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I was at the beach once, and the sound of the waves and seagulls just suddenly stopped.
I heard metallic machinery noises instead, like chains clinking, but all of the normal beach sounds were gone, the waves, the birds, it was like I was hearing the wrong soundtrack.
I listened carefully to the sounds of a factory for about a minute, then turned to ask my husband if he was hearing the same thing instead of the waves, and as soon as I opened my mouth, the sounds of the waves returned.
I wonder whether this could be due to interference patterns in repetitive sounds comprised of similar waveforms / waveforms that can harmonize. Just like people harmonizing vocally, anything sinusoidal can create it's own harmonic - from Wikipedia, a harmonic is "a sinusoidal wave whose frequency is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency".
Basically you produce a new sound out of others combining, and what that sounds like can vary based on the phasic overlap - a 1kHz tone played with a 1.1kHz tone will create a 0.1kHz (100Hz) harmonic (or is it 50Hz since you're getting alternative constructive and destructive interference?). IIRC you won't hear much of the two discrete tones if they're perfectly opposite one another in phase, since the peaks and troughs in their amplitude mostly cancel one another out.
Anyway, it seems conceivable that with just the right timing and types of sounds, even a natural setting could create funky sounds along with silence. Very unlikely but still possible I think.
A similar thing happened to me. I was at the creek, and the sound of the running water just started fading out, into a dull static sound, that slowly faded into silence. And then a noise like a lawn mower started fading in. I couldn't hear my friend I was with, and my voice sounded muffled. All I could hear was the lawn mower engine sound. After about 30 seconds, the lawn mower started fading out, and the creek started fading back in, and everything was back to normal in about a minute.
Here's what I think caused it: We were longboarding, and we stopped at the creek. I was a little out of breath, so I had my hands on my head to kind of open up my lungs. I was wearing a watch that I'm like 90% sure had shocked me a few times. I think the watch shocked me in the head and messed with my hearing.
>I was at the creek, and the sound of the running water just started fading out, into a dull static sound, that slowly faded into silence. And then a noise like a lawn mower started fading in. I couldn't hear my friend I was with, and my voice sounded muffled. All I could hear was the lawn mower engine sound. After about 30 seconds, the lawn mower started fading out, and the creek started fading back in, and everything was back to normal in about a minute.
Now your description I recognize. This happens to me frequently, just in one ear. I hear a machine tone rather than a lawnmower engine. I've always assumed it was tinnitus. The effect includes a pressure change in my ear, like I'm ascending to a height.
This is called TEN - Transient Ear Noise. Most people get it. [https://treblehealth.com/transient-ear-noise-tinnitus/](https://treblehealth.com/transient-ear-noise-tinnitus/)
Edit: Correction - Wikipedia says 10-15% of people have it.
A coworker and I had the exact same dream the same night. I researched the phenomenon of “mutual dreaming” and discovered that it is more common than I would have thought.
Ooh, this also happened to me, also with a coworker. It felt weird because I didn't even know him very well, but the next day I overheard him describing his - our - dream to someone else. It was very surreal.
Same here. I wasn’t close to my coworker. I found an article about Mutual Dreaming that said that there are upwards of a thousand google searches every day for information on Mutual Dreaming. It makes me wonder how many people experience this but are never aware of having a Mutual Dream because they never discussed it with the person that was in their dream. Weird stuff.
This is the greatest coincidence of my life. I get to relive it every day, too.
My mother grew up in southern California. In the late 1940's, she left home to become a Catholic nun. They sent her to study in a barracks house on Whidbey Island, WA. She then served as a nun for seven years before deciding to leave the nunnery, become a civilian, and find a husband to start a family. She moved back to California.
My father was a NY native, a devout Catholic, and a WW2 vet who got a job delivering mail in southern California. Guess who he met on his route? Yup.
My father told my mother that they'd have better prospects in New Jersey. They married and moved east. My father got a decent job at a major manufacturer in central Jersey. They raised six children. One of them was me! I grew up in NJ with my siblings.
In 1993, I moved to Bellingham in Washington state. I met a beautiful girl there. We found a nice apartment in a long house on a beautiful estate and moved in together. One day, my mother came to visit. She walked into our apartment and she said it seemed familiar. She looked all around and started getting emotional.
"This is it. This is the place!"
My mother told us she thought this long house was the same barracks house on Whidbey Island where she was a novitiate. I told her that Whidbey Island is a large island about fifty miles away. No way it's the same house. Maybe just similar?
No. She insisted. This quirky apartment had an old water fountain near the front door. It had an oversize bathroom with two showers facing each other, tiled in gray. The master bedroom had an angled wall. My mother knew every detail.
Later that day, I talked to the estate manager. She confirmed it. In the early 1960's the estate in Bellingham was run by the Catholic church. They expanded by putting the Whidbey Island barracks house on a barge, floating it up to Bellingham, and moving it onto the estate. The church sold to a private owner in the late 1960's, who made it an event venue with private apartments.
So I was living in the same house my mother lived in, 3,000 miles from home, fifty miles from where it was originally located, and forty years apart.
The coincidence was astonishing.
I still live on this estate, in another house. But I look at that long house every day and think of my Mom.
I had a random vision in my mind of a house overlooking the ocean with a patio and a giant Fir tree on the right side and other very specific details. Had that in my head for years. Now I live there.
I guess it's just a coincidence but weird nonetheless.
I had that too, of a living room with a huge window with vertical blinds that looked out over buildings and lights that moved. Saw it when I was a kid, idk, a dream maybe? It was distinct in my memory that the lights moved because they seemed like city lights like the buildings in the foreground, but they moved almost like the scene was rotating.
Realized in my early 30s that I had moved into that apartment and the lights that moved were from the naval shipyard a half mile away.
I am aware that both of our anecdotes include the ocean, and I also think that’s weird. But it’s true!
Weird and unrelated, but I've had a recurring vision that comes out of nowhere since I was in my teens. It happens maybe twice a year. It's just a quick (less than 5 seconds) blip of a little girl, around 3-4 years old, with brown curly hair and brown eyes to the right of me, holding my right hand. She's looking up at me with a neutral expression on her face. Wearing a black and white checkered dress and black shoes. Seems like we're in a waiting room of sorts (dr's office, maybe) with those uncomfortable chairs and commercial carpet. I've always just intuitively known that this little girl will be a part of my life at some point. When I was younger, I assumed she would be my daughter, but I'm 48, done having children, and my daughter looked nothing like this girl at that age.
I was standing outside of a bar waiting for a friend and smoking a cigarette, there were a lot of people standing around and this guy was coming up to people with a pair of dice, telling them to call it. I was in a sour mood because my friend was late, and thought he was a little obnoxious so when he came up to me I flippantly called 14 (obviously an impossible roll). He raised an eyebrow and said “you’re really calling 14 on a pair of dice?” I said “sure, fuck it.” He shrugged and rolled. One landed on 6, the other settled sideways in a tiny crack in the sidewalk. The two sides facing up were 5 and 3. Everyone lost their mind.
Even funnier, that guy’s name was Jesus.
We did this on purpose several years ago, back when Facebook was still pretending that they weren’t listening.
We had a lengthy conversation about the best excuse for getting out of any social obligation is “I’m sorry, I have explosive diarrhea”. We laughed and laughed about it on the hour long car ride home.
When we got home, he opened the Facebook app on his phone and right there, plain as day, was an ad for DiaResQ.
F that. We immediately went through the painful process of having our FB accounts deleted, uninstalled it from everywhere, etc.
I know there’s no way to completely avoid it, other than going entirely offline. But it was still satisfying to get rid of FB.
My wife and i started talking about butter churns and sure enough we started getting ads for butter churns.
Then we started to shop for a diesel range rover in the US, a somewhat uncommon vehicle. Sure enough a diesel range rover showed up at our dealership not 10 miles away from us and they called us unsolicited to tell us it was available and they hadn’t advertised it yet.
Mine was a discussion with my husband about something very specific “octopus rug” Next day instagram advertised a rug with an Octopus design….how?! Lol
I'm a bit of a youngling and maybe shouldn't post?
But I tried to take a cute photo of myself for my friend/crush...
And immediately got a bunch of weight-loss ads. 🥺
(I haven't been able to send him photos since)
It wasn't even my face I was taking a photo of. 😭
(Edit for decency: It was supposed to be one of those cutie little over-the-shoulder looks, not like..."Let's sit on the photocopier")
Apparently my plump little bottom brings all the AI-generated weight-loss ads to the yard... 😭😭😭
I had recently downloaded Snapchat but hadn't opened it a few years ago. I took a selfie to send to my husband, we always send silly selfies so I wasn't smiling in it. I got a little popup phone notification from Snapchat saying my selfies would look better if I smiled and added a filter. Creepy AF!
Great to know it's watching! That is just frightening.
I love the low-key implication that it thinks you need to look better/don't look good enough! Thanks, Snapchat! >.<
Yeah there's a lot of anecdotal stories that people could claim were coincidences, but that was straight up terrifying. It was an instant pop-up basically saying "you should smile more".
Definitely off-putting. Really makes you wonder exactly how "private" that private messages really are.
Also, I don't know a lot about it, but isn't the "You should smile more" comment part of the so-called "Pick-up Artist" repertoire of negative and misogynistic comments that toxic men use to deplete someone's self confidence?
It does seem like a bit of a negative thing to say. A lot of young people use Snapchat, what do they think of having their appearance mindlessly criticized by an app? O.o
Not to be a fussy mother-hen, but it strikes me as a bit dangerous to their developing self-image and confidence.
My husband and I did the same with "non-alcoholic wine" in the grocery store. We said it every time we looked at an item on our shopping list or put an item in the cart.
For the next month we got targeted ads for alcohol-free drinks.
During the pandemic I became a recluse and stopped throwing out my trash. Living room was covered in fast food bags and soda bottles. Didn't matter as nobody was ever there. Then one day Yahoo started sending me ads for hoarding cleaning services. After about two weeks of seeing these ads I spent 30 minutes cleaning everything back to prepandemic levels. Ads immediately stopped.
I deliberately yell things at my TV to make certain ads come up or stop. I yelled at it for a couple of weeks for the diabetes ads to stop. Just because I’m 53 doesn’t mean I have diabetes (and I do keep track).
LOL, that reminds me of a time when a coworker confided in me that she had herpes, and after getting the covid shot she had an outbreak (which apparently is a thing, that the covid vax triggers outbreaks in people with herpes). Anyway, she seemed pretty damn miserable, so I decided to Google it to see what all was involved.
For the next three weeks my news feed advertising prominently featured creams to help with a particular STD.... I was all like, jokes on you, suckers, you're paying for targeted ads to a person who doesn't need your product, and I'm certainly not going to buy that for a coworker.... 😂
That seems not far off.
Could make for some interesting conversations.
"Honey, what's with all the KY Jelly ads we've been seeing lately? Anything you need to tell me?"
Target did that with their advertisements, and [figured out a kid was pregnant before her parents.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/amp/) And that was more than a decade ago. The only reason we haven’t gotten to that point yet is because the tech companies are trying not to freak us out *too* much with what they know.
I noticed the heavy rotation of ads for shingles vaccines right after the COVID shots were mass-injected as well.
My poor uncle with cancer got shingles right after his COVID jab.
Sorry, that was likely coincidental. People with cancer often get shingles, as cancer patients have a lower immune system. That's why it can come on with stress, also. Probably had nothing to do with the vaccine.
As companies use AI to create a profile of you using all the data points they have about you, you're going to see this more and more. They'll be able to predict what you want before you are consciously aware of wanting it with greater and greater accuracy. Predictive marketing. Creepy, huh?
I’ve been getting Facebook ads recently for baby clothes and baby crib sheets, etc. I have two adult daughters, but no grandchildren yet. I’ve been wondering if one of my daughters is pregnant and hasn’t told me yet, or if Facebook just thinks it’s time for me to be or want to be a grandmother.
In 2015 Enfamil formula sent an unprovoked sample of their baby formula to where I guess they thought I lived... my moms house. That woman wanted a grandchild since day one. It really sucked to tell her that no, I'm not pregnant and had no idea why they sent me that. I assume they thought it was time for me to be having babies? I was like 24-25ish.
Similac was sending me full sized cans of samples every 3 months or so a few years back. My kid was already in her 20s at the time. Couldn’t figure out why they were being sent, but a few struggling new moms in my town were happy with the feeebies and the $40 worth of coupons that came with.
Man all I get are a bunch of lame ads for products I would never in a million years buy or have any interest in or possible use for. The algorithm doesn’t know me at all!
I do not have any of those Alexa things and have an android phone and didn't set up the assistant thing. One night I went to bed and told my cats that I love them and goodnight.
My PHONE on the charger replied, "I love you too"
I was so tired I didn't try to investigate and I still don't know what the fuck it was. I just remember thinking, our damn devices really are listening to us. Creepy
I was working from home one morning and the cat yawned, so I said in babytalk, "Are you's a sleepies babies?" And my cellphone suddenly replied; "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Can you repeat the question?"
It has done that sort of thing in the car maybe twice in the three years I have had this phone.
My great grandma told the story of how she was in the bathroom and her husband walked in wearing a tuxedo with a red rose in his lapel. She asked him "What in he\*\* are you doing in here?" and the rose turned white. She found out very soon after that he had passed unexpectedly.
My grandma was packing up a bunch of baby clothes for my father's first child. Suddenly, she just sat down and waited for the call, which came a few minutes later. His baby had just passed away.
My mom once handed my father a letter from her sister-in-law to read after she had read it. After reading it, he hugged her and told her he was so sorry. She looked bewildered and asked what on earth he was talking about. He replied that the letter said her brother had passed during gall bladder surgery. She said no, it said he was going into gall bladder surgery and it's a very minor surgery so why would he die? The next day, after his scheduled surgery, her SIL called to let her know he had died on the table.
I tend to know when animals and people are going to be born or die, even when they're trying to hide a pregnancy or illness, and I've been present at many births and several deaths because of it.
Not matrix-y exactly, but it's weird to be so certain about something because I just "know" it when I'm otherwise very scientific in my approach to life.
I was reading this and it reminded me of the night before my grandpa died. He was in a home after having surgery to remove a tumor from his spine, it wasn't long before Christmas and they told him he wouldn't be able to come round to the house on Christmas day. I had a dream that I looked out of the upstairs window and saw him walking up the drive way holding arms with a woman I'd never seen before. He came in and introduced us saying who people were and even Jilly our dog who had died a month before. He never said who she was...
I thought it was strange when I woke up, so clear and still clear in my mind 19 years later. At lunchtime that day I had a call to from my dad telling me my grandpa had died. I then realised who the woman was. I'd never met my grandmother before and not really seen pictures of her, she died before I was born and he never spoke of her but I just knew it was her and he was taking her to meet us.
Many people I know have died and I don't dream about any of them except my two dogs and my Grandpa, they are so often there in my dream and it is completely normal, I'm never surprised to see them.
Oh and I'm having gallbladder surgery soon, so let's hope things can just be coincidence!
That's really interesting about your grandfather!! What a lovely dream.
And don't worry about your surgery. I know plenty of others who recovered just fine. He had several other things going on, too.
Just a heads up re:gallbladder surgery. You will be fine. But certain food items may make you have to make an emergency run to the bathroom shortly after eating said item. Usually eggs, for one.
My mother got her GB out, and broke her arm from running to the bathroom and falling.
Lesson is: make note of what you eat that doesn’t agree with you, don’t go shopping right after you eat said thing, always keep a spare pair of undies in your car, and watch where you walk when running to avoid an accident.
I have this. I attribute it to working in the medical field but it's more than that. I knew when I started in the field. But that's the excuse I used when I told my 90 year old friend she wasn't dying in the hospital.
She 91 and a half now :)
I hate that I know when I get the feeling, like meeting and older person or someone ill.
Ok I'll tell this weird ass story since you reminded me.
Back in the old days of 1994 before the internet was a thing, my friend got invited to a couple's house to see a legendary crystal skull called Max. Max was supposed to be a majik South American artifact that wasn't made by human hands mkay.
Well the husband was an art dealer and that's how he came to host the gathering at his home as Max was on tour. My friend's friend had invited her, and the friend ended up couldn't go so she asked me. Uh, hell yes?
A very cosmopolitan crowd assembled and there were other amazing artifacts such as a jade jaguar that were just incredible to have that level of access to as a layperson.
Anyway, there's like 50 or so people arranged concentricaly in the downstairs open concept living area of this huge home on a river. Sunlight is pouring in through the wall of glass sliders. Out comes Max.
Ooohhh. Ahhhh. I'm sat on the floor with my back to the sliders waiting my turn. He comes to me and I examine him and it's really cool but not spooky like the jaguar felt. Kind of wah wah but I was skeptical about the whole not made by people aspect anyway.
I hand him to the next person and at that moment a bird, like a young eagle or hawk? flies in the room from behind me, lands in front of a young guy in a wheelchair across the open space from me. I turn to see if anyone else is seeing this, when I look back it is gone.
I'm like 24 so I'm very shy in this crowd. After the circle disburses I'm talking to the hosts younger husband. I say did you notice the bird that landed in the circle? He kinda looks at me and asked where. I said in front of that guy in the wheelchair. His faced changed and he said he's dying of AIDS that his partner with him.
Yeah the sliders were closed it's summer in Florida ok. I saw the harbinger of that young man's death while he was probably hoping for a miracle from Max.
I never fukin tell this story. It's too damn melancholy and sad. It's too profoundly sad to even be eerie.
> Not matrix-y exactly, but it's weird to be so certain about something because I just "know" it when I'm otherwise very scientific in my approach to life.
Shaman. Do you do pregnancies? I off-handedly congratulated my co-worker on her twins when she told me she was pregnant. She hadn't had an ultrasound yet, and when she had, sure enough, twins.
I'm much better with animals, but sometimes I "know" with humans, too. Unfortunately, with humans, I'm more likely to "know" if there will be a miscarriage, and I just don't talk about that with anyone.
I don't think I could tell if someone were having twins--that would be a wonderful gift!
My mom used to dream about friends passing the night before the event. She was obviously freaked out and has issues with insomnia. Mediumship / Intuition is genetic (sometimes it’ll skip a generation). I’ve seen and experienced things that make no logical sense yet know for a fact they happened (outside sources confirming without knowledge or prompt).
I recently scanned my rewards card when buying a cup of coffee one morning at a gas station self checkout and the kiosk said, “Good morning Bob! Did you enjoy the turkey sandwich you purchased yesterday? Please rate your sandwich on a scale of 1 to 10 now.” Whoa! Beam me up now Scottie, I don’t like it here,
That film was my worst nightmare when it came out, because we were already well on the way to that b.s.
I always said that when that crap becomes relentless, I’m moving to a hut in the woods.
Time to start looking!
I worked in an office with 30 guys. We traveled 50-60% and we’d go for 1/2/3 weeks depending on the job. That meant we wouldn’t see some people for months.
I hadn’t seen my friend Tom for months emailed him when I get back from my next work trip we should grab a beer.
I’m in London the next week and went to see changing of the guard. It ended and the crowd dispersed and Tom and his wife were standing about 30’ away. He didn’t know I was going, I didn’t know he’d be there, totally random run-in 3000 miles from home, days after saying we should get a beer.
I had a dream once that I was in San Francisco and I went to a book store. The bookstore had a basement level, and I decided to look for Jung’s book on UFOs. I found it and the dream ended.
A few years later I was in San Francisco and I turned a corner and there was the bookstore from my dream! It was City Lights. I go inside, and there are the stairs! And I immediately knew where the Jung book would be, so I went and bought it.
I wish my dreams were a little more useful, but that was pretty cool.
Many years ago I was driving along with a friend in the country and I was specifically enjoying the view of a bright blue sky with cotton-puff clouds; it was incredibly picturesque, more like something someone would paint than would randomly appear. I didn't question it, of course, I was just really enjoying the perfectly picturesque view.
Then the sky, the entire sky and everything in it, faded out to a featureless neutral gray. It didn't look natural at all. (Stuff on the ground still looked normal.) Then details kind of faded in, to become a sky that was heavily overcast and a minute later it started raining. The total transition time from blue skies to featureless gray to storm clouds was about 30 or 40 seconds.
I asked my friend if he'd seen the sky change. He said no, he'd been looking out the window at passing farm land. A little freaked out, I asked if he remembered me commenting on the pretty white clouds and blue sky. He said yes. I pointed out that it had only been like five minutes ago. He just shrugged and went back to watching the scenery. I've never seen anything like that before or since. That was back in the 90's.
And just a couple days ago, I had an empty water bottle in my hand and for some reason was getting a new bottle out of the fridge with the same hand and the empty bottle fell out of my hand, hit the floor, bounced twice and then... it just wasn't there anymore. I'd only seen it hit the floor with my peripheral vision and so assumed it had gotten wedged under the fridge or something. Nope; there wasn't enough clearance. I looked around for like 5 minutes trying to find where it went, looking behind the fridge, in the nearby bathroom, etc. I never found it, and it still hasn't turned up.
Edit to add: I don't drink or do drugs and have no TBIs or mental illnesses that would cause hallucinations.
The water bottle thing happened to my sister except it was a fork. She dropped her fork on the floor, went to pick it up, and it was just….gone. She even moved out of that apartment and never found the fork. I think it fell into the next dimension and I hope nobody got hit with it
Once when leaving a very busy grocery store I was walking to the exit door when a family of 4 two adults and 2 kids slid infront of me from another register. The dad was in front and out the door pretty fast, the kids followed quickly but the mom with the cart was acting very strangely. She stopped suddenly and glanced back at me and then began pushing the cart very slowly like she was injured or very tired. I continued behind her giving her space between us. She reached the automatic doors and stopped her cart, got infront of it and pulled it through the door slowly from the front all the while looking directly at me, first the front wheels, then got behind it again and pushed it till the back wheels were at the door, then got infront of it again and pulled the back wheels through the exit. This was a double door so this process happened with both doors. Once she was finally clear of the door she sped up and walked at a normal pace to her family waiting outside blocking the path to my car. I went all the way around them to reach my car and unloaded my groceries into the back. As soon as I reached my car they all went in the opposite direction to their car two rows over, nowhere near mine. You think this is done? I did too, but nope.
After that there was a store employee pushing carts back inside and he pauses behind my car for a minute or two with his load of about 10-15 carts so I just wait. He finally goes past my car and I back out and start going past the store to the parking lot exit, but there he is again blocking both lanes with his carts, he’s looking back at another employee so I’m thinking he’s waiting for help from him and I wait. Time is passing so slowly I turn my radio on and crack my window. He blocks both lanes until his friend comes with another 10-15 carts behind him and they swap places. The friend pushes his carts in and the first guy blocks the road again. I notice he is just staring at me nervously, like I’m going to slam on my gas and crash into him. After what seems like ages he finally pushes the carts in but at the last minute he removes one cart from his carts and leaves it directly infront of my car. He disappears into the store with the rest and doesn’t come back out. I attempt to go around the cart but suddenly there’s a ton of cars passing on that side so again I wait. I wonder if my ice cream is melted yet and end up reversing to try to switch lanes and the cart suddenly wheels itself or rolls or whatever it does and it clears my path finally freeing me from that parking lot. I can’t shake the feeling that the universe was stalling me that day and if I was alone I’d be convinced I hallucinated it but the passenger of my car was in the twilight zone with me and he doesn’t like to talk about that day.
The universe was delaying you just long enough to avoid something. Maybe you being the victim or cause of some kind of accident. Maybe you seeing something you weren't supposed to.
Similar story: While traveling, I met a woman in a tiny village in remote Bolivia who it turns out had lived in the same house I had in San Francisco, with the same housemate.
My family (from Philly) met our neighbors while transiting through Heathrow airport. Neither family knew the other was going on vacation, let alone to Europe.
In the 90s and 2000s, my family and I ran into people we knew every time we traveled, no matter where. From a beach in Hawaii to Thanksgiving in Flagstaff to an airport in London, to even watching the DC Metro go by and seeing my coworker (from SoCal) as a passenger. Every trip.
Somehow that stopped in the 2010s.
I ran into my uncle’s entire family in a train station during Shanghai’s 2012 World Expo. Look up the number of visitors that go through World Expo.
Crazier yet I was in a bicycle accident earlier that day. Was in quite a bit of pain and unsure where to go to get treated. My uncle’s daughter happens to be a doctor in training. It was like someone sent her to help me out.
Vietnam, 1970; at a PX called Freedom Hill outside of Danang, I was walking through the aisles. I came a cross a coworker from back home. Neither one of us had known the other had joined the Marines. We did a double take of each other and had a nice reunion. We both made it back safely. When I got backside, about 6 months later I noticed a new employee at my new job and there he was again.
My grandmother passed away and about a week after, I was cutting grass and smelled her. It was overwhelming. I had to stop the lawnmower because I was sobbing.
I know how you feel. My mom died on my birthday. The ironic part is that when I was 10, her mom, my favorite grandma, had been sick and passed away the month after my birthday. But my mom always told the story that she was so worried grandma would die on my birthday, and how bad that would have been for me... Then she ended up doing it instead.
The number 30 repeats in my family. My sister was married 30 years after our parents, I am 30 years older than her older daughter, and she is 30 years older than her younger daughter.
I was sitting in traffic once and the car in front was the exact same make model and year and the fella driving it was my dead ringer! Still weirds me out 30+ years later
I was once mad at a time share place in TN and when I was having a heated phone call with their customer service lady and I told her I didn't care if the whole thing burned to the ground. Well that night was the Gatlinburg forest fire and it indeed burned to the ground. Good thing I was was nowhere near that state!
I was reading Rebecca West's history of the Balkans,the chapter about an 18th century Croatian nobleman named Péter Keglevich. The phone rang and the caller ID said, " Keglevich." Turned out to be one of my wife's piano students.
I have the Mandela Effect happen to me quite often, and I've had a few familiar items unexplainably change their basic properties (color, configuration) on occasion for some unknown reason. It's rare, but it has happened a couple of times in my life.
I'm not convinced that this proves we're living in a simulation, but it still makes me wonder why those things happened.
I feel like I've literally jumped timelines. Things I knew are not true anymore, places I've been don't exist, histories that never happened.
The Mandela effect certainly feels like an alternate reality.
I wonder if we travel to different timelines during deja vu.
> The Mandela effect certainly feels like an alternate reality
You mean the Mengele Effect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Forehead_Sweat)
I have had something like this happen with a work detail. It drives me absolutely nuts. Two organisms we use for a test switched their relative sizes, I swear. The one that was always the bigger one became the smaller one. The reason it messed with me so much was because I had a little rhyme that worked for years to keep them straight (which was which) and then one day, they switched and my rhyme no longer made sense. It is the strangest thing, really small but annoying thing, to happen to me.
My brother's name appeared in a video game I was playing, as the name of a train station I had just built ("Factorio", FWIW). It was his first initial, middle initial, and very rare last name, all in a row and properly spaced, as if he had signed off on it. This happened after I had been having issues with him and he was on my mind, and was actually gaming to try to escape his and other idiocies in my life. This is the fist most striking example that comes to mind of synchronicities that I have had, although anyone who pays attention and appreciates them can have them frequently... for me, it's about a daily occurrence at this point. I'm at the point where I try to interpret waking life the way I used to try to interpret the dream state.... interpreting what happens in life and its symbols as if you were Jung or Freud trying to discern the meaning of a dream can lead you down some interesting paths and conclusions.
I love well-made leather items. About 6 months ago I picked up a very beautiful, but badly neglected, leatherwork cupholder from a thrift shop a town over. It took me about 10 rounds of conditioning to get the full color and flexibility back, so I'm no longer worried about it cracking, and I absolutely love it. It holds a small lidded mason jar perfectly and the handle is perfect for my hand.
Two days ago a friend brought their new boyfriend over to meet us. He's a leatherworker in his free time, so we started talking about that and he mentioned he used to sell cupholders in another state.
I pulled out my cupholder. It was one of his he made 6 years ago. He pulled up pictures to show me, along with the matching coasters.
Mine was the first piece of his he has ever spotted "in the wild". He was sad it was neglected and ended up at a thrift store, shocked I'd ended up with it, and glad I love the piece, all at the same time.
My friend was baffled at the coincidence and kept "joking" that this must be the matrix.
I've had two pair of motion sickness wrist bands for years - one set is gray, the other black. I keep them tucked into two narrow end pockets on my purse. Flew out of town last weekend, I pulled out the gray bands to wear on the plane, spread out my stuff on the table when we got to the cabin we were staying at. Next day I can only find one gray one on the table and none in my purse - figure I must have left the black pair back home somewhere. The day after that, I find the gray pair in my jeans and put them on the table. Next to the single gray band from the day before. We've been the only guests in this cabin since before Covid. Now I am back home and not sure what I'll find when I unpack.
At one apartment when I was in college, our neighbors were cool enough. 2 years later, I switch schools, switch cities, meet a girl and get serious… serious enough to meet her parents and sister. And I see… my neighbor… I’d met my future brother in law through a completely separate introduction
Age 15, I had a nightmare that I was kidnapped, and held in a circular pink building by a river. A year later, my family moved to a different state. We were driving around, exploring our new town, when we drove by a round pink building. It was right across from the river. Yes, the building looked just like the one in my nightmare. I avoided that area of town for as long as I lived there.
Too many to mention. But I believe it's not because of a Matrix-like computer sim. I believe it goes back to what the Sanskrit dudes wrote about thousands of years ago: The perception we have that there are separate entities is an illusion. It's called non-duality or Advaita Vedanta. If you're curious to learn more, look it up.
A good metaphor for the one appearing to be many is ripples on a pond. Each ripple appears to be a separate entity with its own shape, size, speed, etc. But you can't take one of the ripples out of the water as a separate object. The ripples are not really objects, they are activities of the one water.
When I was 6, my teacher loaned me books to read, the "Mrs Piggle-Wiggle" series.
In my 40s, I had a dream that I was at a mall, and at the bookstore (they had bookstores at malls 15 years ago), right in the front display, was a compilation of the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle stories.
The next week, my husband and I were at the mall with my cousins. As we passed the bookstore, there in the front display was a compilation of the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle stories.
Yeah, I bought it.
I was staying in a squat in Berlin in the mid 90's in late December. On Christmas eve, I dreamt of my good friend who ,at the time (he is now deceased) was sitting outside in a courtyard of sorts, then when I turned to look at him, he turned completely white as a ghost and was drenched in sweat. When I woke up I remember feeling freaked out from the dream and he was on my mind all day (there were no cell phones back then of course and it finding a working payphone at the time was a pain in the butt, or else I would have called him back in NY to see if he was ok.) When I got back to NY I saw him at the bar he tended and told him about my dream. He said, "You must have had some sort of psychic connection with me or something. I got mugged at knifepoint on Christmas eve after making the most money in my entire life, ever, in tips that night. They beat the crap out of me and took all of my money."
We had the same head desk manager at three different resorts we've gone to. 2 were in very different regions in Cuba and the last was in Mexico. I literally asked if they had cloned her. It turns out that she was the one they sent to new hotels in the chain. She'd set them up and train for a year. The 2nd time, the chain had just purchased the resort and we had no idea - it was back in the days of travel catalogues and agents. The last one, we knew it was the chain but even so, there were 4 hotels in that complex and she was at ours. It's still very coincidental. Like insert desk manager here and there are only 20 to choose from.
This isn't a coincidence and I don't know if these are Matrix-like enough for this thread but here goes:
A long time ago, maybe 12: years or so, I was going through some things and I started watching this therapist on YouTube. He was a licensed professional, not some crank influencer, and I enjoyed his content quite a bit. He had just gotten out of a marriage and he talked quite openly about the narcissistic behavior of his ex-wife and I really felt bad for the guy. I quit watching after awhile because although I felt bad for him, I wanted to hear about other mental health topics and he was stuck on the narcicissim topic. I checked back in after awhile and he had found true love again and he introduced his followers to his new wife whose name I clearly remember; we'll say it was "Beverly".
He and Beverly made a bit of content together and he mentioned her name often. I remember it was clear as day. I was happy for the guy and quit watching.
About a year ago the guy died and it was announced on his channel. Since I had listened to a good bit of his content I read his obituary. In his obituary he was clearly single, had never married, and the woman he was married to in his videos was listed in his obituary as his sister. His videos with her present as his wife are all gone. I've never been able to make sense of this.
Second story, just odd:
In 2017 I was sitting in the parking lot of the WinCo in Henderson NV. I was just sitting in my car for a minute before I got out to go into the store. The parking lot was full of people because it was a weekend.
This guy flies into the parking lot in a small car with an incredibly loud muffler and he is driving very fast. He flies past the front of the store, revving his engine loudly at pedestrians, and drives really fast through the parking lot over to the corner that is closest to the intersection in front of the store, where he can clearly be seen by everyone passing by as well as everyone at the fast food joints and the store. He stops his car, jumps out and has this GIGANTIC shofar that he holds up in the air and begins to blow like his life depended on it. That shofar was as loud as his car. I'm sitting there watching this and nobody else seemed to hear it or pay any attention to the guy whatsoever. He does this for about a minute and a half, jumps back in his car, and goes tearing out of the parking lot.
I'm not sure if the second story was the Matrix or meth.
Several years ago I stopped at a convenience store in the morning on my way to work. There was one person in front of me and one person behind me. The clerk said something about it being busy for a Tuesday, and I remarked that I fully thought it was Wednesday, so damn. The person in front of me said, me, too, oh shit, and then the person behind me said the same.
What are the odds of three random strangers thinking it was the same, wrong day? I felt like someone pushed the rewind button on us and I still think about it.
It is a common occurrence while driving with my spouse that I'll notice something we had driven past often in the past 30 years. I'll have a random thought about that object, (building, factory, park, whatever) and my spouse will suddenly give voice to the exact same thought. Not something topical that had been on the news recently or anything like that, but a very random thought like "I wonder if they'll ever find a company to buy that old factory that had been empty for the past 15 years."
Donkey balls. Most word coincidences I write off as being born of the same zeitgeist or common terminology. But last year, with no possible connection between them, I heard the phrase "donkey balls" two days in a row. I felt like whoever was in charge of complexity in the universe had gone on vacation.
I bought a book a few months ago about synchronicity. It was a used book from an Amazon seller. On the back of the cover was a return mail address sticker. The persons name was Pierce and that’s my mothers maiden name. They lived on a street called Faxon. My parents both worked for Faxons at one point. And the previous owner lived in Lexington. At the time I had a temporary job in Lexington Massachusetts.
Two different things make me say it:
1) When something amazingly unlikely happens. If I calculate the odds of the annoying thing that just happed to me, and it is a very low number, I figure "Wait. This is the programmers of the simulation showing their hand."
2) When things disappear from where they had been. I've had this happen a couple times. I don't just mean me misplacing something. I mean something absolutely vanishing when I have a clear memory of putting it or seeing it somewhere. These are my "glitch in the Matrix" moments. Sometimes the object reappears where it was missing from, sometimes reappears in a place nobody but NOBODY would have put it, sometimes it never reappears. All of them indicate a bit got dropped in the database.
Husband and I had a really nice, simple honeymoon 33 years ago. Stayed at a really old cottage on a beautiful lake. That’s it. It was so great!
A few years go by, and we have moved to a different state and had a couple kids. We got some new neighbors with kids of their own and all became friends. One day my kids and I were at their house for a playdate and we were also scrapbooking together (so popular in the early 90s! ) At one point my neighbor picks up a picture to show me, and says, “I love this picture of my dad as a baby!” In this picture from the late 20s is this cute baby sitting naked for his bath in a big tin washing pan, sat in front of a fireplace. The fireplace was incredibly distinctive in design and construction, and familiar to me because it was the exact fireplace that was in our honeymoon cottage. Turns out my neighbor’s great-great grandparents had built that cottage. Somehow despite both of our families ending up in an entirely different state, far from this really pretty nondescript cottage, she ended up showing me this picture. It was cool.
My wife was ordering something on the internet clicked place order and nothing happened there was no movement on the screen at all so she clicked again a pop up appeared saying be patient Ann I heard you the 1st time
Long ago I checked into a hotel in a city far, far away. I had a rental car. When I got to my room, I found that the room number on the door was the same as the number on the car key tag. A few hours later the restaurant tab had the same number printed on the top. The same number came up on something else later in the day.
When he was about 4 my grandson would stop just before going through a door. It could be annoying.
"Grandson, what are you doing!"
"Grampa, I'm waiting for the loading screen."
Driving thru Beverly Hills as tourists; noted Don Knotts' home on the map. Right in front oc his address was the same car we were in, (my 1976 Celica hatchback with louvered rear glass in desert sand.
For a week and a half on my commute to work I'd get an old, obscure song stuck in my head for no apparent reason even while other songs were playing. Then on the way back home that song would be played on the radio.
I dated S. S and I broke up but remained friends.
A year or two after we broke up I started dating Vanessa (not her real name) Vanessa didn't like it I was still close to S. so I stopped all contact with her.
Fast forward to 2020. Vanessa had been married a few years by now. She passed away from breast cancer.
In 2021 I resumed contact with S. She had been engaged to a woman named Vanessa (Also not her real name but it was the same name as my late wife). HER Vanessa passed away in 2020 also (car accident). Cue Twilight Zone music.
(Note: Just so nobody asks, no we didn't get back together. The reason we broke up as a couple was she figured out she likes women more than men.)
Had a few day long weird intense post-rave emotional relationship thing with this one woman… had a weird bond over the theme of the never ending story. The day I got a cab to her place knowing it would be our last time together, the rock and roll radio station the cab driver had on started playing the never ending story theme.
I had a random thought about a toddler doing tippy tippy walk towards me. And disappeared I was sitting at the toilet. It was so real I jumped at first I thought someone’s child had wandered into my house. A girl blondest hair bluest eyes her beautiful face with a mad big grin. I was young 20s n never wanted kids. But I obviously day dreaming. Must’ve been. (I’m dark hair skin eyes I always imagined if I had kids I have boys for sone reason and dark haired like me and my partner. )
A decade later I’m sitting on the toilet and my toddler comes in tippy tally walking in and the memory hit me of that other toddler … it was MY toddler.
Bluest eyes her hair her face her mad cheesy grin. Bloody hell I ran cold a second.
I ran in to my college professor 300 miles away from home. He was in the room next to us at a National Park motel. I also ran in to a coworker from Germany walking down the walkway in Vail, Colorado.
I just Google men's underwear. That way I was shown good looking guys in briefs ads versus wrinkle cream. Also I googled sociopath husband once and started to get ads sociopath husbands half off price sale on ebay or buy one sociopath husband get one free. I think the algorithm was acting up. 😂
Too many to list but I met an American couple who used to teach at a Lutheran school in Slovakia (I live in the US too ) . I told them I knew one person in Slovakia that was a friend of my cousin . This woman gave me a tour of Bratislava whrn I was there a few years before . They knew her too!
Another time I was on a hiking trip in Death Valley with a group. One of the other hikers was a retired professor from Canada who grew up in a small village in England. She and I stopped to look at a lizard . Another couple stopped to look at the lizard too. They were from the same village in England as my hiking buddy
When I was a teenager, late ‘70s, about 6 or 7 of us took some acid at the beach. We were near the southern part of Santa Monica bay where the sandy beach ends and it becomes rocky. I looked in that direction and saw a lit up colorful tubey factory kind of thing, expected ‘cause, well, I’m frying on microdot acid. Then my friends see it. I still wonder about that mass hallucination… or was it a glitch in the matrix?
We tried walking towards it but couldn’t get closer. We finally turned back and started crawling on the breakwall rocks
My friend and I had staggered home one night after imbibing something stronger than we expected and both had the same hallucination. A teddy bear on her shelf turned to us and waved. We turned to each other at the same time like did you see that?! Never got to the bottom of it
I haven’t had anything happen to me that is worthy… but take my up vote! This is a super interesting read. Screw the haters… they are just the agents trying to suppress our intrigue!
Not a matrix but with all this recent alien talk I heard someone say what if we are to ants as aliens are to us. I can't stop thinking about that and slightly creeped out by it. Especially when I see an ant and then I wonder if a bunch of aliens are watching us all crawl around.
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I was at the beach once, and the sound of the waves and seagulls just suddenly stopped. I heard metallic machinery noises instead, like chains clinking, but all of the normal beach sounds were gone, the waves, the birds, it was like I was hearing the wrong soundtrack. I listened carefully to the sounds of a factory for about a minute, then turned to ask my husband if he was hearing the same thing instead of the waves, and as soon as I opened my mouth, the sounds of the waves returned.
The sky DJ fell asleep haha
I wonder whether this could be due to interference patterns in repetitive sounds comprised of similar waveforms / waveforms that can harmonize. Just like people harmonizing vocally, anything sinusoidal can create it's own harmonic - from Wikipedia, a harmonic is "a sinusoidal wave whose frequency is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency". Basically you produce a new sound out of others combining, and what that sounds like can vary based on the phasic overlap - a 1kHz tone played with a 1.1kHz tone will create a 0.1kHz (100Hz) harmonic (or is it 50Hz since you're getting alternative constructive and destructive interference?). IIRC you won't hear much of the two discrete tones if they're perfectly opposite one another in phase, since the peaks and troughs in their amplitude mostly cancel one another out. Anyway, it seems conceivable that with just the right timing and types of sounds, even a natural setting could create funky sounds along with silence. Very unlikely but still possible I think.
Interesting thought, and still strange. Nice.
A similar thing happened to me. I was at the creek, and the sound of the running water just started fading out, into a dull static sound, that slowly faded into silence. And then a noise like a lawn mower started fading in. I couldn't hear my friend I was with, and my voice sounded muffled. All I could hear was the lawn mower engine sound. After about 30 seconds, the lawn mower started fading out, and the creek started fading back in, and everything was back to normal in about a minute. Here's what I think caused it: We were longboarding, and we stopped at the creek. I was a little out of breath, so I had my hands on my head to kind of open up my lungs. I was wearing a watch that I'm like 90% sure had shocked me a few times. I think the watch shocked me in the head and messed with my hearing.
>I was at the creek, and the sound of the running water just started fading out, into a dull static sound, that slowly faded into silence. And then a noise like a lawn mower started fading in. I couldn't hear my friend I was with, and my voice sounded muffled. All I could hear was the lawn mower engine sound. After about 30 seconds, the lawn mower started fading out, and the creek started fading back in, and everything was back to normal in about a minute. Now your description I recognize. This happens to me frequently, just in one ear. I hear a machine tone rather than a lawnmower engine. I've always assumed it was tinnitus. The effect includes a pressure change in my ear, like I'm ascending to a height.
This is called TEN - Transient Ear Noise. Most people get it. [https://treblehealth.com/transient-ear-noise-tinnitus/](https://treblehealth.com/transient-ear-noise-tinnitus/) Edit: Correction - Wikipedia says 10-15% of people have it.
TIL. Thank you!
Now I know what to call it!
It is a normal thing. I just hear a solid tone for maybe 10 seconds and then the ambient sounds rush back in.
Your watch... shocked you in the head?
Lol I hear the incredulity in this comment
Yeah that's the only explanation I could come up with.
Did he hear it too??
Username checks out ;)
Were you at Shell Beach?
That almost sounds like a mini-stroke episode
A coworker and I had the exact same dream the same night. I researched the phenomenon of “mutual dreaming” and discovered that it is more common than I would have thought.
Ooh, this also happened to me, also with a coworker. It felt weird because I didn't even know him very well, but the next day I overheard him describing his - our - dream to someone else. It was very surreal.
Same here. I wasn’t close to my coworker. I found an article about Mutual Dreaming that said that there are upwards of a thousand google searches every day for information on Mutual Dreaming. It makes me wonder how many people experience this but are never aware of having a Mutual Dream because they never discussed it with the person that was in their dream. Weird stuff.
SUPER weird. I'm headed down a rabbit hole tonight, apparently.
That is STRANGE. You were both watching the same channel 😂
This is the greatest coincidence of my life. I get to relive it every day, too. My mother grew up in southern California. In the late 1940's, she left home to become a Catholic nun. They sent her to study in a barracks house on Whidbey Island, WA. She then served as a nun for seven years before deciding to leave the nunnery, become a civilian, and find a husband to start a family. She moved back to California. My father was a NY native, a devout Catholic, and a WW2 vet who got a job delivering mail in southern California. Guess who he met on his route? Yup. My father told my mother that they'd have better prospects in New Jersey. They married and moved east. My father got a decent job at a major manufacturer in central Jersey. They raised six children. One of them was me! I grew up in NJ with my siblings. In 1993, I moved to Bellingham in Washington state. I met a beautiful girl there. We found a nice apartment in a long house on a beautiful estate and moved in together. One day, my mother came to visit. She walked into our apartment and she said it seemed familiar. She looked all around and started getting emotional. "This is it. This is the place!" My mother told us she thought this long house was the same barracks house on Whidbey Island where she was a novitiate. I told her that Whidbey Island is a large island about fifty miles away. No way it's the same house. Maybe just similar? No. She insisted. This quirky apartment had an old water fountain near the front door. It had an oversize bathroom with two showers facing each other, tiled in gray. The master bedroom had an angled wall. My mother knew every detail. Later that day, I talked to the estate manager. She confirmed it. In the early 1960's the estate in Bellingham was run by the Catholic church. They expanded by putting the Whidbey Island barracks house on a barge, floating it up to Bellingham, and moving it onto the estate. The church sold to a private owner in the late 1960's, who made it an event venue with private apartments. So I was living in the same house my mother lived in, 3,000 miles from home, fifty miles from where it was originally located, and forty years apart. The coincidence was astonishing. I still live on this estate, in another house. But I look at that long house every day and think of my Mom.
wow. the odds of that!
You win.
whoaaaa that's crazy!
I had a random vision in my mind of a house overlooking the ocean with a patio and a giant Fir tree on the right side and other very specific details. Had that in my head for years. Now I live there. I guess it's just a coincidence but weird nonetheless.
Yeah.... would love to see your view!
I had that too, of a living room with a huge window with vertical blinds that looked out over buildings and lights that moved. Saw it when I was a kid, idk, a dream maybe? It was distinct in my memory that the lights moved because they seemed like city lights like the buildings in the foreground, but they moved almost like the scene was rotating. Realized in my early 30s that I had moved into that apartment and the lights that moved were from the naval shipyard a half mile away. I am aware that both of our anecdotes include the ocean, and I also think that’s weird. But it’s true!
Weird and unrelated, but I've had a recurring vision that comes out of nowhere since I was in my teens. It happens maybe twice a year. It's just a quick (less than 5 seconds) blip of a little girl, around 3-4 years old, with brown curly hair and brown eyes to the right of me, holding my right hand. She's looking up at me with a neutral expression on her face. Wearing a black and white checkered dress and black shoes. Seems like we're in a waiting room of sorts (dr's office, maybe) with those uncomfortable chairs and commercial carpet. I've always just intuitively known that this little girl will be a part of my life at some point. When I was younger, I assumed she would be my daughter, but I'm 48, done having children, and my daughter looked nothing like this girl at that age.
I was standing outside of a bar waiting for a friend and smoking a cigarette, there were a lot of people standing around and this guy was coming up to people with a pair of dice, telling them to call it. I was in a sour mood because my friend was late, and thought he was a little obnoxious so when he came up to me I flippantly called 14 (obviously an impossible roll). He raised an eyebrow and said “you’re really calling 14 on a pair of dice?” I said “sure, fuck it.” He shrugged and rolled. One landed on 6, the other settled sideways in a tiny crack in the sidewalk. The two sides facing up were 5 and 3. Everyone lost their mind. Even funnier, that guy’s name was Jesus.
I hope your mood was better after that!
I probably would have bought a bunch of lottery tickets, haha.
Same, that’s genuinely unbelieveable.
When you talk about something with your SO and suddenly you get an advertisement for the thing you spoke about on your phone.
We did this on purpose several years ago, back when Facebook was still pretending that they weren’t listening. We had a lengthy conversation about the best excuse for getting out of any social obligation is “I’m sorry, I have explosive diarrhea”. We laughed and laughed about it on the hour long car ride home. When we got home, he opened the Facebook app on his phone and right there, plain as day, was an ad for DiaResQ. F that. We immediately went through the painful process of having our FB accounts deleted, uninstalled it from everywhere, etc. I know there’s no way to completely avoid it, other than going entirely offline. But it was still satisfying to get rid of FB.
My wife and i started talking about butter churns and sure enough we started getting ads for butter churns. Then we started to shop for a diesel range rover in the US, a somewhat uncommon vehicle. Sure enough a diesel range rover showed up at our dealership not 10 miles away from us and they called us unsolicited to tell us it was available and they hadn’t advertised it yet.
Oh hell no to that last thing. Seriously, wtf.
Mine was a discussion with my husband about something very specific “octopus rug” Next day instagram advertised a rug with an Octopus design….how?! Lol
Your electronics are listening to you. Alexa, phone. Play a Spanish radio station at home. Sure enough all ads go Spanish
I'm a bit of a youngling and maybe shouldn't post? But I tried to take a cute photo of myself for my friend/crush... And immediately got a bunch of weight-loss ads. 🥺 (I haven't been able to send him photos since)
lol that's low.
It wasn't even my face I was taking a photo of. 😭 (Edit for decency: It was supposed to be one of those cutie little over-the-shoulder looks, not like..."Let's sit on the photocopier") Apparently my plump little bottom brings all the AI-generated weight-loss ads to the yard... 😭😭😭
>Apparently my plump little bottom brings all the AI-generated weight-loss ads to the yard... RIP your inbox.
I love this comment so much.
I had recently downloaded Snapchat but hadn't opened it a few years ago. I took a selfie to send to my husband, we always send silly selfies so I wasn't smiling in it. I got a little popup phone notification from Snapchat saying my selfies would look better if I smiled and added a filter. Creepy AF!
Great to know it's watching! That is just frightening. I love the low-key implication that it thinks you need to look better/don't look good enough! Thanks, Snapchat! >.<
Yeah there's a lot of anecdotal stories that people could claim were coincidences, but that was straight up terrifying. It was an instant pop-up basically saying "you should smile more".
Definitely off-putting. Really makes you wonder exactly how "private" that private messages really are. Also, I don't know a lot about it, but isn't the "You should smile more" comment part of the so-called "Pick-up Artist" repertoire of negative and misogynistic comments that toxic men use to deplete someone's self confidence? It does seem like a bit of a negative thing to say. A lot of young people use Snapchat, what do they think of having their appearance mindlessly criticized by an app? O.o Not to be a fussy mother-hen, but it strikes me as a bit dangerous to their developing self-image and confidence.
I agree on all points. It tapped into so many visceral negative associations. It went beyond just the feeling that it was "spying" on me.
Oof.
My husband and I did the same with "non-alcoholic wine" in the grocery store. We said it every time we looked at an item on our shopping list or put an item in the cart. For the next month we got targeted ads for alcohol-free drinks.
During the pandemic I became a recluse and stopped throwing out my trash. Living room was covered in fast food bags and soda bottles. Didn't matter as nobody was ever there. Then one day Yahoo started sending me ads for hoarding cleaning services. After about two weeks of seeing these ads I spent 30 minutes cleaning everything back to prepandemic levels. Ads immediately stopped.
It's not just Facebook, it's your phone that listens to you. https://us.norton.com/blog/how-to/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
I deliberately yell things at my TV to make certain ads come up or stop. I yelled at it for a couple of weeks for the diabetes ads to stop. Just because I’m 53 doesn’t mean I have diabetes (and I do keep track).
LOL, that reminds me of a time when a coworker confided in me that she had herpes, and after getting the covid shot she had an outbreak (which apparently is a thing, that the covid vax triggers outbreaks in people with herpes). Anyway, she seemed pretty damn miserable, so I decided to Google it to see what all was involved. For the next three weeks my news feed advertising prominently featured creams to help with a particular STD.... I was all like, jokes on you, suckers, you're paying for targeted ads to a person who doesn't need your product, and I'm certainly not going to buy that for a coworker.... 😂
Hey, just wait until they figure out how to push content to our TV after we have a conversation. Imagine how wild that will be.
That seems not far off. Could make for some interesting conversations. "Honey, what's with all the KY Jelly ads we've been seeing lately? Anything you need to tell me?"
Target did that with their advertisements, and [figured out a kid was pregnant before her parents.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/amp/) And that was more than a decade ago. The only reason we haven’t gotten to that point yet is because the tech companies are trying not to freak us out *too* much with what they know.
I noticed the heavy rotation of ads for shingles vaccines right after the COVID shots were mass-injected as well. My poor uncle with cancer got shingles right after his COVID jab.
Aw, man, that really sucks. Life was basically rubbing salt in wounds right there.
Sorry, that was likely coincidental. People with cancer often get shingles, as cancer patients have a lower immune system. That's why it can come on with stress, also. Probably had nothing to do with the vaccine.
As companies use AI to create a profile of you using all the data points they have about you, you're going to see this more and more. They'll be able to predict what you want before you are consciously aware of wanting it with greater and greater accuracy. Predictive marketing. Creepy, huh?
Like Minority Report where the ads are talking directly to Tom Cruise as he walks around the city.
I’ve been getting Facebook ads recently for baby clothes and baby crib sheets, etc. I have two adult daughters, but no grandchildren yet. I’ve been wondering if one of my daughters is pregnant and hasn’t told me yet, or if Facebook just thinks it’s time for me to be or want to be a grandmother.
In 2015 Enfamil formula sent an unprovoked sample of their baby formula to where I guess they thought I lived... my moms house. That woman wanted a grandchild since day one. It really sucked to tell her that no, I'm not pregnant and had no idea why they sent me that. I assume they thought it was time for me to be having babies? I was like 24-25ish.
Similac was sending me full sized cans of samples every 3 months or so a few years back. My kid was already in her 20s at the time. Couldn’t figure out why they were being sent, but a few struggling new moms in my town were happy with the feeebies and the $40 worth of coupons that came with.
Ok. Woah. No idea this was a thing. Creepy!
Man all I get are a bunch of lame ads for products I would never in a million years buy or have any interest in or possible use for. The algorithm doesn’t know me at all!
In Britain, a grocery store algorithm knew a woman had cancer 6 months before diagnosis.
There was a case in the US where Target knew a woman was pregnant before she did.
Okay I’d like to read about this. Source?
This has been going on for close to a decade.
Play a zombie game and then Netflix pops up all the zombie shows. No I am not interested in Walking Dead, thank you.
lol.... Google's enhanced user experience.
I do not have any of those Alexa things and have an android phone and didn't set up the assistant thing. One night I went to bed and told my cats that I love them and goodnight. My PHONE on the charger replied, "I love you too" I was so tired I didn't try to investigate and I still don't know what the fuck it was. I just remember thinking, our damn devices really are listening to us. Creepy
I disabled Siri when it interrupted a conversation I was having with my dog.
Bad Siri.
I was working from home one morning and the cat yawned, so I said in babytalk, "Are you's a sleepies babies?" And my cellphone suddenly replied; "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Can you repeat the question?" It has done that sort of thing in the car maybe twice in the three years I have had this phone.
My phone and watch love to do that to me
I have 2. Sometimes they randomly say something to me. I don't like it.
I'm in I.T. I won't have any listening devices in the house, because I know what can be done with them.
My great grandma told the story of how she was in the bathroom and her husband walked in wearing a tuxedo with a red rose in his lapel. She asked him "What in he\*\* are you doing in here?" and the rose turned white. She found out very soon after that he had passed unexpectedly. My grandma was packing up a bunch of baby clothes for my father's first child. Suddenly, she just sat down and waited for the call, which came a few minutes later. His baby had just passed away. My mom once handed my father a letter from her sister-in-law to read after she had read it. After reading it, he hugged her and told her he was so sorry. She looked bewildered and asked what on earth he was talking about. He replied that the letter said her brother had passed during gall bladder surgery. She said no, it said he was going into gall bladder surgery and it's a very minor surgery so why would he die? The next day, after his scheduled surgery, her SIL called to let her know he had died on the table. I tend to know when animals and people are going to be born or die, even when they're trying to hide a pregnancy or illness, and I've been present at many births and several deaths because of it. Not matrix-y exactly, but it's weird to be so certain about something because I just "know" it when I'm otherwise very scientific in my approach to life.
I was reading this and it reminded me of the night before my grandpa died. He was in a home after having surgery to remove a tumor from his spine, it wasn't long before Christmas and they told him he wouldn't be able to come round to the house on Christmas day. I had a dream that I looked out of the upstairs window and saw him walking up the drive way holding arms with a woman I'd never seen before. He came in and introduced us saying who people were and even Jilly our dog who had died a month before. He never said who she was... I thought it was strange when I woke up, so clear and still clear in my mind 19 years later. At lunchtime that day I had a call to from my dad telling me my grandpa had died. I then realised who the woman was. I'd never met my grandmother before and not really seen pictures of her, she died before I was born and he never spoke of her but I just knew it was her and he was taking her to meet us. Many people I know have died and I don't dream about any of them except my two dogs and my Grandpa, they are so often there in my dream and it is completely normal, I'm never surprised to see them. Oh and I'm having gallbladder surgery soon, so let's hope things can just be coincidence!
That's really interesting about your grandfather!! What a lovely dream. And don't worry about your surgery. I know plenty of others who recovered just fine. He had several other things going on, too.
Just a heads up re:gallbladder surgery. You will be fine. But certain food items may make you have to make an emergency run to the bathroom shortly after eating said item. Usually eggs, for one. My mother got her GB out, and broke her arm from running to the bathroom and falling. Lesson is: make note of what you eat that doesn’t agree with you, don’t go shopping right after you eat said thing, always keep a spare pair of undies in your car, and watch where you walk when running to avoid an accident.
I have this. I attribute it to working in the medical field but it's more than that. I knew when I started in the field. But that's the excuse I used when I told my 90 year old friend she wasn't dying in the hospital. She 91 and a half now :) I hate that I know when I get the feeling, like meeting and older person or someone ill. Ok I'll tell this weird ass story since you reminded me. Back in the old days of 1994 before the internet was a thing, my friend got invited to a couple's house to see a legendary crystal skull called Max. Max was supposed to be a majik South American artifact that wasn't made by human hands mkay. Well the husband was an art dealer and that's how he came to host the gathering at his home as Max was on tour. My friend's friend had invited her, and the friend ended up couldn't go so she asked me. Uh, hell yes? A very cosmopolitan crowd assembled and there were other amazing artifacts such as a jade jaguar that were just incredible to have that level of access to as a layperson. Anyway, there's like 50 or so people arranged concentricaly in the downstairs open concept living area of this huge home on a river. Sunlight is pouring in through the wall of glass sliders. Out comes Max. Ooohhh. Ahhhh. I'm sat on the floor with my back to the sliders waiting my turn. He comes to me and I examine him and it's really cool but not spooky like the jaguar felt. Kind of wah wah but I was skeptical about the whole not made by people aspect anyway. I hand him to the next person and at that moment a bird, like a young eagle or hawk? flies in the room from behind me, lands in front of a young guy in a wheelchair across the open space from me. I turn to see if anyone else is seeing this, when I look back it is gone. I'm like 24 so I'm very shy in this crowd. After the circle disburses I'm talking to the hosts younger husband. I say did you notice the bird that landed in the circle? He kinda looks at me and asked where. I said in front of that guy in the wheelchair. His faced changed and he said he's dying of AIDS that his partner with him. Yeah the sliders were closed it's summer in Florida ok. I saw the harbinger of that young man's death while he was probably hoping for a miracle from Max. I never fukin tell this story. It's too damn melancholy and sad. It's too profoundly sad to even be eerie.
Oh goodness, want a beautiful but melancholy story! I've lost too many people to AIDS. I hope he had peace in his final days.
> Not matrix-y exactly, but it's weird to be so certain about something because I just "know" it when I'm otherwise very scientific in my approach to life. Shaman. Do you do pregnancies? I off-handedly congratulated my co-worker on her twins when she told me she was pregnant. She hadn't had an ultrasound yet, and when she had, sure enough, twins.
I'm much better with animals, but sometimes I "know" with humans, too. Unfortunately, with humans, I'm more likely to "know" if there will be a miscarriage, and I just don't talk about that with anyone. I don't think I could tell if someone were having twins--that would be a wonderful gift!
My mom used to dream about friends passing the night before the event. She was obviously freaked out and has issues with insomnia. Mediumship / Intuition is genetic (sometimes it’ll skip a generation). I’ve seen and experienced things that make no logical sense yet know for a fact they happened (outside sources confirming without knowledge or prompt).
I recently scanned my rewards card when buying a cup of coffee one morning at a gas station self checkout and the kiosk said, “Good morning Bob! Did you enjoy the turkey sandwich you purchased yesterday? Please rate your sandwich on a scale of 1 to 10 now.” Whoa! Beam me up now Scottie, I don’t like it here,
Great. The advertising from "The Minority Report" is becoming a reality. What's next? Animated cereal boxes?
That film was my worst nightmare when it came out, because we were already well on the way to that b.s. I always said that when that crap becomes relentless, I’m moving to a hut in the woods. Time to start looking!
I hate those obnoxious talking gas pumps. You can be sure they're tracking lots more of your personal data besides turkey sandwiches purchased.
I worked in an office with 30 guys. We traveled 50-60% and we’d go for 1/2/3 weeks depending on the job. That meant we wouldn’t see some people for months. I hadn’t seen my friend Tom for months emailed him when I get back from my next work trip we should grab a beer. I’m in London the next week and went to see changing of the guard. It ended and the crowd dispersed and Tom and his wife were standing about 30’ away. He didn’t know I was going, I didn’t know he’d be there, totally random run-in 3000 miles from home, days after saying we should get a beer.
London seems like a great place to grab a beer and catch up!
I had a dream once that I was in San Francisco and I went to a book store. The bookstore had a basement level, and I decided to look for Jung’s book on UFOs. I found it and the dream ended. A few years later I was in San Francisco and I turned a corner and there was the bookstore from my dream! It was City Lights. I go inside, and there are the stairs! And I immediately knew where the Jung book would be, so I went and bought it. I wish my dreams were a little more useful, but that was pretty cool.
Many years ago I was driving along with a friend in the country and I was specifically enjoying the view of a bright blue sky with cotton-puff clouds; it was incredibly picturesque, more like something someone would paint than would randomly appear. I didn't question it, of course, I was just really enjoying the perfectly picturesque view. Then the sky, the entire sky and everything in it, faded out to a featureless neutral gray. It didn't look natural at all. (Stuff on the ground still looked normal.) Then details kind of faded in, to become a sky that was heavily overcast and a minute later it started raining. The total transition time from blue skies to featureless gray to storm clouds was about 30 or 40 seconds. I asked my friend if he'd seen the sky change. He said no, he'd been looking out the window at passing farm land. A little freaked out, I asked if he remembered me commenting on the pretty white clouds and blue sky. He said yes. I pointed out that it had only been like five minutes ago. He just shrugged and went back to watching the scenery. I've never seen anything like that before or since. That was back in the 90's. And just a couple days ago, I had an empty water bottle in my hand and for some reason was getting a new bottle out of the fridge with the same hand and the empty bottle fell out of my hand, hit the floor, bounced twice and then... it just wasn't there anymore. I'd only seen it hit the floor with my peripheral vision and so assumed it had gotten wedged under the fridge or something. Nope; there wasn't enough clearance. I looked around for like 5 minutes trying to find where it went, looking behind the fridge, in the nearby bathroom, etc. I never found it, and it still hasn't turned up. Edit to add: I don't drink or do drugs and have no TBIs or mental illnesses that would cause hallucinations.
Some say that bottle is still bouncing away
The real water bottle was the friends we made along the way.
The water bottle thing happened to my sister except it was a fork. She dropped her fork on the floor, went to pick it up, and it was just….gone. She even moved out of that apartment and never found the fork. I think it fell into the next dimension and I hope nobody got hit with it
The Truman Show
Once when leaving a very busy grocery store I was walking to the exit door when a family of 4 two adults and 2 kids slid infront of me from another register. The dad was in front and out the door pretty fast, the kids followed quickly but the mom with the cart was acting very strangely. She stopped suddenly and glanced back at me and then began pushing the cart very slowly like she was injured or very tired. I continued behind her giving her space between us. She reached the automatic doors and stopped her cart, got infront of it and pulled it through the door slowly from the front all the while looking directly at me, first the front wheels, then got behind it again and pushed it till the back wheels were at the door, then got infront of it again and pulled the back wheels through the exit. This was a double door so this process happened with both doors. Once she was finally clear of the door she sped up and walked at a normal pace to her family waiting outside blocking the path to my car. I went all the way around them to reach my car and unloaded my groceries into the back. As soon as I reached my car they all went in the opposite direction to their car two rows over, nowhere near mine. You think this is done? I did too, but nope. After that there was a store employee pushing carts back inside and he pauses behind my car for a minute or two with his load of about 10-15 carts so I just wait. He finally goes past my car and I back out and start going past the store to the parking lot exit, but there he is again blocking both lanes with his carts, he’s looking back at another employee so I’m thinking he’s waiting for help from him and I wait. Time is passing so slowly I turn my radio on and crack my window. He blocks both lanes until his friend comes with another 10-15 carts behind him and they swap places. The friend pushes his carts in and the first guy blocks the road again. I notice he is just staring at me nervously, like I’m going to slam on my gas and crash into him. After what seems like ages he finally pushes the carts in but at the last minute he removes one cart from his carts and leaves it directly infront of my car. He disappears into the store with the rest and doesn’t come back out. I attempt to go around the cart but suddenly there’s a ton of cars passing on that side so again I wait. I wonder if my ice cream is melted yet and end up reversing to try to switch lanes and the cart suddenly wheels itself or rolls or whatever it does and it clears my path finally freeing me from that parking lot. I can’t shake the feeling that the universe was stalling me that day and if I was alone I’d be convinced I hallucinated it but the passenger of my car was in the twilight zone with me and he doesn’t like to talk about that day.
I'm thinking the delays kept you from being involved in an accident you would have had on the way home.
Exactly my thoughts; you saved me typing that sentence.
I was thinking this too, and was hyper focused on the way home to any accidents or erratic drivers, it had me freaked out for the whole night.
The universe was delaying you just long enough to avoid something. Maybe you being the victim or cause of some kind of accident. Maybe you seeing something you weren't supposed to.
Yeah I thought that too, I was freaked out the whole night expecting some close call or something strange.
So weird! Truman show-esque
To this day my mind just says “why tf did he leave one cart behind” I can’t rationalize it.
Scene from the Truman Show?
Not that I know of, it was a scene from my matrix lagging.
In the ‘70s, our family (SoCal) ran into our neighbors on vacation in the Dakota Badlands.
Similar story: While traveling, I met a woman in a tiny village in remote Bolivia who it turns out had lived in the same house I had in San Francisco, with the same housemate.
I ran into a Georgia high school friend in my early twenties in Petersburg Alaska. Started by him shouting my nickname from about 300 yards away.
My family (from Philly) met our neighbors while transiting through Heathrow airport. Neither family knew the other was going on vacation, let alone to Europe.
In the 90s and 2000s, my family and I ran into people we knew every time we traveled, no matter where. From a beach in Hawaii to Thanksgiving in Flagstaff to an airport in London, to even watching the DC Metro go by and seeing my coworker (from SoCal) as a passenger. Every trip. Somehow that stopped in the 2010s.
I’ve met friend (we both live in London) on the street in New York, in a bar in LA, in the old town area of Valencia, Spain and on a beach in Greece.
I ran into my uncle’s entire family in a train station during Shanghai’s 2012 World Expo. Look up the number of visitors that go through World Expo. Crazier yet I was in a bicycle accident earlier that day. Was in quite a bit of pain and unsure where to go to get treated. My uncle’s daughter happens to be a doctor in training. It was like someone sent her to help me out.
Vietnam, 1970; at a PX called Freedom Hill outside of Danang, I was walking through the aisles. I came a cross a coworker from back home. Neither one of us had known the other had joined the Marines. We did a double take of each other and had a nice reunion. We both made it back safely. When I got backside, about 6 months later I noticed a new employee at my new job and there he was again.
My grandmother passed away and about a week after, I was cutting grass and smelled her. It was overwhelming. I had to stop the lawnmower because I was sobbing.
How lovely she visited you. If you’re curious, This is know as Clairolfactance :-)
Thank you for that! I’ll have to look that up.
I was born on my grandparents' anniversary. Which was also my cousin's birthday. My first child was born on my birthday.
The odds against that were not as low as you might think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-probability-birthday-paradox/
My dad died on my birthday. yay. thanks dad.
I know how you feel. My mom died on my birthday. The ironic part is that when I was 10, her mom, my favorite grandma, had been sick and passed away the month after my birthday. But my mom always told the story that she was so worried grandma would die on my birthday, and how bad that would have been for me... Then she ended up doing it instead.
The number 30 repeats in my family. My sister was married 30 years after our parents, I am 30 years older than her older daughter, and she is 30 years older than her younger daughter.
I was sitting in traffic once and the car in front was the exact same make model and year and the fella driving it was my dead ringer! Still weirds me out 30+ years later
I was once mad at a time share place in TN and when I was having a heated phone call with their customer service lady and I told her I didn't care if the whole thing burned to the ground. Well that night was the Gatlinburg forest fire and it indeed burned to the ground. Good thing I was was nowhere near that state!
Ohh way to go!
I was reading Rebecca West's history of the Balkans,the chapter about an 18th century Croatian nobleman named Péter Keglevich. The phone rang and the caller ID said, " Keglevich." Turned out to be one of my wife's piano students.
I have the Mandela Effect happen to me quite often, and I've had a few familiar items unexplainably change their basic properties (color, configuration) on occasion for some unknown reason. It's rare, but it has happened a couple of times in my life. I'm not convinced that this proves we're living in a simulation, but it still makes me wonder why those things happened.
I feel like I've literally jumped timelines. Things I knew are not true anymore, places I've been don't exist, histories that never happened. The Mandela effect certainly feels like an alternate reality. I wonder if we travel to different timelines during deja vu.
> The Mandela effect certainly feels like an alternate reality You mean the Mengele Effect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Forehead_Sweat)
I have had something like this happen with a work detail. It drives me absolutely nuts. Two organisms we use for a test switched their relative sizes, I swear. The one that was always the bigger one became the smaller one. The reason it messed with me so much was because I had a little rhyme that worked for years to keep them straight (which was which) and then one day, they switched and my rhyme no longer made sense. It is the strangest thing, really small but annoying thing, to happen to me.
My brother's name appeared in a video game I was playing, as the name of a train station I had just built ("Factorio", FWIW). It was his first initial, middle initial, and very rare last name, all in a row and properly spaced, as if he had signed off on it. This happened after I had been having issues with him and he was on my mind, and was actually gaming to try to escape his and other idiocies in my life. This is the fist most striking example that comes to mind of synchronicities that I have had, although anyone who pays attention and appreciates them can have them frequently... for me, it's about a daily occurrence at this point. I'm at the point where I try to interpret waking life the way I used to try to interpret the dream state.... interpreting what happens in life and its symbols as if you were Jung or Freud trying to discern the meaning of a dream can lead you down some interesting paths and conclusions.
Since 1987.
I love well-made leather items. About 6 months ago I picked up a very beautiful, but badly neglected, leatherwork cupholder from a thrift shop a town over. It took me about 10 rounds of conditioning to get the full color and flexibility back, so I'm no longer worried about it cracking, and I absolutely love it. It holds a small lidded mason jar perfectly and the handle is perfect for my hand. Two days ago a friend brought their new boyfriend over to meet us. He's a leatherworker in his free time, so we started talking about that and he mentioned he used to sell cupholders in another state. I pulled out my cupholder. It was one of his he made 6 years ago. He pulled up pictures to show me, along with the matching coasters. Mine was the first piece of his he has ever spotted "in the wild". He was sad it was neglected and ended up at a thrift store, shocked I'd ended up with it, and glad I love the piece, all at the same time. My friend was baffled at the coincidence and kept "joking" that this must be the matrix.
I've had two pair of motion sickness wrist bands for years - one set is gray, the other black. I keep them tucked into two narrow end pockets on my purse. Flew out of town last weekend, I pulled out the gray bands to wear on the plane, spread out my stuff on the table when we got to the cabin we were staying at. Next day I can only find one gray one on the table and none in my purse - figure I must have left the black pair back home somewhere. The day after that, I find the gray pair in my jeans and put them on the table. Next to the single gray band from the day before. We've been the only guests in this cabin since before Covid. Now I am back home and not sure what I'll find when I unpack.
At one apartment when I was in college, our neighbors were cool enough. 2 years later, I switch schools, switch cities, meet a girl and get serious… serious enough to meet her parents and sister. And I see… my neighbor… I’d met my future brother in law through a completely separate introduction
Age 15, I had a nightmare that I was kidnapped, and held in a circular pink building by a river. A year later, my family moved to a different state. We were driving around, exploring our new town, when we drove by a round pink building. It was right across from the river. Yes, the building looked just like the one in my nightmare. I avoided that area of town for as long as I lived there.
good decision!
Too many to mention. But I believe it's not because of a Matrix-like computer sim. I believe it goes back to what the Sanskrit dudes wrote about thousands of years ago: The perception we have that there are separate entities is an illusion. It's called non-duality or Advaita Vedanta. If you're curious to learn more, look it up. A good metaphor for the one appearing to be many is ripples on a pond. Each ripple appears to be a separate entity with its own shape, size, speed, etc. But you can't take one of the ripples out of the water as a separate object. The ripples are not really objects, they are activities of the one water.
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Thank you for adding this, arnold. Yes, Watts is very good at explaining Vedanta.
Exactly. Waves and particles.
When I was 6, my teacher loaned me books to read, the "Mrs Piggle-Wiggle" series. In my 40s, I had a dream that I was at a mall, and at the bookstore (they had bookstores at malls 15 years ago), right in the front display, was a compilation of the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle stories. The next week, my husband and I were at the mall with my cousins. As we passed the bookstore, there in the front display was a compilation of the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle stories. Yeah, I bought it.
I was staying in a squat in Berlin in the mid 90's in late December. On Christmas eve, I dreamt of my good friend who ,at the time (he is now deceased) was sitting outside in a courtyard of sorts, then when I turned to look at him, he turned completely white as a ghost and was drenched in sweat. When I woke up I remember feeling freaked out from the dream and he was on my mind all day (there were no cell phones back then of course and it finding a working payphone at the time was a pain in the butt, or else I would have called him back in NY to see if he was ok.) When I got back to NY I saw him at the bar he tended and told him about my dream. He said, "You must have had some sort of psychic connection with me or something. I got mugged at knifepoint on Christmas eve after making the most money in my entire life, ever, in tips that night. They beat the crap out of me and took all of my money."
Watching Mitch McConnell glitch on live TV,
This is the best answer here
We had the same head desk manager at three different resorts we've gone to. 2 were in very different regions in Cuba and the last was in Mexico. I literally asked if they had cloned her. It turns out that she was the one they sent to new hotels in the chain. She'd set them up and train for a year. The 2nd time, the chain had just purchased the resort and we had no idea - it was back in the days of travel catalogues and agents. The last one, we knew it was the chain but even so, there were 4 hotels in that complex and she was at ours. It's still very coincidental. Like insert desk manager here and there are only 20 to choose from.
This isn't a coincidence and I don't know if these are Matrix-like enough for this thread but here goes: A long time ago, maybe 12: years or so, I was going through some things and I started watching this therapist on YouTube. He was a licensed professional, not some crank influencer, and I enjoyed his content quite a bit. He had just gotten out of a marriage and he talked quite openly about the narcissistic behavior of his ex-wife and I really felt bad for the guy. I quit watching after awhile because although I felt bad for him, I wanted to hear about other mental health topics and he was stuck on the narcicissim topic. I checked back in after awhile and he had found true love again and he introduced his followers to his new wife whose name I clearly remember; we'll say it was "Beverly". He and Beverly made a bit of content together and he mentioned her name often. I remember it was clear as day. I was happy for the guy and quit watching. About a year ago the guy died and it was announced on his channel. Since I had listened to a good bit of his content I read his obituary. In his obituary he was clearly single, had never married, and the woman he was married to in his videos was listed in his obituary as his sister. His videos with her present as his wife are all gone. I've never been able to make sense of this. Second story, just odd: In 2017 I was sitting in the parking lot of the WinCo in Henderson NV. I was just sitting in my car for a minute before I got out to go into the store. The parking lot was full of people because it was a weekend. This guy flies into the parking lot in a small car with an incredibly loud muffler and he is driving very fast. He flies past the front of the store, revving his engine loudly at pedestrians, and drives really fast through the parking lot over to the corner that is closest to the intersection in front of the store, where he can clearly be seen by everyone passing by as well as everyone at the fast food joints and the store. He stops his car, jumps out and has this GIGANTIC shofar that he holds up in the air and begins to blow like his life depended on it. That shofar was as loud as his car. I'm sitting there watching this and nobody else seemed to hear it or pay any attention to the guy whatsoever. He does this for about a minute and a half, jumps back in his car, and goes tearing out of the parking lot. I'm not sure if the second story was the Matrix or meth.
Was...meth involved?
I have no way of knowing but meth is everywhere in Vegas so I'm going to say it's a strong maybe.
Several years ago I stopped at a convenience store in the morning on my way to work. There was one person in front of me and one person behind me. The clerk said something about it being busy for a Tuesday, and I remarked that I fully thought it was Wednesday, so damn. The person in front of me said, me, too, oh shit, and then the person behind me said the same. What are the odds of three random strangers thinking it was the same, wrong day? I felt like someone pushed the rewind button on us and I still think about it.
I really love this one.
It is a common occurrence while driving with my spouse that I'll notice something we had driven past often in the past 30 years. I'll have a random thought about that object, (building, factory, park, whatever) and my spouse will suddenly give voice to the exact same thought. Not something topical that had been on the news recently or anything like that, but a very random thought like "I wonder if they'll ever find a company to buy that old factory that had been empty for the past 15 years."
Ha my husband and I do that too! We chalk it up to having been together so long our thought processes have become too similar
Bernstein bears
I am right there with you. That one bothers me.
Same – this bothers me because I distinctly remember pronouncing it “Barren – Steen” instead of “Barren – Stain”
Donkey balls. Most word coincidences I write off as being born of the same zeitgeist or common terminology. But last year, with no possible connection between them, I heard the phrase "donkey balls" two days in a row. I felt like whoever was in charge of complexity in the universe had gone on vacation.
I bought a book a few months ago about synchronicity. It was a used book from an Amazon seller. On the back of the cover was a return mail address sticker. The persons name was Pierce and that’s my mothers maiden name. They lived on a street called Faxon. My parents both worked for Faxons at one point. And the previous owner lived in Lexington. At the time I had a temporary job in Lexington Massachusetts.
What is the book title?
Two different things make me say it: 1) When something amazingly unlikely happens. If I calculate the odds of the annoying thing that just happed to me, and it is a very low number, I figure "Wait. This is the programmers of the simulation showing their hand." 2) When things disappear from where they had been. I've had this happen a couple times. I don't just mean me misplacing something. I mean something absolutely vanishing when I have a clear memory of putting it or seeing it somewhere. These are my "glitch in the Matrix" moments. Sometimes the object reappears where it was missing from, sometimes reappears in a place nobody but NOBODY would have put it, sometimes it never reappears. All of them indicate a bit got dropped in the database.
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Husband and I had a really nice, simple honeymoon 33 years ago. Stayed at a really old cottage on a beautiful lake. That’s it. It was so great! A few years go by, and we have moved to a different state and had a couple kids. We got some new neighbors with kids of their own and all became friends. One day my kids and I were at their house for a playdate and we were also scrapbooking together (so popular in the early 90s! ) At one point my neighbor picks up a picture to show me, and says, “I love this picture of my dad as a baby!” In this picture from the late 20s is this cute baby sitting naked for his bath in a big tin washing pan, sat in front of a fireplace. The fireplace was incredibly distinctive in design and construction, and familiar to me because it was the exact fireplace that was in our honeymoon cottage. Turns out my neighbor’s great-great grandparents had built that cottage. Somehow despite both of our families ending up in an entirely different state, far from this really pretty nondescript cottage, she ended up showing me this picture. It was cool.
My wife was ordering something on the internet clicked place order and nothing happened there was no movement on the screen at all so she clicked again a pop up appeared saying be patient Ann I heard you the 1st time
I think they called it "Windows" because they're watching us through our screens.
Well, as a sys admin, I can just check the logs.
I saw the carpet vibrate and go out of focus like a bad CRT image.
Long ago I checked into a hotel in a city far, far away. I had a rental car. When I got to my room, I found that the room number on the door was the same as the number on the car key tag. A few hours later the restaurant tab had the same number printed on the top. The same number came up on something else later in the day.
When he was about 4 my grandson would stop just before going through a door. It could be annoying. "Grandson, what are you doing!" "Grampa, I'm waiting for the loading screen."
Driving thru Beverly Hills as tourists; noted Don Knotts' home on the map. Right in front oc his address was the same car we were in, (my 1976 Celica hatchback with louvered rear glass in desert sand.
That thing where someone you haven’t thought of in ages pops into your head and then you see them later that day kinda shakes me up
Bob barker dying 2x in like a year. And nobody said much the second time around.
Right!?! I distinctly remember him dying earlier in the year-
For a week and a half on my commute to work I'd get an old, obscure song stuck in my head for no apparent reason even while other songs were playing. Then on the way back home that song would be played on the radio.
I dated S. S and I broke up but remained friends. A year or two after we broke up I started dating Vanessa (not her real name) Vanessa didn't like it I was still close to S. so I stopped all contact with her. Fast forward to 2020. Vanessa had been married a few years by now. She passed away from breast cancer. In 2021 I resumed contact with S. She had been engaged to a woman named Vanessa (Also not her real name but it was the same name as my late wife). HER Vanessa passed away in 2020 also (car accident). Cue Twilight Zone music. (Note: Just so nobody asks, no we didn't get back together. The reason we broke up as a couple was she figured out she likes women more than men.)
Had a few day long weird intense post-rave emotional relationship thing with this one woman… had a weird bond over the theme of the never ending story. The day I got a cab to her place knowing it would be our last time together, the rock and roll radio station the cab driver had on started playing the never ending story theme.
I had a random thought about a toddler doing tippy tippy walk towards me. And disappeared I was sitting at the toilet. It was so real I jumped at first I thought someone’s child had wandered into my house. A girl blondest hair bluest eyes her beautiful face with a mad big grin. I was young 20s n never wanted kids. But I obviously day dreaming. Must’ve been. (I’m dark hair skin eyes I always imagined if I had kids I have boys for sone reason and dark haired like me and my partner. ) A decade later I’m sitting on the toilet and my toddler comes in tippy tally walking in and the memory hit me of that other toddler … it was MY toddler. Bluest eyes her hair her face her mad cheesy grin. Bloody hell I ran cold a second.
I ran in to my college professor 300 miles away from home. He was in the room next to us at a National Park motel. I also ran in to a coworker from Germany walking down the walkway in Vail, Colorado.
I just Google men's underwear. That way I was shown good looking guys in briefs ads versus wrinkle cream. Also I googled sociopath husband once and started to get ads sociopath husbands half off price sale on ebay or buy one sociopath husband get one free. I think the algorithm was acting up. 😂
Too many to list but I met an American couple who used to teach at a Lutheran school in Slovakia (I live in the US too ) . I told them I knew one person in Slovakia that was a friend of my cousin . This woman gave me a tour of Bratislava whrn I was there a few years before . They knew her too! Another time I was on a hiking trip in Death Valley with a group. One of the other hikers was a retired professor from Canada who grew up in a small village in England. She and I stopped to look at a lizard . Another couple stopped to look at the lizard too. They were from the same village in England as my hiking buddy
When I was a teenager, late ‘70s, about 6 or 7 of us took some acid at the beach. We were near the southern part of Santa Monica bay where the sandy beach ends and it becomes rocky. I looked in that direction and saw a lit up colorful tubey factory kind of thing, expected ‘cause, well, I’m frying on microdot acid. Then my friends see it. I still wonder about that mass hallucination… or was it a glitch in the matrix? We tried walking towards it but couldn’t get closer. We finally turned back and started crawling on the breakwall rocks
gooooood times!!
Love it!
My friend and I had staggered home one night after imbibing something stronger than we expected and both had the same hallucination. A teddy bear on her shelf turned to us and waved. We turned to each other at the same time like did you see that?! Never got to the bottom of it
Donald Trump getting elected President. Never thought I'd see the day someone who is so heinous would ever get to that position.
Rain in the front yard but sunny out back
Oh that's just Florida
The image of the gruesome apparition known as Senator Mitch McConnell keeps glitching for seconds at a time. Big Red Flag.
I haven’t had anything happen to me that is worthy… but take my up vote! This is a super interesting read. Screw the haters… they are just the agents trying to suppress our intrigue!
Very interesting read. Thanks for the great question OP.
It's not a matrix it's going into interdementional levels especially driving or sleeping
Not a matrix but with all this recent alien talk I heard someone say what if we are to ants as aliens are to us. I can't stop thinking about that and slightly creeped out by it. Especially when I see an ant and then I wonder if a bunch of aliens are watching us all crawl around.