Not the best way to be woken up
Over a decade ago, my girlfriend at the time (T) had had a sister who was - before I met T - murdered by her husband. The sister had a son (M) who, poor kid, had to be walked through the room where his dead mother lay. This turned M who was intelligent enough into a bit of a case, which one can understand.

Anyway, when I met T, M was inside prison - first offence - a bit of thieving from hanging around with the wrong crowd when he was in his late teens. When he got out, I met him every week at the family Sunday meal held at T's mother's, where he was living.

I liked M well enough but obviously he was a damaged person; I didn't feel particularly close to him. This bit is important when I describe what happened next.

One Saturday night, T and I were asleep in bed. We'd had a couple of drinks and smokes, but nothing major - I didn't go to sleep even half-cut.

I woke up, or was rather woken up, at 3 in the morning. Something was in the bedroom - like a column of light.I saw it for a split second, and then I was:

a) shit-scared like never before
b) convinced that something was wrong with M.

The former feeling I could understand - for a split second I had felt, in fact seen, something which I still consider to be an Out of Context phenomena, as Iain M Banks would put it.

The latter knowledge though appeared to have been planted in my head. Nothing had been spoken by the spirit, no words echoed in my head, just awareness, instant awareness, that someone I knew was in extreme peril.

I woke T up as calmly as I could and explained the situation to her. "We must phone your mum up and get her to check on M" I said.

Nothing doing. It was 3am, she wasn't inclined to believe my fairy story - despite this being somewhat out of character for me. Eventually, fitfully, I slept.

Next day was a Sunday. We walked to her mother's for lunch as normal. This time, no M.

He had tried to kill himself the night before with an overdose of paracetamol, which I hope we all know is not a good method (damages the liver something awful if you don't succeed, if you do, you tend to end up in horrendous pain before dying. Don't do it kids !)

Thankfully, he survived.

I still believe that it was his dead mother who found me and alerted me that night. Why me and not her sister or mother, I have no idea.

I have never felt inclined before - or since - to mess with the spirit world. I think it exists, I can't think of a rational explanation to this episode I've related above. I think mediums are frauds and ultimately there's lots of money on offer (James Randi award) if anyone can demonstrate anything supernatural.

I'd welcome people's comments on working out a rational explanation to what happened that night. I didn't think even in the back of my mind that M was a likely suicide candidate, it wasn't something he'd spoken of to me or anyone else to my knowledge - so where did my certainty come from ?!?
( I_Was_Mordred, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:35, 6 replies)

Rational explanation?
It didn't happen. You're confabulating. It happens - no biggie.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:43, closed)

Enzyme
It happened. I swear on the book of Kells it happened. I woke T up thoroughly - it wasn't a case of me "dreaming" anything. We obviously spoke about it the next day, when we saw that M had been taken to hospital...
( I_Was_Mordred, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:47, closed)

OK - I take that point...
But the general principle stands. You had an instance of night terrors of some sort. Soon after you learned that something bad had happened to someone you vaguely knew.

Had the bad stuff not happened, you'd not have given another thought to the nightmare. But it did happen. Now, the human brain is good at spotting patterns, even when there's none there to spot. It's also quite good at convincing itself of all kinds of stuff.

So here's my explanation. You had a nightmare. You mentioned it in the morning. A little later, something bad happened with emotional resonance. You (subconsciously, if you like) drew an inference about a link. Subequent discussion of events that you would otherwise have written out of your memory has distorted that memory, and now you have the beliefs you have. So it goes.

(I had a friend who was doing a psychology PhD on witness statements - they're often unreliable because people misremember and confabulate what's left. I'd suggest the same is happening here.)
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:49, closed)

Co-incidence.
What you're not remembering are perhaps the nights when you've woken up fearing for M (or anyone else) and nothing was wrong with them.

The fact that M is troubled made it more likely that he'd be the one in your mind when you randomly fear for him.

Or, if it's less random, perhaps you had subconciously picked up some clues from him or elsewhere that he was feeling worse than usual, and your subconcious was brewing some fear that you weren't aware of, and it happened to hit your concious mind on that night by complete chance. Because let's think about it; if you'd had that thought the day before, you'd still call it amazing that you got worried before he hurt himself...and had it happened the day after, you wouldn't have been amazed at all; duh, subconcious, you'd have thought; of course something's wrong, it's just happened.

So if you think of it like that, if you'd got some hint of him being more troubled than usual, the only probability at work is a: whether you'd get a worried realisation and b: whether it'd fall on or before the day he does something. When you think of it like that, the odds aren't magical, and it's bound to happen to someone somewhere quite often. This time, it happened to you.
(Musuko, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 19:33, closed)

OK, but...
a) I sleep well, generally. I've got a large circle of family / friends and so of course there will be times when I will worry about people. I don't however wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things. Ever.
b) I wasn't worried about M at the time - I wasn't close to him, didn't feel close to him. He wasn't a big concern of mine
c) My absolute belief is that I was woken up. I've never before or since woken up in sheer panic and fear as I was that night.
d) I was completely convinced that there was something wrong with M when I woke up - an absolute knowledge. I don't go overly much on intuition - I'm a rational person.

I suppose the only answer I'll ever get on this one would be to be hypnotised to see how accurate this memory is. But it's still a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me which, given I'm now in my 40s, makes me believe strongly that it didn't have a rational explanation of me being "worried" about M, having a bad dream, then panicking. It's too out of character for me.
( I_Was_Mordred, Fri 4 Jul 2008, 11:39, closed)

@OP
Look it this way, even if suddenly having that accurate worry at the right time is down the sheer co-incidence on a million to one chance, in a world of six billion people that still means it's going to happen to six million people out there somewhere, and you happened to be one of them.

And it doesn't matter that your didn't feel worried for him; you have no idea whether or not your subconcious was worrying without you being aware.

All it's going to take is another instance perhaps ten years from now where you wake up terrified again...and nothing bad has happened. Then you'll know that, the world over, millions of people are waking up terrified in the middle of the night for no reason whatsoever, just because their subconcious dreaming thoughts got a bit muddled up...and a very small number of them will find that something in reality has matched up with their nightly terror...while the other 99.99% of them fall right back to sleep.
(Musuko, Sat 5 Jul 2008, 19:49, closed)