The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[Bus Surfer]

8 hours ago, Loki said:

@Silky Kisser - if it's not a very impertinent question, are you a larger gentleman?

 

I'm around 5'10" and I weigh around 11 stone. Never really thought about sleep apnea before. I'll do some digging. Cheers! 

[BomberPat]

Dreams are an interesting one - I've been giving a lot of thought recently to how my brain works, after something I posted about in the Work thread gave me cause to consider why I might struggle with abstract thinking and metaphor, or being asked to be creative on the spot. I know people who claim not to have an internal monologue, or not to have a visual imagination, and it's making me think - how do you know? I sort of talk to myself in my head, but is that what other people mean by an internal monologue? Is my imagination more or less visual than someone else's? How could you possibly compare? 

And I think maybe that ties into dreams, because I hardly ever remember mine at all, and I'm always amazed when people can remember them to the slightest detail. To me, if I remember anything, it's just the vaguest of feelings for around half an hour after I woke up, just kind of a mood - I think it's one of the reasons I love David Lynch, because his work captures that liminal space and slightly broken dream logic in a way that nothing else does. 

Two or three times that I can remember, I've had something, whether it's a nightmare or being startled by something while still only half-awake, that has made me properly jump out of bed in a panic. Several years apart, always in a hotel or otherwise not my own bed, and always when I've been in bed with whoever my other half was at the time, but the explanation of why always disappears almost immediately, so I'm just left sort of panicked and anxious, having just scared my partner too but now unable to actually explain anything to her.

 

I like to think I'm pretty rational most of the times, but one thing I still stubbornly sort of believe despite knowing there's no real evidence for it is dream interpretation. I know that dreams don't really mean anything, and that interpreting them is all bullshit, but there are such specific recurring themes and images that it feels like there must be something to it. I used to get the "teeth falling out" dream a lot, and that's generally explained as being about anxiety or stress, and it's hard to really view it any other way. Annoyingly, those do tend to be the dreams I remember - they're completely mundane, just ordinary day-to-day life stuff, so it feels completely real, until the moment I'm looking in the bathroom mirror with my teeth dropping out. Blurgh. Thankfully, not had that one in a while.

I'm all over the place thinking about this now, but I always find it interesting where your brain tends to locate dreams too - pretty much everyone has dreams about being back in school, and I used to, but more often now have dreams where I'm back working at an old job at a petrol station. But it's not that I'm back there and it's my full-time job again, I know in the dream that I don't work there any more, but kind of rationalise it that I'm doing them a favour by doing this shift, but then it only makes me angrier when weird or annoying stuff starts happening, because I know I shouldn't be there. I wonder why our brains put us back in these places? Is that school was such a formative time for your brain that it's kind of imprinted as a default setting, or that it was so traumatic that your brain can't shake it? In terms of the job, it was the last job I did that was public-facing customer service, and I wonder if my brain puts me back there in dreams because it works as a setting to put me in contact with assorted other people in a way I can't avoid. But then that suggest dreams follow some kind of narrative logic. And if the dream is just about work stress, why that job and not one of the many jobs I've had since? All very odd.

 

Going back to the Forteana side of things, though, there's been a lot written about sleep paralysis and that kind of half-awake space (and what @Loki said about your brain just getting things in the wrong order) as an explanation for practically any Fortean phenomenon you can think of. I think it's a viable explanation for an awful lot of ghost sightings, because pretty much everyone has had that sense of thinking they saw something or someone in their room before their eyes and brain have fully adjusted, and if your memory has placed the seeming clarity of seeing a figure at the foot of your bed after the time you adjust to being awake, it's going to feel very real. A lot of cultures have stories of hags, devils, or succubi that pin you down in your bed, presumably as an explanation for this kind of sensation, which mirrors a lot of UFO abduction encounters, particularly those with a pseudo-sexual element. And if it felt completely real to you, the further removed you are from it in time, and particularly if you're often retelling the story, the more real it will likely start to feel, with fuzzy images becoming clearer, the story becoming unconsciously embellished, fleshed out with half-remembered bits of pop culture and other stories, until it becomes something that couldn't possibly have been just a misunderstanding.

It's fascinating stuff - he retired shortly after I started working where I am now, but I briefly worked with a Psychology lecturer who headed up our Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, and he basically specialised in psychological explanations for paranormal beliefs and experiences. It was often a surprisingly difficult job, as he repeatedly found himself in the position of effectively having to tell someone that an experience that, to them, was completely real was actually just a trick of the brain, and people don't want to hear that. I also used to get all sorts of emails for him from the weirdest of people wanting him to "verify" their paranormal experiences or abilities, which is absolutely not what he did.

[SuperBacon]

Fun little show on Netflix called Encounters. 

Only watched the first episode but it seems to hark back to more simpler times like when a load of Welsh schoolkids saw a UFO land in their playground.

@BomberPat you might enjoy it. It's fairly light stuff though.

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

Just need a quick ruling on something that my mum has brought up for some reason this morning, and considering thst she hates The Smiths beyond all measure it is surprising. 

The conspiracy theory is this. The song Panic! is a song about Jimmy Savile if you look at the lyrics, and that Morrisey was trying to slyly point Savile's actions out whilst still getting his records played. 

This is cobblers right? 

 

[Keith Houchen]

46 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

This is cobblers right

Right. 

[Chili]

54 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

Just need a quick ruling on something that my mum has brought up for some reason this morning, and considering thst she hates The Smiths beyond all measure it is surprising. 

The conspiracy theory is this. The song Panic! is a song about Jimmy Savile if you look at the lyrics, and that Morrisey was trying to slyly point Savile's actions out whilst still getting his records played. 

This is cobblers right? 

 

Yep, in fact the original tale that it was based on Steve Wright announcing the Chernobyl disaster on the radio and playing Wham! after is equally mythical. 

[BomberPat]

I've seen the Savile connection to that song floating around a lot lately, but never before the last few months. Might be coincidence, but it feels like a new thing, and I wonder what prompted it. Probably just someone on the Internet having a reckon, but if I were going to proffer any kind of conspiracy here, it would be that this neatly paints mad old racist Morrissey as actually being a brave truth-teller calling out establishment nonces.

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

There is certainly enough in the lyrics that if you really want to connect it to Savile then you can. I agree with Pat that it sounds like trying to paint Mozza as a brave truth teller. 

[Keith Houchen]

Janice Long was the DJ to be hanged in the song. I still haven’t gotten over Moz dying about 20 years ago. He is sorely missed
 

Anyway! Christmas dinner at my girlfriend’s parents house was a pleasant affair. No GB News or any conversations like that. Towards the end of the day, my girlfriend mentioned footage from 9/11 that she hadn’t seen before and her 13 year old niece asked if that’s when they crashed a plane into the building. Her mum’s boyfriend (if he had twitter his bio would be “Love the royal family, Rangers, fishing and weed. Hate illegals and scroungers”) then said to her “It wasn’t a plane, it was the US government” and started going on about that debunked theory of the bloke taking out insurance on the towers just before the attack etc. 

So I said how the insurance was essentially an auto renewal a few months before the attack and if they didn’t have that insurance in place, they couldn’t have rented the towers as office space and how it’s was really all boring administrative stuff and how the bloke was singled out of about 30 named partners because he’s Jewish etc. 

He carried on saying there was too many things didn’t add up etc and started asking if I believed the building could’ve collapsed the way it did. I cut him off with “Can I just ask, you said it wasn’t a plane, so what do you think it was”. He said “I’m not saying it wasn’t a plane, I’m saying they knew about it” 
 

Goalposts always shift. 

[Chili]

To go back to The Smiths, I've heard, but never verified that it was probably Morrissey having a whinge about black music, of which he had form for that kind of bunkum in interviews before he died in late 1987.

[SuperBacon]

The Smyths.

[BomberPat]

9 hours ago, Chili said:

To go back to The Smiths, I've heard, but never verified that it was probably Morrissey having a whinge about black music, of which he had form for that kind of bunkum in interviews before he died in late 1987.

Quite possibly; a few people made that accusation at the time, particularly because of the "burn down the disco" line - I'm not sure to what extent it was the case in this country, but certainly in the US a lot of attacks on "disco" were driven by racism, and to a lesser extent homophobia. 

I'm going to give Morrissey the benefit of the doubt on this one and say that it's just a simple, straightforward "pop music is rubbish" song and there's nothing more to it than that. When he wants to be racist, he isn't often subtle about it!

[Ro_y Disco]

Reading the front pages of the papers today, I noticed the Daily Star has a story on the French government releasing their "X Files" to the public. 

I could only find one article about it online though https://bnnbreaking.com/world/france-unveils-x-files-archive-igniting-global-ufo-transparency-movement

I know the French have a history of UFO transparency, most notably releasing a load of their archives in 2007.

Is anyone able to provide more detail on this, or where the files can be found?

[waters44]

Has anyone had any experience with psychics before?

Fifteen years ago I was preparing VAT returns for a company in Basingstoke, I’d go to their site for a couple of days every three months.

There was a lovely accounts clerk there, must have been in her 50s, and one day said to me “I need to talk to you about something and I hope I don’t freak you out”. I said ok and honesty as a young stud in my early twenties I thought she was hitting on me

She said “Mary wants you to know Cath is ok”. I was completely bemused as I didn’t know any Marys so just stared blankly back at this lady. She then said “Your Grandma”. 

This then sent a shiver down my spine because my Grandma, who’s name was Victoria Mary had died a year earlier, which was maybe five years after her daughter, my Auntie Cath died. 

This lady then explained that she can talk to dead people. I didn’t believe her and kept quizzing her. She told me details about her house that I don’t think you would guess (for example Grandma’s house had a big front garden but no back garden, that’s quite unusual isn’t it? And this lady knew that) but then she also told me stuff that didn’t make sense, like one of my cricket coaches was there too. I played cricket for one season when I was about 12, why would he give a fuck about me?

She swore me to secrecy as she didn’t want people to know she had this gift. She said she’s told people before and they just don’t leave her alone. She said she loves it as she can still ask her family for advice even though they’re dead

Every time I went back i’d ask more questions and some things would work but other things would be bollocks

So overall I don’t know what to think honestly. Firstly, I don’t understand why she would do this to deceive me, it’s not like I paid her or anything, and as mentioned she wouldn’t even let me tell other people about it. And how (and why) would she get my name then try and track down what my Grandma’s house looked like?

But then if it is true why did my Grandma give her her middle name rather than her first name? And then all the stuff that I just couldn’t tie up. I’d say she had a 50% hit rate

Has anyone been to a psychic before? If so how was it and what’s your thought about it?

[Surf Digby]

I never have, and I'm not sure whether I ever would. I am genuinely intrigued by them, and wonder what they'd say to me if I went, but I also know people (mostly workmates) that have been to them, and what they've recounted has been the most obvious carny cold-reading shit, and often taking advantage their past griefs.