I think thats the modern term) inducing the phenomena.

Incidentally how exactly do hypnotist do what they do? 🤔😉

Ah so it was you, nothing I said was particularly derogatory.

If you are going to believe in any old hokum prepare to get called out.