Anomaly in the Projection – Ep. 247

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] Odd Trails is a true paranormal podcast. If you have a story to share, send it to stories at oddtrails.com. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:10] [SPEAKER_01] Forget facts. Forget logic. Forget everything that seems real. Just trust. Believe.

[00:00:58] [SPEAKER_00] My Parallel Sister by Pazza Yesterday something very strange happened to my mom and my sister that made me think that we might have had a brief overlap with another reality. I was at work between 1 and 2 p.m. when my mom texted me saying that she was going to have lunch with my sister. We texted for a bit until she stopped replying.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_00] Later, when I got home, she told me something that honestly freaked me out. She said that she was in her bedroom. For context, our apartment layout is like this. When you enter, there's the living room and dining room. Down the hallway, there's the kitchen. Then my bedroom, my sister's empty room, and finally my mom's room at the very end. From her room, you can only see the hallway, not the front door.

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_00] While in her room, my mom heard my sister come in. She swears she heard the front door open, the sound of her keys, her purse, and her jacket even being tossed on the chair near the entrance. All of the normal noises my sister makes when she arrives. Even the cats that were sleeping on my mom's bed jumped up and ran down the hallway like they always do when my sister comes home.

[00:02:21] [SPEAKER_00] But then, there was silence. No footsteps in the hallway. No door opening. Nothing. Nothing. My mom went to greet her, but the hallway was empty, and there was nobody there. Later, my sister told us that around noon, she had texted my mom to plan lunch. She left her phone on the bed to shower and get ready, and then when she came back, it was gone.

[00:02:51] [SPEAKER_00] She searched everywhere, stripped the sheets, moved the bed, checked every corner of the apartment. She even used find my iPhone, but it just showed that her phone was somewhere inside the apartment. She was so frustrated that she ended up calling her boyfriend on Discord from her PC to ask if he had somehow taken it by mistake, but he hadn't.

[00:03:16] [SPEAKER_00] After about an hour of searching and crying, she checked the room one more time, and her phone was just lying there, in the middle of the bed in plain sight, like it had never been missing. The timing really shook me. While my sister was desperately searching for her phone in this reality, my mom heard her arrive home in hours. It was as if somewhere else, my sister never lost her phone.

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_00] Left on time, and actually came to have lunch with my mom, and for a brief moment that version of her bled through into our reality. I joked about it that night to calm myself down, but the more I thought about it, the more it made me feel like it could have actually happened. Could we really have experienced a momentary overlap with a parallel universe?

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_02] Anomaly in the projection. By Faye. I'd like to give a bit of a background before I begin, and I'm sorry if this is a bit long, but I've never put any of this out there before, so I'm a bit nervous, but I'm excited to share. I'm a 27-year-old woman from a Middle Eastern background. My family heavily believes in the paranormal. Ghosts, djinn, black magic, all the good stuff.

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_02] This is because my grandfather was a kahine, which, without going too deep, is similar to a shaman. My grandfather passed away early on from a motorbike accident, years before I was born. Before that, he passed on his teachings and his Shams al-Marif book, including many others, to my father.

[00:05:19] [SPEAKER_02] Dad was an army man who kept the teachings as more of a side hobby, but the two of them had some sort of abilities that are known of yet technically unknown to our family, because of their vast and unusual nature. They saw and knew a lot, is all I can say. As I've grown up, I feel that I've inherited some very random parts of what my dad and grandfather had.

[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_02] These abilities being seeing certain glimpses into my own future, making contact or seeing things from another realm. This one's a bit more rare. And the third and final, but most active one, is astral projection. I don't have any control over any of these abilities. They just happen to me at random times, some more often than the others.

[00:06:10] [SPEAKER_02] Among the many experiences I've had, the one I'm about to share really stuck. So, my old house, or my family villa that I lived in, is situated near a military training facility. I was always curious as to what goes on there. I've taken walks around it years ago, but that's the most I've done. I now live with my partner in a different city. And of all places in the world, that would be the last one on my mind.

[00:06:40] [SPEAKER_02] So, a week ago, I astrally projected into this very facility during an afternoon nap. At first glance, I saw shooting ranges, open ground, hot four o'clock sun, military trucks and whatnot. I was there, fully, not walking, but hovering, and with full control of where I could go. This wasn't my first time projecting, though.

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_02] I saw military people walking around and going about their day. And as I took in my surroundings, two of the men stood out to me. They looked particularly worried as they talked. I was curious so I got closer to them. I was off to their right, facing them a few feet away, while they stood parallel to a truck facing each other. This is what I heard. No one's going in the room, though, dude, said Guy A.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_02] My body vibrates when I get close. Like, what is it? Guy B replied. Guy A then looked up toward Guy B, not directly at him, but beyond him. Naturally, I moved my head in that same direction, to see what he was looking at. And there, off to my right, about twenty feet away, I saw a medium-sized shed, with a thick black gate that was about halfway open from the middle,

[00:08:06] [SPEAKER_02] guarded by two to three chained-up dogs on either side. They then started barking ferociously. At me. Shit, I thought to myself. This felt so real. And then, out of natural fear, I turned my head toward the two speaking men. As soon as I did this, Guy A turned to his right, which is where I was hovering a few feet away, and he looked me, dead in the eyes,

[00:08:35] [SPEAKER_02] with a look of utter disbelief and confusion. As if he'd seen a ghost. As if he'd seen me. He started to mutter something that I couldn't quite hear, and there was so much fear in his eyes. This scared the shit out of me, and prompted me to wake up. But, no. When I opened my eyes, I was floating in the air, and slightly vibrating from head to toe.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_02] I was in the middle of my bedroom, three feet up in the air, simply stuck. I immediately had tears welling up in my eyes. This had never happened before. Aside from the fear, everything felt as though it was heavy, almost like the air in the room was invisible slime, that I got lodged inside of, I could only move in slow motion. I thought of a few things like moving my limbs faster,

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02] or screaming out. Of course, none of which worked. I slowly turned my head around, toward where I should have been laying on my bed, and I saw myself and my boyfriend sleeping. And as soon as I saw myself, it was like a vacuum cleaner turned on. In a flash, I got stuck into my body, moving backward and downward at speed, onto my bed, and into myself.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_02] In this feeling, I remember so damn well. I sucked in a gasp of air as I was being pulled into myself, and weirdly it felt really cold in my lungs. Then I jolted up, shaken to my core, but also really famished and thirsty. I had a really dry mouth, and it felt like I had run a 10K, or been hit by a truck. As I woke up, I remembered again, the sheer look of confusion

[00:10:33] [SPEAKER_02] in that man's eyes as he saw me. And I don't know why, but it brought me to tears. I still think about this so often. Maybe I was suspended or something, and couldn't enter my body again for that short amount of time, since I had been seen by that man. It's like something happened there, and it was against the rules. I've had weird sleep anxiety ever since, and I keep involuntarily

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_02] recalling that man's face, over and over. I have found and seen creepier things while projecting, or just in general over the years, but nothing beats this encounter. And as I'm writing this, I'm starting to realize that one question still stands. What was in that damn shed?

[00:11:24] [SPEAKER_00] A man watching us from the bushes by CPackage417 My old best friend and I have been in tons of scary situations because we were always doing reckless and naive things.

[00:11:53] [SPEAKER_00] One night in September, 2024, we got the bright idea to hang out with some boys and ride around for a while. Her mom wasn't home, and it was around 2am when they dropped us off just a short distance away from her house. After they drove away, we started walking back. It was really dark since the area wasn't well lit, but we didn't mind because we had the flashlights on our phones.

[00:12:21] [SPEAKER_00] Right before we got to her house, we stopped in her neighborhood yard. It was huge with a long stretch of bushes that led into the woods. We stood there because we couldn't decide if we wanted to go back to her house or hang out with other people. We spent about 5 minutes talking about the boys that we had just been with, basically having a little debrief. Then I looked behind her. Standing in the bushes was what appeared to be

[00:12:51] [SPEAKER_00] an older man. He was just watching us. He was so close to my friend that it scared me. I was surprised we hadn't noticed him sooner. She was facing me so I immediately grabbed her hand and said, there's someone behind you. The look on my face must have said everything because she knew I wasn't joking. She took off running so fast that she let go of my hand. I ran right behind her.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_00] We cut through the short wooded path that led to her house. Then she quickly unlocked the gate to the backyard, leaving it wide open, and we sprinted up the stairs into the house. I think we both forgot about it the second we got inside because we were so focused on being quiet and not waking up her grandfather. For me, though, something felt different after that. The next few days, I almost felt detached from the world. I couldn't really explain it,

[00:13:49] [SPEAKER_00] but I was constantly on edge. Every night, I locked my bedroom door because I just didn't feel safe. One night, I went with my dad to pick up my sister from work. While we were driving, I suddenly felt something grab my leg. Freaking out, I immediately turned my phone flashlight on, but my dad brushed it off, saying, it was probably a bug. The thing is, I remember it feeling

[00:14:18] [SPEAKER_00] like an actual grab gripping my leg. A few days later, my friend called me after she got home from school and she sounded panicked. The police just came to my house, she said. Why? I asked. They were asking for ring camera footage from the night we snuck out, she explained. At first, I thought we were about to get in trouble for sneaking out to hang out with those boys. Then she continued.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_00] No, you don't get it. There was a man found dead just a short walk from my house. My mind started racing. Was it the man that we saw? How did he die? What if the person I saw standing in the bushes was actually his murderer? Or, what if I saw his ghost and that's why I felt so uneasy after that night? After we hung up, I went straight to Google to see if it was true, and it was.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_00] There was an article with a picture of the older man who had been found dead. According to the article, he had gone missing the same night we snuck out and was found the following morning. A few days later, my friend told me that the police had checked the ring camera footage but hadn't found anything related to the man. I haven't looked back at the police reports since then, but I remember reading that he was around 70 years old and had underlying medical issues.

[00:15:47] [SPEAKER_00] To this day, I still don't know who I saw standing in those bushes that night. That haunts me still. And this was one of the scariest experiences of my life.

[00:16:13] [SPEAKER_02] The Receipt by Tara Sour Rex Something weird finally happened in my boring life, so now I have a reason to email you guys. I work at a grocery store, usually the closing shift, and on weekdays we get really dead at around 8. Two nights ago, I was standing at my register. Nobody was in my line, and a receipt printed all on its own.

[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_02] I put my arms up, sorta like, it wasn't me, I swear, even though nobody was really looking at me. I figured someone's transaction from another register had somehow gotten sent to mine. That hasn't happened before, but it doesn't seem impossible. But I checked the register number on it, and it was mine. There were five or six things listed, but the main item that stood out was the pickled beets. Who buys pickled beets?

[00:17:13] [SPEAKER_02] Then I looked at the timestamp. It was dated for the next day at 4.18pm, so yesterday from the time of writing this. I showed it to my shift supervisor. She said maybe the clock reset or something. Then she crumbled it up and tossed it toward the trash, but missed. I picked it up and put it in my apron, because for some reason I wanted to show one of the managers. It gets interesting, I promise.

[00:17:43] [SPEAKER_02] The following evening, one of our regulars came through my line, an older man we all address as Mr. Storm, which is his real name by the way. He had some instant oatmeal, bananas, coffee, 9-volt batteries. Then he put a jar of pickled beets on the belt, and it all clicked. I don't think I've ever seen anybody buy those. I pulled the receipt out of my apron, then I started comparing it with what Mr. Storm purchased.

[00:18:13] [SPEAKER_02] He purchased all five items from that receipt. The only difference was he had one additional item, a bottle of aspirin. The total on the receipt would have been exactly the same if it weren't for the aspirin. He could tell something was up, so he asked me if anything was wrong, but I just told him my register was being weird. I checked the time shortly after he left. It was 426,

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_02] just eight minutes later than the other receipt. I swear this whole thing has to be something more than a coincidence. I mean, come on, pickled beets and 9-volt batteries? Really? Hopefully this makes the cut. I really want to know what happened, and why. The universe is funny.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_00] I just lived through a dream I had six years ago by Varinyatan of Manwe. I don't have video or anything to prove what happened, but I need to tell someone because the odds

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_00] of this happening are so incredibly low that even I, a person incredibly skeptical about stuff like this, am sitting here going, what the hell just happened? In 2019, I had this dream where I was sitting downstairs on my couch in the middle of the night, feeling super scared and confused, like something was in the house with me. I was paranoid and scared. I was shouting, hello, hello,

[00:20:04] [SPEAKER_00] for maybe a little under 10 minutes. Someone then came down the stairs. The staircase is visible from the couch. They said, go to bed, please. And then, I was trying to get up from the couch, but I couldn't get up for some reason. Basically, just that classic dream thing where you can't move properly. Then, I fell off the couch to my side, stood up, went to the stairs, and another person came down. I gave them my phone

[00:20:33] [SPEAKER_00] and told them, bring this to my old boss. I forgot to leave it when I quit. At the time of this dream, it was right after I had quit my job and forgotten to give back my work phone. The guy in my dream basically just agreed to it. And what just happened a few hours ago is literally the same thing. I'm not even joking, except the person that was in my dream was now my grandfather. My grandfather had been living with us

[00:21:02] [SPEAKER_00] for a few days. He has Alzheimer's, and it's getting pretty bad. He's going into an elder care home on Monday. Anyway, he was sleeping on the couch downstairs, and in the middle of the night I heard him going, hello? Hello? Just like I did in my dream. Then my brother went downstairs to calm him down and said something like, go to bed, Grandpa. It's alright. Right? Then, I heard a little bit of a struggle and my brother saying,

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_00] you want to get up? Need the bathroom? And then I heard a thud. My grandpa had apparently fallen to the floor, and that's when I came down, and I was worried that he might have hit his head or something. As I was standing on the staircase, my grandpa came to me and asked, hey man, would you give this to the supervisor, please? And at that point, I realized this was all part of my dream. I just played along with what he said and told him, yeah, I'll do that.

[00:22:02] [SPEAKER_00] Now, I've been trying to rationalize it. I'm not misremembering my dream or filling in the blanks or anything. Since I was about 17, I've kept a dream journal where I write down all my dreams, especially when they're interesting or when it's a nightmare. This is a great way to get ideas, by the way, if there are any everything I just wrote explaining my dream is pretty much exactly what I wrote when I originally had it. And I particularly remembered this one because of how scared I was,

[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_00] just sitting on the couch screaming, hello. I've been telling my mom and my friends about it. I'm going to post this in a few subs online because I just feel like sharing it with people.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_02] The Survey Point by Miguel This happened about six years ago when I was working for a surveying company out in Pennsylvania. I was mostly the guy carrying equipment and pounding steaks at that point, so I'm probably going to explain some of this badly. We were out surveying along a field where the county was planning to widen a road. My crew chief had the total station set up near the shoulder.

[00:23:24] [SPEAKER_02] For anyone who doesn't know, and I imagine many don't, it's basically an instrument that measures distance and angles. Ours could automatically find and track the prism that one of us carried around on a pole. We had been working for maybe two hours when the crew chief asked me if I had left the prism out in the field. I told him no. It was leaning against the truck about 20 feet behind us. He pointed at the total station, and he said

[00:23:54] [SPEAKER_02] it kept locking onto something. At first, we thought it was catching some other type of equipment farther away. Then it started moving. The instrument slowly rotated toward the field, almost like it was following someone walking through it. But there was nobody there. It would move a few degrees, stop, and then move again. The crew chief took a look through the scope and couldn't see anything either. I remember joking

[00:24:23] [SPEAKER_02] that somebody invisible was doing our job for us. Nobody laughed. They all just kept staring at the display. They said whatever it was, the machine was getting a distance from it. I don't remember the exact number, but somewhere around 250 feet away. The strange part was that the measurement kept changing gradually, like the target was actually walking. We grabbed our prism just to make sure there wasn't somehow another one

[00:24:53] [SPEAKER_02] lying out there from a previous crew or something. We pointed ours in another direction and the station immediately locked onto it like normal. Then we turned ours away. A few seconds later, the instrument swung back toward the field. Same thing, tracking something we couldn't see. Eventually, it reached the tree line at the far end of the property and it stopped.

[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_02] Then the station lost the target completely. We walked across the field afterward just to see if there was anything reflective and there wasn't. No equipment, signs, glass, nothing that made sense. We finished the job and never had that problem at that site again. I've asked other surveyors what could have happened. Any sort of explanation would be nice.

[00:25:52] [SPEAKER_02] hopefully I explained it good enough because it wasn't just some malfunction and I don't understand how a reflection could walk across an empty field.

[00:26:01] [SPEAKER_00] I hope my mind was playing tricks on me by logical story 77. This took place in our old apartment when I was about 6 years old. Part of me still likes to think that it was just

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_00] some crazy trick of the mind that kids experience before their brains are fully developed but either way, it's still eerie as hell. That morning, my dad asked if I would help him with bringing the Christmas tree up from the basement later that day. We lived in an apartment complex so the basement was a large shared space and it was a pretty long walk from our unit. About 4 or 5 hours later, my dad called out to me to come help him. He also asked me to stop by my

[00:27:00] [SPEAKER_00] neighbors on the way to see if they needed help with anything down there. I was in my room when the door shut. The weird thing is, he didn't actually enter my room, which is what he always did and still does to this day. Instead, he just spoke to me through the closed door. I did exactly what he asked and went one floor down to check on the neighbors. As I was walking back up the stairs toward our apartment,

[00:27:30] [SPEAKER_00] my dad was already waiting for me on the landing. He didn't say a single word, he just turned and slowly started walking down the stairs. At first, I wasn't too freaked out, but the way he was moving down the steps was deeply uncanny. It looked like he was dragging his own weight, barely able to walk straight, wobbling like some sort of junkie. As he dragged himself down, the only sound filling the stairwell was the distinct jingling of keys moving in

[00:27:59] [SPEAKER_00] his pocket. When we finally reached the basement, he just stood rigidly in front of the door and muttered, I don't have the key. I could swear I just heard the keys jingling in his pocket the entire way down. To this day, he keeps every single key he owns on that one keychain. Hearing him say that completely terrified me. My immediate thought was that he was having some kind of medical emergency because of the way that he was walking and acting.

[00:28:30] [SPEAKER_00] In a panic, I turned around and sprinted back up the stairs. As I ran, I looked back down. He was still frozen in the same exact stiff pose, staring at the door. I'll never be able to erase that image from my head for the rest of my life. I think you all know what happened next when I got back upstairs. I burst into my mom's room crying and yelling that something was wrong with dad and he wasn't feeling well. At that exact moment, my dad walked

[00:29:00] [SPEAKER_00] into the room from the kitchen. To this day, he swears he never went down to the basement with me that afternoon because he had already brought the tree up by himself the first thing in the morning. For years, I tried to convince myself that it was just a vivid childhood imagination and that I had subconsciously conjured an image of my father. But I've experienced so much more explainable stuff later in life

[00:29:30] [SPEAKER_00] that at the end of the day, I'm pretty skeptical of the imagination excuse. Alright, let's jump into the feedback. Mr. Vosh 103, I know just how much you guys love those flock cams. So have you heard about the two new

[00:30:00] [SPEAKER_00] trends coming up? Spiderween and Flocoween. Just imagine if they combined them together, we would have the best news clip the next day. Also, just remember to leave your phone at home. I do know what you're talking about with Flocoween. I'm assuming Spiderween is a good costume for people that are going to be participating in Flocoween.

[00:30:23] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, promoting the benefits of Floc cameras, I'm sure. Yeah. And making sure they're operating properly and in accordance with the law. That's amazing. Yeah, just please don't deface them. That would be horrible. And don't saw them off. Don't climb up and use a Sharpie to deface the lens. Don't do any of that. Don't snip the wires that are super easy to cut. Don't snip those either.

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_00] They will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. Shucks. And beyond that. There are no rules anymore.

[00:30:52] [SPEAKER_02] Nope. Rules for thee, not for me.

[00:30:55] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Do with that what you will, but Flocoween and Spiderween is coming up. I can't recommend celebrating.

[00:31:03] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, let the record show we do not condone any form of vandalism or theft. Anyway, DNH225, also referencing last week's episode, for the purse story, I would blame it on the teleportation powers of ADHD. Also, if I saw a person maybe looking a little frantic and searching for something, and I had just seen a misplaced item turned in at the desk, I don't think it would be out of the question for me to put those together.

[00:31:32] [SPEAKER_02] Fair enough. The ADHD does have, does tend to have some teleportation effects, some side effects. Very well plausible.

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I think it affects your ability to just find something.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_02] 100%.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_00] I can't tell you how many times I've opened a cabinet or the refrigerator or a door and looking for something, it's not there. My wife opens it up and it's sitting right there, right where I looked. I can't explain it.

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_02] I lose my keys almost every day and I have air tags on them and among other things, like a hat. I have probably 17 ball caps laying around the house, but I'm frantically trying to throw one on because my hair is long and gets to my face and it's annoying, but I can never find a hat for some reason.

[00:32:14] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Same. I have a bunch of hats. I've been wearing the same hat for the last two weeks just because I can't find any of the other ones. I also have a small head, so I have to buy either women's caps or even youth caps. I got a tiny little head. You should get a little bucket hat net for toddlers. That'd be cute. So yeah, Little Red spark is back. They've always got some good feedback referencing last week's episode. The janitor at the pizza place was in a rubber mask the whole

[00:32:44] [SPEAKER_00] time. On a more somber note, that trucker story got me. Even if it wasn't his ghostly way of saying goodbye, maybe he realized something bad was happening or about to happen and reached out to say bye-bye.

[00:32:59] [SPEAKER_02] Hmm, fair enough. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Um, hmm, maybe.

[00:33:04] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, yeah. And as far as the mall janitor, maybe they were in a disguise, who knows? I keep thinking about that story in the disappearing pizza place and the weird bowler cap or whatever guy with his sunglasses. Super creepy.

[00:33:18] [SPEAKER_02] Mm-hmm. It is. And then finally from Lola, also about the flat cameras. I love it. Nobody wants it. It's all the rage. Pretty soon it's going to be mandatory for everybody to have one attached to their house and we're going to have to like pay the electricity bill. Even though it's solar powered.

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_01] Mm-hmm.

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_02] Anyway, Lola's comment. She says, The guy tracked by Flock for buying weed was where I'm from. It's very common for Wisconsin folks to drive up to Michigan to buy weed and drive back. And sadly, one of the cops that tracked their ex lives near me in Massachusetts now. Slanted keyboard face. It's crazy. It makes me sick as it definitely should. All we really can do is smile and laugh. Actually, I shouldn't say that. That sounds so

[00:34:05] [SPEAKER_02] submissive. But yeah, no, fight, take a stand. And that being said, I should actually do something about it too. But here I am.

[00:34:12] [SPEAKER_00] That's our problem. We're complacent because we're scared to lose our comfortability of our life.

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_02] Exactly. And we know we're being monitored and tracked with everything we say and do. So it's like,

[00:34:24] [SPEAKER_00] eww. They've weaned us into a sense of comfortability. We're scared to even do anything or speak up because we could lose our whole livelihood. Government could just make you disappear.

[00:34:35] [SPEAKER_02] As they do.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it's so weird that these things happen, like these flat cameras. I would say 99% of the country does not want them. So why would it be happening if all of us do not want it? Like, it just doesn't make sense to me.

[00:34:50] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, the same reason it took forever for some states to have legalized weed or same-sex marriage legalized nationally. It doesn't matter what the majority want. The people that pull the strings are going to do whatever they do to align with their own interests. It's such a silly little puppeteering game.

[00:35:08] [SPEAKER_00] Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:35:10] [SPEAKER_02] So there is one really short story that we got in an email, so I wanted to share this real quick. It's called Disappearing Car by McKenzie and McKenzie writes, This particular experience happened to me a few times, making me think it wasn't my mind playing tricks. Back in my hometown, I would work until early in the morning, usually getting off at about 2.30 a.m. I took two highways to get home. The city I lived in was large enough that there were

[00:35:40] [SPEAKER_02] always cars on the road, no matter the time of day. Seeing someone drive behind you is normal, right? But disappearing into thin air? Not so much. The first time this happened, I was taking the off-ramp from one highway to the other. There was a car behind me, a few car lengths between us. And there's a short tunnel you drive through, where the road slightly curves. It's really narrow, and only takes 15 seconds to drive

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_02] through. There's nowhere to pull off on the shoulder. If someone were to stop there, there would definitely be an accident to follow. At the beginning of the tunnel, I saw the car's headlights. But as I exited and kept driving, there was no one behind me or around me. The car just vanished. Now, the first time, I wrote it off. Maybe they stopped or possibly hit the tunnel wall. Who knows?

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_02] But this happened several times over several months, to the point that I couldn't ignore the weird feeling in my gut. I wouldn't be able to either. No. The fact that she saw it repeatedly doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make any sense to me.

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_00] Phantom car. It's similar to my story where I was on my walk the other night when that car just disappears. It turns around the corner, around this other car, and it's just gone. No sound, no nothing. Just vanished into thin air.

[00:37:10] [SPEAKER_02] Something similar happened to me earlier this week, actually. I was on the freeway in the fast lane. There weren't many other cars around, and I come up behind a car that's of course just cruising in the fast lane, going exactly the speed limit, not moving over. So I check my right mirror to see if I'm going to pass them on the right if they don't move over first, and there's only two other cars that are remotely close to me. A white car and then some other car. I don't remember what color, it doesn't matter. But the car in front of me is still going faster than those two cars. So I wait maybe

[00:37:40] [SPEAKER_02] ten seconds, if that, to move over to the right lane, check my mirror and blind spot again, and that white car is just gone, and there isn't a shoulder for them to pull over to, there wasn't an exit, there wasn't a weird turnoff or anything, it just completely vanished. It completely boggles my mind. That's so weird. I can't make sense of it.

[00:38:01] [SPEAKER_00] I want to say things like this have been happening more often, but I think we're just seeing it more often because the internet and people are telling these stories, and it's just the nature of our podcast, but it seems like the glitches in the matrix are increasing, like they're on the rise.

[00:38:14] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I'm going to blame it on AI. Maybe it got sentient, or we made it sentient, and it hasn't been revealed yet, but it's doing something. The matrix is glitching out more than usual as a result. Yeah, something's failing. Yeah, it's falling apart. It really is. We're going to wake up in our matrix pod any day now, or maybe it's all a dream. Hopefully we transcend to something greater though.

[00:38:38] [SPEAKER_00] That kind of leads me to some of my thoughts on that dream premonition story that we had from Manwe. Oh yeah, perfect. So, here's my thing about dream premonitions. Pre-cognitive dreaming, it has a decent amount of peer-reviewed studies. This isn't just a fringe thing. It definitely has some science behind it. There was this book that I learned about recently called An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunn. Hopefully I'm saying that right.

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_02] You said W, right? That was cool to hear. W.

[00:39:11] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, W. But it's been cited by people like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as being really influential on their writing. Dunn was an engineer who designed military aircraft. He wasn't just some nut. He had a bunch of prophetic dreams and wrote this book. The book apparently gets into non-linear time, the afterlife, and consciousness. It branches out quite a bit. That sounds awesome. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Non-fiction. He's just talking about

[00:39:40] [SPEAKER_00] his experiences with prophetic dreams, his research, the road it led him down. It was such an important book that the greatest authors of our time reference him as a huge influence. I'm going to add that to my list. It looks like a great read. It doesn't look super long either. Here's the thing. The interesting thing about dreaming, and I learned this just by reading some of his stuff and some of the literature on it. The prefrontal cortex is basically offline during REM sleep. We know

[00:40:09] [SPEAKER_00] this, but that's the area that affects linear and time ordered thinking. So there's this theory that your brain is capable of receiving non-linear time-based information because that's shut off to you. Yeah, I'm following. And trusted friends that I have personally have experienced prophetic dreams. I keep saying prophetic. I don't know why I keep saying that. Yeah, I

[00:40:34] [SPEAKER_02] didn't want to say that. I caught that earlier. That's funny.

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_00] I don't know where that was coming from. Prophetic dreams. I was wondering the same thing. Oh, God. Don't get me started on that one. But yeah, it's one of the few phenomena that I can vouch for because I've had the experience. And my friend who's a lucid dream coach, she's had plenty of prophetic dreams that she wanders about. But here's the question. Can we recognize our dreams when they're prophetic so well that when it starts occurring, can we change the

[00:41:06] [SPEAKER_00] course of whatever's going on?

[00:41:08] [SPEAKER_02] Ooh, I like that. I like that. So let's assume that we do recognize a prophetic dream for what it is. But if they actually allow us to change future events that would have happened if we didn't have the dream at all or didn't act on them, you got to wonder if the future is actually, fixed some sort of predeterminism because maybe the dream is showing us something that has already happened in another timeline or a possible version of reality. And by acting on it, we branch away from that outcome. Yeah. Or maybe the

[00:41:37] [SPEAKER_02] opposite is true. Our dream or our reaction to it in the final outcome were always part of the same predetermined sequence. We never actually changed anything, just sort of fulfilled the path that we were always going to take.

[00:41:50] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_02] Hopefully that makes sense, but yeah, fun theories, cool story, and I think I really am going to check out that book. It's an

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_00] interesting thought and I think this book is going to be the next Robert Monroe rabbit hole for us.

[00:42:05] [SPEAKER_01] Woohoo!

[00:42:06] [SPEAKER_02] In the same vein as Prophetic Dreams, I guess. Astral Projection, that weird anomaly story by Fae. I love this one. Thank you for sending this one and it was really well written and it made me think about a lot of new things. So what really gets me is the dogs that were barking at her. We know that our pets always manage to notice things that we don't. Apparently this is also true in the astral realm or service dogs, I guess, but the fact that the soldier looked right at her, I

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_02] think that would bother me more than anything else that she experienced because I don't remember any sort of astral traveling stories where people have been spotted by those who aren't sharing the dream or sharing the not dream but sharing the astral experience with them. Why would the soldiers be guarding a room with guns, I'm assuming, on the ground when she's up there flying, yet they saw her? Yeah, I couldn't wrap my head around that. I really like that little detail or major detail rather.

[00:43:03] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, when you said the dogs were barking and they looked at her, anytime somebody says something like that, it reminds me of that scene from The Simpsons where Ralph is talking to his parents and he is like, Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me. Oh, man.

[00:43:24] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, such a cromulent episode.

[00:43:26] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I love that episode. So this sounds, yeah, like astral projection, but at the same time, it also reminds me of a lot of remote viewing stories because it seems like the remote viewing is a very government, they've got their fingers in that, they always have, and they're always trying to get these remote viewers, at least the ones that tell the stories, they're trying to get these remote viewers to go to different military bases and stuff to spy and to get intel. And it kind of feels like maybe they accidentally stumbled upon this.

[00:43:55] [SPEAKER_02] maybe, actually. Maybe a remote viewer somehow slid into Faye's dream and then kind of like the telephone interference back in the day. Maybe that's what happened. She was dreaming and then a remote viewer from an adversarial country somehow like crossed paths with Faye and then she got to see a glimpse of that and then that could explain like maybe the weird sudden jolting back into bed, how abrupt everything was.

[00:44:21] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, a lot of different theories here, lots to speculate. Excited to hear what the audience has to say about it as well.

[00:44:28] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, definitely. Okay, so before we go, I want to talk about the mimic story, at least I think it's a mimic with this author's dad. So, the keys disappearing. That seemed to be like this weird trigger. So, he follows his mimic dad down to the basement. He's acting like a horror movie, basically, not moving, barely talking, seems just like a zombie. Things are weird. They go down to the basement door, he realizes he doesn't have his keys. However, the kid says

[00:44:58] [SPEAKER_00] that they heard the keys jingling. The keys existed, but then they all of a sudden didn't. So, this leads me to believe that it was something non-physical, more spiritual, or some type of ghost. I don't know, but our mimics physical beings are spirits. It got me thinking.

[00:45:17] [SPEAKER_02] I think they're ferrets if they're taking keys and jingling them around like that and messing with us. They gotta be ferrets or something.

[00:45:24] [SPEAKER_00] Ferrets?

[00:45:25] [SPEAKER_02] Ferrets, yeah. Like the animal? Yeah.

[00:45:29] [SPEAKER_00] Okay. Yeah.

[00:45:31] [SPEAKER_02] Or like an offshoot of ferrets.

[00:45:33] [SPEAKER_00] Okay. Can you explain that to me?

[00:45:36] [SPEAKER_02] Well, just because ferrets are known for doing things like that, being very mischievous, and ferrets don't mean harm at all. They're sweet, but they can be annoying and unpredictable, just like mimics. So it's more of like an analogy than something I'm being very literal about.

[00:45:51] [SPEAKER_00] Okay. Mimics are ferrets. Yep. I don't get it, but you do. All right. Okay. My other thought, leading him down to the basement, it seems very creepy, very bad. What do you think would have happened if the kid would have went into the basement with this mimic?

[00:46:10] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, no, the possibilities are unfortunately endless, so we can leave it at that. And I guess that would make my whole ferret theory null and void. And mimics may not necessarily be known to be physically harmful, but it's, yeah, I don't want to minimize any of it.

[00:46:26] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, and then the kid hightails it up the stairs, looks back, and the dad's just staring at the door. It's like the illusion of the mimic starts falling apart when the author or the person starts to realize things aren't right. It's almost like the facade starts to fail.

[00:46:42] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I mean, that sounds like it checks out, and there's so many different types of mimics underneath that whole umbrella, so I'm sure that's the case for some of them.

[00:46:50] [SPEAKER_00] I guess they call the doppelganger or mimic a fetch in Ireland, and this is a new one for me. I don't know if you've heard this. No. Thanks. Thank you. Yes. But it's what came up in my research when I was looking through all this stuff because the fetch are generally quiet and emotionless, just like the dad in this story. And in the folklore, they appear at night as a sign of death, and then during the morning, it's good fortune.

[00:47:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, it's like Aloha. It depends on the context, but one and the same, kind of.

[00:47:26] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, exactly. I don't remember if this story happened in the morning or in the evening, but regardless, it didn't seem good. It seemed like a sign of death.

[00:47:34] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, yeah. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. And as the saying goes, well, that is the saying. So listen to more Odd Trails. See you next week. Don't be mean or evil.

[00:47:46] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Anyway, listen, if you guys have anything nice to say, make sure you send us a comment on Spotify, Apple Reviews, email us at stories at oddtrails.com, especially if you got any stories you want to share on the show. to sign up and support the show today. Check out the new episodes of my other podcast, Let's Not Meet, and the Old Time Radio Cast. We'll see you guys next week. Stay safe. Peace out.