Have any of you, while awake, sane, and sober, ever experienced a hallucination? Seen a ghost?
Have any of you experienced any form of extrasensory perception, similarly while awake, sane, and sober?
I’ve experienced both. I’ve seen deceased pets, weeks, months, or years after they’d died. I also knew immediately when my dad died. As soon as the phone rang and I’d had no warning that he was even sick.
I think these things are much more common than many people think. By some reckonings about 10% of the population have experienced hallucinations at least once in their lives.
Never – 0/1
Nope.
Steve
Are you familiar with the concept of eternalism? I have wondered if perhaps precognitive episodes like knowing your father had died might be isolated instances of recalling the future.
There’s an interesting summary of it here.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/search?q=eternal+return
Here’s a true story…
I was living with my grandmother when I first started university and my parents and youngest siblings were overseas. They were due to return to the US in a matter of days.
One night I had a dream that I was attending their funeral — four coffins, two big, two small — at the church across the street. The dream was vivid and I recognized faces, church and altar decorations. The dream shook me.
At breakfast the next morning, I mentioned the dream to my grandmother. She dropped her cup on the table and blanched. She said she’d had the same dream. She placed people in the pews as they were in my dream; the same church decorations; the same coffins in the same arrangement.
This turned my freak-o-meter way past eleven. I went through the considerable process of making an international call to my parents, 12 time zones away. After getting my father on the line, I told him about the dream(s) and asked if he might not want to make different travel plans. He pish-poshed the idea.
Five days later, everyone arrived safe and sound. My parents went on to live another 25 years and my siblings are both fine.
Whatever the hell that was, it was strange, but ultimately meaningless.
Only when I was a small child, so I don’t really trust those experiences. (In one of them I suspect I was feverish – and as that time I thought I saw Jiminy Cricket dancing on my mother’s nightstand, I think I can safely discount that one completely.)
I personally believe in such phenomena, but have had only what could be said to be intuitive twinges.
Nonetheless, I have friends and my son experience these events. One of my closest friends, dreamed of the 911 event before it happened. Another friend’s father (very straight edged, I might add) saw his deceased daughter after she died, at a very young age. It scared the Hel* out of him, as he didn’t believe in the after life etc. Our son, though, has had the most amazing experiences with these psychic kind of events. For instance, when his grandmother died, he saw her waiting in the car for his grandfather when he came to visit us after her death. He said she smiled and waved at him. He accurately described a dress she was wearing that I vividly remember had been one of her favorite’s. He has also had dreams about peer group who died unexpectedly, coming and asking him if they were dead or not. He apparently helped them to pass over in his dream.
I personally believe that there is much we don’t know about life, the reasons for us being here, or what happens upon death. However, there is growing testimony from those, having near death experiences, that bear many similarities. Also, there is that internal nudge people feel, labeled intuition, that I have come to listen to rather than ignore. It has served me well in many instances, and I continue to pass along an advisory to others that they would do well in heeding it too.
I have no doubt whatsoever that these experiences are common, but mostly I think of them as byproducts of the architecture of cognition.
Nope.
@John Burgess, how can you know it was meaningless? Your parents or your grandmother or you yourself may have changed your actions in some important, but imperceptible, way.
@PD Shaw: Well, both my grandmother and I — other than the phone call — really had no possibility of doing anything that would change events. The tickets and itinerary for my family had been set for months and — being provided by the USG — were not changeable.
Unless some sort of psychic brainwaves were involved in shifting the order of the universe — for which I can find no reasonable support — I can only assume a weird and coincidental but meaningless event.
People are kind of stuck, IMO, in thinking that if you can’t scientifically figure something out, prove that we saw something, if there is no logical constructs in our mind to support something from happening, we should then dismiss it an hallucination or a meaningless happenstance.
So, that means we can happily scratch off miracles, prayer, blind faith, anything paranormal or extraordinary, as being viable alternatives or possibly real. Boy, what a blah existence that is, absent of any surprises or unseen help that isn’t either controlled or manifested by us, the all powerful ones.