A now-deceased coworker of mine had a medical condition that made him unable to walk without pain. One night in his late 20s he had a uniquely vivid dream that he was jogging down a residential street, before turning and entering into a beautiful house.
A treatment for his condition was found at some point, and he regained an ability to not only walk normally, but also run. He took up jogging because it was enjoyable to finally be able to move freely and quickly.
He married a wonderful woman, and moved to a new city with her. They were riding down the street with the realtor when he realized he recognized it: it was the street from his jogging dream. The house they drove to look at? It was the exact house from his dream. He put in an offer, knowing he'd get it.
A month or so later, he was jogging down that street, and turned and walked into that beautiful house.
I had a dream of a house 🏡 on a very large lot (5 acres). The type of area I had never seen before.
There was an unusual crooked fence on on of the neighbors property.
15 years later, I was driven to a house in an other state to buy. I decided to get it. The next time I drove to see the house I took a different route. There was the crooked fence I had seen.
This goes straight to saves because I need more time to get through all of it, but this is a brilliant and comprehensive piece of work.
I can see how it could be an academic paper or published someplace else (is it? Was it meant to be? I skimmed through the argument and read a few stories so far, I could've missed it).
I will eventually edit and post a piece I wrote for a literary nonfiction class at my university 5 years ago. I interviewed 3 people for it and connected them with a general thread about humanity's tendency to turn to the occult at times of uncertainty. I backed it up with academic research, too. I guess it makes the piece sound skeptical.
This is technically not incorrect, we indeed need a tarot spread when we're losing it rather than when all is clear and stable. But because my work was all anecdotal evidence, my goal wasn't to prove that these stories were real to my professor.
I guess I was a skeptic back then.
One of the stories was about a man who transferred all of his chronic headaches to a stone as a kid with the help of a mentor (they tried practicing with a plant first, and it dried up quite fast). The second story was more ridiculous, about a woman who was brought to the residence of a local cult, saw some shitshow, and got out fast. The third one is about my close relative who claims he was under a heavy love spell for 20 years, but no other family member corroborated that story.
Two years after I submitted that assignment, I met my magick mentor and proceeded to study a specific type of traditional Greek & Egyptian magick, but we ended up parting ways before I did any rituals, and I chose against continuing.
I then switched to softer, more organic, less forceful new-age stuff that's mostly meant to fix one's attunement with the world, themselves, and their higher self. It's closer to shamanism than to traditional church-related witchcraft. We dabble in clairvoyance there too, it's much more common than people think.
This type of practice did wonders for the quality of my life, especially when paired with therapy. My current teacher actually encourages everyone to only ever practice when they're mentally stable and/or in therapy, it can be dangerous otherwise.
I also have close friendships with witches, shamans, family constellation practitioners, occasional tarot readers, etc. I participated in many rituals they did throughout the years. Needless to say, I have good materialist friends as well :)
2) I was working on an organic farm in Brazil. The first night I was there I met N who was like no one I had ever met (British, black, 7ft tall, so fucking smart) and felt like I knew him before and basically fell in love with him right away.
He was seeing someone else and I was not really in a sexually magnetic state, let’s just say.
One night I had a dream that felt like I was visiting a long lost memory. It was the two of us, but in different forms, like we were ancient gods. We met in a colosseum like structure under the moon light and kissed in a way that felt like an a contract being signed.
I woke up at around 2 am and left my room to walk up a near cobbled road and look at the stars. I sat on the road and then he appeared, also having been woken in the night, approached me without speaking and kissed me.
He was still with the other girl after that but there was something alive and unspoken between us. We never talk about that night and I never mentioned the dream. We haven’t spoken in years, though maybe I will message him about the dream now.
Beautiful. My own experience is that about three months before we found out my wife was pregnant, I had an incredibly vivid dream of myself lying on the couch with an infant on my chest, a dream I mostly forgot about after mentioning it to my wife. About a year later, in that same position, the dream came true. My son was the exact same size, felt the same way on my chest, and the light coming in from the windows was the same.
Being an embodied soul is Catholic doctrine, so no dispute there. That we are more than we superficially seem to be is so obviously true, based on everyone's personal lived experience, that people have to exert themselves to make themselves believe something else. That no one would be a materialist unless they were indoctrinated to think that way seems accurate.
In 2011, my family moved states to live with my grandmother in the wake of my grandfather's passing. His death had been a painful drawn out process for the family and for him too I assume, though I can only guess on the last part. During open heart surgery they'd unknowingly knicked an artery and left him to bleed into his chest cavity until he collapsed in the dining room of a Subway. He was pronounced brain dead, though he still seemed to respond to recordings of his grandchildren's voices, and was kept on life support for 6 months until the family finally decided to let him go. Today's actually the 14th anniversary of his death.
Anyways, the house we moved into was my mother's childhood home and up until the point she began staying there during his long dying, she never reported any paranormal goings-on. One day after returning from the hospital she heard children's laughter from the basement and went to turn the TV off, which it already was. I think this marked the start of our collective grief acting as a sort of gravity that kicked this all off.
I personally don't recall anything else like this happening until a couple years later, but all of a sudden it seemed like every one of us had stories of being touched in some way by a ghostly visitor. Several times, my father and I felt the mattress dip like someone had sat at the ends of our beds. My sister reported someone stroking her hair in the night. Again my mother went to turn off the TV, only this time she felt someone push her into the stand from behind. And of course, upon waking or turning, we saw no one there.
Despite this all going on in her house, we don't have any such accounts from my grandmother. She doesn't recall a single thing in the 4 years following his death. I think that might just be grief, if not heightened to the extreme.
After that, I have a couple experiences no one else in my family did. Once, around 2014, I opened a video game on my laptop, expecting the usual rain sounds of the loading screen and was instead met with a child's sobbing wail at full volume. This never happened before and, deeply unsettled, I set Cheerios and bubblegum around my room to ensure it never happened again. I decided to call whatever entity was present "Jeremy" and I assume it appreciated the gifts since it never bothered me again.
Then there's the matter of the sliding screen door (2018). Nearly every night around 2 AM for several months I heard what I thought was my sister opening the door off the kitchen and pacing the patio before returning inside. This made no sense though, as her own room was right next to the basement's backyard exit, which was a far stealthier means of meeting her then-secret wife than going up two flights of stairs, opening a loud sliding door, walking across a deck, and then descending through a rattling metal gate past the front door she'd have already passed. The footsteps I heard never made it that far and she openly admits to just leaving through the basement anyways. It could have been a home intruder scoping the place out, but nothing was ever stolen and that wouldn't explain why the footsteps always originated in the house. So this, as well as everything else, my family and I just blame on "the ghost children." We moved out of that house in 2019 and haven't experienced anything similar since.
However, here's a list of other stuff that's happened outside the house:
-My grandmother's friend died in high school. A white bunny sat at the edge of the funeral gathering for the entire duration before hopping away.
-My mother visited her father's grave a week or so after his passing. A stag with a mighty rack stood watching her from the far side of the cemetery until she left. It's worth noting that my grandfather was an avid outdoorsman.
-On days when my mother struggles with her father's death, she almost always encounters a beautifully plumed pheasant, either dashing across the road or serenely watching her pass by. Sometimes flying it keeps pace over her car as she drives through the country and she knows he's there to comfort her.
--When my aunt is struggling with his death, she is visited by a monarch butterfly. She reports the same feeling of comfort and relief.
--When my mother was struggling to give birth to one of us, she said the entire hospital room went silent and a deep, steadying man's voice emanated from the light above her. It told her she was going to be okay and a wave of total calm rolled over her, briefly causing the pain to recede in its entirety. To this day she maintains that this was God and I'm inclined to believe her.
--In the oil rigs of North Dakota, my father repeatedly felt a hand on his shoulder but would turn to find empty space. On the day it aggressively pulled him back about 3 feet and nearly put him on his ass, he returned ~wherever~ to find some industrial hose or something had turned on by itself when it shouldn't have been possible (I don't know anything about oil rigs and don't remember his exact wording. If this does seem possible, oops!) and flooded ~whatever~ area it was in. At the ensuing safety meeting, one of the new guys leaned in and whispered "this place is haunted as /shit/"
--My father once looked up from his work outside and watched a hazy black shadow of a man walk "clear as day" past the garage door.
--I am blessed with whatever it's called when you have spooky predictions. A little voice says "don't go driving tonight, you're gonna hit a deer." I go anyways and two run down the hill into the broad side of my van, nearly shoving me into an icy ditch. I pick up my new mug and get the feeling that this one won't last very long, but that's okay because I don't like it much anyways. The next day someone bumps into it, it shatters on the floor, and I don't really care. On this date 14 years ago I got the overwhelming feeling that it was the last chance to speak to my living grandfather and frantically composed an email telling him I loved him, how much he meant to me, my fondest memories of him. I later found out I happened to send it at the exact time of his death. It's not like he'd ever physically see it, being brain dead and all, but part of me thinks he still did somehow. The list goes on.
BUT. I believe I have written far more than enough now. In the words of Everyman, "I think I have a soul. In all humility, I think I have a soul."
It's always astonished me that materialism exerts such a strangulating grip over our sense of cosmology here in the West. As far back as early adolescence, the notion that we MUST assume the universe is just a bleak, lifeless void struck me as patently absurd. Moreover, that framework is utterly anti-logical. And the fact that that model is the default position of science reveals to us that science has been hijacked.
If you listen to high-profile "science" proponents like Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse-Tyson, and Richard Dawkins, they sound IDENTICAL to religious fundamentalists. Just like people who can't elevate their thinking above scriptural dogma, fundamentalist materialist zealots blindly chase their own tale within a closed-circuit scheme that blocks-out anything that doesn't fall within its arbitrary limitations.
This is a perversion of science. After all, if we haven't yet designed tools to even identify what makes tissue living in the first place, what empirical basis do we have for saying that nature itself isn't conscious or sentient? Why is Western culture so institutionally geared towards propagating this view, even as the U.S. military practices a completely divergent brand of science?
How many of us have had the routine experience of thinking about someone out of the blue, only to run into that person or receive a call from them moments later? How in the hell did we allow ourselves to be persuaded en masse that such cases don't count as "empirical" data or valid case studies? Who benefits from keeping the masses blindfolded from all the wondrous things that consciousness can do?
Tao, I'm glad you mentioned Rupert Sheldrake's animal telepathy studies. Let us never forget that Enlightenment-born "science" once assumed that animals don't feel pain, much less emotion or psychic awareness. Descartes dissected animals alive and even then concluded they didn't feel pain. Even though a child could tell you otherwise!
Materialism is the human ape's desire to feel dominion over nature. It's nihilism disguised as science. Its adherents gladly accept the despair and negativity that comes with the idea that we exist in an ocean of nothingness, so long as they can feel like they're nature's top dog. They're pathetic and woeful. And soon enough we'll look back on the period between The Enlightenment and now as its own Dark Age.
I'm convinced that "science" in its modern, debased form exists to sever the human being from our core awareness, so that we passively allow ourselves to be de-convinced of capabilities that would seem as natural as breathing, if only we listened to our instincts.
Great piece. I actually wrote something on this topic a year or two ago on my substack - of my wife's and my own experiences which mainly revolved around our animal family members. We currently live in a time of human spiritual drift. Science has been fashioned into a faith and that which cannot be easily measured is dismissed and ignored.
Wisdom is lacking. Especially at the top levels of our society where humans are understood as mere economic cogs in a machine. And so we see crises of faith and increasing authoritarian responses to the natural human resistance to this fashion and falsity.
I was 12 years old and had just got into bed. It wasn’t late and I wasn’t tired so I was just sitting up in bed letting my mind wander. After what felt like ten minutes, a transparent light blue-ish static-y figure came into my room. It was my best friend, wearing what looked like a regular outfit of hers and she was on rollerblades. She rollerbladed into my room (like she has always done) and just aimlessly stood in my room for a minute before disappearing. This was so strange to me because 1) it felt paranormal but my best friend is ALIVE and I would only expect to be visited by someone passed and 2) I didn’t feel fear at all. It felt warm and fun when she came in my room but I question why seeing that didn’t terrify me - I feel like someone like me would scream and jump at that.
I told her the next day that she rollerbladed into my room last night, didn’t seem important to her, don’t remember what she said.
Hi Tao, thank you for this piece. I don't know if this qualifies but it's my closest thing to a spooky brain scratcher (it's not scary). For 20 years or so whenever i check the time which is rare (i don't often wear a watch because of hair and let's just say not much going on as far as appointments, soccer practices) every 8 out of 10 times i look at a clock it's 7:47. Now, my mom always made a big deal out of the fact that i was born at 7:47 am, and that her own mother suggested that they name me Boeing. Well, it just happened again for the thousandth time. And I never think "I bet it's going to be 7:47 again" when I look. I forget all about and then am shocked or something each time, pardon the pun.
As for "paranormal" experiences, I haven't had much of anything like concrete encounters with what I'd call ghosts or spirits, but I experience the wonder of synchronicity on a routine basis -- so routine, in fact, that you couldn't convince me that nature itself isn't sentient.
As far as I'm concerned, you have to go through a kind of artificial mental gymnastics to convince yourself that synchronicity >isn't< real. When people say shit like "Oh, it's just a coincidence" and "The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine that convinces itself to see meaning where it might not exist"... statements like that are so unbelievably self-contorting of what we deeply instinctually KNOW about those experiences, which is: that we can interface and merge with the sentience of nature at the level of our own individual consciousness. You can empirically demonstrate this to yourself, too, in the way that your material circumstances can (and do) reflect your inner state.
I also VERY regularly experience pre-awareness of things, like running into certain people. And have what I would say are definite psychic connections with certain people. But I wouldn't call that stuff "paranormal" because, to me, mind-to-mind communication/ awareness/ synergy is so concretely obvious that I consider it as much a concrete aspect of nature as, like, gravity or something.
I did, however, have two experiences where I felt some VERY clearly defined sensations with objects. It was uncanny. And in one case, it was later revealed to me that there was something to those sensations. I was being warned. I had picked up on something threatening and felt it come through an object. If I ever have that experience again, I'll >know< it's something I need to listen to.
In the late summer of 2013, my mom and I were headed home from my grandparents’ house around 9pm on a Sunday. This was in a semi-rural area in south Texas, so there was not much traffic, especially on a Sunday night. We were the only ones on the road, and it was drizzling/misty, which I believe was a very important aspect. Despite this, the memory is still very vivid and clear in my mind. My mom was talking to me, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking forward in the drivers seat, and as we were approaching a red light at the intersection, at the corner of the street there suddenly appeared a light blue glowing figure of a man who was crossing the street. He seemed to be in his late 50s and had a haggardly look with dirty tattered clothing (a shirt and pants) like a farmer or an agricultural worker who had just finished working in the fields. He had a lanky build. He took about three or four steps forward from the corner of the intersection onto the crosswalk, swinging his arms, and then turned his head towards our direction as we were about 20 feet away from the lights. He looked us and smiled, squinting. I believe he might have been blinded by the head lights. Then in that second he disintegrated into the mist in an upward motion in the direction of the light wind. He was about more than halfway transparent, although still opaque enough to discern his appearance. His light blue glow could not have come from the reflection of the two or three dimly lit street lights, nor from the head lights of our car, which were yellow. I remember it took me a moment to process what I had just seen, and then had asked my mom, “did you see that?”. I had interrupted her, and she responded “see what?”. I told her that there was a blue glowing man was crossing the street and then disappeared. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had never been a spiritual or perceptive person. During this time in my life there was a lot of strife at home. I don’t believe I was meant to see this spirit. I think it just happened to be a rare moment in time that had all the right characteristics for a paranormal occurrence: night time, light rain/mist, rural area, no other humans around other than my mom and I.
I am only just discovering your work, so have read this collection about a year later than most other commenters but I wanted to leave a few of my experiences and also say that your work has helped me view them in a different and more cohesive way.
1. When I was very young, maybe 2 or 3, my parents were testing my knowledge while on a car ride. My father asked me what our phone number was and the first three numbers appeared in my head “212” as puppet-like Sesame Street numbers on a stage. I said them out loud and my parents were impressed thinking that I had heard my phone number said in the past and was recalling what I could remember but I knew that wasn’t true. I couldn’t explain what had happened.
2. When I was six I drew a picture of a jungle with helicopters and explosions causing my mother to wonder if I had been in combat during the Vietnam war.
3. When I was in 8th grade I was the only one awake in my house on a summer night. I had been up late on the family computer and walked into my room to get something, but stopped and paused having forgotten what I came in the room for. I felt a distinct pressure in the middle of my back like a hand gently pushing me into the middle of the room. I knew I should feel afraid but I didn’t. My mother has also felt and heard a presence in our house. Once it complimented the smells of her baking bread, and another time an item she had been missing for years appeared on the carpet in her bedroom. Our cats have also seen things and responded.
4. I sometimes have dreams where I am other people in other times. They are mundane and nothing specifically tells me that I am someone else, but I know who I am and I seem to just be experiencing a normal day in that life. In my most vivid one I was a young man in Ireland. I knew it was the 1980’s and that I had attraction to other men. Scenes in the dream include me looking at a picture in my home and standing in a field while the sun set. Nothing was there to tell me my age, my location, the time period, or my sexual preference I just knew somehow. The other dreams have been similar, but as different people in different times. Maybe 5 total dreams throughout my life.
4. My cousin passed away tragically in a car crash when he was 19, I was 21. It was devastating for our small close family. I began to have dreams where he would visit, maybe one or two per year. The dreams were always the same, we would be interacting normally as a family—maybe we would all be children again playing together or having dinner with the adults in the family as well. I would feel joy and contentment and an excitement that I couldn’t always place. But then a time would come in the dream where I would realize that this was an impossibility, as he was dead. I would become sad, almost desperate to keep the dream together but he and I both knew that it would soon be over. No one else in the dream would notice the shift in awareness. A change would come over him, he would become much more serene and seemingly wise and hug me and impart a message either verbally or non verbally. Always one of love. Once he told me to tell my grandmother that he was alright. Then he would hug me again and I would wake up feeling actual physical pain in my chest/stomach as if something had been torn from me. These dreams still come but much less frequently. He has been gone for almost 14 years. The dreams have the distinct quality that he is coming to give me a gift of his presence and my family’s renewed wholeness, if only for a short time.
This post and your work have helped me understand an aspect of his death differently. About a week before he died I felt the need to quit my job. I was still in school and working at a restaurant. I liked my job but I decided I wanted to quit. When my manager asked me why I said that something was wrong with my cousin and I needed to be with my family. I didn’t know why I had said that. For so long I had interpreted this as a lie I told and that my cousin died a week later as a punishment for that lie, or as an event that came about because I had put it into the universe and spoke it into existence. Now I wonder if it was a type of precognition.
I could tell a lot of stories about my mother, but here is a link to one I posted at my blog some years back. I would add a couple of things now. One is that my attention was caught by the name Ang Wupp because it reminded me of Angkor Wat, though I was reluctant to admit that to my parents because it seemed silly. The other is that my mother clearly had occult interests although she never discussed them openly. For example, when I was sick in bed she would bring out the Ouija board to entertain me. So in retrospect, it seems clear that she was trying to use me as a kind of psychic conduit — and scared herself when it worked.
Thank you for this post, btw. It was a delightful read -- except for the creepy-as-fuck story about sleep paralysis. I experienced sleep paralysis a bunch as a kid, and every now and again will start to feel it coming over me as an adult, though I always manage to slip out of its grip now. (A tip: wiggle the very tip of your finger or toe and eventually you'll re-gain motion over your limbs.)
The experience was much more intense as a kid, though. I'd wake up COMPLETELY paralyzed and yet fully conscious. Wow, that sucked! Back then, my mom told me that >she< experienced the same thing as a child herself, and that she thought it was an evil spirit holding her down. I myself have never had the sense that there was a malevolent entity trying to harm me, though, and I shudder to think that that's even possible. Yikes...
A now-deceased coworker of mine had a medical condition that made him unable to walk without pain. One night in his late 20s he had a uniquely vivid dream that he was jogging down a residential street, before turning and entering into a beautiful house.
A treatment for his condition was found at some point, and he regained an ability to not only walk normally, but also run. He took up jogging because it was enjoyable to finally be able to move freely and quickly.
He married a wonderful woman, and moved to a new city with her. They were riding down the street with the realtor when he realized he recognized it: it was the street from his jogging dream. The house they drove to look at? It was the exact house from his dream. He put in an offer, knowing he'd get it.
A month or so later, he was jogging down that street, and turned and walked into that beautiful house.
I had a dream of a house 🏡 on a very large lot (5 acres). The type of area I had never seen before.
There was an unusual crooked fence on on of the neighbors property.
15 years later, I was driven to a house in an other state to buy. I decided to get it. The next time I drove to see the house I took a different route. There was the crooked fence I had seen.
This goes straight to saves because I need more time to get through all of it, but this is a brilliant and comprehensive piece of work.
I can see how it could be an academic paper or published someplace else (is it? Was it meant to be? I skimmed through the argument and read a few stories so far, I could've missed it).
I will eventually edit and post a piece I wrote for a literary nonfiction class at my university 5 years ago. I interviewed 3 people for it and connected them with a general thread about humanity's tendency to turn to the occult at times of uncertainty. I backed it up with academic research, too. I guess it makes the piece sound skeptical.
This is technically not incorrect, we indeed need a tarot spread when we're losing it rather than when all is clear and stable. But because my work was all anecdotal evidence, my goal wasn't to prove that these stories were real to my professor.
I guess I was a skeptic back then.
One of the stories was about a man who transferred all of his chronic headaches to a stone as a kid with the help of a mentor (they tried practicing with a plant first, and it dried up quite fast). The second story was more ridiculous, about a woman who was brought to the residence of a local cult, saw some shitshow, and got out fast. The third one is about my close relative who claims he was under a heavy love spell for 20 years, but no other family member corroborated that story.
Two years after I submitted that assignment, I met my magick mentor and proceeded to study a specific type of traditional Greek & Egyptian magick, but we ended up parting ways before I did any rituals, and I chose against continuing.
I then switched to softer, more organic, less forceful new-age stuff that's mostly meant to fix one's attunement with the world, themselves, and their higher self. It's closer to shamanism than to traditional church-related witchcraft. We dabble in clairvoyance there too, it's much more common than people think.
This type of practice did wonders for the quality of my life, especially when paired with therapy. My current teacher actually encourages everyone to only ever practice when they're mentally stable and/or in therapy, it can be dangerous otherwise.
I also have close friendships with witches, shamans, family constellation practitioners, occasional tarot readers, etc. I participated in many rituals they did throughout the years. Needless to say, I have good materialist friends as well :)
Thank you. I’ll probably use what I write here in some form in a future book on spirituality. Thanks for sharing your stories.
2) I was working on an organic farm in Brazil. The first night I was there I met N who was like no one I had ever met (British, black, 7ft tall, so fucking smart) and felt like I knew him before and basically fell in love with him right away.
He was seeing someone else and I was not really in a sexually magnetic state, let’s just say.
One night I had a dream that felt like I was visiting a long lost memory. It was the two of us, but in different forms, like we were ancient gods. We met in a colosseum like structure under the moon light and kissed in a way that felt like an a contract being signed.
I woke up at around 2 am and left my room to walk up a near cobbled road and look at the stars. I sat on the road and then he appeared, also having been woken in the night, approached me without speaking and kissed me.
He was still with the other girl after that but there was something alive and unspoken between us. We never talk about that night and I never mentioned the dream. We haven’t spoken in years, though maybe I will message him about the dream now.
Beautiful. My own experience is that about three months before we found out my wife was pregnant, I had an incredibly vivid dream of myself lying on the couch with an infant on my chest, a dream I mostly forgot about after mentioning it to my wife. About a year later, in that same position, the dream came true. My son was the exact same size, felt the same way on my chest, and the light coming in from the windows was the same.
I agree, this is a brilliant and comprehensive piece of work, could be an academic paper.
Being an embodied soul is Catholic doctrine, so no dispute there. That we are more than we superficially seem to be is so obviously true, based on everyone's personal lived experience, that people have to exert themselves to make themselves believe something else. That no one would be a materialist unless they were indoctrinated to think that way seems accurate.
So this turned out to be a long one...
In 2011, my family moved states to live with my grandmother in the wake of my grandfather's passing. His death had been a painful drawn out process for the family and for him too I assume, though I can only guess on the last part. During open heart surgery they'd unknowingly knicked an artery and left him to bleed into his chest cavity until he collapsed in the dining room of a Subway. He was pronounced brain dead, though he still seemed to respond to recordings of his grandchildren's voices, and was kept on life support for 6 months until the family finally decided to let him go. Today's actually the 14th anniversary of his death.
Anyways, the house we moved into was my mother's childhood home and up until the point she began staying there during his long dying, she never reported any paranormal goings-on. One day after returning from the hospital she heard children's laughter from the basement and went to turn the TV off, which it already was. I think this marked the start of our collective grief acting as a sort of gravity that kicked this all off.
I personally don't recall anything else like this happening until a couple years later, but all of a sudden it seemed like every one of us had stories of being touched in some way by a ghostly visitor. Several times, my father and I felt the mattress dip like someone had sat at the ends of our beds. My sister reported someone stroking her hair in the night. Again my mother went to turn off the TV, only this time she felt someone push her into the stand from behind. And of course, upon waking or turning, we saw no one there.
Despite this all going on in her house, we don't have any such accounts from my grandmother. She doesn't recall a single thing in the 4 years following his death. I think that might just be grief, if not heightened to the extreme.
After that, I have a couple experiences no one else in my family did. Once, around 2014, I opened a video game on my laptop, expecting the usual rain sounds of the loading screen and was instead met with a child's sobbing wail at full volume. This never happened before and, deeply unsettled, I set Cheerios and bubblegum around my room to ensure it never happened again. I decided to call whatever entity was present "Jeremy" and I assume it appreciated the gifts since it never bothered me again.
Then there's the matter of the sliding screen door (2018). Nearly every night around 2 AM for several months I heard what I thought was my sister opening the door off the kitchen and pacing the patio before returning inside. This made no sense though, as her own room was right next to the basement's backyard exit, which was a far stealthier means of meeting her then-secret wife than going up two flights of stairs, opening a loud sliding door, walking across a deck, and then descending through a rattling metal gate past the front door she'd have already passed. The footsteps I heard never made it that far and she openly admits to just leaving through the basement anyways. It could have been a home intruder scoping the place out, but nothing was ever stolen and that wouldn't explain why the footsteps always originated in the house. So this, as well as everything else, my family and I just blame on "the ghost children." We moved out of that house in 2019 and haven't experienced anything similar since.
However, here's a list of other stuff that's happened outside the house:
-My grandmother's friend died in high school. A white bunny sat at the edge of the funeral gathering for the entire duration before hopping away.
-My mother visited her father's grave a week or so after his passing. A stag with a mighty rack stood watching her from the far side of the cemetery until she left. It's worth noting that my grandfather was an avid outdoorsman.
-On days when my mother struggles with her father's death, she almost always encounters a beautifully plumed pheasant, either dashing across the road or serenely watching her pass by. Sometimes flying it keeps pace over her car as she drives through the country and she knows he's there to comfort her.
--When my aunt is struggling with his death, she is visited by a monarch butterfly. She reports the same feeling of comfort and relief.
--When my mother was struggling to give birth to one of us, she said the entire hospital room went silent and a deep, steadying man's voice emanated from the light above her. It told her she was going to be okay and a wave of total calm rolled over her, briefly causing the pain to recede in its entirety. To this day she maintains that this was God and I'm inclined to believe her.
--In the oil rigs of North Dakota, my father repeatedly felt a hand on his shoulder but would turn to find empty space. On the day it aggressively pulled him back about 3 feet and nearly put him on his ass, he returned ~wherever~ to find some industrial hose or something had turned on by itself when it shouldn't have been possible (I don't know anything about oil rigs and don't remember his exact wording. If this does seem possible, oops!) and flooded ~whatever~ area it was in. At the ensuing safety meeting, one of the new guys leaned in and whispered "this place is haunted as /shit/"
--My father once looked up from his work outside and watched a hazy black shadow of a man walk "clear as day" past the garage door.
--I am blessed with whatever it's called when you have spooky predictions. A little voice says "don't go driving tonight, you're gonna hit a deer." I go anyways and two run down the hill into the broad side of my van, nearly shoving me into an icy ditch. I pick up my new mug and get the feeling that this one won't last very long, but that's okay because I don't like it much anyways. The next day someone bumps into it, it shatters on the floor, and I don't really care. On this date 14 years ago I got the overwhelming feeling that it was the last chance to speak to my living grandfather and frantically composed an email telling him I loved him, how much he meant to me, my fondest memories of him. I later found out I happened to send it at the exact time of his death. It's not like he'd ever physically see it, being brain dead and all, but part of me thinks he still did somehow. The list goes on.
BUT. I believe I have written far more than enough now. In the words of Everyman, "I think I have a soul. In all humility, I think I have a soul."
It's always astonished me that materialism exerts such a strangulating grip over our sense of cosmology here in the West. As far back as early adolescence, the notion that we MUST assume the universe is just a bleak, lifeless void struck me as patently absurd. Moreover, that framework is utterly anti-logical. And the fact that that model is the default position of science reveals to us that science has been hijacked.
If you listen to high-profile "science" proponents like Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse-Tyson, and Richard Dawkins, they sound IDENTICAL to religious fundamentalists. Just like people who can't elevate their thinking above scriptural dogma, fundamentalist materialist zealots blindly chase their own tale within a closed-circuit scheme that blocks-out anything that doesn't fall within its arbitrary limitations.
This is a perversion of science. After all, if we haven't yet designed tools to even identify what makes tissue living in the first place, what empirical basis do we have for saying that nature itself isn't conscious or sentient? Why is Western culture so institutionally geared towards propagating this view, even as the U.S. military practices a completely divergent brand of science?
How many of us have had the routine experience of thinking about someone out of the blue, only to run into that person or receive a call from them moments later? How in the hell did we allow ourselves to be persuaded en masse that such cases don't count as "empirical" data or valid case studies? Who benefits from keeping the masses blindfolded from all the wondrous things that consciousness can do?
Tao, I'm glad you mentioned Rupert Sheldrake's animal telepathy studies. Let us never forget that Enlightenment-born "science" once assumed that animals don't feel pain, much less emotion or psychic awareness. Descartes dissected animals alive and even then concluded they didn't feel pain. Even though a child could tell you otherwise!
Materialism is the human ape's desire to feel dominion over nature. It's nihilism disguised as science. Its adherents gladly accept the despair and negativity that comes with the idea that we exist in an ocean of nothingness, so long as they can feel like they're nature's top dog. They're pathetic and woeful. And soon enough we'll look back on the period between The Enlightenment and now as its own Dark Age.
I'm convinced that "science" in its modern, debased form exists to sever the human being from our core awareness, so that we passively allow ourselves to be de-convinced of capabilities that would seem as natural as breathing, if only we listened to our instincts.
“ I'm glad you mentioned Rupert Sheldrake's animal telepathy studies” ✨✨✨✨💖
Great piece. I actually wrote something on this topic a year or two ago on my substack - of my wife's and my own experiences which mainly revolved around our animal family members. We currently live in a time of human spiritual drift. Science has been fashioned into a faith and that which cannot be easily measured is dismissed and ignored.
Wisdom is lacking. Especially at the top levels of our society where humans are understood as mere economic cogs in a machine. And so we see crises of faith and increasing authoritarian responses to the natural human resistance to this fashion and falsity.
Thanks for writing this.
I was 12 years old and had just got into bed. It wasn’t late and I wasn’t tired so I was just sitting up in bed letting my mind wander. After what felt like ten minutes, a transparent light blue-ish static-y figure came into my room. It was my best friend, wearing what looked like a regular outfit of hers and she was on rollerblades. She rollerbladed into my room (like she has always done) and just aimlessly stood in my room for a minute before disappearing. This was so strange to me because 1) it felt paranormal but my best friend is ALIVE and I would only expect to be visited by someone passed and 2) I didn’t feel fear at all. It felt warm and fun when she came in my room but I question why seeing that didn’t terrify me - I feel like someone like me would scream and jump at that.
I told her the next day that she rollerbladed into my room last night, didn’t seem important to her, don’t remember what she said.
Hi Tao, thank you for this piece. I don't know if this qualifies but it's my closest thing to a spooky brain scratcher (it's not scary). For 20 years or so whenever i check the time which is rare (i don't often wear a watch because of hair and let's just say not much going on as far as appointments, soccer practices) every 8 out of 10 times i look at a clock it's 7:47. Now, my mom always made a big deal out of the fact that i was born at 7:47 am, and that her own mother suggested that they name me Boeing. Well, it just happened again for the thousandth time. And I never think "I bet it's going to be 7:47 again" when I look. I forget all about and then am shocked or something each time, pardon the pun.
As for "paranormal" experiences, I haven't had much of anything like concrete encounters with what I'd call ghosts or spirits, but I experience the wonder of synchronicity on a routine basis -- so routine, in fact, that you couldn't convince me that nature itself isn't sentient.
As far as I'm concerned, you have to go through a kind of artificial mental gymnastics to convince yourself that synchronicity >isn't< real. When people say shit like "Oh, it's just a coincidence" and "The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine that convinces itself to see meaning where it might not exist"... statements like that are so unbelievably self-contorting of what we deeply instinctually KNOW about those experiences, which is: that we can interface and merge with the sentience of nature at the level of our own individual consciousness. You can empirically demonstrate this to yourself, too, in the way that your material circumstances can (and do) reflect your inner state.
I also VERY regularly experience pre-awareness of things, like running into certain people. And have what I would say are definite psychic connections with certain people. But I wouldn't call that stuff "paranormal" because, to me, mind-to-mind communication/ awareness/ synergy is so concretely obvious that I consider it as much a concrete aspect of nature as, like, gravity or something.
I did, however, have two experiences where I felt some VERY clearly defined sensations with objects. It was uncanny. And in one case, it was later revealed to me that there was something to those sensations. I was being warned. I had picked up on something threatening and felt it come through an object. If I ever have that experience again, I'll >know< it's something I need to listen to.
I wrote about it in a Substack post of my own: https://feedbackdef.substack.com/p/the-monster-at-the-edge-of-the-music
In the late summer of 2013, my mom and I were headed home from my grandparents’ house around 9pm on a Sunday. This was in a semi-rural area in south Texas, so there was not much traffic, especially on a Sunday night. We were the only ones on the road, and it was drizzling/misty, which I believe was a very important aspect. Despite this, the memory is still very vivid and clear in my mind. My mom was talking to me, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking forward in the drivers seat, and as we were approaching a red light at the intersection, at the corner of the street there suddenly appeared a light blue glowing figure of a man who was crossing the street. He seemed to be in his late 50s and had a haggardly look with dirty tattered clothing (a shirt and pants) like a farmer or an agricultural worker who had just finished working in the fields. He had a lanky build. He took about three or four steps forward from the corner of the intersection onto the crosswalk, swinging his arms, and then turned his head towards our direction as we were about 20 feet away from the lights. He looked us and smiled, squinting. I believe he might have been blinded by the head lights. Then in that second he disintegrated into the mist in an upward motion in the direction of the light wind. He was about more than halfway transparent, although still opaque enough to discern his appearance. His light blue glow could not have come from the reflection of the two or three dimly lit street lights, nor from the head lights of our car, which were yellow. I remember it took me a moment to process what I had just seen, and then had asked my mom, “did you see that?”. I had interrupted her, and she responded “see what?”. I told her that there was a blue glowing man was crossing the street and then disappeared. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had never been a spiritual or perceptive person. During this time in my life there was a lot of strife at home. I don’t believe I was meant to see this spirit. I think it just happened to be a rare moment in time that had all the right characteristics for a paranormal occurrence: night time, light rain/mist, rural area, no other humans around other than my mom and I.
I am only just discovering your work, so have read this collection about a year later than most other commenters but I wanted to leave a few of my experiences and also say that your work has helped me view them in a different and more cohesive way.
1. When I was very young, maybe 2 or 3, my parents were testing my knowledge while on a car ride. My father asked me what our phone number was and the first three numbers appeared in my head “212” as puppet-like Sesame Street numbers on a stage. I said them out loud and my parents were impressed thinking that I had heard my phone number said in the past and was recalling what I could remember but I knew that wasn’t true. I couldn’t explain what had happened.
2. When I was six I drew a picture of a jungle with helicopters and explosions causing my mother to wonder if I had been in combat during the Vietnam war.
3. When I was in 8th grade I was the only one awake in my house on a summer night. I had been up late on the family computer and walked into my room to get something, but stopped and paused having forgotten what I came in the room for. I felt a distinct pressure in the middle of my back like a hand gently pushing me into the middle of the room. I knew I should feel afraid but I didn’t. My mother has also felt and heard a presence in our house. Once it complimented the smells of her baking bread, and another time an item she had been missing for years appeared on the carpet in her bedroom. Our cats have also seen things and responded.
4. I sometimes have dreams where I am other people in other times. They are mundane and nothing specifically tells me that I am someone else, but I know who I am and I seem to just be experiencing a normal day in that life. In my most vivid one I was a young man in Ireland. I knew it was the 1980’s and that I had attraction to other men. Scenes in the dream include me looking at a picture in my home and standing in a field while the sun set. Nothing was there to tell me my age, my location, the time period, or my sexual preference I just knew somehow. The other dreams have been similar, but as different people in different times. Maybe 5 total dreams throughout my life.
4. My cousin passed away tragically in a car crash when he was 19, I was 21. It was devastating for our small close family. I began to have dreams where he would visit, maybe one or two per year. The dreams were always the same, we would be interacting normally as a family—maybe we would all be children again playing together or having dinner with the adults in the family as well. I would feel joy and contentment and an excitement that I couldn’t always place. But then a time would come in the dream where I would realize that this was an impossibility, as he was dead. I would become sad, almost desperate to keep the dream together but he and I both knew that it would soon be over. No one else in the dream would notice the shift in awareness. A change would come over him, he would become much more serene and seemingly wise and hug me and impart a message either verbally or non verbally. Always one of love. Once he told me to tell my grandmother that he was alright. Then he would hug me again and I would wake up feeling actual physical pain in my chest/stomach as if something had been torn from me. These dreams still come but much less frequently. He has been gone for almost 14 years. The dreams have the distinct quality that he is coming to give me a gift of his presence and my family’s renewed wholeness, if only for a short time.
This post and your work have helped me understand an aspect of his death differently. About a week before he died I felt the need to quit my job. I was still in school and working at a restaurant. I liked my job but I decided I wanted to quit. When my manager asked me why I said that something was wrong with my cousin and I needed to be with my family. I didn’t know why I had said that. For so long I had interpreted this as a lie I told and that my cousin died a week later as a punishment for that lie, or as an event that came about because I had put it into the universe and spoke it into existence. Now I wonder if it was a type of precognition.
Thank you for your work 🤍
I could tell a lot of stories about my mother, but here is a link to one I posted at my blog some years back. I would add a couple of things now. One is that my attention was caught by the name Ang Wupp because it reminded me of Angkor Wat, though I was reluctant to admit that to my parents because it seemed silly. The other is that my mother clearly had occult interests although she never discussed them openly. For example, when I was sick in bed she would bring out the Ouija board to entertain me. So in retrospect, it seems clear that she was trying to use me as a kind of psychic conduit — and scared herself when it worked.
https://trogholm.panshin.net/?p=6102
Thank you for this post, btw. It was a delightful read -- except for the creepy-as-fuck story about sleep paralysis. I experienced sleep paralysis a bunch as a kid, and every now and again will start to feel it coming over me as an adult, though I always manage to slip out of its grip now. (A tip: wiggle the very tip of your finger or toe and eventually you'll re-gain motion over your limbs.)
The experience was much more intense as a kid, though. I'd wake up COMPLETELY paralyzed and yet fully conscious. Wow, that sucked! Back then, my mom told me that >she< experienced the same thing as a child herself, and that she thought it was an evil spirit holding her down. I myself have never had the sense that there was a malevolent entity trying to harm me, though, and I shudder to think that that's even possible. Yikes...