Paranormal experiences?

Oh sounds really scary. My grandfather used to tell a very scary story of him personally in a haunted place that he rented for few nights but was scared to sleep there more than one night. It's terrifying to look at it this way. Maybe this is why I prefer to ignore the memory of it. 

My sister had a similar experience to you.

They stayed in a French chateau.

Overnight, although in the middle of a heatwave, the room became stone cold.

My sister got out of bed and stood in the middle of the room and raised her arms high in the air.

I believe she did some other things but am now unable to check (both deceased).

My brother-in-law, who was a total sceptic about the supernatural, was very disturbed by this occurrence.

The room going cold happened to me too.

We stayed in a hotel that has a reputation for being haunted.

https://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/product/ettington-park-hotel-stratford-upon-avon

We had a great problem with making electrical items work but also there was an icy cold patch in the room that never heated up and bizarrely, it was next to a hot radiator.

I have been avoiding answering this. Well, I tend to lean towards logic. Whatever logic can't explain, I just ignore. So I kind of ignored an experience that I couldn't explain. Well, I was an adult. I was sleeping. I got out of my bed, eyes open, seeing my way but not in control. I never sleepwalked in my life before nor after. I went to my parents room and opened their door like a military scout breaking in. I had enormous amount of strength. Not afraid of anything, although I'm more of a bunny in real life when I'm awake. I stormed in their room in a way that made both of them jump out of bed terrified and that kind of brought me back into my body or woke me up. Maybe it's my one and only sleepwalking experience and maybe it's a paranormal experience.

Hi Hibernating. I'm not sure I'd want to call them paranormal experiences. I'd prefer to call them transcendent. For the most part, I've only heard accounts from people who have taken psychedelic substances and that claim they have been in contact with benevolent entities from another dimension, dimensions that co-exist, but which are only accessible by means of a change in consciousness.

Personally, I have smoked cannabis in the past, and when I was high, I did experience disturbances to my field of perception, such as interruptions to radio/television frequencies, and changing/evolving physical aspects of the room.

Now, it could be that I was just in as state of deep relaxation and had imagined it. I'll never know. But it felt real at the time, and it felt good. I think that is the ultimate measure. How does the experience make you feel? Does it feel good or bad. Does it put you at peace or does it disturb you?

'In 2013, neuropsychiatrist Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell worked with a nine-year-old autistic girl who was showing signs of telepathic abilities. And the test results were nothing short of amazing.

In tests, experts, who had no contact with the girl, showed her randomly generated numbers, false words, equations, and phrases. The girl was then asked to read the minds of the experts to see if she could see what they were seeing. Based on the study results, the girl was able to correctly decipher random numbers and meaningless words; in addition to the equations and phrases. In short, it included the ability to see what other people saw.'

Yeah me and my son have telepathic link always have since he was born I think as he has aspbergers and sometimes struggle to talk etc so I believe the link is there as we can't connect like most would in the ordinary way if you see what I mean. Had lots of poltergeist activity is usually around stressful times ..this your own stuff there is no ghost .be  carefull  dabbling in the occult even something as innocent as a pack of tarot cards can and does open gateways or "doors" ..the famous saying goes...Hamlet ...There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy ...plus I used to do Crystal ball reading back in the day and so I know what I'm on about. You should be looking into protecting yourself and your space with say meditation techniques etc if you are young etc..its only us oldies with years of experience don't get bothered .

Coincidentally, I just deleted my Twitter account because the short format felt like an amputation. Nice to be among fellow pontificators!

That's really cool! My grandfather saw ball lightning as a kid, and that was widely believed to be a myth until pretty recently. 

I wonder if it was some similar phenomenon.  Are you ever able to "see" an electrical charge in other contexts?

Dang. I have the opposite problem. I learned early in life the trick of becoming invisible. And now people don't notice me even if I am standing a meter away and waving at them! Couldn't haunt anyone if I tried... 

This is an important thing about thoughts. It's one of the things that was very liberating about the religion I now belong to--  the concept of *thoughts* as separate from *self*.  

It's very contrary to quite a lot of implicit modern cultural conditioning-- we're very attached to the idea that we *are* our thoughts, and that we must *accept and love ourselves exactly as we are*. So whatever thoughts flit through our heads, those are ME, and if I reject them, I'm committing the cardinal sin of rejecting myself. Self-hatred. 

It was such a relief to find a different framework for looking at that, because I'm a very anxious person and hell is being trapped with my thoughts!  Like, no, actually, thoughts are all sorts of things that are just *out there*. Some of them are ours, and quite a lot of them are zipping into us from advertising, from other people, from the zeitgeist, from cultural expectations, from bodiless intelligences both benign and malign...   that doesn't make them ME. It actually takes some practice and discipline to tell which ones are your thoughts, and which ones are just buzzing around like airplanes in your mental space, and it's not healthy to automatically accept them all as if they are part of my self. Discernment is well worth working on!

Oh hell yes Betony....in this place, people do.  I did with your post above and found it to be very thought provoking and interesting.

Thank you for sharing....you make a lot of sense...irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, your thought is strong.  I like that.

We're autistic, many of us like to read and write long posts! Some of us won't read it, but probably more us will than on NT forums :) 

Thanks!  I do pontificate, and wonder if anybody reads past paragraph one ;)

That's a really outstanding post, I think.

According to string theory there are actually 14 dimensions but most of them are too small to affect anything. I saw a youtube video about how a 4th spatial dimension might interact with out world, weird stuff, and that is science!

Yes. No. Maybe. 

I don't think of them as "paranormal" so much as... not currently explicable using a modern scientific/cultural frame of reference.  

I think of autism as largely a filtering problem. 

The brain is not a processor, it is not the seat of our thoughts, or even of our memories. It's a filter, with some other functions like coordinating sensory signals and motor instructions. The world is way bigger than what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Those are just the sensory organs we've been able to study pretty well.  But even with those...  your eyes don't filter.  You see everything around you. In order for that information to be useful, your brain filters out most of it, so that you see only what's useful to you, and kind of mute the rest. Normal people filter out most everything, and are able to zero in on what's immediately relevant to them. Autistic people have inefficient filters. We tend to see a lot more, and we're crap at filtering it, so we are often overwhelmed by the deluge of information. Ditto for the other four physical senses. 

Now, think about all the stuff we don't see. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Radiation. Those things are all real, but we don't have the equipment to perceive them.  The world is bigger than our physical perception. 

Then there are other categories of real things that we can't sense physically:  the number fourteen. The square root of nine. The concept of running.  Love. Hate. Confusion. Forgiveness. Grace. Stories. You can't touch or smell those things, but they are nonetheless real and important. They're not physical, we just find handy ways to represent them symbolically. 

Now, consider that basically every human civilization since the dawn of humanity (excepting our remarkably weird materialist age) has believed that there are whole other planes of existence apart from the physical (heaven, hell, hades, olympus, nirvana, valhalla, dreamtime), and that those planes are just as real, are concurrent with our physical plane, and that there are all sorts of beings that live there: spirits, gods, ancestors, ghosts, angels, demons, djinn, fairies, etc. 

I could be completely wrong of course, but in the context of autism as a filtering problem, it makes perfect sense to me that: 

A) in our current materialist age, it is maladaptive to perceive things from other planes of existence. Culturally we've chosen not to believe in those, so in the process of growing out of babyhood and pruning off un-needed neurons most people lose that perception. They filter it out. Tell a kid "that's not real" enough times, and they actually stop seeing it. Normal people see what they're supposed to see, and nothing else. And for the most part, this works well for them. It's functional. What's interesting is that completely normal people in other cultures, and in the past (effectively a foreign culture) can/could see those things because everybody believed in them, and it was not dysfunctional to perceive them, within their own cultural context. 

B) We're poorly adapted, specifically because we could not prune our neurons efficiently during development and now we do not filter out enough. It makes sense that we might, more often than the average NT, have perceptual experiences that are both real and outside normal and culturally acceptable perceptual parameters. 

A couple of interesting findings from a recent, Swedish study of autists and the supernatural:

'It is here suggested that unusual somatosensory experiences are frequent among (a subset of) individuals on the autism spectrum. It is noteworthy that 14 out of 17 participants responded that they have had at least one somatosensory experience (sensed presence, touch, and visions) that is labeled in supernatural terms, and such experiences are much more common compared to the matched non-autistic group. These experiences come through as persuasive, and may be key to why the participants embrace supernatural models for understanding the world, despite the secular norms that they encounter.'

-----

'Lastly, Hammer argues that a yearning for enchantment motivates people to embrace supernatural ideas: “For the believer, such phenomena point to the fact that the world is more obscure, grand and magical than what science tells us”. Enchantment quite rightly comes through as an emotional trigger and key aspect in choice of attributions: the participants appear to find ghosts more interesting than gods. Experiences are also described in affirmative terms; even those that trigger fright and adrenaline are described as thrilling, rather than troublesome. In other words, the participants wish for the world to be enchanted, and bodily experiences reinforce this notion. Embodied, embrained and encultured structures are accordingly entwined into a web of magic.'

Nice!  It does work in the other direction too-- On meeting new people, I am very quick to file them into a few basic categories: 

1) Dangerous, stay away.

2) Not dangerous, but we have nothing in common and they won't like me. Business transactions only.

3) Good people. Won't understand you, but will be kind and helpful and/or treat you fairly.

4) Potential friends. Weird but not dangerous. 

5) Sweet young things. Darling over-trusting kids, teens and twenties who are fun to talk to, but whom I deliberately limit interactions with because they're quite normal and I don't want to hurt their social prospects...  but I try to be nice and help them out if they need anything. It's fun to play the dotty old auntie now and then :)

Some of these I use physical indicators to sort out. Especially category 2-- these are generally people who dress smartly. I can tell them by their expensive shoes and high-maintenance hair and makeup. These people care a lot about social status and signalling, and we're just fundamentally incompatible. 

There's a subset of category 3 that are androgynous straight women. For whatever reason, I gravitate toward them. They're not friends, but I find them easier to be around than either men or more feminine women, and I *love* having them as supervisors at work--  there's no sexual tension, I appreciate their blunt, straightforward approach and they make for a calm, low-anxiety work environment with clear expectations and fair treatment. Would follow to gates of hell and back like a loyal hound.  They're easy to spot, and I like them based on past experience with others. 

Beyond that...  I just don't know how I know.  I miss so many things that normal people find totally obvious, like indicators that someone is gay, or that I've overstayed my welcome, or knowing which person is the leader, in a group. Often, I can observe behavior over the long-term that confirms the initial assessment, but I have no idea how I arrived at the initial assessment, and the initial assessment is rarely wrong. Some of that may be personal bias-- maybe I never bothered to try to get to know someone because of their shoes, so I never found out they were an OK person after all. Not sure.  But generally...   accurate, and later behavior confirms. *Dangerous* is a thing that just leaps out-- internal klaxons blare, adrenaline hits, the works. Eeek! Run! 

So perhaps category 4 are just people who visibly *don't* care about social status, but also don't set off the danger alarms. Hi there. Maybe we could be friends. What's funny is sometimes these are people who are *trying* to signal dangerous-ness, but just obviously aren't actually dangerous-- hang about in all black and talk about burning things, or adopt a grumpy persona of loud complaining and snarky opinions. My favorite auntie when I was a kid was the gruff, outspoken, chain-smoking lady that all my cousins were sort of afraid of. She was terrific and I loved her to bits...  and she never minded me coming and hanging out in her kitchen after school.  She died nearly twenty years ago, and I still miss her. 

Me too......although pleasingly, most of my most notable "spotting" has been for the *good" where others only seem to see bad/dubious.  It means that I tend to give some souls an honest and trusting "chance" whereas other people would be more dismissive or prejudicial.  I seem to attract genuine loyalty and care from some of the least likely souls you can imagine because they are not used to being treated calmly and fairly from the outset.  I am always humbled by this.

Well done for spotting the "bad'un" at your church group.....I hope people take your "intuition" more seriously these days?  I am pleased (these days, in my 50's) to be acknowledged as being "a bit special" at this form of "intuition", whereas when I was younger, I was considered foolhardy or a risk-taker or a social idiot!  It is an extremely useful skill - but I can still get it wrong on occasion despite being hyper-vigilant  of everything most of the time = exhausting, but I can't help myself and it helps to keep me safe in potentially dangerous situations.

I seem to feel most nervous and suspicious of the MOST "normal" people I meet.  I find this fact interesting!

Good to meet you here Betony - I hope to see you around more.

Kind regards

Number.

As a child, I developed an intense fear/dislike of someone at my family's church.  It was super awkward, because the guy was the youth teacher, and all the grownups seemed to think he was OK. Worked in sales, was good at the smile-and-be-friends insta-charm act. I could not explain why I needed to stay away from the guy, I just knew he was dangerous and I wanted to be far far away from him at all times.  I got a lot of "why can't you just be nice?" from my mother about it. We did not find out until several *years* later that he was a thief and a heinous domestic abuser. Tried to murder his ex-wife. 

I have never doubted that sort of intuition again. It has served me very well in life, for all that it is awkward when you cannot explain it to others, and when you try you are not believed.