Don’t we all, from time to time, get the feeling that there’s something not quite right with the world around us? Experiences of this nature – glimpses or hints of a not-quite real world – are now popularly referred to as ‘glitches in the matrix.’ This is a nod to the classic 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix, which hinges on the premise that reality as we know it is a computer-generated illusion.
Perhaps you think there’s something to the notion that we live in a CGI dreamworld; perhaps you think it’s complete and utter codswallop. Consider the following stories shared by Reddit users before you make up your mind either way.
1. A wave from a stranger
I remember being pretty young like 9 or 10 and I was the car park of a pub in England (Southend). I remember seeing someone in their teens in the window of a house looking over the car park. They waved at me and I felt like I knew them somehow. My parents asked who I was waving at, and I said just some lady in the window over there. Didn’t think much of it.
Fast forward 10 years. I was at my nan’s new house. I remember walking into her room (which I never was allowed to do) and going to the window. I then realised I was in the house looking over that same parking lot and remembering that interaction years before. Then a girl around 9 or 10 who was in said car park waved at me and I waved back. I felt like I knew her.
2. The mysterious dog figurine
About 5 years ago in November we lost our family dog to cancer. She was the dog my children grew up with, loved by all. At the next Christmas, at the end of the day of gifts, food and family, as I was packing up, I found a tiny pewter dog figurine sitting on the mantel.
I asked everyone who had been at the house that day if they left it. No one had. Okay, weird, but took it as a good omen. When my eldest went back to college at the end of that Christmas break, he asked if he could take the little figurine, to remember his dog. Of course, I said yes.
A week or two later, picking up things around the house, there was the figurine again! I called my son, and said, “You forgot the dog figurine!” He said, “No I didn’t, it’s right in front of me on my desk!” I had now found a second figurine! Again, no one claimed any knowledge of it. No idea how… but I still have the two of them tucked away on a shelf to this day.
3. Is Google Maps annoyed with us?
About a year ago me and my cousin visited Los Angeles. We were driving around using Google Maps, and after missing our 3rd or 4th exit we swear we both heard it sigh loudly before it rerouted us. We freaked out and made sure our driving was on point the rest of the ride.
The rest of the trip there if we missed any of our exits or turns we always apologised to Google so hopefully she would know we were just morons and not a**holes.
4. Recurring dream proves to be a premonition
I used to have a recurring dream as a teenager every night for months. I was sitting at a table on the patio of a restaurant, I was out there alone, waiting for my food. A homeless man comes up to the other side of the patio and asks for change. I remember it so well.
I’m digging in my wallet for a couple of dollars and then I hear tires screech and look up to see a crash in an intersection near the restaurant. I run out there to see if I can help, and as I run out into the road I get hit by a car and wake up at the impact.
After a while the dream stopped and I put it out of my mind. Fast forward to me being 28 and sitting at an On The Border, on the patio waiting for my food. A homeless guy comes walking past the restaurant but doesn’t stop and ask for change. It makes me think about that dream though, and I start to feel uneasy.
Shortly after, I hear the tires screech and I see a wreck happen in the intersection near the restaurant. I begin to run out there but stop at the sidewalk and look out towards incoming traffic and there is an SUV not slowing down. [The driver] was on her phone and blew through the intersection completely unaware of what had just happened. Ran out and checked on the people. Everyone was fine.
5. A dream of real events as they happen
This happened around 1991. It’s the middle of the night. I’m standing in my sister’s living room and it must be a full moon, because even though it’s around 1am and the lights are off, I can see clearly. There’s a mixing bowl with popcorn kernels in the bottom on the floor in front of the tv and some rental VHS in a pile nearby.
I hear a noise and turn around to see my sister’s normally very friendly Labrador retriever looking like Cujo. Fangs bared, snarling, hackles raised. Suddenly there’s a bright flash of light and I wake up like I hit the bed from a great height. I think, “That was a weird dream.”
Eventually, I fall back to sleep and in the morning I call my sister, planning to tell her the story, but she preempts me by telling me about the weird thing that happened in the night. They woke up to the sound of the dog snarling at about 1am. Her husband thought there was a prowler in the house, got a gun and went to find the dog.
She was standing in the living room snarling at the middle of the room. He couldn’t see anyone, so he flipped on the light. No one was there, the dog instantly stopped snarling and walked to her bed like nothing had happened. He checked the property and went back to bed.
We talked a bit and I found out they watched some rental movies and “Of course we had popcorn, why?” My sister is a little woo-woo at times, so I decided not to tell her about my night. She lived about 450 miles away by the way. Did I teleport in my dream?
6. A book hits close to home
So, back in 2016, I was injured at work and for about six months my life consisted of going to physical therapy and being confined to bed until I could walk again. With that in mind, I had a lot of time to read books. One of the books that I was reading was “Ex-Heroes”, by Peter Clines.
Now I don’t know about anyone else, but when I read a book I like to “cast” the characters in my head, coming up with how they look. One of the minor characters in this book was named Ilya and, because I know someone named Ilya, and because the book is set in Los Angeles where I live, the Ilya in the book became the Ilya that I knew in my imagination.
But then, something strange started to happen. The Ilya in the book made specific references to movies like “Aliens”, a movie which the Ilya I know is a huge fan of. The Ilya in the book was a big fan of firearms, as the Ilya that I know is. Put into words, these details seem slim, but there was something so strange about the character in this book that I eventually reached out to the Ilya that I knew to ask about it.
Turns out that Ilya knows the author, Peter Clines, who had put him in the book! What are the odds that I would choose to buy a random book, with a story that takes place essentially on my street in Los Angeles, and features someone I know in real life as a minor character?
7. Experiencing my own death
I died. I saw it, I lived it. Either it was another world with a version of me that died I saw or I’m going crazy but I DIED. We had a pep rally in school and after it was finished we had to go back to class. Well, my friend and I were not into that so we wanted to go across the street… there is not heavy traffic, but if you don’t pay attention you could get hit.
Well, I remember walking with him and he dropped something so I went across the street first. I just saw a red Tahoe heading right for me and I got hit. I remember everything. I remember gasping for air, I remember waking up and sleeping again. Then nothing.
All of a sudden I was back in the stadium again and the EXACT SAME WORDS came out of the principal’s mouth. My friend wanted to go… I was freaking out [and] asking him everything. I thought it had to be a dream, so I went with him just to see what would happen.
He dropped his stuff again and I waited. To my horror, that same red Tahoe showed up. I told him that I’m going back to school, I ain’t dying again. I can still see the other version of me on that street just messed up. Not even moving. Like something out of a horror movie.
8. A flash of darkness
I was on vacation on Florida visiting a friend, we were walking on the beach on a perfectly sunny day when everything went black for a second. I thought it was weird but explained it away thinking that my eyes were playing tricks on me until my friend looked at me and said “did everything go black for a second?”
9. Meeting my double
When I played baseball as a kid, they were handing out the trophies at the end of the season. They called out the names of the kids while we received our trophies. There happened to be a kid with the same name as me. We met after the ceremony because it was weird since our last name isn’t a very common one.
We had the same birthday and everything. We looked alike, both our Dad’s were named Derek and both of our sisters were named Lilly. As a kid, I found it cool. As an adult, I find it cool and also disturbing. I often wonder what that kid is doing now, and if his kids are called the same names as mine…
10. Spirits bringing strangers together?
This summer I bought my girlfriend a last-minute birthday trip to go kayaking around the San Juan Islands off the Washington state coast. After a long drive and ferry trip, we found the tour group of about 20 people and were then shuffled into a shuttle van for a ride to the beach.
Now, my girlfriend has a unique name similar to the name of a famous painter. Let’s say it’s Rebecca Warhol just for fun (it’s not). She’s a little ray of sunshine, and started chatting with the middle-aged woman sitting next to her on the shuttle as we waited to leave.
The woman noted that she had always loved the name Rebecca, as it was her mother’s name. They made pleasant small talk in the van until the tour guide passed around the sign-in sheet for all of us to fill out. That’s when things got a lot more strange.
My girlfriend wrote her full name on the sheet and passed it on to the woman, who immediately shouted “Oh my God,” and started crying. After a few minutes of total confusion, she told us “Rebecca Warhol was my mother’s full name, and these islands were her favourite place in the world. She passed away this summer from cancer and we’ve traveled hundreds of miles to spread her ashes here.”
We were STUNNED. I literally picked a random date, time, and tour company, and THEN we were split into the same group as this woman AND my girlfriend was sitting right next to her on the shuttle. What the hell? She continued by saying, “My daughter told us that Nana Rebecca would be with us on this trip, and I didn’t believe it until now.”
11. A literal glimpse of the Matrix?
Several years ago, I went home, turned on my PC, browsed the web for a bit, literally watched a video about The Matrix, then looked out of my window. Then I suddenly snapped awake sitting in my chair. I looked at my monitor to see that it had turned off.
I thought “Strange, I must have fallen asleep” and proceeded to move the mouse to wake my PC from sleep mode. It did not wake up. I was confused until I noticed that the power strip was not even plugged in. It had never been turned on in the first place. That one weirded me out out for quite a while. I must have gone home, fell asleep and dreamt the whole thing (at least I hope so…)
12. Thoughts of a friend make the friend appear?
My wife and I were at the local mall shopping. We were walking around in Spencer’s and there was a display with a bunch of sexy/slutty boxed outfits. Once we saw them, we both blurted out “this looks like something Samantha (an acquaintance we both knew from from mutual friends) would wear”, at the exact same time.
We started laughing about it and as we walked around the corner, the Samantha we were talking about was looking at the exact same rack but form the other side… We hadn’t seen her in probably a year or so before then. That left everyone scratching their heads for a bit.
13. Fake obituary – real death
In college, I took a hard news/soft news journalism class where one of the assignments was to write an obituary for one of my grandparents. The professor told us to write it on a deceased grandparent, but if all of your grandparents were still alive we had to choose one. In my case, all of my grandparents were alive.
I procrastinated actually doing the assignment until the night before it was due because it seemed like a morbid assignment (especially once all of my grandparents were still alive). Scramming for an easy grandparent to write about, I gave my mom a call and asked her for some basic biographical information about my maternal grandfather.
As we were talking about my grandpa’s career, my mom couldn’t recall the name of one of the companies he worked at. She lectured me about waiting until the last minute to write the assignment because it was late – 10:30pm my grandpa’s time. However, she said she would give him a call to see if he was still awake and be able to answer that question once my assignment was due the following morning.
When my mom called my grandpa, my grandma answered the phone in a panic. My grandma frantically explained that the paramedics had just arrived and were performing CPR on my grandpa because he had stopped breathing and lost consciousness. My mom was able to stay on the phone with my grandma until they took my grandpa to the hospital, where he was declared dead.
In the time my mom and I had been talking on the phone about my grandpa’s “obituary,” he was dying. His death was entirely unexpected at that. Although he was in his eighties, he was the healthiest of my grandparents at the time. We ended up using the obituary I wrote for that writing assignment as his actual obituary. Still freaks me out when I think about the timing.
14. Did someone hit pause on the simulation?
About two years ago, I went to collect my husband from the ferry after work. My husband got into the car and as I was driving very slowly out of the car park we both noticed two people standing a few metres in front of our car. It looked as though they were strangers, older looking professionals, both walking to their separate cars in different areas of the car park.
The man was reaching into his side bag and the lady was further ahead than the man, with her head turned to the right. I know the exact positions they were in because they were completely frozen on the spot! My husband and I sat there watching the frozen strangers, not saying anything to each other and then all of a sudden it was like someone pressed play and the two strangers just continued on like nothing had happened.
My husband and I promised to each other that we would never forget how weird the experience was. I can’t remember exactly how long they stayed frozen like that but it was long enough to freak us both out! Then again, maybe they were just playing a really good prank on us.
15. A shared nightmare
1985. My ex-wife and I were sleeping. There was a small sliver of light coming in through the window from a streetlight, so the room and bed were dimly visible. Our black Pomeranian was at the end of the bed asleep. I dreamt that I woke up, reached down to pet him, and he turned into a glossy black bivalve/oyster thing which opened up to reveal rows of gleaming glass teeth.
I woke up to my ex back-pedalling up the bed over the pillows towards the wall. I asked, “What’s wrong?” She said, “What is that shiny black clam thing with the teeth at the end of the bed? Where’s the dog?” We had had the same nightmare at the same time. This still gives me a chill.
16. Sleep paralysis attack
Every night I go to bed about two hours before my husband. I always wake up when he comes into the room. One night he was gaming with a friend and it was hours later I heard him sneak into the room and crawl across the floor so he could pop up and scare me.
I felt the floor kind of shake and felt him bump clumsily against the side of the bed in the dark. I held out my hand and asked him not to scare me, I was already scared enough and begged him to just take my hand and come to bed. I couldn’t see anything in the room, but knew he was there and just waited for him to jump up so I could move on and go back to sleep.
That’s when I heard him talking to his friend in the other room. I was frozen. I know there’s sleep paralysis or lucid dreaming or something that explains this, but I would have sworn on my sons life that someone had crawled across the floor and jostled the bed. Eventually I worked out of the fear enough to grab my phone and text my husband to come in and turn on the lights and check under the bed.
17. Driven sick by an unseen presence
A friend and I went to a buddy’s house for a bday party. Stayed up playing halo 2 and hanging out. We all crash in the basement. R (friend who came with me) and I got up at the same time. Not like one after the other, we both got up at the same time after being asleep for a few hours and rushed to the bathroom.
R was more athletic than me (probably still is) and beat me there. I ran upstairs, barely getting my head over the toilet before puking my guts out. R was doing the same thing in the basement. I was wearing a wooden cross my grandmother mailed me from Romania.
(I’m not religious but I appreciated the gift as I had never met her at that point.) Cross somehow became detached from the cord, fell on the tile and broke into two pieces. So we both call our respective mothers and get picked up. By now it’s like 3-4am. I felt sick up until we left the house.
Once I was in the car and a few blocks away, felt perfectly fine. R reported the same thing to me that day over MSN Messenger. Felt perfectly fine after a few blocks. Got the pictures developed a few weeks later. Theres a picture of us on the couch rocking some Halo and the whole room looks like it’s filled with mist. Super spooky.
18. Floating lights from nowhere
Witnessed while driving… All of these little sparkles started swirling around in mid air roughly 3-4 feet off the ground out of nowhere. The group of them were roughly 2 ft wide by 3-4 ft tall. It lasted 3-5 seconds and then they were gone. No one was around and when I asked my passenger if he saw it too he breathed a sigh of relief and said yes. We spoke about it a little more but there is no reasonable explanation.
19. Time travel?
I once clocked out of work at 6pm (like I always did at the time) and began my hour long train ride home. After I had found a seat, I went to sleep and woke up just before my station. From the station, it is a short bus journey (10-15 minutes) to reach home. During the entire journey, I didn’t use my phone and I don’t wear a watch so I didn’t really notice the time anywhere.
When I reached home, my family surprised me with “You’re home early, everything alright?” I look at the wall-clock and it is about to be 6pm. I was too shocked to understand what happened. Checked other watches, cellphones etc and the time is absolutely right.
A few days later, the admin emailed us the timesheets for the month (times clocking in and out), and every single day’s for me was around the same: 6pm. So it certainly wasn’t me having left work earlier. To this date, I haven’t figured out how I gained between 60-90 minutes that day.
20. Bottomless elevator shaft
Once when we were kids, I had some friends with an ouija board at the basement of the building where I lived. Through the stairs there was an elevator shaft that had these wide bars where you could stick your arm in them, typical old elevator design.
So one night, they decided to go to the basement to do another ouija session, and I decided to drop a cup of glass through the shaft, just to scare them off. I let go of the cup, saw it vanish into the darkness, and I never heard the cup hit the ground.
I stood there, confused. Next day, I went downstairs at the basement with one of my friends, and the cup was there, placed in the middle of the elevator shaft floor. The cup was upright, and intact. I was seriously freaked out by that, because it would be impossible to someone enter the elevator shaft and place the cup there like that. The cup should have broken into pieces since I threw it from the 10th floor against a cement floor.
21. Sold car returns to its owner
Around 12 years ago I had a dark purple 3 series BMW which I drove to work and parked in the same spot for around 3 years. I sold the car due to mileage and wanting something a little more reliable and purchased a different car. One week later, I turn up to work to find my purple BMW parked in my parking spot. I was totally WTF?
Turns out that we had a work-experience kid start that day, and his dad had dropped him off in my old car that he had bought only two days earlier. What are the chances of that? I’ve never met this kid or his dad, and yet here was my old car in my/its space.
22. An ambulance vanishes
I had just pulled into the parking lot of where I worked and was walking towards the building. It was like 3 in the afternoon, broad daylight. All of a sudden, I heard an ambulance’s siren start sounding. Naturally, I looked down the road to try and see the ambulance.
I see it approaching and decided to watch it for a bit. It was quickly getting closer, and it was about to pass right by me. However, there was a large SUV waiting to turn out of the parking lot and onto the road, blocking a few meters of the road from my view.
The ambulance passed behind the SUV, probably about 50 feet away from me at most, and I vividly remember the siren becoming completely silent in that instant. The ambulance had vanished entirely as it passed behind that SUV. I just remember being so confused.
The road did not have many cars on it at the time, and it was broad daylight. I did a triple-take and made sure that I didn’t just miss it. I had a clear view of the road going both directions, and there was no more ambulance to be seen. No more siren either.
I walked up and down the road, trying to find it for a solid minute. But nope, it was gone. I was well rested, not on drugs, and I didn’t have a history of hallucinations. It seems dismissible, but I was completely aware of what happened, and I can’t explain it to this day.
23. A lucky coin appears
Me and a bunch of friends were standing in a circle in our school’s hallway, when suddenly we heard something fall. We all simultaneously looked at the floor, and there was a small, silver, foreign coin (Swiss I think) just laying there. I picked it up and asked if any of them had dropped it, and they all denied.
I looked around and there was nowhere it could’ve come from, and the hallway was empty, so there was no-one who could’ve thrown it. Later we joked, that someone in Switzerland probably dropped it, and is now frantically looking for it. I don’t remember what happened to that coin.
24. Saved from a deadly drop
I should have fallen into the River Thames once. Me and some friends from uni were exploring London and taking pictures beside the Thames when I decide posing next to the wall is a weak photo, so decide to climb up for better photo opportunities. As I hoisted myself up I must have used far too much power…
and knew fully I was about to go straight over and into the river, which was like a 20ft drop. I managed to get one foot onto the wall and felt something completely stop my momentum. almost felt like divine intervention in a way. I stood up straight, alive and still on dry land.
25. Disappearing wrench
I was working on my motorcycle in a dirt lot… I had brought a wrench set with me and I was using one of them to take off a bolt when I put it down on the ground to finish unscrewing the bolt with my hand. Two minutes later I went to pick it back up and it was gone.
I ran all around this dirt lot looking for it to no avail, luckily I had a spare in the car. Fixed the bike and drove back to my apartment to shower as I was filthy. I walked in my room and sitting on my desk was the wrench. I was dumbfounded. Why would I even put it on my desk?
26. Angelic pet
My family had a rescue cat, Milly, when I was a teenager… One day I was watching her play, and she came to sit on the arm of the bench next to me and sun herself for a while. It started to go dark, so I called Milly to follow me inside, and as she stood up I saw this little metal thing that she had been sat on.
I had a closer look, and it was a little silver angel charm. I thought it should belong to her as she had found it, so fastened it to her collar. That angel was with her on her collar until she passed last year. A while after she passed, my Mum wanted to adopt another cat and was going through the old RSPCA files from her previous rescues, when she came across Milly’s file.
It had all her details, markings, DOB, health conditions, and her previous name on the top of the page, ‘Angel’. The reason it’s so weird is that the angel charm that Milly had seemingly fabricated out of nowhere when I had found it. It didn’t belong to me or anyone we knew, and was found, under Milly, in our securely enclosed back garden.
27. Vivid dream
Every couple Sundays I go to my Uncles house with my mom and have coffee with him and my aunt. A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I appeared outside his house, in his driveway. I let myself in the house and sat down in his chair in the living room. It was so vivid.
He walked into the living room and was surprised to see me. He asked if it was really me there? I told him yep! Just stopping by to hang out. I then complimented him on his new television and the new desk top on which he set it up. That’s when I woke up. I told my mom about this, and she was shocked. She asked how I knew he had a new tv and new desk? She hadn’t told me a thing about it.
That Sunday I went over his house, and sure as s*** the new set up in his living room was the same down to every last detail. His greeting to me was “I knew you’d be coming today.” But he had no idea about my dream.
28. The wrong face
Let me lay it out for you. The TV is at the foot of our bed. To the right of the TV is a wooden wardrobe. And beside that, is our laundry basket, a tall one with a lift lid. We were watching TV in bed when out of the corner of my eye, I see the lid of the laundry basket lift up and…something…peeked up, looked at me, then slid back down into the basket.
I legitimately thought I was seeing things and tried to convince myself it was my imagination. I almost HAD myself convinced until my partner turned around to me and asked me, in a very low voice- “I saw it too.” We were scared absolutely s***less and we refused to go near the basket. The next morning we checked it. There was nothing there.
29. Lost number
After my little brother was murdered the next morning I was talking with a friend and he mentioned this other dude I went to high school with younger brother had died in a car accident a couple weeks before. Later that day I pull out a slip of paper with this other dudes number and name on it from my pants.
I vaguely remember running into him a year or so before this at a club where he gave me his number. I swear I had worn and washed these jeans at least a dozen times since I had run into this dude. I still makes no sense how that paper was there and I only found it then. I call the dude and we talked a bunch it really help me deal with the situation.
30. Wasp attack
I was once chilling at my ex’s house in his room, sitting on my phone while he was napping on his stomach with his face in his pillow, he jumped up suddenly yelling ahh! He said in his dream a wasp was trying to sting him. Sounded like a really horrible dream.
A couple hours later, I picked up the pillows straightening the bed and there was a dead wasp under the one he was using and it looked like it had been there awhile because it was part disintegrated. Very weird. But I didn’t exactly feel sorry for the wasp.
31. Vanishing jewelry
I have a necklace that [vanishes]. I found it when I was around 4 years old in my grandparent’s enclosed gazebo. I was outside with my grandpa and asked him if I could keep it. I’m nearing 30 now, and I still have that necklace. I’ve lost it countless times only to find it in the most obvious places such as on top of my dresser or in the middle of the floor after not having seen it for months.
I once even found it lying on my welcome mat in front of my front door as I was coming home from work. My grandpa died when I was 5 years old, and even though I have a hard time believing in the afterlife, I can’t help but feel like my grandpa is saying hello when I find it.
32. Deja vu
I was walking my dog and I was almost to the driveway when I looked down for some reason and I looked back up and I ended up being back at the road about 6 blocks away from where I thought I was. I was so confused but my dog looked completely fine. FYI – I don’t drink or do drugs, I’m still pretty young.
33. Hungry bear
My sister pretended to feed my [teddy] bear when we were kids. I saw the beans on the spoon. She put it to his mouth and scooped, showed me the spoon and the beans were gone. No beans on his lip. Nothing… like he actually ate it. She never told me how she did it and she doesn’t remember doing it now.
34. Impossible postcode
When I was living with my parents, my dad was cleaning out one of his drawers and found a piece of paper with a postcode for a nearby city on. When he showed me, I immediately recognized it as my own handwriting except I have no memory of ever writing out this postcode, so I punched the postcode into maps to find it is a random street I have never visited before and I have no reason to visit it.
35. Lost in time
Around 12 years old I was watching megas xlr, or something that was on at the time. Sitting there I noticed that the sun just turned off. Like completely. I was real confused, opened the blinds and it was dark. Show was still at the same spot, but the clock on the cable box said it was 5 hours later…
My best guess for what happened was that I passed out without realizing it, like those nights where you lay in bed and blink and suddenly its morning. So I’m guessing I fell asleep sitting up, for exactly enough time to have cartoon network play a rerun of the show get to the exact spot I fell asleep at.
36. No evidence
I am 100% sure I vividly remember a dog that apparently doesn’t exist. When I was 16 we lived on the other side of the province and my uncle had this little Jack Russell named Crue. Crue went missing for several months and then turned up at a humane society over an hour away and we were all shocked this little dog has made it so far.
Anyway that was almost 20 years ago and the other day I was talking to my parents and was like you know “whenever I hear about Jack Russells I think about Crue and that stunt he pulled” and they had no idea what I was talking about. I nearly fell out of my chair.
Insisted my uncle had never had such a dog, I must have dreamed it, etc. Honestly anyone else who would have remembered this dog has been dead for a long time and I don’t even have any pictures of my uncle. I have absolutely no way to prove this dog existed but I’m sure that he did.
37. Morbid dreams
When I was a kid I had a dream. A bunch of us kids were playing hide and seek near my house out in the snow. I started digging into the snow to hide and came across a dead girl. The very next day, I was walking home from school and pretty much in the exact same area I dug in my dream, I saw the girl.
Same hair, same face, same jacket. I was across the street but I kept staring at her while walking, she eventually noticed and I ran off. Never saw her again. Was the weirdest thing ever. Then again, at the end of the day, I’m just thankful she was alive and well!
38. Classroom premonition
when I was in high school I had a dream I was in all white class room (totally white, like the ones you would see in a dream), and a girl was sitting in the chair on my side. During the dream, I knew it was a dream because that girl was a senior; we didn’t have common classes.
About six years later, I was at a master class, the sun was shining bright outside, the classroom was very illuminated, and I see this girl on my side. We are doing masters together… and having a class, in all white f***ing classroom. Of course I remembered the dream at that very moment.
39. Strange impulse
My friend Sarah was in a nightclub, drunk off her face, when she got an overwhelming urge to tell a total stranger that her leg hurts (edit: it didn’t). All a bit strange, she ignores it but it doesn’t stop so she walks up to this guy and says, ‘I know this is crazy but I’ve got a huge urge to tell you my leg hurts. I know that’s crazy, again! Sorry!’
But he bursts into tears. Turns out his dad had just died and they made a pact before that if there was an afterlife he would get a message to him saying a totally random phrase, so there could be no mistakes, which they decided was ‘I’ve hurt my leg.’
40. Traces of the past
3 years ago my childhood dog died very suddenly and unexpectedly. She was sick for a few days, but turned it around and got better before dying very quickly and painfully, in my dads arms. One night I had a dream about her. I dreamt I was in this empty space and Charli came running up to me, whimpering excitedly.
She was licking my face and generally just freaking out and I was sobbing. I knew she was dead and I knew she was visiting me in my dream. I was very aware of it all. I kept hugging her and crying and apologizing and she just kept licking my face and being affectionate.
I woke up with tears streaming down my face and sat up in bed. I could still smell her distinctive smell and on my sleeve I pulled off one of her hairs. She had never been to my apartment and I hadn’t seen her recently. It wasn’t a cat hair either as Charli was a collie mix and their fur pattern is very distinctive.
41. Phantom doctor
My mom had an experience like this after giving birth to my middle brother. She had lost a lot of blood and had to have emergency surgery after the C-section. She said an attractive male doctor walked into the room and reassured her that everything was going to be ok and that her baby was fine.
She said his presence was so reassuring and made her feel so calm. Afterwards, she wanted to find this doctor to thank him, but according to the hospital, no such doctor was on staff. We still don’t know who she thought she was talking to – if the person ever existed.
42. The wrong face
I was about 12 years old, and woke up in the middle of the night needing to take a leak. I walked across the hall to the little bathroom, hit the lights, and was about to reach for the toilet when I glanced up and saw a face in the mirror. It was not my face. It was as if someone was on the other side, standing to the right, with their face right next to the glass, staring at me…
I screamed, and ran out of there to find my Dad. Of course, my dad investigated, then calmed me down, or tried to… Fast forward to my 30s. I’d forgotten all about the event. One night while visiting, my dad quietly brings it up. “Remember that one time you saw a face in the mirror…”. It suddenly came back to me in a rush of memory, sending a chill down my spine. “Yea, I remember”
“Well…” he said, “I sometimes think about that night.” He looked down at the floor, with a serious expression. “I saw it too.” He went on to describe exactly what I’d seen. We have no idea what that was. Apparently when he investigated, he saw it and had a freak out of his own.
43. Stabbed stove
So one day when they were around 16 years old, my mother and aunt were alone in the house for a couple of hours while their mother was out working. I don’t remember exactly which one of them noticed this but one of them walked into the kitchen and was shocked to find that the stove had somehow been ripped open all the way into the oven.
My mother described it as is someone had stabbed the top of the oven, slashed it, and then pulled that slash open with their hands. Both of them saw it and when I asked my aunt about this story she gave me the same description. Seems like an impossible coincidence.
Also, this was definitely not a visual hallucination because they swear they reached with their hand from inside the oven to the top through the hole… When my grandmother got home they naturally went to show her the slash, only to find it was completely gone. The stove was completely normal and there was no sign of a hole ever being there.
44. Phase-shifting sibling
Ok my sister and I were playing the age old game of “Get the f*** out of my room.” If you’ve never played it before, all you do is try to get the intruder out. I managed to get her outside the door, but she always trying to push it open while I was attempting to close it.
Suddenly, I slam it shut, meaning I won. I turn around and there is my very confused sister wondering how she ended up back in my room. In her confusion, I managed to get her back out. So what’s important is that I won the game, and we don’t have to think about anything else.
45. Mysterious words
My dad’s story. So we spent a lot of time growing up by a local creek fishing in my family. My brother and dad were all alone in a meadow around the end of summer and my brother looks at him and says “Do you remember when I was big and you were little?” Keep in my mind my brother doesn’t talk much at all and he would be about 4.
My dad was obviously creeped out but was like “what buddy?” And my brother said “when I was big and you were little!” And wouldn’t elaborate further. My brother has no clue what he was talking about but apparently we all had a moment like that. All alone with our parents asking if they remember when we were big and they were little.
46. Psychic pooch
When I was 14 (1995) during the eerie calm before a summer lightning storm, my dog Daisy, (Chow Lab Mix) started barking at the corner of the basement. There was nothing to bark at. Just stone fireplace and a tile floor. Suddenly a lamp set above the fireplace had the lightbulb explode and a painting hung next to it shattering as it flew off the wall at an almost 90 degree trajectory, landing ten feet from the wall.
My brother and I have theorized for years what it was. Our best guess is that lightning hit the chimney and that’s what did the damage. We’ve never been able to figure out how our dog knew it was about to happen. Somehow the animals are always the first to know…
47. Self-made bed
I once went to sleep in a unmade bed (cause I’m lazy and was too tired to make it lol.) I was laying under the covers and I woke up laying facedown sideways on top of a completely made bed. Maybe someone managed to move me off the bed, make it, and put me back on? I must have been sleeping really deeply…
48. Dream revision
When I was in high school, I remember reading a question on a test, thinking to myself, “Why do I already know the exact numeric answer?! I’m not even done reading it!” Thinking on it for a brief moment, I realized I had literally dreamt this exact question word for word the night before. Only time it’s ever happened to me, but to my grave I will swear that it did. Got it right, btw!
49. Bizarre birds
I was about 16 when this happened in Chicago. My friend was driving and we were in the alley heading to her garage. Two small ostriches darted in front of the car. We freaked out and chased them, but ultimately lost them when they ran into a yard. We even got out to look for them.
When we told her parents, they accused us of being high (we weren’t) and they still give us s*** about it to this day. Honestly, after going over it in my head a bunch, I don’t even know what we actually saw. The closest animal would be deer, but you’d think we could tell the difference.
50. Doppelgangers
My Dad and I went out for some milk and other essential items. As we returned to our subdivision, we passed a kid who looked to be about my age with a similar build and a seemingly identical jacket (I didn’t see his face) walking a dog that looked oddly similar to mine. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
About an hour later, I decided to take the dog for a walk. As we approached the street corner from earlier, a truck that looked just like my Dad’s drove by, driven by my Dad with someone in the passenger seat (Again, I didn’t get a good look at the kid’s face). I then noticed that the license plate was identical.
When I got home, the truck was in the exact same spot as when I left (I know because it started raining just after I left, and it was completely dry under the truck. I had an umbrella). Dad also confirmed that he hadn’t gone anywhere, and so did my Step-Mom.
51. One day more
When I was younger, I went to bed on a Wednesday. I woke up Thursday and went to school. I went through the usual boring stuff, had lunch, finished school and went home, had dinner and then went to bed. As far as I could tell, it was a perfectly normal day.
I woke up the next day and went to school, and was thoroughly surprised to find that it was Thursday. It messed with my head for a long time. I must have dreamed up a whole day. However, that begs the question of why it was to real. My dreams are hardly ever boring and never quite realistic, so why this one?
52. Classic glitch
Me and my friend saw a black cat with a white mark on his head cross our paths and walk one way. A few seconds later, its near identical brother or sister with almost the same markings came from the same place and sauntered off in the same direction as its twin.
Definitely told my friend we just experienced a glitch in the matrix. Nothing crazy, just a basic standard run of the mill glitch. What makes it weirder is that we never saw either of those cats again, even though we lived in that neighborhood for another ten years or so.
53. Time warp
One day I got out of school and got in my car. It was something like 16:07. I had about 15 minutes to drive to get home. I start driving, blink, and I am in my room. I check the time, 16:10. I still don’t know what happened during those 3 minutes. Always drive while rested!
54. Wrong floor
I was returning home to my apartment and took the elevator up to my floor. Turned toward my door but noticed the door mat was gone. I thought for a second maybe my roommate took it up to clean it. Then I realize I’m on the wrong floor while looking at the door number. One floor higher than me.
So I turn down the stairs and head a flight down. And now I’m on the ground floor by the lobby. My floor disappeared. I have never been so confused in my life. I step into the lobby and I’m just shook for a moment then head back up the stairs paying insanely close attention to every floor’s door and finally find my floor.
55. The delivery guy
I was putting beers into the well at the bar I work at during the daytime when we get deliveries. As I was working, in my peripheral vision, I saw a delivery guy, black, grey shorts, grey shirt, red dolly, three boxes, coming in through the double doors next to the dance floor. As soon as I looked at him, he was gone.
Before I had a chance to finish saying “what the f***” in my head, in he comes again through the double doors, same exact description and way. I stopped him and asked him if he came in, left, and then came in again. He said no. Then I told him what I saw and he just nodded and stopped talking to me. I have not had an episode like that ever before, and not since.
56. Amnesia
Not my story but something my grandma told me. She said that she had went to get groceries like she always did every Wednesday. She said she did her thing and when she went to pay, she had a pleasant conversation with a nice young lady. She had left like usual, nothing weird yet.
Then the next week she saw the same lady, had a chat, left. Repeat for a few months. One week she didn’t see her, didn’t think much of it because maybe she was sick or something, no biggy. But then the next week she saw the lady, she went to say hi and the lady didn’t recognise her. My grandma had tried to help her remember but she couldn’t. That was the last time my grandma ever saw that lady.
57. Dream vacation
Once I had a very clear and vivid dream of visiting some place on vacation. Pretty normal until years later I take a normal vacation and the place I go is exactly the same as the place in my dreams so many years ago. Even my actions were the exact same as many years ago dream me.
It took me a long time to figure out why the place was so familiar. And now, I’ve lost all memory of that place. I don’t remember the name, what I did, or even when this happened. But at the time it was all too real. Any ideas what happened to me? It wasn’t just deja-vu…
58. Glassy-eyed
You know the dolls with eyes that closes when you lay them down? I saw one laying down and its eyes suddenly opened while it’s still laying down. It scared the s*** out of me when I was a kid. Proper horror movie stuff. I still don’t let me kids have any toys like that in case they’re coming to get me.
59. Radio head
Sometimes I’ll have a song stuck in my head as I’ve gone to the car to go somewhere. I’ll turn on the radio and the song will be playing at the exact same spot it was in my mind. Once was weird but this has happened more than a dozen times. Not sure what to do with this super power.
60. Sub-conscious snacking
I had this thing happen to me when I was maybe like 3, I can’t remember it that well because I’m 17, was quite a long time ago, but I remember the confusion that I felt on that day. I got sat in my mum’s car, in my car seat (which has openable and retractable cup holders, I assume for a sippy cup or some s***)…
…but I bought snacks into the car one day and my young mind was like “I’m going to put these snacks in the cup holders and push them back in so I can have them later. So I did so. When you’re a kid, delayed gratification just feels like magic, and I was just learning that.
I open it up like a few minutes later and the snacks are gone. I don’t remember if I sub-consciously ate them or what, but my little head was so f***ing confused, because I was saving it. I though my car seat had ate the snacks. That’s possibly the most confused I’ve felt ever.
61. Still bothers me
Once I slept with my window open. In the morning I stood up and closed it and just got back to bed and slept on. Maybe an hour later I woke up again and my window was still open. I lived alone at that time and nobody owned a second key or anything like that.
I’m also sure I really closed it and it was no dream. But on the other side, if it was a dream, it was waaay too realistic. I just can’t explain it until today. And it still bothers me. Did something try to rob me? Was I actually robbed? I’m not sure which is more disturbing…
62. Duplicates
Once I was making myself a cup of tea and I had a teaspoon in my mug, as I was turning I kind of hit it/pushed it out of my mug and it fell to the floor. I picked it up and saw that the teaspoon was still in my mug. Now I had two. Tried to repeat it and get another spoon, but it didn’t work. No more spoons for me.
63. Slamming doors
So I was 6 years old and we had this heavy ass sliding wood panel door that must have weighed at least 50 pounds and led from the kitchen to the dining room. No one. Not my dad or mom could open it without straining and using both hands. One night long after my dad and mom divorced, I started having insomnia and went to get something to drink and when I started pouring my drink.
The f***ing door started opening and slamming repeatedly. I was wide awake no hallucinating, because my mom woke up and I ran scared and she saw it too. It freaked us out. Well it did another five times until we finally moved out. The new owners never had that happen. What was it? Why did it happen? Your guess is as good as mine. Hated that house.
64. Strange visitors
I was living in a share house a few years ago and there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there’s two people there, a guy and a girl probably mid 20s. They ask “does thebrownishbomber live here?” Except using my real first name obviously. I say “yeah that’s me” and they just go “oh ok” and leave. I was and am so confused about this incident because I have no idea who they were or what they wanted.
65. Seaside discovery
My daughter was at the beach and lost her pinky ring in the sand somewhere. She was bummed. Two years later she’s on the same beach in another spot chatting with her friends. She’s letting the sand run between her fingers, and what’s left is the ring she lost!
66. Creepy autocomplete
One time after work I was about to drive home. It was a super exhausting day, having worked 14 hours. My feet f***ing hurt, as my job required me to be on my feet the whole time. I decided my work shoes needed to come off. So I’m sitting in the parking lot in the driver’s seat, haven’t said a single word, when I recall a memory when my sister told me that it’s against the law to drive barefoot.
I decided to Google it, and it’s important that I haven’t said anything at all. I begin typing, “Is-” when the auto complete filled in the rest of the sentence. “Is it illegal to drive barefoot in the state of Texas?” I hadn’t talked about it in years, didn’t say anything out loud, so it couldn’t have been listening (which of course it does).
67. Cinematic vision
A new movie preview popped up on the tv. It looked familiar so I thought it may be a sequel. When I said to my sister that I swear I have already seen it a few years prior and described it in detail. She assured me it was new, not released yet.. I knew the cast members and the whole plot to the tiniest detail.
I went online and searched for movies like it in case I was just mistaken. Nothing. I told her about lines in it that were not in any previews. When it came out, she was finally shocked. Maybe I had some kind of telepathic link to the mind of one of the movie’s producers. Wasn’t a great movie though.
68. Invisible door
I was in a shop with my friends, when we all bought what we wanted my friends walked out the door. I was the last to walk out and I walked into the door… but the door was open. There was nothing in front of me that I could have walked into but I felt that I had walked into something, my friends saw me do it and was just as confused as I was.
Still confuses me to this day because I absolutely did walk into something like an invisible wall. And, no, it wasn’t one of those pranks where you put clingfilm in a doorway and someone walks into it and gets confused – my friends walked out right before I did. No clingfilm time.
69. Chilling text
My wife had just gone out for a few drinks with friends on New Years Eve, and she had left her phone at the house. Not something she would normally do, but it wasn’t a major problem. About 30 minutes after she had left, I heard her phone vibrate from the kitchen, so I went to go check it.
It read: ‘You have ten seconds to live.’ This freaked me out, but I just assumed it was some sort of prank. It vibrated again. ‘Just kidding, Jess, I got a new phone number, lol. It’s me, Lynn.’ I laughed to myself before putting the phone back on the counter. At around 11:15, two hours later, I get a text from my wife’s friend, saying she had been hit by a car and was in hospital now.
I went to go see her and she was dazed, but okay overall, a few fractures but nothing life threatening. Here comes the weird part. The person that had hit her was Lynn. It really freaks me out. Why did two parts of my life suddenly collide – literally – on that night in that way?
70. Sudden calm
I was in class and for 5 seconds it went from craziness to calm. Like people teleported to their desks and were taking notes. Then after like 5 seconds, they were teleported back to craziness. Me and like 1 other person noticed it, and we’re friends. Gotta stick together.
71. UFOs
About 25 years ago I was sitting on my deck at night having a beer. At that house there were a ton of trees that were very tall so if you looked straight up there was only a small area of sky that you could see from the deck. It’s really cool and peaceful.
I did happen to look straight up and I saw egg-shaped glowing somethings in a V pattern like birds fly. If I had to guess I would say that they were about 2000 feet in the air? Didn’t see it for very long because of all the trees and I just sat there and went huh. I wasn’t afraid for some reason, but wtf was that?
72. Under the bed
When I was five or six me and my sister were roughhousing on my bed. We were wrestling essentially and also sort of pillow fighting. Anyways, at some point she manages to pin me down in the corner of my bed that happens to also be the corner of the room. She’s sitting on my chest just laughing and I’m laughing and I slip my arm through the crack between the bed and the wall and I froze.
I had been grabbed from underneath my bed by (at least what felt like) a hand. I can still vividly remember feeling individual fingers and like the hand was trying to pull me under the bed with it. Naturally I’m freaking out screaming and crying, my dad had to calm me down. Of course there was nothing under the bed, I even made my dad flip the mattress.
73. Not a scratch
In June of 2017, two minutes after I leased my Nissan Leaf and drove it off the lot, I was rear-ended HARD in San Francisco. My head hit the headrest hard enough to hurt and the car surged forward from the impact. I was so mad! I had just drove it off the lot, and the insurance papers hadn’t even been processed, and now the car was probably totalled.
I got out of my car to inspect the damage, and there was zero damage to my car, not even a scratch. The car behind me was rear-ended by the car behind him, and that drove him forward into the back of my car. Both cars behind me suffered extensive damage, but the paint on my car wasn’t even scuffed.
74. Random pairing
Playing age of mythology online (2004ish) and got hooked into a random match. Basically random match selects a person who is also in queue in my connection range and pairs us up to fight. When the match started he typed in chat “hey crazewire (my epic username) I had a dream I played you, your name is my first and last name” and then he disconnected. I was shook as hell.
75. Tiny tornado
I was playing tennis at my high school on a weekend in the summer. It wasn’t an exceptionally windy day and it wasn’t storming or anything. I heard a windy noise coming from the football field which was next to the courts. I look over and see a tiny “tornado” (the funnel shape I could make out from the swirling dust and leaves) hitting one of the light poles.
The pole is swaying like crazy and almost looked like it was going to fall over. The tornado thing is coming toward us and hits the windbreaker on the tennis court and makes a really loud noise as it whips through our court and knocks us off of our feet as it passes through. It was only a couple seconds but it was pretty wild. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
