TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 18)

POST: [Proposal] Investigate How to Reprogram, Build a Wiki

Ah, you've also reminded me of this from Realityshifters.com. The 'finding lost objects' approach is similar to one I've used for myself (let go of your body, "ask" for it to go and find what you've lost). I think the larger idea, of letting go and asking the world, has many applications. Relevant part of the page:

[QUOTE]

The Matrix Applied/Small Flight With Project Runway
Fighting Shadow - Everett, Washington
This is a summary describing how to do everything you've seen in the film, The Matrix, in what I call Project Runway. A few days ago, on a nice sunny Monday, I went with a friend to test a theory I've had for a while. We went to a local park for a new type of long-jump. Neither of us had been in track or sports for at least a year. We set up some sticks in front of a hill for us to jump over. Our objective was similar to what Morpheus advised Neo in the movie The Matrix, "Let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, disbelief [and love (explained later)]."
We started small, jumped it, then made the jump larger. This went on for 20 minutes before I looked at how far our last successful jump was. I couldn't comprehend it (and had to quit for the day because I started thinking about it). From only jogging (if we ran, we only got half-way), we both successfully jumped 16 size 13 feet! (we had no ruler). As in, take a size 13 shoe, and step 16 times, heel-to-toe. Quite a long way for jogging, huh? I swear we flew for at least a few feet as well, when we did it right, because sometime in mid-air, I felt completely joyful, and closed my eyes. You'll have to try it to find out though...
You try it: Method explained.
My theory involved letting go, as explained above. But first, here's some history. No "finding lost objects" techniques ever worked for me, not even using my awesome "third eye manifestation". So, soon after I started thinking of the body as a "shell", I said "shell, find my book." and it did, instantly. Then my towel, then another book, etc. Later, I remembered it's just energy linked to the mind. So I consider it a function, not even a physical thing (this is important in letting go). Then, sometime after that, I began experimenting more, and learned to stop thinking. Yes, when you don't think, sparring's easier, and so are sports. In order to obtain this state, I decided to use the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. It clears the mind quite well. Remember people telling you "not to think about it so much"? Well, forget that, just don't think. Now, one last thing. I said that you'd have to let go of love as well. I believe this is explained somewhere on realityshifters.com in the Let Go of Wishes article .
The idea is, you can't hold on to love, so just let it go, and it will flow naturally. Love is also the energy to live, fly, etc. (YES! You DON'T need to spend years gathering energy!) What I have learned is something others have also felt and written about. Reading Communion With God and Illusions helps a lot in understanding this. Remember to just let it go, and let it flow. Most importantly (because you have to stop thinking once you start running) is to trust yourself Ready now? Here's how I did it.

1. Set up your sticks/markers. Start out small if you're new.
2. Find a place to start (I started on a small hill).
3. Let go of all fears, doubts, worries, etc.
4. Tell your body to jump the distance.
5. Trust your self, AND your body.
6. Be mindful, and clear your mind.
7. Everything will suddenly just "click", and you'll know it's time to start.
8. Keep a clear mind, free from negative thoughts, and don't force anything. The speed of your run does NOT matter. Trust you will fly.
9. Repeat until you want to stop.
   Tomorrow or the next day, I'm going out to train again with my friend. I know I flew, and I'm gonna do more than just jump far.==

[END OF QUOTE]

...

Ha, I didn't mean the "flying" bit (although you never know, with practice). I meant the letting go and allowing your subconscious mind to guide you to, say, an object you lost but can't remember where it is. It works for problem-solving in general, actually.

Although -

People can not fly. If this was possible you'd see it at the Olympics.

What he describes isn't flying; it's more like being in the zone and letting your body use its natural coordination to jump the distance without you interfering by trying to "make it happen". Which is probably what really good Olympians in fact do.

POST: So, my kitchen light moved. And I'm in an alternate universe apparently.

This means, you realise, that is no longer your wife.

See here:

"The day I posted one particular reality shift story, I had woken up to find my key chain had turned gray. My boyfriend and I always had identical key chains (actually they were the lock devices that came with our Jeep), and they were both black. When one of us picked up a key ring, we had to look not at the black device but at the collection of keys, because we had the same house, similar cars and other things -- so we had to look to make sure that the gold keys to my office were on the key ring or not in order to determine which set of keys was which.
One day, I woke up after a fairl[y] hard night of half sleeping, to discover that my key locking device was now gray. My boyfriend never remembers a time when my key chain wasn't gray, and he insists that a difference in color is the way we always told our otherwise identical key chains apart, which makes me think I also do not have the exact same boyfriend anymore."
-- Changing Keys / Instant Costume Change, Realityshifters.com

You should think yourself lucky, and perhaps not look at that lamp too closely. No matter how strange it might start to seem.

Q1: His other self married her, and he is now that other self. By that standard, she is his wife.

But, he's not that other self - he's the same self, now looking out into another world. She is not the woman he married, in his old world.

Q1: No, but she's not a different person, she's a different version of the same person. He, too, is a different version of the same person she married.

Okay. How different does someone have to become before they are considered a different person? What is the connection between this woman and his wife in the other 'reality'?

(The fact of his knowledge alone means he is substantially different to any other person with his body; her lack of knowledge means the same thing.)

Q1: If he can just randomly appear in the other person's body, in the same home with one subtle difference, the same life, without even an apparent death to explain the switch -- the two are clearly closely linked.

We could think of it as being the same "person" (soul? experiencer?) but looking through the "viewport" of a particular body in a particular environment.

That works for him. But what of her? In fact, is there even necessarily a "person" looking through her eyes? Could she just be a philosophical zombie, operating on automatic with no "experiencer" looking through her as their "viewport"?

(The more extreme possibility is that of "personal dream-worlds" - that we are each living in our own dream but they may/may not overlap with others' dream-worlds. So his change is then just a discontinuity, a shift in his dream-world, perhaps in response to his desire and irritation regarding the light. She is just his dream wife. There may be a wife having a dream-world of her own, but that dream would only interact with his to the extent they have common desires of experience. In this scenario, we are "extended persons" of some sort.)

And what could have caused that be the case? I see no reason for him to have switched to a world -- this world -- where she is just a hollow shell. I see no reason for this universe's version of him having been a hollow shell before this version of him appeared in our universe's body, either.

Well, it might make no difference - most of our actions and responses are automatic, it's just that we experience them. We can, if we choose and if we know how, redirect ourselves and our path though.

There is more to our consciousness than we know. He most likely is one facet of a consciousness with multiple bodies, experiencing a multitude of existences, in different universes. That he cannot consciously connect to the other parts of the consciousness does not mean that they do not exist, or are not linked.

Actually, I do prefer this - what I call "extended persons" - but it's hard to tell the difference between this and the "viewport" version with a single experiencer. A hollow shell can behave exactly the same way, externally, as someone with an experiencer, or as an extended person would. In fact, perhaps his wife's behaviour is dependent upon his expectations, rather than being autonomous herself. With the extended person idea, and infinite worlds in which to express all possibilities, other people actually do correspond to our expectations/beliefs/desires (even if those are detrimental to us).

Combining those ideas:

Everyone can get their ideal world. You are extended throughout all possibilities, but only need to experience the possibility-version that you want. Extended persons and viewport-like experiencing.

To me it seems just as worthwhile to point at random people on the street and state that they might be hollow. Well, yes, they might be. But how is it relevant to this situation?

It's to do with the mechanics of the change, and what we're really experiencing right now. A "hollow" person needn't be any different to anyone else. Because you are effectively acting as a hollow person most of the time - you are on automatic. Being "hollow" just means not being observed through.

It's easier to say that there are infinite universes each with a /u/TriumphantGeorge and a /u/parafact in them, but we "the observing consciousnesses" only look through one at a time. When we interfere, then we jump to looking through one that corresponds to our desire/intention.

We are always experiencing never actually doing.

Human bodies are part of the surrounding environment, seamless with them. We are not the bodies, we are just the experiencers of bodies and environments.

I absolutely disagree that we are only looking through one universe at a time. It's just that the part of me that is aware of looking into this universe is only able to be conscious of looking into this one.

It depends on what we mean by "we". Right now, I am only experiencing looking through this universe. I can imagine that other parts of me are looking elsewhere, but if I can't experience it right now, where does that leave me?

I also still do not see the point of contemplating the potential hollowness of OP's wife specifically when, by both your viewpoint and mine, she is equally likely to be hollow in this universe as she was in the last one -- though we disagree on the actual likelihood. Nothing has changed in that regard.

You have exactly the same problem with your "I am looking through all universes" view - it's not testable. You - you right now - only ever experience one universe at a time. If you "jump universes" you will then experience that one, not two at once.

Meanwhile, you can't tell if the wife is "hollow" or not, because it makes no difference to her behaviour. However, if you are only experiencing one universe at a time (which all the evidence points to), then we can assume that is the same for her, and that given infinite universes, it is infinitely unlikely that she's looking out of those eyes.

However, the universes (personal world-dreams) must overlap in some way. We are all alone, but our worlds are "inspired by" the intentions and choices of all other universes as well as our own.

EDIT: That read as being "shouty". Not meant to be, just quite interested in bashing this out. :-)

The essence of this is, "what is a person" and does it require awareness, a "presence" that is experiencing it? I say no. So why do we need every universe to be "looked-through"? You just pick the one you like best! The rest will roll along by themselves.

Previous attempt to visualise this here [POST: Meta-switching realities].

...

Q: [Deleted]

Just decide you are going to notice them. Then you will.

POST: I dream about the future then live it?

[POST]

So this has been driving my completely insane recently and I've decided to share my weird reoccurring glitch.
I dream about and relive days of my life. Now I know how crazy this sounds and I've looked all over for an explanation and I assure you it's not me having deja vu mid day and thinking I had a dream.
This happens about 4 times every year and is usually started the exact same way, with me having a dream about my life.
Now before the incident I'm about to describe I pinned this on stress and told myself I was just making these things up. However this latest occurrence has me 100% sure it was a glitch in the matrix.
Now I've gotten use to these rare dreams of mine but the latest one bothered me because it was so vivid. I specifically remember seeing these pile of blocks when I woke up and someone saying "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?" The other thing I remember was a co-worker of mine named Jennifer saying something about her son and a baseball injury.
Due to the vividness of the dreams I kept thinking about them all day mostly the blocks and what such a strange phrase could mean.
Later in the afternoon we had a surprise team building exercise with... You guessed it! Blocks.
At first I thought nothing of it because I had become preoccupied and was not thinking about my dream at the time.
The goal was to build certain structures out of these blocks, it began with basic triangles and then it got more advanced to the point we needed to share blocks but every block had to be used in the construct for the team to pass.
I was looking around the table trying to figure out how we could build a tower we needed and I noticed me and my co-worker frank had an extra pile of blocks and blurted out "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?"
As soon as I heard the words come out of my mouth I froze and remained very quite for the rest of the exercise trying to rationalize what just happened.
After the exercise is done we all head to the break room for some coffee and bagels. While everyone is chatting I hear Jennifer talking to her friend Cathy, I was very hesitant to ask but I forced myself to do it "By any chance did your son get injured playing baseball recently?"
Now I have no outside work Connection to Jennifer so her immediate reaction to me knowing about that injury was to think I was a stalker but I quickly explained to her my dream and convinced her I was not a stalker but she was still pretty sure I was insane.
Creepy right?
But here is where it gets extremely bothersome and the reason I'm debating putting myself in a mental hospital or some shit.
The next day was exactly the same. No dream this time but the day was exactly the same down to little details.
The surprise team meeting was held again with the same problems and initial reactions (the confusion and brainstorming were the same right down to the wire) I was even in the same position where I almost asked frank if my greens would go with his blues.
As we walked to the break room Jennifer was talking to Cathy but I decided to not ask her about the injury this time. Instead she ended up telling everyone about it herself! How could I dream about something happening if the knowledge of the event caused it to not happen originally!?!?!?!?
To this day I still have these episodes randomly but none were as vivid (or maybe I was not as aware) as this one.
Please tell me I am not alone in this and other people have also experienced freak time travel combined with dreams of the future.
Edit: please forgive formatting and errors, I am on mobile.

[END OF POST]

Q1: There's no need to be alarmed by this, it's perfectly okay. In fact, many people have access to this ability, but tune it out or try to rationalize it away.
The thing is, most of our experiences are lined up days before they actually play out in physical terms. So, more sensitive people can get glimpses of the "blueprint" of the event. This often happens in our dream state, because we are less resistant at that time.
Take care and have fun with it :)

It's all deterministic, unless you actively choose to "re-direct"?

Q1: Determinism would imply someone running you life for you. Rather, we have complete freedom of choice- our expectations shape these blueprints. It just takes some time to assemble the cooperative components for the physical manifestation.

No, determinism would imply that a path just "plays out" via its own momentum. When a rock starts rolling down a hill, it doesn't need gravity to keep pulling it. It will keep going until it is redirected (by a collision, or by a change in the landscape).

I think we have free choice to re-point the path, but if we don't then it plays out deterministically. This is why we can tell what is going to happen: the whole future is effectively here, now unless we make an intentional change that affects it at the ground, seed level.

Q1: Ah, I see what you mean.

It's a common point actually. Do we control our actions, moment by moment? Do we constantly intend? No, I'd say we experience ourselves rather than do ourselves - except when we inject a new target into awareness (reshape ourselves). Just as well. I quite like that my blood supply is self-circulating, for instance. :-)

EDIT: Although some people do a constant 'holding back' of themselves. Perhaps most people, even. They don't fully commit to their own flow.

...

Q2: Souuuuuuuurce?

Q3: (It's total garbage, but don't tell anyone I said anything, I'll get downvoted to hell for not believing in supernatural bullshit.)

Q1: Eh, life would be much less fun without the variety of opinions. So we can probably agree they're all valuable. Everyone finds their own little nuggets of truth- who cares, if others agree with them, or not.

Q3: Most of the stuff posted here is 99% batshit insane. There's a few 'actual' glitches that I nor anyone else can explain, but when it's stuff like "I dreamed about the future", I chalk it up to either 1. a brain issue where the person actually thinks they had a dream about that day, or 2. hyperactive awareness in their daily life that allows them to perceive a possible 'future' that just happens, and then they think they are special in some way.
When something posted on this subreddit is only observed by the OP, then the OP should have talked to a doctor to get a brain scan. When it's something like "I have actual proof I jumped into a parallel universe", then I'll be interested. what I'm trying to say, is that for a glitch to be considered real, it should be verified by at least a bystander or a friend, not just by the OP.

Q4: I believe everything follows fundamental laws that we as human beings cannot break. We can't escape from the universe, we can't enter a black hole without being crushed to the size of an atom, and we can't go faster than the speed of light.
As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Of course, nobody's ever tried those things to find out...

As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Isn't that deterministic though? Your preferences are already determined, so your choices are already determined. You might "experience thinking and choosing", but really there's no influence you can have over it. It's all just unfolding, as it always going to be. (And for this reason, nobody has "abilities to see into the future". The future is already there, in a sense. So it's not unreasonable you might end up knowing, but you wouldn't be doing it; the thought would just happen to you.)

Although other views are available [http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/%7Eellis/realworld.pdf].

Q4: It's deterministic if you start from a certain point in time, for one decision. If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents), and that shapes who you are as a person. Both through nature(genes), and nurture(environment). For instance: I would never eat crickets on a stick. In China, it's a snack you can buy. People love it.

If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents)...

Is that true, though? I'd have thought the parents and environment were part of the "deterministic" input, so what you've said mean there's really no choice, because you don't choose your nature. You actually never chose not not-eat-crickets-on-a-stick, that choice was pre-made for you by your upbringing.

(Note: I personally believe we do or can have some top-down influence, but it requires a bit of dis-identification with our own body and thought processes.)

Q4: Well it's not like you can be raised by wolves. If you were, and you survived, you would eat meat and berries. You wouldn't know language, and you'd be naked... unless you thought "hmm, fur is warm, I'll skin an animal".

Well, that's determinism in action! No real choices. Wolfy-behaviour all the way.

Q4: You still have choices. "Should I follow this hard rocky road with metal animals?"

Haha. :-) But your options are pre-determined by your upbringing and experiences. In turn, your upbringing led to your nature and preferences, which determine which option you will choose. So it was always going to happen the way it did: loudly squished under the metal animals due to ignorance!

EDIT: Although personally I believe there is the possibility of creativity in the options which appear to us mentally, if we give space for it to occur.

Q4: Okay, then say you get taken away from your parents due to some bullshit. Now you're in a foster home. Your entire life just changed based on that alone. You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family. Every single person has free will. As a collective, we guide each other.

You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family.

How do you make the choice? Does the choice you make not come from your 'character'? Did you choose your character? But...

The way out of this is to say: Free will isn't the ability to do just anything, randomly - rather it's to act according to your own nature, given the information available to you. The extra secret sauce is if you discover the technique/ability to "ask for further options" from your creative mind (or whatever). Then, although you will always make a choice based on your nature (determined) you at least have the possibility of a fresh direction (creativity) - which in turn will change your nature. If you don't discover or aren't introduced to the secret sauce, then you'll pretty much unfold deterministically for your whole life. Fortunately, you'll likely be unaware of it. And if you were, you'd respond deterministically anyway...

This whole conversation really boils down to your own definition of what free will is.

Quite probably. Basically, it's a kind of meaningless topic for most people! It doesn't matter if your choices are effectively determined in advance (by upbringing, environment, inherent character, this is a common philosophical argument against free will), so long as they're aligned with your best interests. For most people, that's enough.

Although I'd say that the extra bit: That the options are not necessarily pre-determined, means we have the ability to creatively change our world, rather than simply react to it and be a cog in it.

(Personally, I believe that we can get stuck in a reactive mode, but that we generally do have the ability to live creatively and not deterministically.)

What's your definition?

Q4: My definition of free will is being able to do anything that you desire. If you want to go on a rampage, you can. You will probably get shot, but that's just something that happens. People can snap. They can act any way they want, but they choose to go along with daily life.
An example: I want to uproot my life and move north into a forest. I hate the way society behaves, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that people feel like this is the way life is (and there's nothing we can do about it). If I chose to go right now, I could. My family would be upset, and my friends would turn on me, but I COULD go. I'm completely free to do so. It is my choice, and my choice alone.
Free will is essentially freedom to act and think the way you want. There's consequences, but that comes with others disagreeing with the way you're acting/thinking.

All good. As Wikipedia says, "The underlying issue is: Do we have some control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent?"

So, you are free to do all those things. But are you free to "want what you want", can you choose your thoughts in advance, are you a victim of your impulses? To what extent are you choosing your actions, to what extent are they happening to you? On what basis are you making the choice that is "my choice, and my choice alone". That's the philosophical dilemma of free will (rather than just "freedom").

In that case, whether you consider you have 'true free will' or not might be about where you draw the line - what you consider as "you" and what you consider as external or "the environment".

"Everyday free will" is just the notion that, based on the information you have, you will make choices in alignment with your own character/nature. I think that's fairly straightforward, and what you're going for?

Q4: Again, you're trying to change the definition of what free will is.
free will: noun 1. the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
Based on this definition, we have free will.

The definition is half the problem, but going with that:

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion

People could argue - if you examine exactly how decisions and actions come about - that you'll find you are actually entirely subject to "necessity or fate", and that the "discretion" is therefore an illusion, simply an experience you have. Note, I'm not really arguing with you! In practical terms, everyone experiences having free will - they just know they are agents, directly. Logically though, it's hard to prove. But then so is consciousness, which is essentially the same thing (free will being "first cause" if it exists at all). And everyone knows they are conscious, simply by the very knowing itself.

POST: Not sure if this is a glitch or reality

[POST]

I'm going to explain this the best I can then provide several scary examples. I dream EVERY night. They are vivid dreams. I read, write and interact with strangers, family and even go to work. I've heard that it's impossible to read in your dreams ( because that part of your brain isn't active?), but I do with ease. Writing is a bit if a challenge and my handwriting looks like a child's. Anyway, I try to forget these dreams- but they always come back to bite me. The dreams make no sense when I have them. Events are out of order and often I have no idea why I'm somewhere or doing something. If the dream seems important or scares the shit out of me I tell my SO, that way I can point out in the future that we knew it was going to happen. Ok, so these dreams come true. They are impossibly accurate. Every job I've ever had, I've dreamed about months or years in advance. Jobs I could never imagine myself doing ( and I mean never!) and yet, they happen. Before you say the dreams are influencing my choices, no, not the way I dream. Example ( not scary)-
I dream I'm sitting at a desk, calculating percentages and gazing out a window. Out the window I see a tree with its leaves blowing in the wind. On the desk I see some sort of statements, stapler, little do-dads , your typical desk. I wake up thinking what a crazy dream, I'd never voluntarily take a desk job. I'm a typical blue collar worker. Low and behold six months later I apply for a bread delivery job( as a second job). It was a few months into the job at the end of a long day. I had to bill each customer for the bread I delivered and discount for the un-purchased bread I removed from the store. There was a desk in the rear of the bakery positioned directly in front of a window ( it wasn't mine but I was allowed to use it). Frustrated from the paperwork I look up to see the tree outside and wish I was done for the day. Then it hits me like a brick, the tree. The desk. The paperwork. The do-dads. It's all there.
Next dream -
I dream I'm holding the most beautiful baby infant, though it's definitely not mine. I smile and somehow know this baby, but I don't. It was a girl that had blue eyes, and dark black hair. I'm alone in a beautiful Park like setting. I can't see very far in any direction because the sun is absolutely blinding. I wake up it's early morning. I can't go back to sleep so I have a very long day the next day.
I lived over 1500 miles away from my family. But the next day I get a call. My sister had had a late term miscarriage. I asked her if it was a little girl with blue eyes and black hair. She wondered how I had known. Somehow I thought it would help comfort her so I told her I knew when her baby died because she came to visit me. My dream occurred at the time she was in the hospital giving birth the night before.
Next dream-
I dreamed I was in two rooms joined by a doorway there was literally 100 people there. I didn't know any of the people. Somehow they all knew me and were talking to me and touching me. I found this very uncomfortable my eyes search the room for someone I knew. Then I saw my father. I ran to him, opened my mouth to speak then I woke up.
Later that year my grandfather died who lives in another state. Not just another state but on the complete opposite coast. I went with my father to his funeral. You guessed it I was at the funeral home standing amongst lots of relatives that I had never met. Somehow, I lost my father in the crowd. I looked around for him and spotted him in another room. I hurriedly went towards him and as I went to speak I realized instantaneously this was that dream. It scared the living shit out of me and I could not speak.
The problem I have is my dreams are broken bits and pieces. I cannot pinpoint these events that will take place. I only realize what is going on as it is happening.
Have I dreamed about my death? Yes. More than once. I will not elaborate, I have heard that you can influence your surroundings more than you know when you speak out loud/write about incidents and it's possible to make those things happen. I'm not risking it.
Apparently this runs in the family- one of my parents also has these predictive type dreams. They can truly be horrifying.
I also seem to have weird glitches in this reality. I'm a relatively shy person and I try not to make eye contact unless I must in my daily routines. I've had more incidents than I care to recall of seeing someone who is gone mere seconds later.
For instance, I was walking out of a building towards a smoke break area. I was looking down to avoid eye contact with a man that was coming towards me. I passed the man then turned to ask how his day went, the man was gone. He WAS there a few seconds ago.
I walked past an office and saw a man sitting in a chair with the lights off. Being familiar with the men who often work there at night I turned around to ask WTF he was doing with the lights off and to have some friendly banter. The was no one there. It's not uncommon for co-workers to nap on night shift, so it didn't strike me as odd.
I've never been on drugs, medications, I don't drink except on rare occasions ( maybe once a year). I've never been arrested. I was raised religious, but do not attend church.
Does anyone else have similar experiences? Are you able to influence the outcome of reality because of your dreams?
Is there a way to shut off my dreams? Anything over the counter? I never feel rested when I wake up. The dreams wear me out physically and mentally.
I posted anonymously for obvious reasons. If someone told me this, I'd think they were crazy or on drugs. For once Id like to sleep with no recollection of dreams.

[END OF POST]

The "shy person" glitches are likely due to you not truly looking at your surroundings. Your mind just makes a best-guess based on peripheral vision and so on, and fills in the environment accordingly. When you decide to deliberately look directly at the "person", your mind-model gets updated and the person disappears/becomes a shadow/whatever.

The dreams, though, are fascinating! Well, "all time is at once" it is said, so it's already happened from some perspectives. You should maybe play with trying to deliberately imagine situations you'd like before you go to sleep. Some New Thought people used to say that this worked. Worth a go [http://www.thepowerofawareness.org/], as an experiment... you might be able to improve the usefulness of your dreams by doing it.

No, although I don't look at faces as I pass people I see their bodies( often from the chest down), gender, what they are wearing or holding.

Right, that's a bit clearer. Don't know if you've being trying to do lucid dreaming deliberately, but that's maybe worth a look, /r/luciddreaming and the Robert Waggoner book perhaps. Might let you get better control in the dream of yourself if not the situation, keeping calm, the better to ask questions and so on. They sound quite challenging anyway.

What do you think's happening?

EDIT: Just read your other reply on the dream control thing.

i know this stuff is going to occur.

The certainty is interesting. And I think you're right: you can know and it will happen. But...

You should read the Neville Goddard book, but for one idea: That although our lives are deterministic in the sense that they unfold along a fixed path if we don't interfere - we have a "destiny" - we can re-direct our lives, and re-point that destiny. However, this isn't necessarily by action (because we'll pre-dream our actions), but by changing your momentum in some sense. I dunno, it seems to be the sort of thing he was saying (PDF here). Whatever you think of that, his little exercise might be useful for you (summoning the feeling of the new direction, in your dream or otherwise). In some ways this makes sense: If you always act in character, then even "spontaneous" action would be in-character and therefore inevitable. Only by changing yourself can you change how you might respond to something in the future, and change your fate?

I'm sure you've experimented with trying to change things, but maybe it can't be done the way you've been attempting it so far.

POST: I think I entered another dimension...

[POST]

Something is weird here. I don't exactly know what it is for sure, but I know when it started.
A couple days ago I was walking through one of the dorms on my campus. It's the oldest dorm, built pre-WW2, so there's some weird quirks about it. Also, it's incredibly hard to navigate your first couple times. I was going through it to study some calc and had the hardest time finding the right stairwell to get to the room I needed. I went up one set of stairs and saw a sign pointing me towards the set of rooms I needed to go to. I turned left and followed the hallway. I saw a girl with her door open talking about econ, walked passed some guys heading towards the dining hall, and saw one guy knocking on another person's door. I reached the end of the hallway and the only thing there was another stairwell, not the room I needed, so I went into the stairwell.
I saw a sign saying I was on the floor below where I thought I was, so went up the stairs again, confused. One flight up, I saw the same sign that led me to the left. I passed the same girl talking about econ, same guys going towards the dining hall, and same guy knocking on a door. I was really confused at this point, but saw the room I needed to be in at the end of the hall.
Things are different now though, and nobody is admitting it. Every stranger I see in the street makes weird eye contact with me. It's as if I'm not welcome here. I bring this up to my friends and they just laugh and change the topic really quickly. My friends are acting strange too, as if they need to keep an eye on me at all times. I stood up to go to the bathroom yesterday and my roommate said he'd go with me, which I thought was weird. Even weirder when he just stood there and didn't say a word while I peed. Other friends suddenly want to go out of their way to walk with me to my classes. I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I don't belong here.
EDIT: Just to address some issues that plenty of comments have brought up:
a) I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake.
b) I understand that people making eye contact isn't necessarily abnormal, but their eyes are telling me something now. They're looking at me like I don't belong. It's a look of disgust, and "what is he doing here?".
To make things worse, I've been pretty thrown off by this so took the half hour train ride home to visit the family for awhile. Things seemed normal, my parents were fine, but my dog barked at me repeatedly. He's never done this before, not even the times that I've visited home before, and he wouldn't stop. He was angry at me.
EDIT 2: After a relatively normal afternoon and dinner with the family I came back to campus. One comment suggested I go back to the stairwell. I'm not really sure what I expected, but I went back anyways. It's like people didn't want me to go back. More than the weird, hostile looks I'm used to being given, people were bluntly bumping into me as I walked towards the dorm. I get to the stairwell and feel fine, everything seems normal, until I almost shit myself when I heard a guy behind me say "You're not supposed to be here". I walked quickly out of the dorm and made way towards my own hall, and people were much less resistant to me walking back. I don't know guys, maybe your reality isn't my reality.
EDIT 3: Went to the University health services office, as people suggested. They recommended me to a psychiatrist, and I was luckily able to walk in to see him. I explained my problem to him, and he had this grave look on his face while I was talking. Once I finished, he simply explained that it must be all in my head and hurried me out the door. I asked if there was anything I could do about this and he told me I was just imagining things.
Strangers are becoming much more aggressive the longer I stay here. At the dining hall this morning the employee that was swiping student IDs had to ask her manager if I should be let in. The manager gave me a weird look, but acted like he didn't want to make a scene and said sure. I was walking to class with a friend and one guy looked me directly in the eye and just said "leave". People intentionally bumping into me is now the norm. They have a look of disgust in their eyes. I'm starting to think that I really don't belong.
EDIT 4: People have been asking for an update, and I wish I could say things have been getting better. Still the same rude behavior from random strangers; the other day I was asked to leave the library because I was "a disturbance to the other students" when all I was doing was reading my textbook. It's finals week right now, so I haven't gotten the chance to see help outside the University. My friends are still concerned about me, and my family still acts the same. This is all becoming "normal" unfortunately.
FINAL EDIT: I've come back. It was the strangest experience. I was at the dining half with my friends and this girl was looking at me the whole time. But it wasn't a bad look, it was friendly. And something was different about her--she seemed just ever so slightly "off", I was drawn to her. After I ate, I told my friends to go without me (which they hesitated to do, but eventually complied). I went up to the girl and before I knew it I had told her my entire story. Every built up frustration, every tear, every bit of confusion, and she just listened. When I finished, she looked me in the eyes and said "Follow me". I did, and she took me to a bridge over a river that connects two parts of the campus. She held my hand and told me to close my eyes. I felt a strong gust of wind and next thing I know I was on that bridge alone, but things were normal. People no longer make disgusted eye contact with me or are rude to me, my friends are normal again, I belong. I have this overwhelming sense of joy, and I think that whoever this girl was knew that I was in the wrong place and somehow knew how to fix that.

[END OF POST]

So, this is the most interesting glitch in ages.

Any other changes? Minor things, even light switches being the wrong way round, things like that? Some people have tried to make changes deliberately and small glitches result (if one believes this):

. . . I wasn't upset by this, I didn't believe in it anyway, so I went home without expectations or anticipation about how my universe might change.
That night I set to making dinner, but when I turned the knob to light the burner under my pan of water for the pasta, the burner behind it went on instead. I had been living in this apartment for close on five years. The inner knobs had always lit the front burners and the outer knobs had always lit the back burners. I got one of my room-mates to come and see. "But that's the way it's always been.", he said. No one else remembered it the way I did.
Later that night I called Ebony. He laughed, but he seemed impressed, "You must really be doing your will if that's the only change your universe needed to balance it." Considering some of the horror stories I've heard related I'm grateful that a switch of the oven knobs was all it took to convince me of the reality of magick!
-- Some memories of Ebony

The overall vibe of "not being in the same place anymore" reminds me of my favourite story on another website:

Suddenly everything had changed. My buddy was not quite the same guy I had known moments before while sitting peacefully on the trestle, the river I knew so well had changed, my home was different, everyone and everything was different, yet appeared somewhat the same.
Everything looked exactly the same as it did before yet it all had a different feel to it. It's as if everything was replaced with identical stuff. It's like accidentally putting on someone else's coat that looks just like your own, but it just doesn't feel the same and the fit is a bit off. It's like walking into a motel room. It's like driving some else's car which is identical to your own.
The way people are different is also hard to describe. They seem the same, yet they act just a bit off from their usual patterns. They don't send out the same vibes. It's as if you are meeting them for the first time. You know them, yet you don't feel like you know them. They seem to be close copies of how you remember them.
-- Realityshifters.com

Having said all that, you have to be careful and not over-interpret.

If you change or shift for some reason then your world will seem to change and shift. One theory is that, like with shared dreams, we are each in our own dream world but we overlap with others via common "archetypes". If we meet in a restaurant, my Wendy's might be your MacDonald's.

If something glitches - which really means that you hiccup in some sense - then the environment image spawning from the archetype might shift. Our environments are made up in our minds; it's just that we don't notice it. This includes our experiences of other people: they are "filled in" based on very minimal information. You dream most of the details of your experience, spawned from a loose outline, in an ongoing feedback loop of enfolding and unfolding.

You might be experiencing an extreme version of that.

EDIT: Does anybody else remember a story (might be here, /r/occult or /r/psychonaut) where everyone on the street suddenly stopped and turned around to look at this guy, who was sitting in the shadow of a doorway or something? Like he'd been "discovered" by the other characters/figures?

Q1: The second one sounds like Capgrass syndrome. Where due to a mini stroke in the 'familiarity' path of the brain, everything seems to be replaced by copies or 'imposters'.

I'm not sure about 'familiarity paths', but yes it does sound like that. A few glitches here have a variation on it: The guy who 'glitched' in his drive and everything changed (car colour noticed first) and was unfamiliar (not his wife anymore); the guy who didn't have that new car after all seems related too. Of course, "brain problems" might just be the in-world ad-hoc explanation provided for the change when you "jump"... ;-)

...

I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake

In a way, this might be true. If you did "get back" would it be a waking up into your previous world, from here?

Q2: late to the party and I hope that it hadn't been said before,but have you though about the fact that somebody could have spread (negative) rumors about you? a crazy ex, a deluded friend...did you have any fight or argument with somebody on the campus? this could explain the strange behavior of your friends (who believe the rumors and are not concerned about you, but more about themselves)..the fact is that often we understand the things subconsciously but we cannot explain it rationally. this could also explain the other students' reaction:can be that in some way this rumor is big and everybody knows "about you" or alternatively, could be just this "bad vibe" that your friends are sending you - and you don't understand rationally- makes you a bit paranoid about everybody else...

So your TL;DR is: "You're not paranoid, they really do hate you" - ?

Q2: this made me smile :) I didn't think it exactly in that way, but yes, I think before talking about alternate universes better discard all the other practical options...

With your help, I think OP may be finding the idea of being irretrievably cast into an unfriendly parallel reality is getting more appealing! :-)

Q3: Your story reminds me a glitch I read once (not here) where a woman shifted in another reality and people there looked at her weirdely , some seemed upset to see her. Most people had a hostile attitude towards her. She sat on a bench in a park and a woman came to tell her: You have nothing to do here, you do not belong to this place. She tried to explain that she did not even know how she endep up there but the woman would not listen. Finally, she walked a little and one person came to meet her to tell her that she had nothing to do there and explained her how to return to her own reality. The only difference with your story is that in her case the place was unknown to her. You should go back to the stairwell and if someone talk to you, don't be shy or afraid , ask him/her questions.

Thing is, we are those other people, right now.

Q4: Anyone else think this is a very clever no sleep? Wher3 everything is real even if it Inst? Otherwise welcome to the other side breather we be got the habit movies hope theywerent any better in your dimension

The individual elements are pretty common in Glitch reports, just not usually together. The "lost track of where I was / the map seems to change or repeat" element (seizure/disorientation type symptoms), the "people aren't who they used to be" thing and the world responding to me a bit differently (Capgrass-type symptoms). But: it's not quite inventive enough to be really absorbing as a fictional story or lead-in.

If I were inventing something, I'd go nick some of the stories from /r/psychonaut, like on this thread [https://old.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/25q6o7/ego_death_from_mushroom_causes_instantaneous/chjt4dd/].

Q4: health context aside I'm starting to blur the lines when I read this sub, most posts are entertaining

I treat 'em all as real for the purposes of commenting, unless they're so obviously fictional prose that it's not even worth the fun.

Thing is, a lot of it is quite reasonable once you've had a couple of experiences yourself - not necessarily dramatic things. Just, say, seeing through your eyelids, dark vision, things shifting before you. Perception isn't as straightforward as you assume. And once you notice it, you see it all the time. You're basically sort of dreaming your environment, based on very minimal cues and updates. (I mean, this whole room looks in focus to me now. But that actually isn't possible if I'm directly seeing with my eyes.)

*Q5: I just found this post randomly. I had a very similar experience back when I used to party really hard. It was at a point in my life where I was drinking heavily and using cocaine heavily basically everyday and also smoking weed, using shrooms and taking my xanax which was the one thing I was legally prescribed at the time. ANYWAYS... everything was fun for awhile, party all night, sleep during the day, repeat. Then everything got weird, I started getting really paranoid. I remember having a similar thing happen where all of a sudden people seemed like they were either staring at me with evil looks or wouldn't look at me at all. In my delusional state I thought that maybe I was witnessing the end of the world and that people were choosing sides. The good people were the ones that wouldn't look at me because I wasn't on the good side yet and the evil people were the ones staring at me because they wanted me to join the side of evil. It got weirder and weirder and more intense every day. Everything seemed to have a meaning and be a sign from god or the devil and I felt like I was being told that I needed to choose a side either good or evil because it was the end of the world and the final battle between evil and good was going to happen soon. I started seeing things as patterns and thought people on television or strangers were giving me clues. Like I had my car worked on and the mechanic gave me back my bill and to me it seemed like he was trying to give me a clue and he circled the number of the invoice and the number contained my current address. Or I would see a sentence on an ad like on a napkin from a restaurant and I would think the slogan had a deeper significance and was speaking directly to me. Tons of stuff like that. The other similar thing I had happen is the getting lost in places that shouldn't be easy to get lost in. I remember being lost outside of my friends house. I was on my phone talking to him and he was trying to direct me to his place but I couldn't follow his instructions even though I had been over there a million times.
So yeah I was really messed up. I quit drinking and drugs BUT I keep living in this hallucinatory state for about 6 months after I got sober. So yeah there was like 6 months where I was still seeing shit and thinking the tv was talking to me directly, hearing voices of people I knew who weren't there, or who were dead, thinking everything was a sign from god or the devil, etc. etc. when I was stone cold sober and under the supervision of a friend who took me in and was taking care of me and making sure I cleaned up and didn't wander the streets. And one night I actually did roam the streets in the middle of the winter and I was officially sober but yeah my mind was still messed up. I remember walking through the snow in my friends yard and then thinking the lights on the neighbors houses were making a noise that I should follow. I don't even remember how I got back exactly but I remember wandering and following the sounds I was hearing from peoples porch lights, at the time I was searching for a house I thought I was being led to by god. But I couldn't find it and then I went back. My friend was really freaked out and started locking me in the room I stayed in at night so I wouldn't wander out and end up hurting myself or getting arrested or something.
Seeing all these patterns and connections in random data I later found out is called apophenia. I also found out later that extreme cocaine abuse like I was doing can cause stimulant psychosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulant_psychosis#Cocaine . Also I've always been more prone to hallucinate than the average person, sleep deprivation, weed, high fevers have all caused me to have hallucinations. So when I added tons of cocaine and booze and drugs to my natural ability to hallucinate easily I believe it caused drug induced schizophrenia.
Moral of the story is yeah I think something is messing with your brain. I had similar feeling of the weird looks and getting lost and feeling like everything was off and like I was in another dimension or another world. My advice is.
1 try to find a safe place you can stay with a person you trust who can look out for you.
2 if you drink alcohol, coffee, do drugs of any kind stop doing them all now, even coffee, even coca-cola. no drugs, no booze, no caffeine. You don't want unnatural substances messing with your mind while you are in this state.
3 SLEEP. Make sure you are getting sleep, even try to sleep more than usual if possible.

4. try to make sure you eat extremely healthy and are getting regular exercise.
   5 if you are completely sober, eating extremely healthy, exercising and sleeping properly and you still are feeling crazy then go get on some anti-psychotic meds. BUT please try the natural ways first since most of those meds are a crap shoot and don't necessarily 'cure' you. sometimes they make you worse, sometimes they just mask your problems by numbing you, oftentimes these meds give you more problems but sometimes they are the only choice you have.
   So yeah you aren't in another dimension, your brain is just malfunctioning. Try the sober, sleep, eat healthy, and exercise stuff first and see if there are any improvements, if not then seek out another psychiatrist or psychologist. I'm surprised the psychiatrist didn't lock you up and drug you up after you told him your story. The shrinks I've dealt with in my life always want to push drugs on me. Good luck dude. I eventually fully recovered but there was a time where my friend who was watching me thought I might just stay in that insane waking dream state forever. My situation was drug induced though so it probably has a different cause than yours but I did experience a very similar distorted reality to the one you describe.*

Great comment, really fascinating. A bit better than the usual "...seizure!" :-)

There's maybe a fine line between having a looser perception of things (making useful connections and picking up on things) to just seeing the whole world as a pattern. I mean, it is a pattern, and things are often personally meaningful in a synchronistic way, but not always usefully so - it's the obsession with it to the exclusion of everyday living that makes things go a little too far.

Caffeine is "connection juice" for me. It's only when you stop that you realise how such an everyday boring stimulant has a strong effect on your "reality".

We need an OP update soon.

...

OP?

POST: Dear rGlitch, do Glitches make you happy?

I think they're a tip-off that "things are not as they seem" and that's quite exciting - because they reveal the rules are not as solid and unbendable as we assumed. There's a genuine, deep thrill when these things occur.

Sure, sometime it's scary too - because flexible rules mean less certainty as well as more freedom and possibility. Your response maybe depends on which side you fall. I'd say freedom = happiness.

Whether you interpret glitches as "the brain does strange things" or "reality itself isn't what you thought" doesn't matter: your previous assumptions about your everyday moment-by-moment experience aren't correct. Which might lead to /r/neuro or /r/oneirosophy or somewhere in between, depending on your taste and inclination.

What can be scary though is that, no matter which path you take, it'll turn out that you are not what you assumed you were.

...

Q1: Stories in this subreddit can almost always be explained by science, but what makes them interesting is that it adds a touch of doubt.
It makes you wonder if perhaps something else that we just don't understand is going on. Something we haven't figured out about this universe yet.
That level of mystery adds beauty to a world too bland and boring. The world is a magical place when humans are too ignorant to know all of the mysteries around us. As a child, when Santa and the tooth fairy were real, that was magic to you. When someone does a magic trick that you just can't understand yet. The reason religions are so popular.

Q2: So, most of the universe? We really don't know jack about much of it, so saying that science can automatically solve everything is a little much.

Q1: I never said anything remotely close to that.
There are known things in this universe we cannot explain, for instance, quantum physics. We don't know how it works, but it still can be observed. Science isn't the "knowing" of this universe, but the search for what is not known using our observations to better understand what is around us.
What I did imply though, is that we can indeed use science to get an idea of why or how these stories in this subreddit happen. Some times people say they remember something that no one else saw, or even saw something on the edge of sleep.
If we were able to replicate these so called phenomena, we could use scientific method to rule out possible explanations that some people have, like ghost or aliens or whatever.
I honesty think a famous magician on stage isn't actually using actual magic to perform his tricks, but is using illusions to trick us. Having said that, I still ENJOY the idea of not knowing, of wondering, of being in awe and still being subject to very simple bodily senses. I won't jump up on stage and wave the "It's actually science!" flag, because people happen to enjoy his act. It's fun.
This subreddit is fun, and I feel that is one of the reasons why, the possibility of the unknown. I was merely answering your question to the best of my ability.

The problem is the replication, I guess.

Science is great at inferring conceptual frameworks from specific, repeatable observations of regularities or patterns, and reapplying those frameworks more generally. (Much of science is also about the "explanation of explanations".) Most "glitches", though, tend to be one-off life events which occur out of the blue. That's why they're fascinating I suppose - but it also makes them very hard to study.

e.g. "Seizure!" isn't much of an explanation unless you can repeat it, say, but objects appearing and disappearing may point to quirks of our perceptual systems that we might be able to study.

There are definitely certain "commonalities" to the many of the stories here.

POST: [Metax2] The Matrix

It's not really a simulation; that's just an idea your experiencing. In consciousness. Computers, the Internet, AI, their intelligence and wonder is actually just the intelligence and wonder of ourselves, as observers, creators and participants. It is we who give life to information.

You're right, though, that this isn't as it seems. Whether it's the strange nature of subjective experience and its dreamlike ways, or our more esoteric attempts to manipulate it by action or exploration. Something is definitely going on!

POST: Astral Projection

You want to check out /r/astralprojection, /r/outofbody, /r/occult and /r/psychonaut really, rather than glitch. Check out this guide if you're in need of hints. Also recommend the books of Oliver Fox and Robert Monroe.

As to what it's made out of, it's the same stuff as your dreams, as your thoughts, as your body sensations, and as the room around you. Something like this post [Outside: The Dreaming Game] or along these lines perhaps [https://web.archive.org/web/20150224160123/https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/the-new-science-of-consciousness/].

/r/psychonaut is pretty good for the philosophical discussion, I find. This subreddit is more about responding to specific stories.

My take is that our ongoing experience is imaginary anyway to some extent (like this), so astral projection is basically viewpoint-shifting within the same information space, or connecting/creating to other dream-spaces, depending on how exactly we approach it.

Q1: I love this. This way of thinking helps a lot with the fear. Think about it: This life/world iS a dream - a dream we've created (as a challenge? like a chess game or ski jump?) with loss, heartbreak, war, illness, death - and also love, fun, laughter, beauty (let's not forget that part!). But IF it's a dream that can cause us to feel we are experiencing very painful and frightening things, then why the hell would viewpoint-shifting to experience a different dream - or the dream from a different "angle" - be "scary"? What can be "scarier" than the ever-present possibility of illness, pain, loss, etc. "here"? Might as well fly and explore!
Seriously, it seems to take a lot of COURAGE and extreme loosening up of nearly ALL beliefs! It seems the known and familiar hut in the valley is not as "scary" as the distant mansion on the hill. :)

Yeah, that mansion eh! :-)

It's scary because it involves letting go, which leads to a feeling of exposure. Beliefs are like "structural tensions", a held pattern through which the sparkles of experience are filtered into familiar shapes, rather than creative avenues. Beliefs control experience, and we know this intuitively. Releasing those tension means you are open to absolutely anything happening. Which makes us feel insecure.

Even doing a simple exercise that involves opening out can be intimidating. For example: Lie on the floor, and give up completely to gravity. Give up all control, let your body and mind and attention unwind and open. Pretty soon, you'll start to feel the openness around you. Pretty soon, you'll feel the 'danger' in the fact that this openness is unstructured, unbounded, and goes on forever. It's like standing a the cliff-edge, overlooking infinity.

We (arbitrarily) identify with aspects of our experience that are unchanging, or change slowly. Primarily, the "sense of viewpoint location" which is a subtle thought, then the "background texture/feeling" that we intuit as ourselves (beliefs, expectations), then regular thoughts, then body sensations then - lastly, because it changes so much - the world/environment. Really, they're all "you", but you bias yourself into thinking you are the most stable of those... and yet we tend to miss the point.

Because of course the most stable isn't an experience at all - it is the background to experience, the background awareness in which experiences arise. That's the only thing that doesn't ever change, so it's the only thing that can be "you".

Metaphysical ramble over. :-)

POST: [deleted by user]

Something a bit like this perhaps?

[QUOTE]

Third Man factor:
The Third Man factor or Third Man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence such as a "spirit" provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. Sir Ernest Shackleton in his book South, described his belief that an incorporeal being joined him and two others during the final leg of their journey. Shackleton wrote, "during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three." His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences.
Image i - Two mountain climbers:

[END OF QUOTE]

Q1: Kinda? Except that it doesn't happen in any particularly stressful situation, I don't feel any sort of comfort from it, or discomfort for that matter. So it seems a bit similar in the sense that I will randomly feel there's a third person with us.

It stresses the "stress" factor, but actually it's common in other circumstances. More of a "felt presence". Relevant, perhaps:

In a laboratory setting, they were able to evoke such a presence in an epileptic 22- year-old woman, by electrically stimulating part of her brain.
Every time they stimulated the left temporo-parietal junction - a part of the brain involved in organising sensory information - the woman turned her head to the side, convinced there was 'someone' there.
-- A renowned and respected scientific publication

POST: What is a glitch?

[POST]

I like this thread, there is a lot of good stories here, some with more truth than others, but nearly all fun to read. But something I think we should remember is what a glitch is. Isn't it an error in the system? Well, if it is an error, might we not be able to utilize it, and try to break the matrix? We should find out what triggered a specific glitch, try to recreate it, find out if there are bugs and hacks also! In the name of this subreddit, we state that the world we live in is Matrix, and glitch-able. Shouldn't we then hack it and escape?

[END OF POST]

Q1: Ummmmm. That might kill everyone.

Q2: If we can hack it, it is a simulation, and therefore not real. So should we not do it because some believe the simulation?

The worry is that you are simulated, your body and thoughts, and you might therefore discover there is no solid background to it, to you.

If each character in the world is like a wave in the ocean, pulling the plug flushes everyone away...

...

A1: I am glad you asked. I felt for a while the impulse to write down my own definition.
A glitch is not just any type of paranormal phenomenon, it is quite the specific one and this subreddit needs the definition, if we want to weed out things that are not glitches.
A glitch is an event that, when it happens, seems to show our reality as temporarily "broken", by having us experience situations that are impossible or illogical, while being mundane.
Since reality appears as "broken", the idea of a glitch carries with itself two other ideas, not necessarily mutually exclusive:
a) the idea that our reality is in fact a sophisticated computer simulation, which can occasionally glitch out
b) the idea that there are multiple and slightly different parallel universes through which we accidentally cross, therefore experiencing them at the same time
The following are the most often quoted types of glitches (some of the definitions are mine :o):
1- "hardcore déja vu": we see a person walking by, we look away, see the same person walking by again... we see or remember things before they happen, etc...
2- "doppelgänger phenomenon": meeting ourselves
3- "alice in wonderland": while in a familiar area, we casually wander into an area that is unknown and seems to be located in another time or another place, we then wander back into familiar territory in an equally casual way
4- "the no-players-map": casually wandering into a familiar area or indoor location that was full of people only to find it temporarily completely empty; said people reappear after re-entering the same location during a timeframe that is too short to allow for the movement of those people
5- "quantum suicide": having a near death experience where we should have died... and probably did but "woke up" in another universe where we did not die. Example: driving and crashing into another car, only to find ourselves driving normally again, in the same split second, as if the crash did not happen.
6- "the disappearing and reappearing object": objects that disappear suddenly in ways that are logically impossible (closed rooms, no other people around, etc.) and that reappear in similarly impossible ways (falling from the ceiling, etc.)
7- "the odd synchronicities": bumping into the same person an impossible amount of times, witnessing the same event too many times to be able to explain it, etc.
8- "the groundhog day": very rare, as in the movie by the same name, people report experiencing the same day over and over again; it might stop at some point and revert to "normal"... or it might not
9- "the missing time": as the definition implies, chunks of time missing from our memory although the people around us seem to remember spending that time with us
10- "the alternate reality": remembering people that suddenly seem to have never existed or, rarer, the opposite, not knowing certain people we are supposed to be familiar with... a particularly widespread version of this has been called "the Mandela effect": it is remembering certain events as different from what they are officially recorded today, i.e. remembering Mandela dying in our childhood instead of when he actually did die, remembering the location of New Zealand as being different from its current location, remembering the "Berenstain Bears" being called the "Berenstein Bears" instead, etc.
This list is by no means complete but it contains all the types of glitch I could think of at the moment.
Comments welcome!

Great summary!

I think that glitches can be generalised as "space and time" anomalies rather than "ghosts and spirits". This allows quite a lot of leeway in the specifics, but gets to the essence I think.

POST: [Meta] A lot of the people here may have glitched into our universe

[POST]

Assuming many of these stories are true, does it make anyone else feel strange that a lot of the folks here may have "glitched into" our universe or plane or what have you?
When hearing things like rooms disappearing, people being different and things of the sort, I always consider the possibility that these people glitched into our universe in which these things that they describe never happened or were never there. This could indicate that there is another, very similar version of them in the other universe that may have the opposite glitch story or may just never notice that anything was different.
Rather than thinking that something changed within our universe, it is possible that our glitchers have come to an exceedingly similar universe to the one that they came from: the one we all share now.
I think that's pretty fuckin' neato.

[END OF POST]

I like.

And some of the stories really do lend themselves better to that interpretation. Or similar: That we are each in our own "extended dreams" but we overlap with other people's dreams for a consensus reality experience. However, when we push things to the limit of consensus reality, or 'glitch', we snap into another consensus that better fits our personal dream aspect. Thing is, we retain our memory trail of the previous consensus, even though it's no longer valid...

Q1: "...that better fits our personal dream aspect."
My lifelong work has become to transform my personal dream aspect for the better.

I think it always happens, if you give up and let go to the flow. But that might be bumpy, since it'll unfold in alignment with your expectations and beliefs - or events will happen to knock those out of you, before your journey continues.

So the thought is: To what extent can we directly update the dream, directly make jumps? This would involve accepting "discontinuities" in our experience though: broken narratives. And it seems that one of the things we hold onto tightest is the "coherent narrative of our days and lives".

When strange things happen, people usually wilfully don't see them - they internally refuse to experience something which conflicts with their world-view - as the stories in this subreddit often indicate.

Q2: A cool idea to ponder. Though, it would imply that parallel universes are separate and independent from each other. Perhaps, the more likely possibility is that they represent a mesh of sorts, where time and space interweave. The nodes of the mesh might be represented by ideas, and consciousness navigates and weaves the mesh- resulting, in our perception, in what we know as reality.

Yes, all possible universes are enfolded into the our environment, with individual moments unfolding one at a time from our currently "selected" universe.

Look around: All universes and possible moments are literally here with you right now, enfolded holographically into the space of the room you are in.

It would take only one small push for you to glitch into another reality...

POST: Brought my bouncy ball to school, pulled it out of my desk, and it was different

Which means... your Mom had changed too. Neither the bouncy ball nor your Mom are the same ones you had before school that morning. Like this story:

I had woken up to find my key chain had turned gray. My boyfriend and I always had identical key chains (actually they were the lock devices that came with our Jeep), and they were both black. When one of us picked up a key ring, we had to look not at the black device but at the collection of keys, because we had the same house, similar cars and other things -- so we had to look to make sure that the gold keys to my office were on the key ring or not in order to determine which set of keys was which.
One day, I woke up after a fairl hard night of half sleeping, to discover that my key locking device was now gray. My boyfriend never remembers a time when my key chain wasn't gray, and he insists that a difference in color is the way we always told our otherwise identical key chains apart, which makes me think I also do not have the exact same boyfriend anymore.
-- Realityshifters.com

Yes, that's what I assumed as well. However, why would only two aspects of reality change (the ball and my mum)?

Because what changed was the bouncy ball, but the whole universe has to be consistent with the new bouncy ball, which includes your Mum's memories. And, therefore, your actual Mum.

Yes, the simplest explanation is that you jump realities, and the reality you jump to is always self-consistent (if one thing changes for you, everyone else will remember it as always having been the "new" way). Or simply that your dream updates and remains self-consistent; whatever "other people" are is neither here nor there. This gets away from the idea of some people being "transported" or whatever. Nobody is transported. Your dream from your perspective changes. That's it. There are an infinite number of possible dreams, and everyone gets to live out their own version of things and their own version of other people.

Unfortunately, there's no one else I could ask about my ball.

They'd remember the new version.

POST: My girlfriend never knew me

[POST]

About twelve years ago, when I was a teenager, I met two girls. Their names were Michelle and Anna. I met Michelle first and was introduced to Anna through her. We spent a massive amount of time together over the course of several years. Anna and I were actually dating for the majority of that period, and I still have tons of pictures and online chat logs to prove it. Eventually, college came up, Anna moved away, and we split completely amicably. Michelle left for college not long afterward, but things between us were also amicable. We gradually just lost touch.
I hadn't really thought about them for a long time, but I ran into Michelle a couple of years ago. I said hello, but she seemed to have absolutely no idea who I was. I told her my name, and she just stared at me completely dumbfounded. At first I thought maybe I had misidentified her, so I asked if she was Michelle [last name] who went to [her high school] and had been friends with Anna [last name]. She stated that she was, but still seemed incredibly confused. I told her a few other things in an effort to jog her memory, but her expression gradually changed to one of absolute terror. She became angry and started yelling, "Who the fuck are you!? Get away from me." With no other options, I left.
The meeting with Michelle had really freaked me out. I considered that maybe she had suffered a head injury or something of that sort, but I decided to look up Anna online. I found her, living out of state, and sent her an e-mail. She verified who she was, but also seemed to have absolutely no recollection of me. I gave her my phone number and asked to her call. She did. I tried to make her remember, but she continued acting clueless. I mentioned that I'd dated her for almost three years, but she just laughed at me. "That's ridiculous. I was dating Mike through most of high school!" Who the fuck is Mike, I wondered. She accused me of trying to play a trick on her, and she hung up.
The whole situation bothered me for a while, but I managed to let it go. Then, a few months ago, I started going through CD-R backups I had made of old computer data. On one disc were audio recordings from early 2002, recordings I'd created by recording my answering machine messages into a computer microphone. (That might sound weird, but I'm autistic. I have a definite inclination toward saving and categorizing things which feel important to me.) Much of the disc had become corrupt, but two of the messages which remained intact were from girls. Judging by the filenames, one was named Jessica and the other was Heather. Both girls declared that they loved me, but I didn't recognize either of their voices. In fact, I hadn't known anyone with those names since grade school.
Yesterday I called up a few people who had been my friends when I was a teen. None of them had any idea who Michelle and Anna were. Neither did they remember Heather, but they all mentioned how I'd spent years absolutely in love with a girl named Jess. Apparently they'd all met her at least briefly, I wouldn't ever shut up about her, and I was absolutely heartbroken when she broke up with me. Nobody recalled her last name, where she went to school, or any details I could use to find her. They were able to give me a physical description, short and slightly chubby blonde-haired girl, and tell me that she had a squeaky high pitched voice. The girl in my recording does in fact have a voice which fits that description perfectly.
How did I lose Michelle and Anna? How did I gain Jess? Who even is Jess? Has anyone else experienced this kind of thing?
Edit: Several people encouraged me to send an e-mail to Anna about this and include my pictures. I have now done so. Screenshot of the e-mail:

Edit 2: There has been no response. I promise that I will update this post when/if anything changes.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Something similar, but less extreme, happened to me too. I was 16 (12 years ago) and I met a girl from Austria that was doing a high school exchange in my town (in a high school different than mine). Her name was Theresa and she became my girlfriend. She introduced me to some friends of hers, in particular Julia and Mary. The four of us hanged out a lot for 4 or 5 months. After Theresa moved back to Austria I lost contact with all of them, even though it happened I saw Mary randomly a couple of times.
4 years ago (so, 8 years after) I saw Julia on the train and said hello. She had no idea who I was. I mentioned Theresa and Mary, she knew them, but she didn't remember Theresa had a boyfriend. She sounded genuine. She really seemed not to remember me, even though I could mention a lot of places we went to during that Spring/Summer and those sounded familiar to her. I could say where she lived, the name of her sister, and other details that only somebody that spent some time with her could know. She started to feel uncomfortable, she asked me if I have been stalking her or something, and eventually went to another carriage on the train.
I was really weirded out by that meeting and her reaction. As soon I got home I looked her up on Fb and we had 4 friends in common. Three were people we probably met in different circumstances (I used to live in a smallish town), while the last one was Mary. Well, I wrote Mary and told her about my weird encounter with Julia. She confirmed we definitely knew each other. I asked her what she thought of what happened, and she said it was definitely weird, but didn't seem like she wanted to investigate further. She told me she hasn't seen or heard from Julia for a while. I searched for Theresa on Fb too, but I even forgot how to spell her German surname, so that didn't help. I looked for pictures of that Spring. Digital cameras were not that common yet, but I managed to find a few pictures of me with Mary and Theresa, and none with Julia. (maybe she took those other pictures? don't remember that) I have never been able to explain to myself how Julia could remove the memory of me.

Interesting. But maybe that Spring/Summer just wasn't that big a deal; she was a periphery character (or rather, you were peripheral in her life). Still, you'd think there'd be some fragment of recall.

Q2: From the voice mail OP posted: [http://vocaroo.com/i/s0zNuzxkAm2n]
Updated transcript: This is what I heard. Updated many of the undecipherable parts in OP's transcript here: [http://pastebin.com/7G6S87QT]
Synthesized Voice: Three saved. Next message. Sent today at 12:29 A.M.
Jess (?): Hey, it's me. -sighs- I called my friends, like nnnnone of them respond. Nobody called me back. I'm calling people that I know, and they don't pick up or I get their answering machines or something. Because everybody else I called they're not picking up; I'm gonna cry. They don't love me enough to talk to me. But you've got a good excuse. You're asleep because you've been hurt and don't feel good. -sighs-
I wish I could take care of you... give you a rub down, full body massage, and make you feel a lot better. And I'll kiss you all over and you'll feel so much better, because everyone knows that my kisses are the best kisses -giggle-. Okay, nobody knows that; that's stupid and that's not true. -giggles- I'm a crappy kisser anyway. Anyway... I can't believe I've called you so many times and you haven't woken up yet! Aren't you supposed to be here with me too?,(indecipherable) you're supposed to be like, "Wow!"
-exhale laughing-Idk -pause- I heard a voice and it made me like jump or something, but you're asleep and I can't believe you haven't woken up yet! -sigh and giggle- Oh my God. -sigh- Oh boy. What if I alarm like this? BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEP! You didn't wake up for shit. (Truly indecipherable), anyway -giggle-
Oh gosh. I'll probably talk to you tomorrow. -sighs- I need to talk to you, techinally it's already Monday so hope-full-ee I'll get to talk to you later today. Email me when you get home from school, and if I can I'll call you..and (possibly says "well" instead of "and")..you know -giggle- I wake up, you know, like every hour, every hour!
When I can, I'll call you, okay? I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eyes. I love you. Bye.
Synthesized Voice: End of message.*

Q3: So...by reading many times this transcription I think we can all agree that seems obvious from the first part of the message that the girl feel like being herself stranger to this world:
"I called my friends, like nnnnone of them respond. Nobody called me back. I'm calling people that I know, and they don't pick up or I get their answering machines or something. Because everybody else I called they're not picking up; I'm gonna cry. "
This could be seen in 3 ways:
1)OP story might check out as himself not having memory of the girl either him or the girl are out of place.
2)OP story could still be true, and the girl just overreacting to her friends not picking up some calls.
3)OP is making up a story, as the "too good to be true" would fit well in this situation.
I mean...How many chances are there that OP could upload this very message?
It kinda looks really suspicious...but maybe coincidence.

Good analysis.

Q4: It's possible that you need medical attention. Speaking for myself, if I found out that my friends remember me being in love with a girl I have no recollection of, I'd schedule an MRI.

Q5: I've actually had an MRI on my brain. I'm epileptic, so it was a necessity to determine that my occasional seizures (which started when I was in my twenties) weren't caused by a tumor or some severe damage to my brain. My brain's fine and Vimpat has kept me seizure free for a long time. I've probably had between 15 and 20 seizures in my lifetime.
Yes, if anyone is wondering, I have experienced short term memory loss after tonic-clonic seizures, which is normal. I've never lost more than a couple of hours, and certainly not details of multiple years. It also wouldn't explain why other people don't remember me.
Edit: And for the sake of making this a more complete medical history . . .
I've never had more than one or two beers in a single sitting, and I haven't drank in years.
I've never used drugs, not even marijuana.
I have experienced clinical depression and social anxiety. I don't have any other mental health conditions.
The only longterm medication I am on is the aforementioned Vimpat. Previous longterm medications were oxcarbazepine and zonisamide, two medications which are also seizure meds.

Reminds me of the guy who went on a ground camping trip, hit his head diving in a pool, and suddenly the girl who he had been getting on with had never been close to him, and the guy who had accompanied him on the walk had never been there, he'd gone home injured on the first day. This is different though - because it seems the other people do exist. And don't remember you at all, not even as a classmate. So, next: Origin of the photographs with Anna, and who is Mike? Plus: school yearbook?

EDIT: Found the story here [POST: The day the world...shifted...].

[POST]

I recently discovered this subreddit via subreddit of the day and was enthralled by all these stories. It reminded me of something that happened to me long ago, something that always stays slightly at the back of my mind. I never thought of it as a Glitch in the Matrix, but this fits so well! The memories of it are still vivid to this day, even though I had also written it all down in my journal a couple weeks after I got home. (that I've used as a refresher for writing this up)
I was 16 and a typical teenage boy. It was the summer of 1993. My parents had sent me to Outward Bound. A month in the outdoors with other "troubled teens" pushing our limits, making us learn trust, etc. In reality, hiking 10 miles a day with 40-60 pounds on your back in the middle of nowhere with other misfits just trying to get through it and back to our lives.
We were in the Three Sisters wilderness of the Oregon back country. Beautiful land. We we're about 2 weeks in to our month long trip. I became close with a girl named Eva in my group (of about 10 girls and boys, and 3 guides, one guy, two women), who was from Sweden. I had been to Sweden a couple years earlier, and we were able to talk about places I visited that she knew. I'll never forget her, I was completely crushed on her. Beautiful blonde, with green eyes. Tan for a swede. The night before this...Incident, she and I kissed, and we made out a little out off by where we camped. We got caught by one of the guides/counselors, and told that relationships (and especially sex) were not allowed. (Something they drilled into us from Day 1. No drugs. No alcohol. No sex - we were just kissing somewhat innocently)
I had also been friends with a guy named Steve. He has got blisters on his ankle the first week, and it got quite infected. The guides wanted him to drop out, go to a doctor, but he soldiered on. We kept it clean and bandaged and even though he had a noticible limp, he managed to keep up with all of us just fine. He talked the guides into thinking it was no big deal and he stayed. He had amazing will power and I kind of looked up to him. He was almost always our group leader.
Now came the weird part. The part where everything changed for me. We were taking a lunch break alongside a gorgeous crystal blue glacial fed pool. There was a minor waterfall (maybe 10 feet) from the stream above feeding it. The water was deep, but absolutely crystal clear and blue. (and COLD! Very refreshing after a hot summer hike) You could see the soft gravel bottom. Five large boulders stood in a perfect circle on the bottom, as if set there by someone. Completely submerged, they were perfectly equidistant from each other. Someone quickly noted that there was just enough room in the center to dive off the waterfall and swim down to the gravely, beautiful bottom. A couple of the other kids (including Steve, with his injured foot) went and dove. I of course wanted to impress Eva, and she said it looked fun, but was too scared to it. She said she would try it if I did it. My teen ego immediately rose to the challenge. I climbed up the wet rocks next to the waterfall to the top.
I remember looking down at the beautiful crystal blue water. The light filtering through the forest leaves. Eva looking and smiling up at me. It was just a perfect, beautiful day.
I jumped.
The next thing I know I'm on the side of the pool coughing up water with two extremely concerned guides nursing over me, and a massive headache. Their telling me I hit my head on one of the boulders. I'm lucky I'm not dead. Steve is no where around. Eva doesn't look a mote concerned, she's off gossiping with one of the other girls. A couple of the other kids are with me, and the male guide helps me up.
The waterfall is there, but the pool is now a murky green/brown. You can barely see the boulders on the bottom. I think I just must have stirred some dirt or something up the waterfall above the fell in. I wasn't thinking clearly. I seem OK (the back of my head hurts, although my forehead is the part that has a minor cut). The third guide (leader) comes up at this point and makes me do some tests. What year is it? Who's the president? What's my name? etc. It's 1993. Clinton is the new president. All is right with the world.
We take an extra long lunch, just to make sure I'm OK. The guides decide I probably just have a minor concussion. They should keep me up all night just to be safe. They decide we're going to hike to a closer, alternate camp, since I might be concussed. If things get worse, they call the rangers. I didn't notice until later, but Steve was not with us. Eva seemed decidedly standoffish, but I didn't get much of a chance to talk to her. The guides wanted to keep me behind them. (One in the back, two in the front).
At camp that night I notice Steve is missing. I freak out thinking we have left him, and tell the guides. The guides quickly calm me down. They tell me Steve hasn't been with us for 4 days. When his foot got infected, they called the rangers and the rangers took him to town. He could barely walk and he's now out of the program and has been sent home. That made no sense to me. I could have sworn he was with us. I remember all 4 days of him hiking with us and his foot getting progressively better everyday. I didn't say anything else, I didn't want them thinking I was crazy. I figured because of my head I misremembered, although it was all so clear. I remembered talking to him at lunch.
That night it got weirder. The guides were going to take shifts staying up with me. I asked Eva if she would stay up with me a little bit. She looked at me like I was crazy. And her accent was different. She just laughed at me. The male guide noticed and he said to me that I was one hell of a persistent guy. We talked. He said I'd been after Eva this whole time, and I really should give it up. He was nice about it, but it got through to me that I was being a creep (or at least he thought so) I didn't understand. And he said, it wouldn't work anyway, when she get's back to Brazil you'll never see her again anyway. BRAZIL. Not Sweden. BRAZIL. Eva was from Brazil. This was not true. I thought I must've taken a bigger hit on the head than expected. I just stayed quiet from that moment on. I was so confused. I stayed up all night, thinking of things. And in the morning I felt just fine.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, but everything seemed suddenly slightly different for me from that day on. I've never understood exactly what happened. I suppose it's just the head injury. That makes sense but some part of me just doesn't believe it. My world shifted that day. The memories before that moment are as clear and as easy to recall as what I had for breakfast this morning, or my wife's face. Even after I got back, my parents seemed different. They kept telling me what a changed and different person I was. (Outward Bound is supposed to change you, just not I guess, like that). The whole world seemed different. Computers seemed better over night. Like I didn't remember having such a cool computer, just a shitty one. Everything seemed...different. Video games were more popular and better. The rest of high school I felt like an outsider. I had always fit in before. But as the years passed, I've grew used to it, and grew back to my old (new?) self.
Even though I have a rational explanation (my head injury), I have always doubted. I wonder if the Matrix reprogrammed itself, or I switched consciousness with an alternate me, or some how, through some fluke of the universe, I slipped through into a universe almost, but not quite, the same as the one I came from. I'm late 30's now, happily married, and I still think about that day, and that crystal blue pool.

[END OF POST]

Q6: They say the human mind rather than recalling a memory like a computer, instead re-writes a new every time a recollection is made... so maybe that kind of head trauma might result in the brain's ability to rewrite being severely interfered with, forcing new false memories to be written up based on bits and pieces of information from the old memories.
This is of course speculation.
If perhaps the person who bumps his head also has physical evidence (like say a picture or a video) of said people who no longer either look the same or recognize him... well, that's a whole 'nother ball game. A quite scary one, but a different ballgame nonetheless.

No location in the brain has been found for "memories". My thinking is that, while the ongoing present leaves "traces" as it unfolds, it doesn't leave full memories - they're too big; where would they fit?

Instead, these "traces" are re-interpretated as mental imagery; memories are created on demand whenever you put in a request for one.

Since these memories are created on the fly, to be consistent with whatever traces and other circumstances there are, very small changes would lead to quite drastically different 'histories'; your mind would strive to create a coherent narrative for you as best it could, based on the limited information available.

That's why memories change over time anyway: once you know more about a situation, you tend to 'remember' it with those new facts take into account.

*Q7: So this is a good one. But when I read the post and the thread, I see a few relevant bits of information.

1. You are autistic (high functioning I imagine, but possibly have social issues, any sensory issues?).
2. You have epilepsy
3. You were abandoned by your father
4. You have social anxiety.
5. You are depressed
6. You are taking Vimpat, and the drug fact sheet has this to say: "If you develop any unusual or strange thoughts and behavior while taking lacosamide, be sure to discuss it with your doctor. Some changes that have occurred in people taking this medicine are like those seen in people who drink too much alcohol. Other changes might be confusion, worsening of depression, hallucinations (seeing, hearing, or feeling things that are not there), suicidal thoughts, and unusual excitement, nervousness, or irritability."
   In short, before I would consider glitches, I would take a more serious look at neurology.*

I'm going for a fit-based rewire as my main theory at the moment. Brain twitch, trace mangling, then subsequent constructed memories corresponding to the "needs" of the other elements.

POST: The lights went out, but no one noticed.

[POST]

This glitch happened on a beautiful, clear summer evening in 1982. My friends and I were all 17 years old. I was with my best friend, Betty, my boyfriend, Scott, and his best friend Steve. We had not been drinking or doing drugs. It was a Saturday night and we had decided we were going to eat at our favorite local taco place.
Now, this place was set up where you ordered and paid at the counter and then someone would bring you your food. So, we’d ordered and after a few minutes the waitress brought our meals. We were talking, laughing and just having a nice time. The eating area was about the size of a McDonald’s eating area. There were booths along the walls and tables in the middle. The three walls of the eating area were mostly windows. We were sitting in a booth near the door. Scott and I were facing the counter, while Betty and Steve were sitting across from us.
Since it was a Saturday night, the place was fairly busy and there were only a few empty tables. The glitch happened when we were almost done eating. With no warning, the lights turned off and the room was plunged into darkness. Now, as you know, when something like that happens you get a few gasps, someone might let out a small shriek, and people will start asking questions.
None of that happened. Betty, Steve, Scott and I all looked at each other in confusion. We looked around the restaurant and everyone acted completely normal. Families were chatting and eating. People were at the counter ordering. The waitresses were bringing out food. One guy got up and wandered into the pitch black bathroom. The cooks were busy cooking in the dark kitchen. A couple came in from outside and placed an order at the counter.
After looking around and realizing no one else was reacting, we huddled together and asked each other what was going on. Moonlight was streaming onto our table. Car headlights flashed around the room as cars passed by on the busy road outside. Red lights flashed around the room as a police car sped by.
We all watched as a waitress brought food to another table. We briefly discussed getting up to ask her what was going on, but none of us did. We watched as the cashier rang up the new order and the couple seated themselves at a vacant table. We saw a small boy playing with his toy car while his parents ate and talked. And all of this was happening in a room lit only by the moonlight.
Unnerved, we decided we’d go up to the counter and ask what happened. Right then, the lights blazed on. We blinked and squinted in the sudden brightness. Everyone else continued uninterrupted. We waited for a few minutes to see if anything else was going to happen, but nothing did. We finally decided to leave. The rest of the night was completely normal and we never experienced anything like that again.
TL;DR: In a full restaurant, we were the only ones who saw the lights go out.

[END OF POST]

...

Q1: [Deleted]

Q2: Wow, that's a weird story. I wonder if that's what would have happened if we'd asked another customer (or the waitress) about the light.
And you're right, we were regulars- or as regular as our limited incomes allowed :)

See, for the other story I thought it might be a variation on this [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams] - that what we perceive isn't direct and so maybe goes "wrong", like projected memory or accidental self-hypnosis - but when a bunch of people shared the experience, that's not so explainable!

Q2: That's exactly what I think. Four of us experienced it. I moved from the area and lost touch with all three of them for a while.
In the last few years (thanks to facebook), I've reconnected with the guys (I still haven't found Betty). In different conversations with them, I've brought the subject up again. Both of them agree that it happened. Our memories of the incident are basically the same. What's odd is that we're all still questioning how normal everyone else acted. It was like someone had announced a 'power outage' before we came into the restaurant. The thing is that even the customers who came in later acted completely normal. Ordering and paying for their food in the dark, finding a seat, etc. Not one person acknowledged that the lights were out.
It was definitely weird and unsettling.

It's a great story.

I wonder if "sharing a connection" means we are more likely to share a "localised consensus reality"? Being linked, the group of you had the experience together; others didn't; there was no "really how it was" behind the scenes, everyone was just in their own loosely-connected dream-like states. Or something! :-)

(Other 'glitches' occasionally occur with a couple of people, with nobody else sharing the experience. They end up hypothesising being 'in their own world' or 'jumping universes' for the period, and sometimes beyond. It definitely says something about "how things are really", even if that's not a Matrix-type really. These ones interest me the most - rather than lost keys, dreams, I-fell-asleep-for-a-bit.)

POST: Dead cousin is coming to dinner tonight.

[POST]

==Last night I was on phone with my mom, and she told me to come over for dinner. Everything was going great. Then suddenly she comes out with "Janet is going to be there!" I was like, very funny mom, great one. But in my head I was thinking that's really not funny, why would you say something like that? Then my mom keeps going on with this. "You haven't seen her in forever, it'll be nice, etc."
Janet died last year! I have a vivid memory of it. I did -not- attend the funeral, but I remember everyone talking about it and making a scene of it because she died young. She died of cancer and I remember her husband coming to visit and being very depressed. I never saw her body or anything, but I'm 1000% certain this woman is dead and I remember many family members talking about it.
I never saw the body or visited her grave, and I wasn't that close with her so I never had much grief over it. But I have vivid memories of her dying and my relatives being depressed over it.
I was really weirded out by my mom on the phone, and finally I came out and said "Janet's dead, what are you talking about?" And my mom just kept talking like it was ridiculous or like I was kidding around. She jokingly said "She's back!" or something like that.
I asked my dad later on and he looked at me like I was insane. I also can't find the obituary online (but I never looked for it to begin with).
I'm assuming one of 3 things is happening:

• My parents snapped from grief and are imagining my dead cousin is coming to dinner.
• I switched universes where Janet never died
• A zombie is coming to dinner.
  I guess I'll update this post and let you know how it goes? Did anything like this ever happen to someone else?
  I changed the name for paranoia/privacy.
  Edit: I'm finally back, I made a post. Sorry for taking forever.==

[END OF POST]

Q1: Okay, sorry for taking so long. I'm finally back. This probably won't be as exciting as you guys were hoping. But it was indeed the same "Janet" I remembered dying last year. I remember getting a really creepy feeling when I walked in and saw her sitting there, but everyone was acting perfectly normal. Nothing extraordinary happened, but we sat around talking for a long time. She talked with me some about finding work. Coincidentally she sat right next to me during the meal.
Obviously I wasn't going to come out and say "Hey, I remember you died last year" so I just kind of went with it. I wanted to ask about cancer or get some sort of evidence that I'm not going insane, but it seemed inappropriate. Nobody mentioned cancer or anything out of the ordinary. I like to think I'm a sane individual so I kept my thoughts to myself. Saying I have memories of her dying of cancer isn't exactly polite dinner conversation.
The eerie part is that I was sitting around having dinner with the same people I remember talking about Janet's death with. Some of my aunts were there, and I distinctly remember last year one of them crying over it and being in the same spot. I don't know why but this isn't hitting me as strongly as it should. It doesn't seem profound and I'm not creeped out as I should be anymore. The memories didn't clear up once I saw her, and I still know what I saw/heard a year ago. But it doesn't make me question my sanity or anything. It's just ..... very bizarre. I guess I haven't really absorbed it.
So yes, I did have a lengthy conversation with my "dead" cousin that isn't actually dead. She seems perfectly healthy and in great spirits. I enjoyed talking with her and I'm glad she's still alive!

Q2: There is no way to bring that up organically so I don't blame you.
"Hey, why aren't you dead?"

Q3: There's a 4th option I can see being the likely case: false memory.
I'm no neuro scientist by any means, but the brain is capable of playing tricks on us at any given moment. I see it far more likely that this is the case than you "switching universes".
Have you run all of the information you gave us by your parents? How you vividly remember her dying of cancer and everyone grieving? If not, that should be the first thing you do before assuming this is some kind of glitch.

Q4: False memories/switched universes what is the real difference

Q5: False memory has been proven?

Q6: Yeah, false memory can and has been created under experimental conditions.

Experimental conditions that, coincidentally, are identical to the experimental conditions required to induce universe-switching of the subject.

Q7: Another option is that you had a very vivid dream where she died and your memories actually trace back to your dream. If it was that vivid, then it could possibly be a premonition. You might want to tell Janet to have a check up specifically related to cancer. If you remember what kind of cancer, that might help.
In his book on Premonitions, Larry Dossey, M.D., tells of medical cases where the patients sought such check ups related to dreams. Premonitions often come in the form of dreams more vivid than usual dreams. In one case, a woman dreamed she had breast cancer. The exam by her doctor found nothing. She insisted on a biopsy which discovered the cancer.
I regard premonitions as a form of preventive medicine, because they so often warn us of threats to our health. For instance, one woman reported a dream premonition of a breast cancer before it appeared on breast exam or on a mammogram, when there was no lump or symptom of any kind. She even saw the specific location. A breast biopsy confirmed her premonition, and minor surgery completely cured her.
He gives more details about this story in his more recent book, One Mind.
A woman had a dream that she had breast cancer. Worried sick, she visited her physician the next morning. She pointed with one finger to a specific spot in her upper left breast where she'd seen the cancer in the dream. "It's right here,‟ she said. She could not feel a lump, however, and neither could her physician. A mammogram was done, which was normal. When the physician reassured her that nothing was wrong and that they should take a wait-and-see approach with frequent exams, she was not satisfied. "This was the most vivid dream I've ever had,” she protested. “I'm certain I have breast cancer at this exact spot.” When she insisted on going further, the physician, against his better judgment, pressured a surgeon to do a biopsy. "But where? There's nothing there,‟ the surgeon objected. "Look, just biopsy where she points,‟ the physician said. In a few days the pathologist called the original doctor with the report. "This is the most microscopic breast cancer I've seen,‟ he said. "You could not have felt it. There would have been no signs or symptoms. How did you find it?‟, "I didnt,‟ he replied. "She did. In a dream.‟

Q8: Sounds crazy but if you think about it, it's really not all that off the wall. Your body knows that something is effected, body tells the brain (all this so far is subconsciously), brain tells you in a dream.

Q7: Yes, it seems to make some sense that a premonition dream could work when it's your own body. However, Dossey's books, The Power of Premonitions, and One Mind, provide documentation about cases where dreams lead people to avoid potentially negative outcomes, where it doesn't involve their own body.
For example:
Amanda, a young mother in Washington State, was awakened one night by a horrible dream. She dreamed that the chandelier in the next room had fallen from the ceiling onto her sleeping infant’s crib and crushed the baby. In the dream she saw a clock in the baby’s room that read 4:35, and that wind and rain were hammering the windows. Extremely upset, she awakened her husband and told him her dream. He said it was silly and to go back to sleep. But the dream was so frightening that Amanda went into the baby’s room and brought it back to bed with her. Soon she was awakened by a loud crash in the baby’s room. She rushed in to see that the chandelier had fallen and crushed the crib—and that the clock in the room read 4:35, and that wind and rain were howling outside. Her dream premonition was camera-like in detail, including the specific event, the precise time, and even a change in the weather.

Q9: this just gave me goosebumps...

Q7: this just gave me goosebumps...
I know what you mean. I keep thinking about this story all the time. Either it's a hoax or a fascinating story about the kind of reality we live in. One idea I have about this leads me to the hypothesis that we live our lives in one timeline, but we can communicate in some way with ourselves in another timeline. Dossey doesn't really explore this idea much in his book about premonitions. It's a book mostly about documenting that premonitions frequently happen.
Suppose this woman lived out her life in one timeline where her baby died that night. Imagine how she might have felt and all the years she wished that she had not left her baby under the chandelier. Then, she gets a second chance to live her life with her child, because somehow, she managed to communicate with herself across timelines, using the power of premonitions. It's just a hypothesis and I don't know how to go about testing it. The story just seems to have that implication to me.

Or: all time is all at once, and at any point in the timeline you can influence the rest of the time line, from the ground up. Re-seed your reality as it were. As a single pattern.

So, at the point where the baby died, the woman super-intends that it never happened, at which point the timeline is amended in the least invasive way possible - which, obviously, is for her to have an appropriate dream (no material changes need happen in that case) and then make a different decision - to prevent it.

Q7: So, at the point where the baby died, ...
I've studied relativity physics enough to buy into the idea that all time is all at once. I don't understand how that idea, or the idea that the woman could re-seed her reality from the ground up, would differ from multiple timelines all happening in parallel dimensions all at once. Talking about "the point" in time where the baby died seems to acknowledge that in at least one timeline the baby actually died. Otherwise, where is that point? If we accept that the baby died in some timeline, then that timeline always exists forever and in that timeline the woman lived the remainder of her life facing the consequences of that tragedy. Even so, other timelines could happen in parallel where the baby doesn't die.
I've found the YouTube videos about Imagining the Tenth Dimension [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA] helpful in thinking about such ideas.

Hi. I've read the book that goes with that, enjoyable. I'd suggest that the notion of timelines is merely a diagrammatic convenience used for explaining things; there's no such thing as branching, etc, really. The alternative formulation - the grid of all possible experiences, which we traverse over time - is the most general, but even that is an abstraction. It is never experienced. Even the other three dimensions are a bit suspect sometimes...

The difference is between multiple timelines and re-seeding/all-time-at-once arises when you think: How do you cross timelines or communicate between timelines? Which woman has her baby die, and which woman has it live? Or is it the same woman? If each woman-version occupies a different timeline, there is no advantage in sending a message back: her baby is already dead. That another, forever-inaccessible baby lives means nothing (and truly, there would be no bridge between these 'timeline universes'; they are not spatially arranged).

"Re-seeding, all-time-at-once" = rewritable, but self-consistent, single apparent timeline*:

Woman's baby dies, she wishes it hadn't, the timeline updates so it didn't, and now the baby always lived, but there was a dream about it dying, which resulted in the action that led to its survival.

Effectively, at the point of wishing, her present moment shifts discontinuously to a new state in which the baby is alive, with a remembered-past now consistent with that outcome - the explanation for her now being beside a crushed crib "accounted for" by the dream and subsequent action that she now remembers in her past.

In effect, you are just changing the present, with a new past memory in it. So even the notion of a single timeline is just a convenience, a mind-construct.

Q7: even the notion of a single timeline is just a convenience, a mind-construct.
This seems to imply that either way you look at it in the abstract, looking at it one way or the other only serves as a mind-construct. So, it doesn't seem to make any difference how you look at it. Either way would work just fine as a mind-construct. Yet, we still have to deal with the real world and come to grips with what we think actually happened.
The difference is between multiple timelines and re-seeding/all-time-at-once arises when you think: How do you cross timelines or communicate between timelines? Which woman has her baby die, and which woman has it live? Or is it the same woman? If each woman-version occupies a different timeline, there is no advantage in sending a message back: her baby is already dead. That another, forever-inaccessible baby lives means nothing (and truly, there would be no bridge between these 'timeline universes'; they are not spatially arranged).
I think if you put yourself in the mindset of the woman living with the tragic loss of her baby, she would say that it would make a significant difference to her to know that in a different timeline an alternate version of her rescues the baby. Indeed, the communication of the information across the timelines might depend on just how much she felt that it would make a difference to her. For the communication to happen successfully, it might require a strong sense of importance on both the sending side and the receiving side of the communication. I can imagine that a large number of timelines might exist where she does as her husband suggests, rolls over and goes back to sleep, after having the premonition dream, and then the baby dies. After all, what does she care, it was just a dream, not something important enough to get out of bed.
Think about the multiple timeline question, "Is it the same woman?" I think the question has two answers, both yes and no. Up to a certain point in time, the answer is yes. After the woman receives a communication from her future self, then she becomes different in a significant way from the woman who traversed through the same point in clock-time without receiving any such communication. The question is whether that difference amounts to something which should lead us to think of her as a different person or not. People go through life changing experiences all the time where they essentially become a different person. At least that's the way they describe it using words such as, "It changed my life. I became a different person." We might still question that though. When people go through such transitions, do they really become a different person or not? In some ways yes, and in some ways no.

Nice discussion.

This seems to imply that either way you look at it in the abstract, looking at it one way or the other only serves as a mind-construct.

Essentially, yes. It's fine for thinking-about, as it were. When we focus on explaining the real world version, we have to account for a few things.

Let's take "right now" to be the moment of the woman waking up and seeing the crib smashed and the time on the clock. She now has cause to recall the previous events: she remembers having a dream, she remembers moved the baby, she sees the time on the clock. She tries to account for what happened. She thinks...

There's an issue with timelines communicating with each other: If all timelines unfold at the same time, how can the woman in one timeline communicate to the past of another timeline? The moment is already gone in both timelines. Unless both timelines are both "complete" already, in which case it's too late and there's a good timeline and a bad timeline already: one happy woman and one unhappy woman. If they're complete and there is a way of communicating and so one timeline updates another, why not just have a single, self-updating timeline?

I see three ways around this that fit what we know:

1. The woman's intention to save her baby simply updates "right now" and there's no such thing as a timeline really. (No Timeline)
2. The woman's intention updates/rewrites the timeline she is on, sends a dream into the past, which ripples to her present. She updates/reseeds her own timeline. (Single Timeline)
3. The third requires some pondering about what the "woman" is: In regards to the "same person" issue, I'd say that what you are is the "consciousness that experiences your situation", which includes your personality. In other words, your character can change, but you're still you. In this case, perhaps changing timelines is just a case of "refocusing" from your current timeline to another one. Timeline people are "viewports" for experiences, if you like. So in this case, the woman jumps timelines. She detaches from the bad timeline, and refocuses on the good timeline. She is now looking through the eyes of a body whose baby was saved. (Multiple/Infinite Timelines)

What do we actually know, though? That she remembers a dream. That she remembers moving the baby. That the chandalier fell. That the clock time corresponds to the remembered dream. She doesn't remember jumping timelines. Nor does she remember a discontinuity in her experience (reality "shifting"). How things happened seems to always have been how things happened. Her experience of now and remembering the past is self consistent - coherent.

I'd say the version with the minimum "new parts" invented and added to reality is number one: She intended the baby be alive, and reality shifted to have this be the case. This requires that for some reason she would get up and move the baby. The dream narrative works for that. When intending she may even have said to herself I wish I had known about this before, I would have moved the baby, even if I'd had a dream about it beforehand - and reality shifted so that this was the case.

(The problem with "timelines" and "branches" for me is that nobody every experienced them. Where are the timelines stored, where to they take place? How do I get from one to the other? Does the whole universe actually get duplicated every time there's a change? Or is there just an infinite number of universe, covering all possibilities? It's easier surely just to have one, self-consistent universe that takes everything into account, and is updatable. It's just a bit harder to think about or draw diagrams of...)

(Best effort for now.)

Q7: Yes, nice discussion. I like your analysis of the three different ways of thinking about timelines too. Certainly, the more simple perspective is (2), the single timeline. Applying Occam's Razor [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor] would seem to make (2) the best choice. However, for whatever reason, I still feel more satisfied with (3), multiple timelines.
What do we actually know, though? ... How things happened seems to always have been how things happened.
I see this view as a constraint imposed by thinking only about a single timeline. Within the confines of a single universe, we can only experience a single timeline. It's like Flatland.
(The problem with "timelines" and "branches" for me is that nobody every experienced them.
We don't have any direct perception of them, but then again we don't have any direct perception of electrons. Perhaps physicists can eventually devise scientific experiments to detect the definite presence of parallel branches. I've seen some discussions about the double slit experiment that point to parallel universes. You may have seen these scientific discussions about the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics too [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation].
Where are the timelines stored, where to they take place?
The same place where a single timeline would happen. I see this question as the same as asking what place the known universe is in.
How do I get from one to the other?
Although our brains may have evolved to the level where we naturally have a means to communicate between timelines, that doesn't necessarily mean that we could transport between them. Who knows though, maybe some technology could make that possible, something like on the TV show Sliders [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdrNNKYBMXM].
Does the whole universe actually get duplicated every time there's a change? Or is there just an infinite number of universe, covering all possibilities?
It could work sort of like how a computer game simulates a world for a user. The game processes the current state of the world, together with the current user input, to generate the next state of the world. The game doesn't have a complete tree of all possible worlds, given all possible user interactions.
Then again, maybe the universe doesn't react with conscious minds to form parallel branchings. In that case, the infinite branching view seems to fit better. I think of this as similar to how the physics of the universe has particles interacting with other particles. Only, in the parallel universes some kinds of reactions can happen in ways that allow the particles of the parallel universes to interact with each other. This would then provide the infrastructure by which humans might have the means to communicate across timelines. So, however we might imagine that telepathy might work in a single timeline universe, it might also work across timelines, both forward and backward in time, in a parallel universe.
It's easier surely just to have one, self-consistent universe that takes everything into account, and is updatable. It's just a bit harder to think about or draw diagrams of...)
Yes, in some ways it's surely easier with the single timeline. Yet, as you say it's also harder to think about it that way too. Consider how Einstein changed our view of how time passes. That's not a straight forward and easy way to think about time. It's much easier to assume that our human perceptions about time give us an accurate sense about time. That works until you try to resolve experimental issues about measuring the speed of light. That's when relativity becomes the easier way to think about it.

[QUOTE]

Occam's razor:
In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae). Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used these exact words. Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred."
Many-worlds interpretation:
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in different "worlds". The evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic: 9  and local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957.[ Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it many-worlds in the 1970s.

[END OF QUOTE]

EDIT: Whoops, quite long. Sorry.

To expand a bit on the 1-2-3 options

For me, Occam's Razor suggests (1). Although it's harder to think about, it involve less extra parts. When we remember something, we don't "reach into the past" and we don't even have a full memory, we create a memory in the present based on some sort of trace. Often, people who had the same experience differ in their recall. This suggests to me that there is just "now", and as "now" changes, it leaves traces, which are then used to create ("now") an image of a "past" by inference.

Alan Watts had a nice metaphor: the ship and its wake. A ship travels along the ocean, leaving its wake behind it. Would anyone say that the wake causes the ship, causes the movement of the ship? No. In the same way, the past doesn't cause the present, it is a trace left in the present, by the present changing.

For the purpose of thinking though, it's easy to diagram/mentally assemble the idea of a timeline (for straight past-present-future) or branching (to imagine "options" and choices being made). However, we can demonstrate to ourselves that this is just a habit of thought:

Think of a past event. Now point to where that event seems to be. Do the same with an anticipated future event. Now, most people imagine past events to the left, future events to the right, present now, on an imaginary thought-timeline. (In other cultures, they imagine this as back-to-front literally: past to the back of them, future to the front.)

So it's an approach of convenience; we can't find it in our actual experience.

Consider how Einstein changed our view of how time passes. That's not a straight forward and easy way to think about time. It's much easier to assume that our human perceptions about time give us an accurate sense about time.

That's a very good point. How we think about it (above) and how it is - quite counterintuitive (however it is).

Branching and Many-Worlds

I find the Many-Worlds interpretation to be a bit of a clunker myself (even though I find it attractive, in my imagination). It's just a way to try an escape from the probabilistic interpretation of QM. Without a way to actually detect the other universes, it's non-falsifiable, and basically not scientific. It's in the maths, but not in "reality". Whatever that is. :-)

It is a really nice mental picture though. One of the visualisations I had for "jumping realities" went for the grid-of-possibilities notion, which you can read here.

It could work sort of like how a computer game simulates a world for a user. The game processes the current state of the world, together with the current user input, to generate the next state of the world. The game doesn't have a complete tree of all possible worlds, given all possible user interactions.

That's a nice image. It goes quite nicely with the grid-of-possibilities approach too. Ever read /r/Outside? It imagines the world-as-computer-game. Which leads to another possibility...

Shared Dreams and Extended Persons

If what each of us "is", is a consciousness - and a creative consciousness at that - then we can maybe do without having to pre-make universes, or having whole universes create themselves when there's a change, or having grid of possibilities.

If we are "consciousness + beliefs + intentions" then we could propose that each person lives the dream that they want. It is a personal dream, but it also overlaps with other consciousnesses which share your beliefs. When your intentions differ, your dreams will cease to overlap with those whose intentions are counter to yours.

There are no timelines, just lost of "nows", perspectives, intermingled, co-creating.

When the woman discovered her dead baby, she super-intended for it not to happen. Her dream was then updated to take account of that. Since there were hardly any other observers, that wasn't a problem - no counter-intentions. The dream updates for all participants, with a modified trace of the past:

If, however, other people had seen the baby dead, that might change things. We then have these possibilities:

a) It would not be able to be undone, because of "conceptual momentum" of others who witnessed the vent (the beliefs of others being strong and preventing the chance), or

b) It would be undone, because nobody would oppose the undoing of this event - no-one is intending against the change, or

c) The woman's perspective becomes 'de-coherent' and her dream continues with an alive baby, other participants dream continues with a dead baby.

d) The death of the baby remains a fact.

But this leaves us with one thing to tackle: If the dreams 'de-cohere', become split, what happens to the apparent woman who is left in c) when the dreaming woman has split off? Two options:

a) We are extended beings, a representation of each of us is present in everyone's dream. All versions. It' just that our "consciousness" only engages with one particular aspect of our extended self. (This gets close to being another version of Many Worlds though.) Better:

b) Philosophical zombies. It doesn't matter whether a consciousness is "looking through" a person or not. The mind and body will continue 'on automatic' even if no consciousness is experiencing it. It simply will never get re-directed by the 'free will' of the consciousness. It will roll along its present trajectory.

Brains and Timelines

Although our brains may have evolved to the level where we naturally have a means to communicate between timelines, that doesn't necessarily mean that we could transport between them. Who knows though, maybe some technology could make that possible, something like on the TV show Sliders.

Yes, so what we've just done is switch "brains" for "consciousness" and allowed ourselves to effectively gain control over our own "now" - and hence apparent timeline. We don't need to do the jump or communication though, because we always basically choose the version of the world (dream) that we want. It's other people (consciousnesses) which get left with the bad stuff, if they 'de-cohere'. We've moved away a bit from a materialistic view here, but I thought it was worth exploring to see what ideas it added in terms of getting away from a physical branching - maybe going more towards an "informational universe" idea?

Integrated Information Theory is an interesting read at the moment [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-theory-of-consciousness/].

...

[QUOTE]

Section 4. Dick's Exegesis of article VALIS:
VALIS has been described as one node of an artificial satellite network originating from the star Sirius in the Canis Major constellation. According to Dick, the Earth satellite used "pink laser beams" to transfer information and project holograms on Earth and to facilitate communication between an extraterrestrial species and humanity. Dick claimed that VALIS used "disinhibiting stimuli" to communicate, using symbols to trigger recollection of intrinsic knowledge through the loss of amnesia, achieving gnosis. Drawing directly from Platonism and Gnosticism, Dick wrote in his Exegesis: "We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction—a failure—of memory retrieval."

[END OF QUOTE]

QX: I believe it is true dreams reveal things we don't consciously realize, but that it's definitely not a premonition.
I know someone who terminated a pregnancy after a great deal of handwringing about whether or not she could manage it unplanned. She had a dream in which the father's dead mother (who she'd never met) spoke to her of about a few things and also told her that she was going to have twins, a boy and a girl.
She did end up terminating as I said, and learned that there were two embryos. She mentioned this to her doctor, who said it wasn't uncommon, for patients to sometimes intuit this sort of development.
However, it doesn't seem to be a premonition so much as subconscious awareness.
For myself, I learned quite traumatically that the person with whom I'd been involved with for years had been concealing something large and troublesome from me. It was not a thing I'd outwardly pick up from our interactions, but I was plagued with constant nightmares that drove my desire to learn more and indeed, my dreams did reflect a truth I'd not consciously realized.
I would not call it premonition. I just didn't know I knew. I knew all along.

QZ: I believe it is true dreams reveal things we don't consciously realize, but that it's definitely not a premonition.
I understand how your personal experiences and the experiences of your friends, related to how dreams reveal things, provide evidence that supports your belief that dreams reveal things. However, nothing in your comment provides any reasoning for your strongly stated comment ("definitely not") about premonitions. Perhaps you only meant to distinguish between intuition and premonitions. I would agree that the kinds of experiences you described would not necessarily fit in the set of what many people understand by the word 'premonition'. That such kinds of intuition could happen, whether premonitions actually happen or not, seems reasonable. Thus, one might believe in such kinds of intuition and also say that they believe that such intuitions are definitely not the same thing as premonitions.
Anyone who has doubts about whether premonitions actually happen, yet would still remain open to any evidence that they do happen, would benefit by reading Larry Dossey's book, The Power of Premonitions, which documents, in a scholarly way, the relevant supporting evidence. The documented evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the distribution of experiences people have of premonitions runs higher than we should expect for chance coincidences. Moreover, the level of detail in the premonitions, in some cases, makes it seem absurd to deny that an actual premonition happened, rather than a coincidental close association between the premonition and the future event.
For example, elsewhere in this thread I described a premonition a woman experienced as a dream about a chandelier falling and killing her baby. One could claim that she had an intuition about the danger of the chandelier. Accordingly, her dream could have simply revealed to her what she already knew all along as a subconscious awareness. She might even have seen a weather report predicting a storm at some time before she went to bed. Her dream could have combined the weather report, and her intuition about the dangerous chandelier, and how the storm could cause the chandelier to fall. So, it could all have happened as a coincidence that the chandelier actually did fall on the same night as her dream. However, it becomes absurd to think that she also had a strange kind of intuition that revealed to her that the chandelier would fall precisely at 4:35. Such a level of detail places the dream well beyond the realm of a chance coincidence, and it also puts it beyond the realm of intuition. How could her intuition tell her what time the chandelier would fall?
Now, consider for a moment what that minor detail does to the woman who had the dream. She wakes from the dream and tells her husband about the dream. He tells her to go back to sleep, because it's only a dream. That leaves her in the mode of debating with herself whether to consider the dream as a premonition, possibly even an intuition revealing to her conscious mind the danger of the chandelier. As she went through her internal debate, it didn't lead her to rush immediately to rescue the baby. She took the time to discuss it with her husband. Then she faced the detail about the clock, 4:35. She faced an existential decision about whether she believed in premonitions or not, and she only had until 4:35 to make up her mind. Ask yourself, could you go back to sleep if it was you with that minor detail included in your dream? What would you do? Would you wait until morning to change the position of the crib?
When she got out of bed to rescue the baby, she acted on her belief that her action could possibly make a difference. In other words she had sufficient belief that she knew about an event that would happen later that morning to lead her to act on that belief. Our beliefs lead us to act upon them. In a dark room, we flip the switch to turn on the lights, because we believe that if we do, then the lights will turn on. If you put yourself in the position of the woman who had the dream, and you have to decide whether you will leave the baby in the crib until after 4:35, and you can honestly say that you would leave your baby there so that you can wait until morning to move the crib, then I would accept that you don't believe in premonitions. On the other hand, if you would get up to rescue the baby, then I would say that you do believe in premonitions.
Some things lend themselves to scientific investigation better than others. Dreams fall in the realm of something difficult to analyze with experiments. We have some results, but it remains a relatively young science. Likewise with premonitions. Although, what most people would call a premonition happens fairly frequently. It's not something that happens in a way convenient for scientific investigation, like the motion of the planets, or earthquakes. That does not mean that we shouldn't believe that premonitions happen, simply because science hasn't given us conclusive evidence yet.

Surely the difference between intuition and premonition is just the time at which the 'fact" is true. Intuitions are about "facts now", premonitions are about "facts later"... but they must still involve "facts now"?

The chandelier case involves "facts now": additional knowledge about now: that she sensed now that the chandelier was unsafe, and even when it would "fail". That information was available "in the universe", at that time.

Effectively, it's still intuition, but not restricted to body-based-information intuition?

Some things lend themselves to scientific investigation better than others.

True. One-off life events can't be studied under lab conditions. There is no regularity or repeatability, and they are rarely of the same 'nature' between instances. I doubt we'll ever really be able to study premonitions of this type beyond anecdote collection.

QZ: That information was available "in the universe", at that time.
I like this idea about information available in the universe. With respect to the woman's premonition story, I wonder if she didn't act or think in some way after her baby died which assisted her own access to that information at the point in time where she had the premonition. With all of the information available in the universe, her dream focused precisely on the information that would help her to save her baby.
I also like the idea of thinking about intuitions and premonitions as essentially the same. I've never thought about it that way. That seems helpful. People in general tend to accept that intuitions happen, even though we can't explain how they happen. Yet, many people can't accept that premonitions happen. I think notions about the arrow of time prevent people from accepting that premonitions really happen.

Good point about the 'arrow of time'. But if all information's available, all time is now, effectively. (Neville Goddard has a nice line in one of his books: Everything is deterministic, except when you make a change via intention, at which point you shift the direction, and it plays out deterministically again from that point, in that direction. So everything can be known of past and future, except for the changes brought about by this creative interference.)

Also: see my other, clumsy comment on timelines elsewhere in this thread, describing the intention. You only ever need to change now. We just often have a bit of a bias against dramatic discontinuities taking place as explanations - but it's an easier explanation than "multiple timelines" actually. There's one unfolding experience, but all moments contribute to the entirety, which is effectively an updating of "now".

(She doesn't need to have actually had the dream at the time, she just needs to end up stood beside a broken crib, holding an alive baby, and having a memory of a dream and of getting up that accounts for and is consistent with her "current present moment". How could you tell the difference? Your whole reality could change right at this minute: you could turn into a Belgian sailor, and as long as when you looked for a memory you got a consistent one, you'd be okay with that. Sailor.)

POST: Bone.

[POST]

This happened like, literally 5 seconds ago. I'm sitting in my bedroom on reddit when my dog walks in and picks up his bone and walks away. Pretty normal, right? WRONG. My dog has only one bone. He already ate it like 10 minutes ago. Now he's chewing on one in the living room, that didn't exist previously. Only explaination: My dog IS the glitch.

[END OF POST]

A1: Quantum Bone Immortality.

And your cat can teleport.

What? You don't have a cat? Exactly. It teleported even before you got it. That's how smart they are.

POST: Physicist's theory on interacting parallel universes

[POST]

Just sharing his theory all laid out [https://www.iflscience.com/physicist-predicts-parallel-universes-overlap-and-interact-26184].

[END OF POST]

Q1: I just find this concept too mind-boggling to fully appreciate.
It's one thing to talk about all time existing at the same time. It's another to now hypothesize that a universe exists for every single probability imaginable.
Just imagine how big this universe is in and of itself. And then to think that every single scenario possible can take place or rather is taking place at the same time, and in the same space? It's just too much.
Just the probable scenarios that could take place on one planet alone like Earth would be astronomical.

See here for an alternative formulation (in the comments). Configuration spaces! Like Julian Barbour's Platonia idea: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonia_(philosophy)].

A further point: The universes wouldn't be in "space" really; it's not like they are in a storage facility. Each possibility isn't discrete, just like each frequency in the spectrum isn't discrete.

But... all this, is just nonsense. :-/ It comes out of that maths, it just a way of accounting for the different probabilities. But these probabilities don't need to "exist" anywhere; only one outcome is ever observed. Alternative formulations - e.g. David Bohm and de Broglie and BJ Hiley - give us a deterministic version of quantum mechanics (the environment becomes the observer, so there is no collapsing of the wave function), so only one universe.

I do think that this universe is quite... flexible though. Probably go for idealism rather than materialism (idealism: consciousness is fundamental) to get the Matrix effect, I'd say.

One universe, but perhaps many possible dreams...

POST: Automatic reaction

[POST]

This happened not too long ago, It was my sophomore year of college and I had just got done cooking myself some pasta and sauce in my small apartment kitchen. So fast forward to me cleaning up and putting everything away, I just got done putting away the pasta box and all the other things I'd taken out of my pantry and put my focus and attention on the dishes. My kitchen is super small, when you walk in the sink is directly ahead, fridge to the right, and a row of cabinets to the top left above the stove and oven with about a 3 foot gap between counter tops. So as I was doing the dishes, I get this feeling in my arms like they're slowly becoming numb and I'm no longer controlling them, they"re just kind of moving on their own. This is not an exaggeration to try and make whoever reads this more impressed, my arms were moving so fast and I was cleaning dishes with such precision and efficiency that I was convinced someone had drugged me or put coke in my food or something, I had no explanation at the time, but I could not stop my arms from doing the dishes, it was like I was watching somebody else do them through their eyes. Then all the sudden my body turns incredibly fast to my left with my left arm out and i catch a box of noodles that was all ready half way out of the pantry falling to the ground. I was not consciously aware that they were falling, I did not hear the box fall from the pantry nor did i see it. After that happened my arms regained control, I stayed up that night, the whole night... just trying to give myself an explanation on what just happened. Never told a soul until right now.

[END OF POST]

This is actually pretty normal. There's a technique for being good at catching/hitting stuff:

• Centre your awareness in your forehead area.
• Keep out of the rest of your body.
• Have a friend throw a ball at you.
• You will catch it super-fast and automatically, in a "creepy" way.

The feeling is very much that "your body is moving by itself". Thing is, though, that is what's happening quite a lot of the time; you're just not paying attention. (When you do pay attention, you'll tend to 'hold on' and create the feeling of 'doing'.)

Q1: When my mother was once explaining this technique to me, related to fencing, she called this state of mind/body "grocking." I do not know if that is French or English nor what, that is how the word sounded.

Q2: "Grok" is a made-up verb from a novel called "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein. When I was in high school in the 60s-70s, everyone and their mother-in-law was reading it. "Grok" refers to a special, deep, intuitive kind of understanding, if I recall.

[QUOTE]

Grok:
Grok /ˈɡrɒk/ is a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science-fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, where it is defined as follows:
Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines to grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment".

[END OF QUOTE]

POST: Tamagotchi Dream

[POST]

When I was a kid, in the 4th grade, I believe, Tamagotchi had just come to the U.S. and was hugely popular. Like every other kid, I really really wanted one. There was one night where I had a dream that I was going into my house after coming home from school, only to find a purple Tamagotchi sitting on the dining room table. In this dream, my mom said she would have gotten me one that was a different color, but that was all they had left. Before I could respond, I woke up from the dream.
Low and behold, next day, I'm coming home from school, same outfit as in the dream (which I didn't notice until after the fact), and guess what's sitting on the table: the purple Tamagotchi. As I open it, my mom walks in the room at the same time as in the dream and says the same exact thing. In this ending though, I gave her a big hug and said "THANK YOU!!!"

[END OF POST]

Yeah, I used to always have intuition/knowledge about presents. One time I was going to the States as a treat for my birthday (I'm UK based). One day in the week before, my girlfriend came in the room and I just "knew" what present I was going to get (an electronic device of the time). Sure enough, on holiday visiting our friend, that's what I got.

Similarly, I'd know when it changed. My parents got me a games console when I was a kid, but it didn't work so they had to take it back, and got me some Star Wars stuff instead. Thing is: I "knew" I was getting the console, and then I "knew" I wasn't, before Christmas day.

(In other words, it's not precog, more 'extended awareness' or something. Also, I am plainly selfish and all-about-me!)

Extended awareness, eh? Sounds interesting. Good to know I'm not the only one!

I think it's probably something you can get good at, with practice. I've not really deliberately tried though. Maybe this December eh! :-)

POST: Seeing dark figures.

[POST]

Not sure how else to describe this. Over the last 3 months or so, I keep noticing things out of the corner of my eye. The first few months I shrugged it off as my brain just acting up in strange ways, but it keeps happening. Lately, it's been a bit more detailed in nature. Just last night I was driving home and saw a dark figure seemingly run across the street. It was dusk, but no other car was around me and when I looked at the other side of the road no one was there. Just a few days before that, I saw a similar figure standing on the sidewalk as I drove by. It's beginning to kind of get to me, thinking about seeing a psychic or something along those lines just to see if they mention anything. Which is a really strange thing for me to be sitting here typing as I am not the kind of person who thinks psychics are real or paranormal activity is going on.

[END OF POST]

Mostly in the dark? Peripheral vision? [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations]

[QUOTE]

Visual release hallucinations
Visual release hallucinations, also known as Charles Bonnet syndrome or CBS, are a type of psychophysical visual disturbance in which a person with partial or severe blindness experiences visual hallucinations.

[END OF QUOTE]

Q: No they mainly happen during the day or towards sunset. At night I typically don't notice it at all. I work in a brightly lit fluorescent room and it happens there too. Also, I'm not partially or severely blind.

Just suggested it for the glaucoma thing, which would mean getting it checked soon as. It can start with minor "errors" like that, that build. Do you get any weird "distance" effects? Look up Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

Otherwise: Stalked By Evil!

Q: God damn, I hope it's not glaucoma. I'm only 27. I mean, no strange distance effects really. I wear contacts and get a regular check up from the optometrist. Last time I went he said my eyes actually slightly improved.

Probably isn't, but get it checked anyway eh? If you'd always seen stuff or if it was a one-off, different, but... And I assume you haven't recently started meditation/cotter practices?

What are cotter practices? I do meditate, but that has been an on going thing for the last 5 years or so. I mean, this really started kind of out of the blue. At first I did think it was hallucinations of some sort, but now I just don't know.

Other! :-)

Hmm. Keep an eye out. So to speak. And update above with other developments.

POST: I put tinfoil in a microwave and it cooked normally

So long as it doesn't have edges and is in contact, it can be fine.

From Physics Forums:

Q: I recently purchased a new microwave oven, and there's a metal rack in it. The salesmen informed me that it shouldn't cause any problems as long as it didn't touch the sides; however, he was unable to tell me why this is. I have a basic understanding of how microwaves(as in the radiation not the ovens) interact with polar molecules causing heat and how they interact with delocalized electrons, and I can't think of an explanation as to why not touching the sides would prevent this interaction from occurring. Well, that's a lie; a more accurate statement would be that I cannot think of a satisfactory explanation. Any thoughts?
A: I cannot think of any problems if it touches the sides of the chamber, I would think that the shelf spans nearly the width of the chamber already and is just separated by a few centimeters of holding brackets (if even).
A microwave is a resonant chamber, the chamber is enclosed by good conductors like metal. The main problem with metals in a microwave is that the electromagnetic waves in the oven induce currents and charge localizations in (and mostly on) conductive objects. Objects with sharp points create an effect known as field enhancement because the density of currents and charges at a point is very high despite the actual magnitude being low. The field enhancement can cause the air to breakdown allowing sparks to occur. But a rounded metal object is usually ok which is why you can place the rack in the oven and I cannot imagine any real problems of the rack coming into contact with the walls that wouldn't occur already by just having it in close proximity to the walls.
-- Physics Forums

POST: Apparently somebody hit rewind

[POST]

Husband and I were coming home from dinner with friends tonight. He turned onto the road that eventually leads to our house; it starts out making a large S-shaped curve before going straight for a few miles. We went through the first curve and were partway through the second when I looked to the side out my window for a moment, then looked back... and we were just heading into the first curve again. As I realized that, I had a brief moment of dizziness like you get when you've been moving fast and suddenly stop. It only lasted for a second or two and then cleared.
I turned to my husband and said, "Wow, that was weird!" and proceeded to tell him about it. He hadn't noticed it himself, so apparently it was just me. Not as interesting as some stories here, but it was an interesting sensation for sure.

[END OF POST]

Given my post the other day, how much do we think our experiences might be almost entirely mind-generated, based on only very minimal hints from the senses?

Things like this, maybe you're basically in 'dream mode' and it's only if you suddenly pay attention that you're forced to 'reset' to match what's actually going on. Mostly, it just passes unnoticed that you're inventing/assuming the experience in the background to your journey, etc.

Q1: Ultimately, our entire consciousness is essentially just the brain making sense and forming patterns out of the millions of data points streaming at us all the time from our surroundings. It's definitely not a perfect process and can be easily perturbed and influenced by a huge number of factors that challenge the brain's effectiveness at stitching reality together reliably.
My guess at what happened here is OP was sat in the car not really focussing on the journey. They go through an S bend somewhere (or something that feels like one) and she assumes they're nearly home. Then they drive on a bit and eventually actually get to the real S bend that leads to their home.
The key thing here is that the perception of what happened is perfectly legitimate - OP felt like she somehow lived through the same moment twice. However, it's vanishingly unlikely that this actually hapoened, with a mundane explanation most probable. Similarly, déjà vu feels incredibly odd and real despite the fact that it is, in all likelihood, an illusion of the brain and not genuine reliving.
I find it important to recognise this as people can often feel belittled and sleighted if they are presented with a more likely alternate explanation for their paranormal/matrix glitch experience. Really though they should feel safe in the knowledge that their sensation and experience was genuine even if the event they believe happened was illusory.

The key thing here is that the perception of what happened is perfectly legitimate

Yes, this is important. People actually do experience what they experience, literally. They are not mistaken in this regard, and didn't imagine it. They really experience it - - - however, if your experience is generated from minor clues and expanded into 'experience' by background knowledge/thoughts, then sometimes we can go quite far adrift.

This isn't to say that some 'weird stuff' doesn't go on: I think it does. However, the nature of the underlying reality (if there is such a thing) might be so different in its form from what we actually see around us, and the level of inference so high, that navigating the world requires an ongoing 'fake narrative' that inevitably goes astray sometimes, and then we see that we 'make up' most of the world.

POST: Lost An Hour Of Time...

Q1: daylight savings time baffles me also

20 years ago, even if all the clocks were digital, they wouldn't have auto-adjusted? Even computers used to require manual changing I think, because they'd be running Windows 3.1? From a website:

I honestly don't remember Windows 3.1 even offering the feature to make the clock change. I don't even think it ever acknowledged timezones. (A program called 'Tardis' was used to set the network time for Windows machines instead.)

But to check... where does OP live? When did this happen? In the EU summer time begins at 1am so the jump would be from 1am>2am. In most of the US, this happens at 2am>3am.

Wouldn't explain the CD though. And if they were thinking so hard about it, surely they would have come up with that solution?

I live in the eastern US, and I don't remember precisely when this happened other than that we were on summer vacation from school. So that would put the event sometime in June, July or August. And even if it did occur in April or October when the clocks are adjusted for daylight savings, I can definitely say that this was before the time of self-adjusting clocks. And even if we did have self-adjusting clocks, the time is either adjusted forward one hours from 2am to 3am, or backward one hour from 2am to 1am - neither of which would explain a change from 1am to 2am.

What I figured. So, go crazy: What's your best theory on this?

Q2: We're making every single bit of it up, and trying to figure out how to make it up BETTER - which we actually already know, but the whole point it to see that we know. We're trying to wake ourselves up with all these "glitches". That's the best I've got at this very moment, otherwise, I'm all out. (btw, I'm a big talker, but it's very challenging to "do".)

Our attempt to wake ourselves up, I like. My best attempt so far is here. The 'game' part is a joke, but the manner in which experience is created, not necessarily.

Q2: (Re: r/Outside - Thank God I'm sorta old and the only computer games I've really played were Myst in the early 90s, and Farmville! I say "Thank God" because I know how addicting they can be.) I liked your comment about players sometimes "losing track", being in an "off-state", etc. In my experience, a regular practice of meditation, a very serious trauma or "falling in love" result in a tremendous increase in "glitches". Anyone else experience this?

Yeah, /r/Outside is a nice satire about how immersive/addicting they can be. I did a bit of Myst and Tome Raider but then mostly let it go. I enjoyed The Last of Us though. All of these have a defined end-point, however! (I guess /r/Outside does too, but it's more... final.)

Meditation, lucid dreaming, or any hard-thinking about the nature of things seems to shift things and bring out the synchronicities and quirks. My other post here showing how 'indirect' and created our perception is, I guess, suggestive of just how flexible things might be. Donald Hoffman has an idea that what we experience is like a 'user interface' for our world, based on utility rather than accurate representation - so perhaps when we change our 'goals' our representations adjust accordingly, to be more useful for that aim...

POST: What would you guys call these... flashes of consciousness?

Everyone's gonna say "absence seizure!", but -

Is it like suddenly "waking up" and being self-consciously aware of yourself and what you're doing?

Yes, almost exactly so.

You're just "coming to". It's something you can practice. Actually, some people do this deliberately: "pretend you just 'appeared' here right now" as an exercise.

Hint: Next time you wash the dishes or tidy up or whatever, trying keeping your attention centred - but not focused - where your prefrontal lobes would be: behind the eyes a bit and up. Imagine you are "looking out from there". This helps you stay "here". See if you can stay "present" throughout the task.

That sounds kind of odd, not gonna lie, but I might give it a try next time.

Yeah it does a bit! It's just a trick for mindfulness. It just keeps your attention from drifting and getting lost in random thoughts, but also stops it super-focusing and getting lost in what you're doing. It should feel the same as that "being awake" feeling, especially if you make sure you take your time with whatever it is you're doing and don't try to rush it, and kind of relaxed.

Give it a go.

...

Q1: Something similar happens to me, too. I think "Why do I see and feel through this body? Why can't I leave and see the world through another person?" But I guess all the bodies need one "conscience" to "pilot" them, and that's why I can't leave. (Why can't we switch places with someone else, though?)
Sometimes (it happens less frequently now) I have this feeling of coming back to reality and I'm like "Oh no, I spent too much time without really feeling!"

Q2: (Why can't we switch places with someone else, though?)
Oh god, that'd be nice. If you ever get sick of yourself, just change over with a willing participant, kind of like a "body vacation" type thing.

Can't find the quote, but I remember the non-duality author Frances Lucille has a book called The Perfume of Silence, and in it someone asks him: why can't I see from your perspective or become another person, if we are all just 'fragments' of the same consciousness? He replies that you could, but it's just that you don't truly believe that you can. In a way, if our bodies are just part of the overall 'environment' and we are 'awareness' looking through them, there's no reason why we can't look out from another perspective really. How you'd go about "doing" that, I dunno. By willpower alone?

I fancy re-perspectivizing to someone in the Bahamas for a bit.

Q: [Deleted]

Yeah, yeah - but if you do this, then you are them! Instead of "you" looking through "SubDee54's body", you'll be looking through "Bahamas guy's body"! I'm gonna practice this weekend, definitely. Hey, if you feel a funny sense of 'displacement' over Sat/Sun, it's just me practicing, okay? :-)

EDIT: Found the quote:

Q: If what you say is true, then I should be able to change places with you, but I don't think that would work!
A: It wouldn't work simply because you think it wouldn't work. What makes this perspective seem unlikely is our assumption that consciousness is personal. This complicates everything because, obviously, a personal consciousness could not possibly be that which creates and contains the totality. When we say that everything is contained in consciousness at every moment, it seems impossible only because we perceive consciousness as personal.
-- The Perfume of Silence, Frances Lucille

So, um, make of that what you will! :-)

Q: ... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L89MTQjvZ0]

Yeah, exactly.

I still love the idea though.

POST: Extreme Déjà vu?

[POST]

So the other day I was playing Destiny with a new friend I had made. We were running around doing some item farming. (basically collecting items to upgrade gear.) I had met this friend earlier that day, and we had been playing together all day. All of a sudden while playing the game, everything started to seem familiar, like I had been here before. Not in the game, but every action my friend was making, every scene, every camera angle seemed perfect to my memory.
I stood still, trying to figure out what was going on and break free from this "memory", only to realize that even the scene of me standing perfectly still in that exact spot was in my memory. My friend was talking to me, but I wasn't paying much attention, as I already knew what he was going to say. I probably spent around a minute wandering around as I memorized each and every move I made, and every sentence my friend was going to say. After that, I promptly told him about it and what I was feeling/seeing, and he just called me crazy. After I told him it was back to normal.
This memory was not only from before I met my friend, but before the game had ever been created and released. This memory was from months, maybe even years ago. I'm not too sure if I would consider this a glitch, but it was definitely one of the weirdest things to ever happen to me.
edit: words

[END OF POST]

...with a new friend I had made

Literally?

Sounds like you should have programmed him with some better AI! ;-)

All of a sudden while playing the game, everything started to seem familiar, like I had been here before.

Yeah, I had heard that Destiny was repetitive, smaller than anticipated, and disappointing. I just didn't realise it was on the level of actual reality - not only didn't they program enough landscape and challenges, they actually rely on deja-vu-ing the memories of the players to fill in the gaps. Cheeky!

Q1: Haha. I had no expectations coming into the game because I hadn't even heard of the game until it was already out. Its a pretty great game though, the only people who truly dislike it were expecting Halo 5 renamed Destiny.
Needless to say this experience was still rather odd.

All true. I can't wait to hear what glitches you get with No Man's Sky when it eventually comes out...

POST: I don't even know what to say.

[POST]

This just hit me, and it's something that's been going on for years. Sometimes, very randomly, and in any state of mind, sleepy, wide awake, day dreaming, or anything at all, but most common and weird when I'm wide awake. Sometimes when I blink or close my eyes I see very vividly an odd variation of where I am. When this occurs, it feels as though I close my eyes, but another set opens? I can't describe it, but that comes pretty close to the feeling. Some of the most memorable moments were just last year.
1: I was sitting in class and I looked out the window, and I blinked and saw a weird spin on the room. The scenery was altered a little bit, and the room was set up differently, more desks, windows in a different place, kids I don't remember sitting in places they weren't just a second before. This all happened in just the fraction of a second when I blinked. I closed my eyes to see what was going on, but I was facing a wall this time. I saw through the wall I guess, out into a city I didn't recognize with a backdrop of mountains I had seen before, but didn't remember where. When I opened my eyes it had only been a second or two. It wasn't a dream because I knew exactly what was going on when my eyes were closed and I wasn't tired at all.
2: I was taking a mid afternoon shower and closed my eyes to enjoy some hot water on my face, but I saw a different bathroom. I felt water hitting my face but I couldn't see it. It was a completely different bathroom with a window looking out to a similar city as noted in number one. I could hear my music playing and was very conscious of my body and what I was feeling, but I saw a different place with my eyes closed. When I opened my eyes everything was exactly what it was like before. My bathroom, same song playing, and not much time passed at all.
3: I was in bed watching a movie and closed my eyes, and saw a different room. Same scenery as 1 and 2, but not my city. I looked around the room and it was not my room at all, some place I had never seen before. It was very disorienting. I went outside to gather my thoughts and closed my eyes to try to calm down, but, and I bet you can guess it, this was not my yard anymore.
These are just three instances of this weird phenomenon that happens regularly. I thought it may have been microsleep episodes from sleep deprivation, but I'll experience this after getting a good nights sleep and I feel well rested. Another thing that may rule this out is that I will get these "hallucinations" during strenuous activity as well as monotonous day to day activities and have never posed a threat as I can open my eyes at any time and everything is normal again. I'm not going to rule it out, as it seems logical from an outside standpoint.

[END OF POST]

"Hello to Jason Isaacs!"

Q: I have to check that out now, thank you very much. Maybe next time it happens I'll try to move around instead of just turning my head.

It's a good show, shame it got cancelled, but it still finishes up okay. Yes, you should try moving and interacting if you can. See here too, in the comments. An example:

After going to bed but before falling asleep some nights I close my eyes and feel as though they are wide open. It's like the muscles in my eyes won't relax. During these times I see as though my eyes are open. I can see the room that I'm in perfectly. It took me a while to realize that even though I see the room, it's not the way the room really is. It's the room as my mind would make it. It's interesting when it happens because you really believe you can see through your eyelids, but it's just your body not ready to shut off and sleep yet. Upon waking and turning on the lights, I normally just see red and dots in my eyelids before my eyes open and adjust to the brightness. If I'm sick sometimes the red dots swirl in circles. Anyone else get these things happening to them?

Q: You're awesome TriumphantGeorge. I wish someone else could borrow my eyes when it happens so they can see what it's like. After it happens I get one of those intense feelings of "we don't really understand everything about the universe yet, what if, what if, what if."

Indeed! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBaXd7dz404]

It reminds me a bit of OOBE stories from Robert Munroe and so on. See this quote from his book Journeys out of the Body, where he 'projects' and finds himself in a persistent alternative world with some regularity, looking through the eyes of a particular person/character in that world. Excerpt:

Locale III, in summary, proved to be a physical-matter world almost identical to our own. The natural environment is the same. There are trees, houses, cities, people, artifacts, and all the appurtenances of a reasonably civilized society. There are homes, families, businesses, and people work for a living. There are roads on which vehicles travel. There are railroads and trains. Now for the "almost." At first, the thought was that Locale III was no more than some part of our world unknown to me and those others concerned. It had all the appearances of being so. However, more careful study showed that it can be neither the present nor the past of our physical-matter world.

POST: My brother and I witnessed an event that couldn't be explained involving my wife and two other guys that couldn't possibly have been there

Q1: The whole point of parallel realities stemming from the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is that they are parallel, meaning we can't affect or observe it and they can't affect or observe ours. So that wasn't it.
If the universal waveform split in such a way that that happened, you would never know.
My take as a physics guy.

Q2: But Isn't the entire point of this sub the possibility of "glitches" overcoming the divisions between worlds?

Q1: Possibly. But, to me, the most interesting stories are ones that can't be solved by seemingly any logical explanation. Tossing out the idea that a person experienced such an event that it literally rewrote our entire idea of modern physics seems too far-fetched to me.
Same problem I have with "wormholes" and such.
Could I be wrong? Sure. This is just how I feel as a skeptic and science person.

Q2: Could I be wrong? Sure. This is just how I feel as a skeptic and science person.
I can respect that. Just keep in mind that "our entire idea of modern physics," like any scientific field, is nothing more than the model that best explains our observations. And physics is one field where new observations are being made every day that are getting harder and harder to explain with the model we've been working with.

Q1: Actually, most of our models are doing a bang-up job of explaining everything. The one we need most is quantum gravity and it would solve most of our current observational problems.

Oh, and something for consciousness eh?

The thing with glitches is, they are not repeatable. Physics, naturally, is about accounting for regularity; most of life (lived, experiential life) is not regular on a macro scale, it's a series of one-offs, so the best ones are always going to be unexplainable, even just because you can't get sufficient info. But you never know...

Remember when ball lightning used to be dismissed as people imagining things?

Q3: Not that person, but your ball lightning question reminded me of something I learned recently. The crackling/sizzling sound heard when a meteor is visible does not come from the meteor. Rather, it is produced by objects around you receiving radio waves from the meteor. When people first started to study meteors, the sound was dismissed as imaginary because it was known that sound would not be able to travel from the meteor to the observers in time to be experienced simultaneously.

That's a great little fact - thanks.

Q4: Ya, what you are saying makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You agree that there might be 'Many Worlds', and that they are parallel, which simply put says that they exist concurrent to are own, like its 3:57am here where I am at, and in the parallel reality it is exactly the same time. So why exactly couldn't something strange, that science simply hasn't seen or heard of yet, have happened that day for a brief moment, like a rift opened up and they were able to observe, and maybe even effect had they gotten out of the car. In that sense, they may have gotten trapped in it. Now before you start spewing sciencey facts at me, let me remind you of something I think even the most brillant people forget about. The Earth itself is moving at over 1,000,000 km/h through the universe. Are you telling me that it isn't possible the our little blue planet doesn't simply 'smash' into dark matter or other strange unknow things that cause peoples 'glitches'. It's actually amazing that it doesn't happen more often if you think about it.

Q1: You agree that there might be 'Many Worlds'
It's an accurate quantum formalism.
which simply put says that they exist concurrent to are own
No, it doesn't. The MWI says that each quantum decision creates it's own branch in the universal waveform, separating the new realities forever. It doesn't mean "concurrent."
like a rift opened up and they were able to observe,
Because causality doesn't work like that and "rifts" of that sort are not backed by any physics or mathematics we know of. It's little more than religious sci-fi.
Are you telling me that it isn't possible the our little blue planet doesn't simply 'smash' into dark matter or other strange unknow things
Dark matter is just some kind of matter that interacts gravitationally but not with electromagnetic fields. Is it possible? Sure. It's also possible there's a duck called Billy that keeps the sun glowing and that nuclear fusion is just his farts. Doesn't mean it's likely.

Multiple Worlds isn't a very persuasive idea either. I'd go as far to say the interpretation isn't very scientific. Where's the benefit between Copenhagen wavefunction collapse or Bohm's deterministic quantum potential?

Dark matter is nonsense too. :-)

The problem with the OP story is there's just no way why it can't happen, but in way to explain if it did. Any "explanation" - rift, shared hallucination, reset - is just another fun bit of storytelling. The answer is always really: don't know.

Q1: It's persuasive in that it's a complete quantum formalism that yields the proper empirical results.
Dark Matter is hardly nonsense. we observe aberrational rotation curves in the arms of our galaxy. There is some gravitational influence.

So is active information, say, if some sort of determinism is what you're secretly after. Really, though, multiple worlds so that all possibilities occur? This problem only arises because discomfort with the original 'collapse' interpretation. The maths is the maths and works anyway (Bohr says: it can't be understood, it just works); trying to make it more palatable and picturable with what really amounts to pseudo-science-fiction tropes is embarrassing.

Dark Matter: The observation is the observation, of course, but whether it is gravitational "influence" or a sign of our present clumsy formulation of gravitation is another matter (excuse the pun). Inventing a brand new type of matter that has not / cannot be observed is fine as a placeholder, of course, but that it is taken so seriously as a possible final solution is a bit poor. What's more likely: an incomplete understanding of gravitation that turns out not to scale well or misses a rotational characteristic, or a mystery hack-job type of matter there's never been any sign of?

(Having a bit of fun here, obviously.)

Until we can empirically separate the formalisms, they are all equal with only metaphysical differences.

Quite so. It's all about which adjective you add to each formulation: "embarrassing", "infinite-speed", "spooky". Fields were "spooky action at a distance". The problem here is that you get the same results, so currently it's a matter of personal preference, of what sits best with your own biases. To me, waveform collapse is story-making, a results of viewing things as "parts" and "steps" and a slight "personification" of the phenomena.

It's a bit more than a placeholder at this point.

It's about inaccessible scales, though, isn't it?

Anyway, we'll see. The boundless enthusiasm everyone has for their 'the end of history' solution is always interesting. I feel that the final (temporarily final, of course) formulation for this will be something else. It just feels "hack-job" and "faith" at the moment. But the fun is in the unfolding of it all.

We know that galaxies cluster along tendrils of invisible heavy mass.

We don't know this at all. We know that galaxies cluster, we don't know about heavy mass. And so on...

POST: The only glitch I've ever experienced; Exactly what happened to me? Did I die?

[POST]

Disclaimer: This might be a long read for some of you, and for that I'm very sorry. I've never told anyone about this and it's been a truly cathartic experience for me, finally being able to let everything out. Once I get home I will probably go back and edit out some of the more unnecessary details just for readability's sake.
When I was a child, I discovered a cool eye-trick that kept me occupied when I was bored. I found out I could bring things into and out of focus by shifting my field of vision from looking 'at' to looking 'through'. To clarify, if I was staring at something like a cereal box, I could 'blur' the text and images until they were unintelligible, then snap everything back into clear focus.
I would practice my secret ability growing up by staring at something and seeing how many consecutive times I could repeat this cycle of blurring and un-blurring before breaking. Over the years, I realized my eyes had developed a sort of unconscious tic where they would lose focus automatically and seemingly vibrate back and forth rapidly. Whenever this happened everything would go blurry for a quick second before returning to normal. I've never been able to catch myself in a mirror and see what it actually looks like, but that's what it feels like. If I were to describe it more, I would say it feels like my eyes are going "bzzt", sort of what you would imagine Jerry the Cat's eyes to look like after having been smacked in the head with an over-sized mallet.
While this tic was worrying the first few times it happened, it was never followed up by a seizure or heart-attack so I never really felt the need to disclose this oddity with anyone.
Fast forward to the ripe age of 22; I had graduated with my B.S. in Comp. Sci and moved back home with my parents until I could hopefully find a job or a paid internship. The year I graduated was my sloth-period. I would wake up at noon, halfheartedly look for start-ups, work on some personal projects I finally had time for, and mostly play all the games my heart desired.
The incident occurred some time in early-mid May of 2007, because I remember the grisly VTech incident had recently happened. I'm not one to pay attention to everyday mundaneness, but I remember this day with crystal clarity, thanks to years of mind-wracking analysis and post-speculation.
One Friday in May I awoke to find, instead of food on the dining table, $30 tucked under a coaster. I checked my phone and my mom had texted me, saying that her and dad had gone to one of their warehouses in Arizona to take care of some urgent business and would be back by Sunday. I checked the fridge, saw hot-pockets, and decided I wanted to eat out. It was at this point I should've realized something was off- what kind of person says no to hot-pockets?!
I made my way, bleary-eyed, to the garage and unlocked my car. Once I got in, I started the ignition, started playing my favorite album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and pulled out of the driveway. Drumming my fingers to the beat of the song, I made my way down to the main road while pondering what to eat (I lived in a small residential community in a low-mountainous area, and it takes 8-10 minutes down a stretch of mostly empty road to get to the first main intersection). I settled on a Double Western Bacon from Carl's Jr so once I got to the first main intersection I got in the left-most lane, flicked on my signal ticker, and waited for the signal to turn yellow.
Then my eyes buzzed.
What I can only describe as a very vague, vignette-effect sort of haze seemed to layer my vision. The light blinked from green to yellow. I shook my head, and blinked hard to clear my vision. The light was going to turn red, so I pivoted and started turning.
I heard what sounded like a boat-horn pierce the air, and what appeared to be, and indeed was a Hummer H2 bearing down on me like a full-powered steam locomotive. Time did not slow down, nor did my life flash in front of my eyes. I only had time to experience what felt like the world's steepest roller-coaster in the pit of my stomach, and think to myself "Oh shit", before the SUV crashed into the side of my compact full force and I felt my body perform a twisted, gruesome marionette-like dance.
Then, as cliché as this may sound, I experienced what I can only describe as a kind of 'intense vibration' start from my head and envelop my body, accompanied by a rushing blindness and a feeling of instantaneous displacement. I blinked- metaphorically I suppose, since I should probably be dead at this point.
I was in my car again, foot planted to the brake and hands on the wheel, fingers mid-drum.
My eyes buzzed.
At that moment a rush of electricity surged through me; at the same time, I was utterly paralyzed. The music started sounding tinny, like it had been submerged in water.
The light turned yellow.
My hands gripped the steering wheel, as a bead of proverbial sweat rolled down my temple.
What the fuck just happened?
The light turned red. What the FUCK is going on? I instinctively closed my eyes as the H2 roared past the intersection, whipping a gust of wind through the open window. The music came back, flooding the deathly quiet intersection.
There were no cars behind me or around me, so I spent a good few minutes at that intersection, foot firmly rooted to the brake and hands still gripping the wheel. I was finally able to un-lock my body enough to shakily finish the journey to the Carl's Jr. parking lot, where I chain smoked until my nerves cooled.
It's been over 7 years since the incident, and I've spent a lot of time thinking on it, wondering exactly what had happened back there.
Was it just a premonition, or did I somehow go back in time?
I so vividly recall the moment of impact and the feeling of being thrown about by a giant, invisible hand- it felt so real to me that I still get goosebumps. I still have no idea what my eye-blurring ability had to do with anything. To this day my eyes still do the involuntary buzzing, but no more "premonitions" or anything of that sort. This was the first and only glitchy occurrence I've experienced.

[END OF POST]

Q: What if we never die? What if, when we die, our consciousness or spirit or whatever is transported to an alternate universe that is identical in every way except for the split between our death? That universe in which we died exists, and we will be mourned, but our consciousness no longer exists in that universe - it now exists in the alternate universe where our death never occurred. What if this happens every time we 'die'?

What if that happens every time we make a decision? What if we are 'extended people' across all possibilities, but we only look through the "viewport" of one possibility at a time. For the other worlds, we are 'philosophical zombies', operating on automatic. We only have free will and influence over our "viewport" world.

This would certainly be quite probably in a many-worlds universe in which me in World A does THIS whereas me in World B does THAT.
What I'm curious to know then is, would all my other "me's" lead drastically different lives, if there is always a "me" that takes an alternate route from me? Shouldn't that make sense?

Imagine that, right now, what you see before you is in fact an image on a screen, depicting this current world-moment. Now imagine that you stand back, and realise that image is actually in a grid of images that stretch infinitely in all directions, containing all possibilities.

Every time you make a choice, you are essentially traversing that grid moment by moment, traversing this 'possibility space'.

It's not quite right to think of there being many of "you". You are not your body; your body is a part of the environment. What "you" are is the conscious awareness that "looks out through" the body, of a particular moment/possibility.

== Wow, that idea will stick with me for probably the rest of my life. As will that visualization of stepping back and seeing a grid of possible lives.==

Yeah, it's my favourite image for this.

If you find that useful, you might be interested in the comments in this post and an attempt to explore the idea in the guise of 'pseudo-time-travel' as a thought experiment here/ (Although the second one is a bit convoluted and mixed into the comments, since it was an attempt to bring out the details via a dialogue.)

Mixed that up with the idea of waking life being a bit like lucid dreaming, and it's quite a powerful idea.

I've entertained the idea that life itself was a mere lucid dream or a simulation perhaps. I don't think that very much anymore, it's an interesting thought but I just get hung up on how vast our universe is with such intricacies, it seems to real to be fake.

Have you had many lucid dreams? They are often more "real" than this experience.

The universe isn't vast, except in your thoughts (neither is it small, though). Your actual daily experience probably covers a few miles at most. And even then, in what sense do you actually move through those miles? Do you go to them, or do they come to you...?

You have to watch and not confuse what you think-about something with what you actually experience of it directly.

It is important to realise that, if you investigate, there is no "underneath" to your experience that you can detect; you are basically dreaming all the time. What you see is what there is, to you. Whether you then think your dream is "inspired by the senses and an external world" or not, your experience would be the same. You can't tell the difference!

This doesn't mean it is "fake"; it just means it (literally) isn't what you think it is.

...

Q1: Thank you for sharing your story. Of course, I have no idea what might have happened! But the "eyes" thing made me think of EMDR, a technique psychiatrists use with PTSD patients and others. In some cases, the eye movement therapy seems to prompt them to go - in their own consciousness (but how else would one "go"?) - into another dimension. You might find it interesting to read about it!

Q2: Thank you for reading! I will look into eye movement therapy and see if I can unearth anything.

The idea is that it helps break the link between traumatic states and certain stimulus. But in a way, that's quite interesting for this too.

...

[QUOTE]

Quantum suicide and immortality:
In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment, originally published independently by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988, and independently developed further by Max Tegmark in 1998. It attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, from the cat's point of view. Quantum immortality refers to the subjective experience of surviving quantum suicide regardless of the odds.

[END OF QUOTE]

POST: Déjà Vu: Is it really a thing?

Or, maybe Déjà Vu is a real thing but is wrongly used by the majority of those who use it, and it is much rarer but it does happen...

I think this. People say 'deja vu' when they really mean "that's familiar but I can't quite place it". The experience is stronger than that. It's pretty hard to investigate experimentally or prove though, because it's not a controlled experience: it happens as "part of life". Unless you happen to have written down a dream or prediction, or happen to put aside your surprise to tell your friend "this is about to happen", you can't. And even then, the actual event won't be recorded except as an anecdote. (Plenty of those on 'glitch' I think, if you search.)

Maybe when people start wearing Go-Pro/Google Glass all the time, we'll be able to get some evidence. :-)

Q: Maybe we're all just a part of the Twilight Zone
Jokes aside, it is a real phenomena in our brains. There are theories which explain this physiological reaction. I say that stress causes it in the brain would which results in inability to distinguish different memories and their timelines.. So an old memory overlaps and you may feel like you don't know which is happening.

Sure, there are theories to 'explain it away', for instance:

The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book A Textbook of Psychology (1928), explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.[1] Scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather explain it as an anomaly of memory, which creates a distinct impression that an experience is "being recalled".[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible.

But with no actual research, this is just story-making, rather than a scientific investigation. Plenty of deja-vu reports have the author remembering the source, or being able to anticipate events in advance as it unfolds - beyond simply 'feeling familiar'. A pretty hard thing to do research on, mind.