Paranormal or explainable.
When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you’re aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn’t zero. If you’re doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn’t just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.
So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw…nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I’m still hopped up on pain killers, but I’m quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.
Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn’t somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.
Ultimately, I didn’t have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.
I felt my blood pressure spiking from just reading this. I’m glad you were okay!
On a trip to Iceland, was hiking with my mom. I see a spot I want a photo in so I hand her my phone and trek out there. It was a small outcropping at the same height of the trail, overlooking some gulleys. Others had been out there because there was a worn path.
I’m standing out there for my photo, and some wind blows through. It picked me up off my feet. Like, I was weightless and severed from the ground for a few seconds.
I knew in that moment I was going to die. The wind would carry me over the edge and down to the gully below. Luckily, it didn’t last long enough to do that, and dropped me back on my feet, but I was so close to death, I could feel it.
People, the Icelandic wind is no joke. There was no uptick to warn me, no dirt or grass or whatever whipping around. It wasn’t A windy day. It was just no wind, then sudden wind strong enough able to pick up a 190lb woman clear off the earth.
I kept to the main trail after that.
Blimey I had no idea that could happen sounds scary
Me either.
Iceland has many crazy areas, and even where there signs (particularly on the beaches), people still venture onto the deadly rocks
Oh yeah, you have to not be stupid. I think the danger is that even when you’re not stupid, it’ll still getcha.
And yup, there were 4 people who walked right down to the waters edge after we were just warned that sneaker waves were not uncommon.
Waking up to Trump’s day-one anti trans EO calling me an “anti American Ideology” and waging war on trans people. My partner and I made the decision then and there to escape.
Close second is choking on a piece of baked potato while home alone as a kid
Not affecting me, came back from a trip to find my friend nearly comatose on my couch. She had been watching the apartment. Her blood sugar was over 1000.
As a baby, my son went through a period of febrile seizures. Basically, if he got a fever, it could cause him to have seizures. Even after learning what was happening and that it was “harmless,” it was an absolutely chilling/gut-wrenching experience, but the first time was particularly nightmarish.
I had the exact same experience. My son became cyanotic since his breathing was so shallow, and then he passed out. For a second I thought he died there and then. Quickly came too. And the ambulance took a wrong turn. Rember running after it. Man, had I had that motivation when young and fit I would have beat Usain Bolt
Just awful. I remember sitting on the couch, friends were over, my ~1-year-old son was sick/feverish but still happily toddling about, came over to me, eyes rolled back, he collapsed backward and was convulsing. I picked him up and was cradling him, sort of yelling at/pleading with him/trying to comfort him? Just panicking basically. Friends called ambulance, I ran outside in barefeet holding him still completely limp. Ugh. There was absolutely no thinking, in that moment, that “this is totally fine and okay/harmless,” even though that was the general response of the various, multiple hospital people.
Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.
I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.
The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.
Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.
I grew up in St Catharines Ontario, home of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo the serial killing couple who abducted, raped and killed teenaged girls, including her 12 year old sister, for a while in the 90s. It was EVERYTHING in my world for a long while. I was extraordinarily fanatically careful about where I went from then on, never travelling anywhere alone, etc. Bernardo also raped a great many women at bus stops before escalating to murder.
And one night I hit my twenties and said fuck it and decided to walk home from the bar we were doing karaoke at, and isn’t there a man with a car idling at the top of the small hill I was climbing waiting for me for what seemed like hours. It was plain he intended to take me, and I think it was only the stark terror on my face that made it clear I’d be a very unwilling victim and fight back and that I was sober as a judge. He told me he was just going to offer me a ride, and I said no, saucer eyed, and he paused for a minute and then said “sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you” and drove off.
When I was younger, maybe 8-10, I was at the beach with my family. I had always been a strong swimmer, we went to this beach fairly often, there were plenty of people around, and always had lifeguards on duty. It wasn’t stormy or bad weather at all.
I was swimming on my own when I got stuck in the undertow of the waves. I remember getting pulled back about 6 feet underwater before I was able to surface again. By that point, I was hit by the next wave, knocking me over and back into the undertow. This repeated for what felt like an hour but was probably only around 5 minutes, maybe 10. I was anxiously looking for lifeguards and trying to signal for help anytime I was on the surface, but no one ever noticed me.
My grandmother had taught me what to do if I ever got stuck in the waves, though, and instead of trying to fight the current I just started riding it and swimming parallel to the shore. I eventually got back to the beach and walked back to my family, and I remember it being so much longer to get back that seemed reasonable.
I was sure I was going to drown, getting sucked out and down under the ocean.
A sudden, relatively small ice patch on a curvy mountain road with no road barrier and a car coming towards me. I swirled towards abyss, then a rock wall, then back to the abyss, and the other car somehow passed me too. Thankfully neither me nor the others were hurt.
Fell on the road with a car going straight at me, I slipped in panic when I tried to get up, I don’t know if I was actually in danger but it was close
That time I ate way too much cubensis and was molecularly taken apart and put together again by the void, that was fun.
Ah, yes. I can’t say I had such a transcendental experience… still I remember watching a small animal, like a field mouse -but bearing wings, that was sipping from my beer using a long trunk reaching down to the heavenly liquid.
My six-year-old and my eight-year-old started fighting and chasing each other around on a skinny trail at the top of the Grand Canyon with very long drop-offs and no fences to either side.
They didn’t die, then, but each time I remember it again they are at risk of being murdered
Unironically, I cannot remember.
My dog and I got attacked by a sausage pitbull a couple days ago for the second time (same dog). I was able to defuse the situation without any major injuries to either dog, and just some scuffs from rolling around on the ground. It was still terrifying and he ambushed us.
You’re more patient than me. I’d have had a knife with its name on it the second time.
Sorry you had to go through that.
Yeah most people I know would do the same, or even just let their own dog attack the pitbull after they were subdued. I did choke the shit out of him until he calmed down though. Funny enough, I used a “bulldog choke.”
Two days after breaking up, I found out that my ex had lied to me about everything about himself, and had gotten out of prison for beating his mother to death shortly before we met. I met him because he had been a canvasser with a friend of mine (also concerning, tbh), and he just fit right into her friend group, and nobody had any information about his life before that. Once we started comparing stories after we found out, it all clicked into place.
Even worse, he killed his mom after she tried to give him some tough love (it sounded like normal, healthy parenting from the reports) about drinking too much and I broke up with him for the same reason. I was certain he was going to kill me for a while there, but that’s no longer a worry because I live in another country and he can’t get a passport.
The realisation about the person you were with would be awful by itself let alone worrying about possibly being in immediate danger, holy shit. I’m glad you’re safe now
Went to wake up my daughter like every morning, bed is empty, covers thrown to the side. Check around the house, nothing.
Everybody else is asleep, house is silent. Check the back, the swings, the rear deck, nothing.
Check bedroom again.
She was rolled up tight in her blanket, against the wall, from head to toe, making it look like the bed was empty.
Weak Knees Moment
I remember doing similar as a kid on the regular, I’d wake up to the sound of my mom calling my name because she had go l checked on me in the middle of the night, only instead of in my own bed I’d be under my sister’s bed, behind the couch, on another sister’s dresser, etc. I had a lot of sleep issues as a kid.
