While I was in senior year of highschool I had something that reminded me of what people describe sleep paralysis as being like. I couldn't move and for some reason I had my blanket over my head. I could hear some guy breathing right in my ear and I could make out the outline of a person walking around through the blanket somehow. I heard his footsteps around the room too. I also heard this consistent little babbling noise in both of my ears and I couldn't ever make out any words. I was laying down in total darkness listening to all this bullshit, with none of the normal house noises you'd expect like a TV running or the air conditioning. I couldn't move at all as far as I can remember. Normally I would've just assumed it was a bad dream but I couldn't really "see" anything and I've never had a dream where there weren't visuals of some sort. I don't remember looking at my body but I think I could have seen it if I tried. It kept me up until my normal wakeup time at 5:30 and I ended up not going to school that day because I was all tweaked. Nothing quite like that has happened to me again since and I never really knew what to make of it. Some kind of hypnagogic evil bullshit. I've been trying to induce something similar on and off for a bit now. If anyone has experience with similar things I would like to hear about it. All things considered I'm pretty mentally normal I think so I don't wanna exagerate the situation to make it seem like I'm a cool schizo or some bullshit. It was just an experience that really stuck with me and I don't really regret having it. I wish I knew what caused it though
A couple of years ago I was on a car trip to Michigan with my grandfather through Amish/rural Mennonite country. It was mostly pretty uneventful, we just shat the shit as he drove and saw the sights; the Dollar General when you entered a certain town, the abadoned house that had been all swallowed up by the woods, all the little landmarks you take note of as you look around when you're driving for a while. All together it really wasn't that interesting. We were about 20ish minutes away from where we were going when we saw something I don't think I'll ever forget. Right before a big stretch of road with forest on both sides there were some people standing near a horse. I couldn't tell exactly what was going on, but I got a weird feeling off of it. Whatever was going on with that horse can't have been good, you could just tell right away. I didn't say anything out loud for a time but I could see the horse and the people from a decent ways off. Something about the angles they were standing at and all that sort of thing just creeped me out.
We drew closer and closer and I could start to make a few details out. I didn't fully piece it together until we were pretty close. A car had hit the horse. It was standing up bleeding onto the ground with two Amish people just staring at the poor thing. Blood pooling all around it, making the grass look dead. I think they'd figured they couldn't help him and didn't wanna put him through any more than he'd already suffered so they were just standing by his side. It must have been horrible for them. I can only imagine how that must have felt, it made me feel a bit sad even just writing about it. It was a microdose of tragedy to us, but they just lost a longterm companion, not to mention an investment of time and money. Gone in an instant just so some asshole could drive on the highway. It made me feel guilty about having even agreed to go. Not only was I another asshole in a car, I was inadvertently watching them grieve and even now I'm broadcasting that experience to however many people read this. Maybe it's wrong of me to even talk about it, I don't know. I don't really know how to even begin to interrogate those ethics. Maybe I'll return to the subject some later time
This scene really stuck in my head for so long. I don't think I can fully understand why, but I'm gonna try to explain parts of it now. There's something uniquely tragic about it. The Amish have long forsaken cars and similar advances in technology and opted for what they consider simple living. It's not fair that they have to deal with its downsides without gaining any of the supposed upsides. Maybe they were right to not live the same way we do. I'd imagine it would really further engrain their beliefs, watching one of the main representations of post-Amish technological evolution (the automobile/engine-powered vehicles) kill their horse. It made me wonder and I'm a godless communist loser. Something deeply cruel about the entire thing. "Progress" doesn't necessarily benefit everyone and doesn't benefit those who do gain equally. It's all quite upsetting once you think about it for a while. Part of me really wishes that whole area had been blocked off for the Amish in that region, that they could just live there in peace without the planes trains and automobiles. I know that wouldn't ever be done in our society, but in that moment I felt like it might be us that are wrong and not the "primitives", so to speak.
There was also a compositionally strong element to the scene. The bright green grass, the deep, dark brown/red of the horse and the crimson blood sparkling in the sun and the amish people in their predominantly blue outfits created a visually pretty stunning scene. I didn't have access to any phone or camera of any sort at the time, but I might have tried to have taken a picture if I did have one; it was honestly pretty beautiful visually despite how horrible of a sight it was. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It was aesthetically a pretty impactful scene, on top of the philosophical/emotional elements I discussed previously. Every now and again I think of the Amish folk whose horse was brutalized for no good reason, I really hope they're doing okay.
A few months back I got into the conspiracies around the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. If you're unaware, the conspiracy surrounding GATE and similar "gifted" programs is that they were actually designed to test for ESP sensitivity and similar things. I was watching some paranormal/conspiracy slop on Youtube and they showed this chart that gave traits of people that were supposedly involved in GATE experiments. The following picture is that chart.
None of the physical characteristics line up for me. The psychological characteristics and life history are much more alligned. I will start with the uncertain details or things I know are wrong. I've never had my IQ tested because it seems like a bullshit exercise, but I can't honestly answer this question. I am INFP, not INTJ. I don't have migraines, but I did have a strange condition in my past that would nearly make me pass out once every few months. I would say I probably don't fit the migrains condition now that I'm thinking more clearly lol. I have a strong sense of what's wrong and right but I don't know if it's extraordinary enough to count towards this one. This is also a commonly stated symptom of having autism which I found interesting. I've had a few dreams that could be viewed as prophetic, but it isn't a particularly common thing for me. I had one dream where we ran over my mom with our car. This dream predicted her death (though not the actual cause) and the sense of guilt we felt around it, considering we had moved up to where we live now on a long car-powered roadtrip. There were no complications involving my birth. My late teens and early twenties aren't over, but I don't plan on doing drugs, at least until I am older than that range. I am a gay man, so I highly doubt I will ever date a jewish girl. There is an interesting connection to this bit later on, so keep reading if you're curious. I have been surveiled by others before, but I don't know if I would really call it a trend. There was one time when I was little and there was a man in the woods spying on me, my grandma and my aunt when we were at a public park. There was another time when there were people with flashlights looking through our back door at night. I have also felt as if I was being spied on or viewed at multiple other times in my life, especially after moving. There was one time when we lived in rural North Carolina where both me and my grandmother were fully convinced there was someone else in the house and we were being watched. There were also a few imes where I felt like I was being surveiled in my current home, and another member of my household has made claims of similar things happening to her as well. I don't feel like that's enough to check that characteristic, but it's a bit more than a hard no. At least in my opinion
Now, for the things that confidently feel true to me. I've always found the paranormal ("/x/ phenomena") to be rather interesting. When I was little, I supposedly loved aliens. I would draw aliens on our porch with chalk. I would also watch stuff like unsealed alien files with my grandmother. To this day I find the paranomral to be interesting, and have even taken an interest in /x/ specifically things like the Empty World Phenomenon. I consider myself an intuitive person for the most part. I have memory loss of various things, including the stuff that happened in the GATE-esque program I was in. I was the firstborn son and I had speech therapy early on, before third grade if my memory serves correctly. I had a near death experience when I was little. I nearly drowned to death in a pool when we went on vacation to the beach, I believe Myrtle Beach. No one in my life has any memory of this incident, but it's something I would swear my life on. Authority figures in my life always gave me leniency. I was allowed to carry a trapper/backpack around my highschool when it was against the rules; I would frequently be late for my first period class to speak with the art teacher and I would always be given a pass. My family would largely let me do as I please and most of my teenage years I wouldn't even be given a bedtime.
The jewish art student detail is a bit odd, but I have a personal connection to it. During the early 2000s, there was supposedly a strange phenomenon of Israeli "art students" making attempts to do various unusual activities, especially the penetration of federal buildings. My aunt was born in Florida, specifically the city of Hollywood. Hollywood is certainly not a small town, but it's far from a metropolis. Curiously enough, these Israelis were, for a time, living in Hollywood, Florida. My grandparents also lived for a long time in Florida. I found this to be a bit strange. I went from watching stupid youtube conspiracy schlock to feeling unironically paranoid pretty quickly.
My point in communicating this information is not to convince you I'm a high-level psychic that was experimented on the CIA or something of that sort. I wanted to establish the mental reasons for why this really got under my skin. Everyone is susceptible to fallacious thinking and paranoia/conspiracism. While there certainly are conspiracies afoot (think project Delta, MKULTRA, etc. etc.), it is easy to fall into rabbitholes of speculation that may seem somewhat grounded but are ultimately fruitless. Think of it this way: while there certainly are targeted individuals, falsely thinking you are targeted saves the people supposedly doing the targetting some effort. If something stupid like this could get under my skin, it seems apparent to me that a lot of people would be better served by skeptical thinking becoming the default. There's millions of old people that believe every AI video they've ever seen. Perhaps it really is best to cease your investigations. The Area 51 conspiracies and QAnon are both examples of the American intelligence community planting "theories" in the minds of millions of Americans to lead them away from the truth. I would encourage skepticism, even of the supposed skeptics. It's fine to speculate, but make sure to keep your thinking reasonable. The devil is in the details
I've felt very lonely lately. I have tried to think about it, and I think I've come to two factors that are related. The first is the Empty World Phenomenon, which is kinda hard to explain but it's basically the idea that there's some level of depopulation going on that has been hidden, or some level of decay that is largely unacknowledged but it is widely felt. The world feels more and more "empty" as time goes on. I've felt this way for some time now; up to half of buildings in some seemingly prosperous (or at least not immediately impoverished) areas seems unused. There's a pretty significant amount of unocuppied houses near where I live and I've noticed more and more abandoned shit in the rural areas outside of the place directly where I live. I live next to a place with no one and there's like 3 in the same direction that have no one. I've also seen way more homes/businesses that are in such a state of disrepair that they look as if they're no longer functional, much less actively used/lived in, places you'd imagine would be empty if there wasn't a car or two parked outside. I don't really know what the deal with this is. Maybe it's just the natural processes of our economic system working the humanity out of our lives. It all has this very creepy feeling, like I'm living in the last days. Which I very well may be. But even when I was walking around DC I saw very few people just out and about, though there were people driving around and there were also busy businesses with some foot traffic, but there were much fewer visible than I would have expected. There's not even that much activity in my college's town; when I go to walk around, there's often very little to really see in terms of human activity, with the exception of some limited commercial activitiy at stores. The world feels increasingly empty. There's this real sense of societal decay that often goes unspoken but is absolutely a shared feeling for everyone under like age 45.
There's a second phenomenon that I am calling the Everyone is Cattle Phenomenon that I have been experiencing lately. I have what is colloquially referred to as autism I think. I have what could be aruged to be specials interests, I'm a loser that has a hard time making and keeping friends and I seem rather bad at reading the room. I've been explicitly told I make people uncomfortable before. I call this the "Everyone is Cattle Phenomenon" because it makes me feel like solipsism is real. The people I have to interact with on a daily basis know nothing about anything. I was one of two people in a 15~ person group that knew anything about freud at the start of my advanced psych class in sneior year. They had literally just never heard of the guy. I can't help but feel alienated from the rest of the world or like 99% of them. I don't really know what to do about it. It's a 90-10 or maybe even 95-5 split on normal people vs. me. I don't know a good word for the distinction, if any of you have ideas let me know. There's a guy I'm acquainted with that doesn't do anything other than work with his dad in an autoshop and play valorant. He seems largely pleased with this way of living, but it would drive me absolutely fucking crazy. Maybe most people genuinely are NPCs or something. I just find it hard to believe everyone I deal with on a daily basis genuinely has an internal life. Sometimes it does feel like I'm the only free one but I still live in chains. I've felt this way for a long time; as a younger child, I was always fonder of my teachers than my classmates, and this has been true as long as I've been in education. I've always preferred older people to people my age. I just don't know how to relate to anyone in my age range. There's people my age that genuinely don't want to ever watch R rated movies. There's some fundamental dividing line that separates me from that massive portion of the rest of the population. I don't like saying shit like that since it makes me feel narcissistic but I can't help it.