Time Slip Anecdotes

[zangtang]

i think we can all agree that my explanation is the more logical and rational?

[coffin_dodger]

Zang - in a universe of infinite possibilities, rational and logical are theories. I like yours.

[zangtang]

just so long as thats settled, then.

hey, i don't like to lose..............

[Luther Blissett]

Time slip anecdotes can sometimes read like neurological disorders, but at least yours had a piece of physical evidence that is / should have been attached to it.

The French Fries weren't there
I was at the supermarket with my good friend, we'll call him K. K and I were buying some food for a party that evening. We've checked off everything on our list but French Fries (we passed them several times before without actually grabbing a bag). I tell him I have to use the restroom and he waves me away.

Take care of business, step out, and K is waiting for me and looking a bit impatient. We're ready to get out of the store at this point, so we head back to the aisle where we saw the fries in the first place...and they weren't there.

It was like some really masterful photoshop had taken place in the Frozen Foods aisle - where there had previously been bags upon bags of frozen potatoes, the entire 'Potatoes' section, right down to the sign, had vanished. K agreed that we had passed it before, and thinking we'd gone to the wrong aisle, we try venturing around the store again...french fries are still nowhere to be found.

K and I are both a little bothered at this point - we passed them, for sure, in this aisle! K remembered because of the displays on the floor that remarked about great discounts. I tell K that I'm going to go find an employee and to wait there, and he does. The employee points me in the direction of the French Fries but I ask him to take me there. I needed to know if K and I were the only ones affected by this weird potato-less reality.

The employee brings me to the aisle, and lo and behold: bags upon bags of frozen potatoes, just like before. K is standing there, and he asks where I went. I tell him that I went to find an employee since we couldn't find the fries, and K just stares at me and tells me he'd been waiting for me by the fries since I'd gone to the restroom.

Tl;dr - Went to the bathroom and ended up in a world without French Fries or other frozen potato products. Got a store employee, ended up back in my own world. Now that's what I call customer service.

[Luther Blissett]

What I had typed in my first message that glitched out was that I've been meaning to start a "best of /r/glitch_in_the_matrix" stories. Even though a rational person would dismiss them as products of creative minds, the sheer volume is overwhelming, and in many cases the details are more mundane than they would be if one wanted to create a really fantastic narrative and get lots of attention for it. The stories fall into a few categories: alternate realities, alternate histories, out-of-place artifacts, coincidences and synchronicities, black-out/lost consciousness episodes, and time slippage.

I'll add some of my favorites in the last category to your thread, but I have to run to a meeting now.

[Luther Blissett]

I sold a car years back, but it turns out I didn't sell it.

My first car was a '75 Falcon coupe. I drove it until I crashed it - nothing serious but it had front end damage that I started to fix with some spare panels scrounged from wreckers. I never got it back on the road, but a friend of a friend wanted to buy it to build a nice streeter so I sold it to him. We loaded it onto a trailer from my parents' property 20km out of town where it'd been sitting since I crashed it, and he drove off with it in about '96. I saw him driving around for a few years after that and the guy gradually built it into a decent ride. I never knew him well but I'd say hi from time to time and we'd talk about the car. He said he owed me a cruise in it after it was finished but we never caught up after then and I didn't see anything of him from maybe 2002 onwards. I always regretted selling that car, and they're hard to find now.

in 2010 my parents made moves to sell up and move into town, and told me I'd better come and get my red car if I wanted it. I didn't know what they were referring to, only red car I ever owned was that coupe, but next trip out there I went to where mum said it was, and it was there sitting up to its axles in dirt just over a rise from one of the old less used gates into the property. It had the same odd colour replacement panels on it and same half-arsed repair job I'd tried in the early 90s. Same car I'd sold to the guy and he'd restored, but there it was in its unrestored state.

Mum and dad insist the coupe had always been there, but I'd used that entry at least a dozen times to get to some storage sheds on the lower corner of the property since I remember selling it and it's just not possible to miss it where it was in 2010.

Our roads and traffic authority verify the numbers and it's definitely my coupe and was never registered after I 'sold' it and there's no record of a change of ownership.

I can't explain that one unless somehow I forgot I owned something I really really wanted and misremembered selling it and seeing it around town after.

[zangtang]

how can that not be a 'multi-worlds hypothesis' ? - if i was closer to the story, defintely cue mulder-music......

unless, you know, constant quantum potentiality constantly manifesting multipleee....sort of thing

i've bookmarked the ' usually happens when they change something' page,...because....Woo.

[BrandonD]

I have a pretty good story from many years ago, but it involves a dream.

I was living in Tacoma WA at the time, and it was 3 days before I was to get on a Greyhound bus and make the 3-day trip back to TX.

That night I had a dream that I was waiting in line to get on the bus, up ahead in line was a guy with short dark hair. In his hand was a chess board. I thought to myself, "I hope I get to sit next to that guy so we can play chess on the bus."

There was nothing particularly interesting about the dream, so I forgot about it. When I actually boarded the bus, the guy who sat next to me was dressed in an army tank-top and cargo pants. He was a guy about my age with short black hair, he looked like a bonehead and I didn't really have any interest in talking to him.

About 30 minutes into the trip, without warning he took a chess board out of his bag and asked me if I wanted to play. The dream suddenly came back to me very vividly, and I saw that this was the guy who was in my dream.

As it turned out he was just getting out of the army and he was returning to his home town in TX, so he was taking the full trip with me (the bus stopped at every major city along the west coast and southern US between WA and TX). During the trip we actually ended up becoming good friends.

I regret that I never got his contact info, so we did not stay in touch after that trip.

This dream was, for me, a pretty clear demonstration of some sort of "outside of time" phenomenon, though I have no idea why the dream had the same elements of the real-life occurrence, but in a different arrangement that never actually occurred (the waiting in line thing).

[82_28]

This sort of hearkens the old "Jack Palance Effect" brought up many moons ago here. Some may remember.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9212&hilit=Jack+Palance

Which also weirds me out because I thought I was the one who started that OP but it was one of my friends and co-writers.

[Luther Blissett]

Is this a time slip or an abduction?

I guess we won't be having cake.
Howdy, Reddit! My husband stumbled onto this sub and thought it would be a great place to share our story. I'm using a throwaway because we don't know what people close to us would think. This is the first time we've talked about this with anyone other than each other. I've read through some of the stories here, and I think hope ours fits here too.

I'd like to preface this by saying that neither my husband nor I do any sort of drugs, suffer from mental illness, or abuse alcohol. We drink occasion, but had not been drinking this night. It happened about 8 months ago. We lived in a small apartment with our two young children and our dog while we saved up for a down payment on a home.

It was a typical Monday night around 7:00 pm. We had just cleaned up after dinner, my husband was surfing the web, and I was relaxing on the couch. I was reading the back of a cake mix trying to decide if I had time to bake it, let it cool, frost it, and eat it before I needed to be in bed. My husband was watching a video on the internet, he said something funny about it, we both laughed...

Then BAM! I woke up, face-down in bed. My clock read 8:00 exactly. My alarm hadn't been turned on. I was very confused and could smell the strong scent of coconut. I sat up and looked at my husband who was also just waking up. He looked at me with a really confused look, and we both jumped out of bed and ran to our kids' room. They were in bed asleep. We went into the living room and the second our dog saw us, she started whimpering and sort of army-crawling toward us. It was such unusual behavior for her. I had never seen her act that way before, and have never since.

Nothing looked out of order in our apartment aside from one small detail. The cake mix I had been looking at that night was gone. I searched everywhere for that cake mix and never found it. Another odd detail from that day is that we were all dressed in our pajamas when we woke up except my youngest. He was in the jeans and t-shirt he had been wearing the night before. Neither my husband nor I would have ever put him to bed like that. Neither of us have any memory of getting into our pajamas or anything else after laughing at the comment he made on the video.

We (already late for work) both called in sick that day. We spent the day talking about it and trying to make sense of it. At some point that day, he asked me if I had smelled coconut when I woke up. We never found the source of the smell.

To this day, I can't look at a cake mix or smell coconut without feeling a little anxious and sick.

TL;DR: Just bake the cake.

Some follow up comments:

…We were pretty good friends with the couple who lived next door, as well as the lady who lived downstairs from us. We asked all three of them (as nonchalant as possible) if anything odd had happened to them that night. None of them said anything had happened to them, so I assume that could rule out any sort of gas/chemical leak. We also had a carbon monoxide detector and it didn't go off. We have tried to come up with some sort of reasonable answer and nothing ever felt 'right'. We've thought of an isolated, mutual hysteria resulting in amnesia of the night for my husband and I, aliens, an intruder somehow spiking food or drink or using something to knock us out (for what purpose, I have no idea), to some sort of glitch in reality.

…I haven't mentioned it to anyone. I'm so afraid of the reaction. It's a little silly, I know, but the story is so weird that I'm not sure a doctor would take it seriously? I would if I was the only one who blacked out that night, but since it happened to my husband too, it makes me hopeful that it isn't something wrong neurologically. Nothing like that had happened before or since to either of us. I do have a doctor that I really trust and thought about mentioning it, but always talk myself out of it.

…I love that thought. A couple aliens passing by, smell my mediocre cooking but just can't resist the sweet smell of shake-and-bake. There was absolutely nothing missing. No food, money, nothing. The door was dead bolted from the inside. I would like to think that if something was happening, like a break in, our neighbors would hear the commotion and our dog barking and come investigate. Or at least mention it the next day.

[tron]

is any of this real? what was the close encounter brandon?

[zangtang]

i'd call that an abduction....with the missing cakemix a 'gaslight'

[Nordic]

Starting to wonder .... just looking at the Drones thread, and the latest stuff posted about the latest in robotic technology, androids, AI ....

Realizing we're on the cusp of a whole new world of this stuff. Probably bigger than the Industrial Revolution ...

Then thinking of how accurate "Terminator" seems to have been (in retrospect) ...

Then James Cameron's obsessive fascination with the Titanic, including building his own damn submarine to go check it out ....

Thinking of his house ..... how huge it is, up in the hills above Malibu ..... and how in so many time travel movies, especially comedies, somebody decides to take advantage of it economically and gets rich by "predicting" the future ...

Is James Cameron a time traveller?

That's what hit me just now.

I mean, it's just my mind wandering around and of course time travel is impossible, the Butterfly Effect, etc. etc. etc.

But some modern geniuses certainly seem to have tapped into something paranormal to see things that might be, or that perhaps WILL be .... Mainly writers of course.

Anyway .... just wild speculation. He's probably just your basic genius, and in fact from what I've heard about him that's it. I've heard he's incredibly difficult to work for, not only because he's a screamer, but because he knows everybody's job better than they do! Everybody's.

[BrandonD]

is any of this real? what was the close encounter brandon?

I have an RI entry where I talk about it: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=38077&hilit=major+ufo+sighting

Looking at that entry again, it happened longer ago than I thought. It feels like it just happened.

After the encounter I posted the story on a local news website and was contacted by another person who lived in the area and saw the same thing. He actually took pictures and video, and sent them to me. The video is posted in that thread, though I remember some people telling me that the video I sent was upside down (?) for some reason.

[conniption]

I have a pretty good story from many years ago, but it involves a dream.

I was living in Tacoma WA at the time, and it was 3 days before I was to get on a Greyhound bus and make the 3-day trip back to TX.

That night I had a dream that I was waiting in line to get on the bus, up ahead in line was a guy with short dark hair. In his hand was a chess board. I thought to myself, "I hope I get to sit next to that guy so we can play chess on the bus."

There was nothing particularly interesting about the dream, so I forgot about it. When I actually boarded the bus, the guy who sat next to me was dressed in an army tank-top and cargo pants. He was a guy about my age with short black hair, he looked like a bonehead and I didn't really have any interest in talking to him.

About 30 minutes into the trip, without warning he took a chess board out of his bag and asked me if I wanted to play. The dream suddenly came back to me very vividly, and I saw that this was the guy who was in my dream.

As it turned out he was just getting out of the army and he was returning to his home town in TX, so he was taking the full trip with me (the bus stopped at every major city along the west coast and southern US between WA and TX). During the trip we actually ended up becoming good friends.

I regret that I never got his contact info, so we did not stay in touch after that trip.

This dream was, for me, a pretty clear demonstration of some sort of "outside of time" phenomenon, though I have no idea why the dream had the same elements of the real-life occurrence, but in a different arrangement that never actually occurred (the waiting in line thing).

Damn. The strangest things happen on Greyhound buses ... don't they?

I have a certain fondness for board games, too, BrandonD. Are you familiar with ...





It's good fun, and you can print out your own copy at the link. Enjoy!