I’d like to relate a personal experience that I had when I was an adolescent in the hope that others might be willing to come forward and share any similar experiences that they may have had.
I’ve titled this article “A Missing Time Experience?” – with a question mark, you’ll notice – because it does not necessarily fit the “typical” missing time scenario of which we hear. It did not happen late at night on a darkened rural road; there was no UFO sighting involved (that I recall). It occurred in the afternoon, on a sunny day, on a relatively busy street in a bustling suburban town in northeastern New Jersey. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that there even was a period of missing time. Yet, it was strange in the extreme and something that I contemplate regularly to this day, more than thirty years later.
The time of year was late winter or early spring – around March or April, I believe, of 1978. I was in junior high school, seventh grade, and thirteen years of age. It was a weekday at about 3:00 PM and school had just let out. I left the junior high school, which is located next to a hospital in my home town of Ridgewood, NJ. Ridgewood is located about 20 miles from New York City, in Bergen County, a very populated area of the state. I walked, as I did most days, home from the junior high (now a middle school). My parent’s home was located about 1.5 miles from the school along a very direct route. Most of the walk was on the street on which the school was located, followed by a left and a quick right toward the very end of the walk. So, I’d normally just walk out the front door of the school, take a left, and proceed straight for about 1.4 miles, the last 0.10 of a mile being that left and the right, at which point I was at our house.
That was the route that I would normally take, however, I had a run-in with a group of boys that bullied me on a regular basis, so rather than taking a left out the front door of the school and proceeding due south for that 1.4 miles, I’d go left and then take another left at the very first traffic after leaving the school. I’d then walk to the next street over and take a right onto that street, again walking due south. It wasn’t much of a departure from my normal route, as the street ran parallel to the one I’d usually take to get home. I’d been doing that for at least a couple of months in an effort to avoid walking past the homes of the boys who were bullying me. Therefore, I’m confident of the the fact that there was no way I would have become lost or confused of my whereabouts.
However, one day as I began walking home, I noticed that everything seemed strangely quiet, almost muted. The normal noise and bustle associated with the after-school rush of children walking home from school was oddly absent and the quiet was rather eerie. There were still cars and some pedestrians present as I walked down this busy suburban street, but there was an odd, unreal feeling to everything, along with this disturbing muted silence.
The street that I was walking down was called North Pleasant Avenue, and the intersection that I was approaching was at the corner of North Pleasant and Ridgewood Avenue. After crossing Ridgewood Ave, North Pleasant turned to South Pleasant Avenue and I would pass the elementary school that I’d attended the years prior to entering the junior high in September of ’77. At crossing that intersection and approaching the elementary school, I was approximately 0.8 mile from my home. I mention these facts only to continue to emphasize that this was a route and neighborhood in which I was used to traveling.
As I continued south, from N. Pleasant toward S. Pleasant and toward the intersection of Pleasant and Ridgewood Avenues, I saw the traffic light, the same familiar stores at the corner, and the small parking lot in front of the stores. However, these landmarks appeared to be getting further away as I walked closer to them, and still this odd silence persisted. As I continued to walk toward the intersection, these landmarks continued to appear to recede further into the distance as I approached them. I began feeling very disoriented and anxious – and then, nothing; a complete loss of memory. I simply do not remember anything past the point of approaching this intersection and seeing it recede further into the distance as I walked ever nearer to it.
“Get John. He needs you.”
My next memory was of “awakening” – for a lack of a better description – on another street in a different part of town, a fair distance from where I had started from at the junior high school. I remember feeling very shaken and confused and somewhat frightened. What had happened? And how did I end up in this different area, nowhere near where I’d begun walking, and nowhere near where I’d “blacked out”? This is where things get a bit stranger still: within a couple of minutes of “coming to” my mother pulled up in her car, parking along the curb of the street where I was walking. I opened the door and she looked at me with great concern and said “John, are you alright?” Now, normally my mother did not come looking for me if I was a bit late arriving home from school. Remember, this was the late ’70s and parents were decidedly more relaxed about the comings and goings of their children. My mother never picked me up from school unless the weather was very severe or we had some kind of appointment after school, and as long as I was home by dinner my parents didn’t worry or wonder about my whereabouts. If I didn’t come straight home it was assumed that I was at a friend’s house or had some kind of after school activity.
The fact that my mother knew exactly where to find me was surprising, and I asked her how she knew where I was. She replied that she was home, doing chores around the house when a voice in her head said “Get John, he needs you”. She of course asked me what had happened and I told her about the receding intersection, the strange silence, the memory loss, and of waking up to find myself walking in this other part of town. I had no idea what had happened and to this day I still do not, other than a vague memory or feeling of having been told or shown something significant. Who told or showed me what, and where it happened, I cannot recall, although I feel at some point that I will recall the entire incident. I simply feel that this event was significant for a reason that I can’t explain, but it’s meaning will eventually be made clear to me.
Being that this was over thirty years ago, I cannot accurately recall the time that I “awoke” or what time my mother found me. However, I don’t think it was a great amount of time, certainly not more than hour, and probably less than that. Thirty minutes, perhaps? So the time was maybe 3:30 or 3:45 in the afternoon, I’d estimate. It may have been later than that, but not by much, if I recall correctly. I’ve always felt that the strangeness of this incident is compounded by the fact that my mother was somehow involved and “contacted”. If I had simply blacked out or became disoriented and wandered off, I could accept that as being a possibility – although I had no history of seizures or blackouts. But the fact that my mother was told to “Get John, he needs you” makes me believe that there was some outside design and involvement in this, the nature of which I do not know.
This, I should mention, was not the only strange and unexplained incidents that I had as a child (or as an adult). Perhaps I’ll discuss some of the others in future blog posts. Meanwhile, I’d be very interested in hearing from other people who may have experienced similar phenomena.
I had a strange incident about 10 years ago: I was at the seaside and taking a walk along the seafront with a friend. We knew what time we had set off because we were on a break from some chef work we were doing at the time.
We stopped to look at some tiny silver fish which were catching the light, wondering what they were, as they just looked like silver glitter in the sea. After watching them for what could have only been maximum 5 minutes we contiued walking. Very shortly after my friend checked her watch and we were both shocked to find that it was about an hour and a half later than it should have been. We are both convinced that we lost an hour, though without any apparent reason for it. The friend in question is a devout Christian, and as we were working on a Christian camp and she was having a spiritually intense couple of weeks she attributes it to that. As an agnostic I have no idea!
Hey Elizabeth – That’s a very interesting story. Thank you for sharing. Interesting also that you weren’t alone, but had someone there that shared in the experience and corroborate. I’m always particularly interested in accounts that don’t fit the typical missing time scenario. I’ll be writing more about that in the future. I have no idea what the nature of these experiences are, but it’s something that I look forward to exploring further. Thanks again!
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patch memories is a concept I recently came across where its not necessary to show themselves as they really are or to actually see a ufo ..the science is so advanced that a simple hypnotic gesture can be enough to be abducted and never know it unless your keen to respectable ufo experiencer groups and their experiences they have shared with me.Especially child ufo abductions. They can appear as anything to not frighten them like cartoon characters or deer or owls or in my case a 4 foot waitress from the 50’s-60’s walking towards me with a tray of food
Well I had left to go pick my children up at school I left at the normal time I remember driving there everything and everything was good no traffic this was down in Tampa and I get to the school and there’s no buses there, I thought that I I got there early I think I’m wow I’m early and I waited a little bit and nothing so I went to the office and my children was in the office so I called home and asked when I left and he said you left at the same time you do everytime but I was 15 minutes late and I thought I was early. Then another time I had called him to tell him I was coming home from work and I didn’t get home for like 4 hours and I have no clue and I was young then so I know it wasn’t old age like now LOL
Thanks for sharing, Julie. If you read through the comments section you’ll see a lot of stories like yours. I wish I had an explanation for it. It’s such a strange phenomenon.
Dear John
I believe it was God protecting you. Perhaps from death or the bullies severely beating you. The voice was the Holy Spirit warning your mother. Look at 1 Kings 18:12. Where the King tells Elijah the prophet that he does not know where the Spirit of the Lord will carry him next. Read about Enoch in the bible. Read about the Holy Spirit showing us the future and what is go come. John 16: 13-15 . Read Jeremiah 33:3 . I also had a missing time experience of 4 hours in childhood. It was God protecting my family.
Thank you, Lisa. I agree. I think God has protected me from more harm than I have ever before realized. I never associated my experiences with God or anything spiritual until a few years ago. My thinking changed after the incident that took place in 2014 that I wrote of in my article Bigfoot, Interdimensional Portals, and Childhood Monsters. I look at all these strange happenings from a much more spiritual and biblical view than I had before that incident. My mother was a very devout and godly woman, too.
Once four friends and I were hanging around town what teens do in high school. We’d stopped by the lakefront and we’re just standing around talking. It was getting a little ‘late’ in the evening for us (the cops had been cracking down on curfew laws at the time.) We noted on the clock tower at the lake front that it was 10:15pm and made comments about how we had plenty of time to stay and talk before having to be home at 11:00 pm. I remember looking off for a second during a lull in the conversation and suddenly we all looked at each other as if coming to from a daze. Then I looked at the clock an was shocked to see that it was 10:45. All four of us were freaking out at this point because we’d lost approximately 30 minutes and we would now have to rush to get home. The whole thing was just odd. I would say that maybe I just had a moment of day dreaming or drifting off and just didn’t realize but all of us had the same feeling at the same time.
Missing time experiences like that become a whole lot harder to dismiss when it happens to more than one person. Like I said in the article, I might have been more likely dismiss the whole thing as some kind of mental lapse on my part if it weren’t for the fact that my mother was somehow mentally/psychically ‘contacted’ and knew exactly where I was. Otherwise, you could more easily make the case that you just drifted off, like you said. Weird! Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to see if I can find a couple of good books about missing time experiences. I’ve read Budd Hopkins ‘Missing Time’, which was great, but it was specifically about UFO abductions.
I have had a missing time episode while driving home from work,and, like you, it was bright outside and I was driving on a highway with lots of other cars around me. But, all of a sudden, I was suddenly in a place at least two hours away from where I originally had been. I know this for sure because when I called my friend who was watching my daughter to tell her that I was lost, she was really mad at me cuz she was two hours late for work and she was in the military. What I find interesting is how you said “awakening.” When this incident happened to me, it was as if I was in one place and the next second I was in a completely different town. I was not drowsy or sleepy at all, I was just suddenly somewhere else.
Wow! Thanks for telling me about that, Andrea. This is great. I’m so glad people are telling me about these experiences they’ve had. Makes me feel less alone in this. This happened over thirty years ago, but I still think about it a lot, and I feel that whatever happened during that brief period of missing time holds some kind of significance. What that is, I’m not sure, but it’s nagged at me for many years. I’ve never gone for hypnotherapy, but maybe I will someday soon.
I just had to say thank you for posting this.
Hi,
I’ve found this site as my boyfriend and I have just experienced a loss of time today. It has been the most bizarre experience therefore I have been searching the net for an explanation or at least to see if anyone else has experienced this.
We arrived home today at 3PM. We made a sandwich and watched I TV programme. I checked my watch after this and noted that it was 4.30PM.
After this my boyfriend went off to do a little work on the other side of the room whilst I watched 2 further TV programmes which both programmes including ad breaks account for around 45mins of our time.
After this we played a video game for around 30mins (our console can tell us how long we have been playing).
I then went to the kitchen to prepare for dinner for later whilst my boyfriend organized some of the cables etc on our sound system. We both agree this had taken approx 20-30mins maximum of our time.
When I returned to the kitchen my clock showed it was 9.45PM. I assumed my clock must be wrong. Also when I looked at the vegetables I had just put on to boil what seemed like 20mins ago they were still firm and not as they would be if they had been boiling for the 3+ hours we had lost. I carried on with making the dinner then I returned to ask my boyfriend to check the time on the TV as I thought my clock was wrong. When he saw that it was 10PM he gasped. I was in
complete shock so I called the talking clock to check and we checked the news channels etc for the time and it was 10PM. We sat down and checked the programmes I’d watched etc and have worked out that we have lost approx 3 and a half hours which neither of us can explain what has happened.
We’re both very disturbed and confused about this. I originally put this down to the date as it is the 28th of February as I have always had the idea of us losing time due to us gaining too much time during leap years and time changes etc.
Now I don’t know what to think!
Hi Jennifer,
I have no explanation as to what the cause of these types of “missing time” phenomena might be, but I believe that they’re much more commonplace than most people realize. Of course we’ve all heard of missing time experiences within the context of alien abductions, but there seems to be quite a large percentage of these incidents that don’t fit the typical alien abduction scenario – like your story and mine, for example. Mine was in the middle of the afternoon in a very populated area. Yours and your boyfriend’s happened during what sounds like a routine Sunday afternoon at home. It’s very odd, and I’d truly like to understand the nature of it. I know my experience is something that somehow feels significant to me, but I just don’t recall what happened during that missing period of time. I wish I could, because I’ve thought about this for over 30 years and it still bothers me.
Question for you, if you don’t mind: did you and/or your boyfriend feel at all “strange” or disoriented before the period of missing time? Or did happen almost seamlessly, with no feel of going into or coming out of “it” – the blank spot that was the 3.5 hours that you don’t recall? I definitely felt an odd, slightly disoriented feeling and a strange silence before it happened, but when I “came to” – came out of my trance or whatever it was – it was immediate. I just popped back into my normal waking reality. Prior to it happening, though, I had a weird, unreal sensation. The amount of time that I missed was a lot less than yours, although when I came out of it I was in a different area a couple of miles away from where I blanked out.
If any details come to mind over the next few hours, day, weeks, etc., I’d love to hear about them if you don’t mind sharing that information. If you’re not comfortable with commenting on the blog, you can email me john@theparanomalist.com if you’d like to. Thank you for telling me about this. One other thought: you and your boyfriend might want to check each other over for any strange marks or rashes, which are sometimes associated with these occurrences.
Thanks again, and try not to get too freaked out over it. Have a drink and try to relax.
Take care,
John
May I also add that I am in the UK hence why my post is showing 6.41PM instead of 11.41PM which is the time here! It did freak Me out a bit there when I saw the posting time until I realised the site would show your time not mine!
I thought as much! Folks here in the states don’t use “whilst” very often, and we tend spell “programme” as p-r-o-g-r-a-m. Whereabouts in the UK do you live? I’m hoping to get to England and Ireland sometime this year.
Hi
Sorry for the delay in response. My boyfriend said he felt as tho he was awakened however I didn’t feel that. We were both very much wide awake after we realised that neither of us could work out what had happened. This is very odd for Me as I wake up very early so I’m usually very tired and almost asleep by 10 however on Sunday I was awake until 1am.
Neither of us have any strange marks. My boyfriend felt very ill yesterday morning when he woke up.
One thing I have noted is that neither Sunday or last night I didn’t dream. This sounds silly but I have conditioned myself over years to remember dreams through keeping a diary of them and I very rarely wake up without even a a small memory of a dream. Silly but the only difference I’ve noticed in my life.
We live in lancashire, north west England. There’s lots of odd goings on in England so I’m sure you’ll find plenty to investigate over here 🙂
Hi Jennifer,
It’s interesting how you and your boyfriend seem to have had different reactions to the experience. These types of things never seem to be consistent, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions about them and the nature of the phenomena. I wonder if it’s there are just natural “hiccups” in time that occur in specific areas? Although that’s a difficult concept to get ones head around. I mean, if it happened to you and your boyfriend, then it should have happened to other people nearby. That’s not to say it didn’t, though. I can see where people might be hesitant to to talk about something so bizarre. Also, how time itself could hiccup, I don’t know. I don’t even know if that’s possible. That would be a question for a someone like a quantum physicist – which I am most definitely not!
Well, the whole thing is very weird, that much I can say. But I know it happened to me, and to this day I haven’t been able to come up with an explanation for it. I used to do a podcast show and one of the authors that I interviewed said she experienced something like this too. She was driving somewhere, if I recall, and she lost several hours and ended up very far from her destination. She too had no explanation for it.
I’ve got a friend who lives in Manchester. We’ve only been in touch over the phone and by email, but I’d like to visit him when I get over there and do a bit of investigating while I’m there. I’m hoping to make that happen this year, if finances allow.
Thanks again for sharing your experience, Jennifer. If you think of anything else or have any other strange experiences I’d love to hear about them. Or if I get up to the Lancashire area maybe you can tell me where the good places are to go for a few beers 😉
John
Hello,
Im not sure if this qualifies as time loss…I went to my parents house from my sister’s place(2 minute walk), I was getting my telescope from their storeroom for later use…earlier this night I saw 7 fighter jets pass over my house…(just seems significant), So…I go to open the door to my parents house and there is an eerie silence. It’s night time about midnight…So upon entering I got the feeling I wasn’t alone…I was actually a bit scared, which is odd to me since I had made similar trips to retrieve things at their house late at night when they were out of town on several occasions. Anyway, I got the storeroom key and unlocked the door, picked up my telescope, locked the door and closed it…then I realized the key was missing. I dont remember putting it down anywhere, it was in my hand the whole time(I thought). It bothered me so much I had to make a return trip at 2:30am just to double check/retrace my steps…Still no key and still a strange silence.
Missing time or not, it’s certainly spooky and I think a lot of people have had strange occurrences like this that they can’t explain. When you tell someone about an experience like this it may seem inconsequential and easy to explain, but to the person to whom it happened it seems significant and tends to bother them. Just like my experience: I know a lot of people would explain it away as a kid just getting lost in his thoughts and wandering off in the wrong direction, but it felt like it was much more than that to me, and it’s something that I’ve thought about all of these years. The eerie silence that you noticed was also something that was present during my experience.
Thanks for sharing that, Damon.
I had one last night at the movie theatre. Me and my friend went to see “hot tub time machine” (i know its not a joke, weird it happened at this movie). He had already seen the movie on the internet but said it was funny enough to pay for and see the real thing. We got there right on time at 7:25. We didnt want to miss the movie so we didnt get any drinks and there were pretty long lines. Before we walk into the theater I tell him i want a drink and lets go back and get one. He tells me the movie is going to start soon and i wont want to miss the begining. So i give him some money for the drink and i go into the theater. I was the first one in the theatre and i sat down in the first row of the regular seating right behind the rail. I start texting my girlfriend. At this point it wasnt even at the previews it was showing the before preview show, the one with trivia and talks about tv shows.
Anyway the previews start and i’m starting to wonder where my friend is. Its been about 20-25 minutes. Half way through the 2nd or 3rd preview i’m thinking he couldnt reenter the theatre or dropped the drinks or something so i leave to go find him. I walk out of the theater and down the hall to the consession stands. I didnt see him. There wasnt anyone in the hallway and at the consession stands there were like 5 or 6 people getting a drink. So no lines really. I shrug it off i figure he’s seen the movie he went to grab something to eat or had to go to the car or went to the bathroom. I walk back to the theatre and see my girlfriend texted me back. So I texted her. I was into the theatre and the movie already started.
This isnt that big of a deal. But they make a few jokes i dont understand. I think this is weird because i coudlnt possibly have missed that much of the movie.
I dont see my friend at all. Somebody is sitting in the front row behind the railing now so i sit in the very front row. Which me and my friend do sometimes anyway.
After the movie he walks up to me and asks what happened. I ask him the same thing.
Apparently he walked in about 5 minutes after the movie started and didnt see me.
Then I walked in about 20 minutes after the movie started.
This is what i dont understand. I walked down the hall and back looking for him before the movie started, remember i left during the previews. I did not see him. All i did was walk down the hallway and back, i didnt stop for anything else. The whole trip could only have taken 5 minutes max. And somehow down a hallway with nobody in it i had to of walked past my friend and not seen him.
I checked my texts messages as a reference. The one i sent to her at the door and the one before that, that i sent in the theatre were 5 minutes apart. Which is about how long the walking down the hall and back took.
So I lost about 15 minutes from the door to the seat.
Even then it doesnt make much sense. If my friend came in to movie 5 minutes late and i walked out during a preview how did we not pass each other or see each other? He admittantly wasnt looking for me and was carrying stuff so he could have missed me. But i was looking for him and the hallway was empty so i coudlnt have missed him.
I’ve asked him 100 times if he was just fucking with me or something. But he swears he wasnt. And i would have seen him walk in. He also said he saw me down in front when i sat down.
The text message i sent my girlfriend was at 7:55. So 30 minutes after the printed start time. Which is about when the movie should start. But when i walked in it was 20 minutes into the movie. I know this because i didnt believe my friend and looked it up on the interenet and watched it till the point that i saw it.
It really bothers me because i dont remember blacking out and dont know what could have happened.
My friend chalks it up to me not really knowing when i texted my girlfriend. But i know i didnt text the whole walk until i was about to go back in the theatre and the difference in time from that one to the one before it which is when i was sitting in the theatre is 5 minutes…which is about how long it should have been to walk down the hall and back. And even if you say my times were messed up. How could we not have seen each other walk down an empty hallway to the same theatre. There’s only one path going from that door to teh consessions.
That’s pretty strange. Like my experience, it was a fairly short period of missing time (I don’t think mine was more than a half hour, at most) and it’s hard to explain. Did you notice anything else, like any strange sensations or an eerie silence? When my experience happened everything seemed kind of dull and muted – strangely quiet and kind of unreal. Did experience anything like that?
Thanks for checking in with this, Jake.
That’s just it nothing was really strange. I didnt know i had missed time until me and my friend talked about when i walked into the movie theatre. He said that i walked in 20 minutes into the movie. I told him that was impossible that i walked down the hall and back and i left during a preview. I told him that it could only have been 5 minutes tops. I checked my texts it confirmed that.
It didnt really hit me that i had missed time until we went back to his house and we watched the first part of the movie on the internet. I walked in 18:33 sec into the movie. My friend walked around 5 minutes into the movie. I left during the 2nd or 3rd preview. I figured the preview had a few minutes and maybe another preview after that. When i realized i had been outside of the theatre for at least 20 minutes i really started to feel like i was crazy or that something had happened that i had no idea of.
These experiences seem like “reality shifts”, a term coined by Cynthia Sue Larson, who has collected about 400 modern first-hand accounts of odd things happening – mostly disappearing / appearing / reappearing events including all sorts of small objects but also larger things such as people, trees, buildings, landmarks, and even towns and mountain ranges. There are also stories of doppelganger sightings, short-range teleportation through obstacles, unaccountable velocity and acceleration changes (e.g. falling slowly), time shifts, lost time, gained time and various other observations of extreme discrepancies. The site lists the accounts in the order they came in, with no tags or subject index, so it will require a bit of reading to be sure you have seen all the stories similar to yours that have been published on the site.
Cynthia Sue Larson’s site realityshifters.com “Your Stories” section is at:
https://realityshifters.com/pages/yourstories2.html
(replace the “2″ in the above address with the page numbers listed below for the doppelganger-related stories. Each page has a few different stories, so the relevant titles are also listed below.)
Interesting, EH, that I’ve been getting a LOT of stories being sent to me lately about these types of strange events, as both emails and comments on the blog. They tend to have a basic similarity that runs through them, but the particulars – time of day, setting, etc. – vary quite a bit. I don’t know what the origin or nature of these events are, or what they mean, but I think it’s too commonplace to simply dismiss. I also believe that it’s further evidence that the nature of reality is far more strange and elusive than we care to admit to ourselves. After over thirty years, I still don’t have any explanation for what happened to me, but it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t a case of a spaced-out teenager just wandering off in the wrong direction. It was very tangible event that has had a real impact on me. I walked home this way EVERY DAY, and it was a very direct route. There is no way that I could have gotten lost. And the eerie silence, the intersection receding further away as I walked toward it, the blanking out and waking up in a different part of the town – NOT something that can be easily explained. Sorry to all the skeptics, but I’m a sane and rational person, and I didn’t do drugs as a teenager, and I didn’t (and don’t) have any mental problems. Factor in that my mother was somehow telepathically told to find me and because I needed help, and that she knew exactly where I was, it just isn’t an event that can be explained away. And if not, then it has to mean something. What that something is, I don’t know. But it was significant – to me, at least. It also coincides with a number of other very strange events that occurred in my childhood that I haven’t written about as of yet.
Hi Tom,
Well, if it makes you feel any better, there seems to be a lot of people that are experiencing the same sort of thing. I’ve been getting a lot of comments on the blog as well as emails about people who have had these type of missing time experiences. I think it’s an interesting point to bring up that many of these occur during daylight hours and in public situations. So much has been written about missing time in relation to the alien abduction phenomena – you know, “I was driving alone down a dark, deserted highway in the middle of the night…etc.” But that wasn’t my experience at all, and I’d wondered how many other people might have had similar daytime missing time episodes. Apparently it seems to be a pretty fair number of folks out there that have gone through this. I don’t know if that’s comforting to you at all, and I wish I could offer an explanation, but knowing you’re not alone sometimes helps. Thanks for sharing that with me.
John
Fascinating, John! And PLEASE go to Britain. That’s where the high strangeness for me, at least, happens. I had a time slip experience in Scotland that I would really like to share with you, but my Outlook Mail doesn’t seem to work right. Could you E-mail me at lsmith33@earthlink.net so that I could send you the details? Trust me, this would make a good plot for Twilight Zone!
Keep up the good work.
Hi Linda,
Just emailed you, and I’m looking forward to hearing about your missing time experience. Hope to hear back from you soon.
Thanks for getting in touch,
John
hi john, i have another story.. this reminded me of this one, it’s very weird and far out. First i’d like to mentioned that Deja Vu is an experience you felt in a dream then later live. That’s a little beside the point. This is very strange. So it was three of us and we were in Ringwood Nj going to a friends house, i had to make a phone call so we stopped at this pay phone near a park rest stop. i stepped on something. It was a tablet. and when i saw it, i remembered making this thing. (i was a kid when i made it, it was a dream i had where i made this when i was a kid. I discribe how i made it. (i forget the details now, but at the time it was vivid.) It was this plaster flat tablet, and i think i made it with a peice of cloth, and four flat peices of wood that left a near rectangular void when on a flat floor.. Then i let it dry, and then i carved an encrpted code into the tablet. i then colored the letters as part of the code using felt tipped markers. I then broke the tablet into a three peices, and then i attatched a fishing line to two of the segmented peices by putting a groove in the back, and glueing it with clear super glue. The reason why i did this was so when i found it, i would make sure to pick up all the peices and not leave any. Very vivid and clear. i did this. I still remember the dream. but i stepped on this tablet that was in the grass and it broke. i went to pick it up, and i know i wasn’t going to pick up all the pieces.but then i found the fishing line, and the peices came up, so i picked up all the pieces and brought it too my friend. The thing that sucks is , this guy andrew, Whom we all felt seemed evil and strange, he took it and hey, wow, that’s cool, um my dad has a computer at home and it could break any codes. i didn’t even get a chance to really look at it. I thought i could figure out the code, by remembering the dream. I told them, how it was a dream where i made this. It was deja vu. I remember all the things about it. But this kid took the tablet and i never seen it again. I should try to get it back, but i think the kids a demon. That is a weird story. what do you think about that? i have no idea what to think about it. it’s so wierd. I think i was a prisoner or something, and that was to help me escape. It was last ditch effort, and a special favor and longshot. so i could avoid something. very strange right?
again, it’s like eventually, it will come to heads and make sense. that’s why i gave up the tablet so freely, but i thought i would get it back, but he wouldn’t give it back. His reaction too was weird. it wasn’t like he paid any attention to what i said, or what it actually was, he just wanted to take it away from me. Strange right. think about it though, it’s some kind of strange life. He was an agent of some sort. He knew what it was, he knew he had prevent me from having it. what do you think about it? like we’re in some kind of dream world, being held prisoners by some things. I can still remember the incident. It is so real, so weird. you can see the cloth tecture on the plaster, and i think i used a t-shirt to make it. did i make it real life and put it there? but how would i know i would step on it? and how would i know that i would neglect to pick up all the peices? It was like i did it before, and i had to do it right. but i still failed because i forgot to keep the tablet which i would have decoded.
that has left me with a weird feeling. i almost forgot entirely about the incident. anyway, thinking back, again, i think i used books and some flat wood to make the thing. the corners of the tablet were rounded. i etched into the cloth pressed face. it just weird. There’s just a host of caustic and destructive demons trying to keep you from God. How did the tablet get there? i couldn’t have really made it, who put it there? why? i’m thinking, this kid andrew, his dad worked for CIA or FBi, he didn’t even know. He just know’s his dad said he was a stock broker but he knows he isn’t. he has all weird stuff, even his house was weird, the steps were an optic illusion which makes them hard to walk up without falling, and they’re designed to make people fall if they try to run up them. maybe he drugged me. maybe i made that thing, while i was drugged, left it by the pay phone so someone could find it. there was i believe a header, etched at the top, a code key etched on the side, and then the body of the tablet. i wish i had this thing. oh boy.
On thing that was clear, the fishing line, it went from one edge and crossed over to the opposite side of the other edge, both from the back. and then there was a short piece that was went straight on one side to add strength.i saw it from the front 1st, and when i noticed to attacked line, i recalled the detail in making this by grooving a furrow for the line, and filling it with super glue. so i flipped it to see if that was how it was done, and sure enough it was. the super glue is not that strong given those materials, and i think one of the lines broke, or i had the knowledge that it was fragile. the obscurity of the oddness is just so inexplicable.
I had a strange experience which, for no reason at all, I’m calling “time-dilation.”
This occurred when I was 11 or 12 years old. I was sitting on my bed during the early evening, I think I was reading a book. I was sitting upright, not laying down or anything. I straightened up, blinked (I cannot stress the “blink” enough) and suddenly it was morning the next day.
The window was to the left of me with the curtains closed. Before I had blinked, it was rather dark out; afterward, the curtains glowed with the morning sun. I was still in the upright posture and my train of thought was never interrupted! I had been considering getting my Legos out and playing with them for a while…a thing which I was still thinking about now that it was morning.
There was absolutely no interruption besides the blink. My mom asked me the next morning if I was feeling alright since I had gone to bed rather early. This remark was because I had gone to my room for whatever reason and simply not come out until morning.
I also noticed that I didn’t feel as though I had slept. I was not tired, not groggy, nothing. It was just a blink and I lost around ten hours. I was also not tired later in the day (that is, I didn’t feel like I had been up all night).
Any thoughts, anyone?
There’s obviously a lot that we don’t understand about the nature of time. It seems as if we occasionally experience hiccups or ripples in time, but I’ve no clue as to how or why these things occur. Maybe it’s something completely different, although I tend to think it’s a little too easy to just dismiss them as hallucinations or mental aberrations. I’ve been getting quite a few emails and comments on this blog about these strange occurrences, and having been through something similar, I’m not inclined to think they’re all just a matter of “spacing out” for a while or going on autopilot and losing track of time.
what i’ve noticed is that there seems to be moments or instances where everyone, seem to feel, ‘the week flew by’ or the day dragged on. i think that’s something you will see. I believe the follow each other too. You see a day fly by, you ask people, did the day seem short? and several people would say, yes it did, Or other times, (and it seems like they follow each other within a weeks space, did so and so day seem to be a long day? and then several people say, yes, yes it did seem to be a long day. My theory is that the conciousness is somewhat of the substance of electric pulse that is a medium that transpire the whole universe. That consciousness ripples. Imagine for a second., consider contemplating what you thought about a movie? It would take some time. Imagine if what you could think in an minutes time, or several minutes time, could occur to you in a much shorter period. Through the day, you notice much more things. There hsould be evidence of that, but pershaps its over looked or it doesn’t manifest so smiply as one might expect. People take timed test, and such, Just some thoughts on it, Next time you seem to have a full day that seems long, or one that seems to fly by, ask others what they thought.
I lost time in 1985 when driving with my girlfriend down highway 299 toward Redding. I was taking her to the bus station in Redding and we were under time pressure to make the trip in a timely manner, and as such, were acutely aware of the time and how much we needed to get to the station.
Background information: My daughter, then 6, had just undergone brain surgery for a tumor, (craniopharyngioma), and was still very unstable physically. I had to quit my job and stay in my parents country home near Burney while she convalesced. My son who was 5 was with us too. I was recently divorced so my life was a nightmare, needless to say. I also must metion, (sorry as I digress), that this remote property was haunted. We heard sounds of people around, (footsteps, bangs, doors slamming, knocks on wall), but no one was there. One night I awakened terrified of something coming down the hallway and I got up to turn on the bathroom light. The elecricity cut off and, in the pitch darkness, something sat on the bed next to me. The mattress moved, causing me to lean toward the thing that made it go down. I was quite awake when this occurred. Then the lights came back on. As soon as they did, I threw on some clothes, grabbed my kids and drove to town to find lodging but nothing was available – (also very freaky as this was a nothing town). I ended up having to go back to the house.
Now, to get back to the missing time part: My good friend and her children came up to keep us company for a few days- (it was around the 4th of July), and she had taken the Express bus from San Jose CA to Redding. The day she had to travel home was very hot and I was concerned because I had an older car that overheated frequently. We were also on a tight time schedule and she and I both were very aware of the time we left, how long it took to get to Redding, and when we’d be there in relationship to the bus’ departure. We were happy to be making good time and she was going to be at the station early, (if the good road conditions continued). Suddenly, we had this awareness that it was MUCH LATER. The day looked different: the shadows were longer, the daylight different. I looked at the clock and my watch, and it confirmed time loss of around 2 hours, (maybe more). We were very chagrined and kept wondering how this could have happened. Worse, she missed the one express bus and now we’d have to figure something else out. We decided it made more sense to continue into Redding, go to the bus station so she could buy a ticket and get the next days’ schedule. (the bus only ran once a day). She would have to get a motel room for the night too. When we got to the station and she was buying a ticket, the agent told her the bus had had some malfunction but they had just repaired it! It was going to leave after all, albeit late. To this day she and I scratch our heads in wonder as to what happened to us and our 4 children, (her two and my two). I do have dreams of flying and going very fast. I also have dreams of being in an “elevator” that goes sideways, up and down and tremendous speed. My daughter, now 16, was born around 9 years after this experience. She has always been afraid of aliens and described one to me as a little child. She said it was looking in her window. I chalked it up to a child’s imagination at the time. She also told me about her nightmare of being around aliens and us, (humans), mutating into aliens. She was the only one who was pure human. She said one other person was human, she thought, but then she saw his hand was an alien one. Well, there’s more but my knuckles are tired. I just pray to God that they leave me alone because I like my reality of being on terra firma!! The notion of being abducted does not sit well with me at all. PS Two years ago my brother, at the same country property, (whose location shall remain secret), saw a UFO hovering in the night sky. He said he did not see a craft but saw bright lights signaling another light in the distance, near Mt. Shasta. They were doing some sort of code. Then, a powerful beam of light swept from over the land, illuminating trees, river and fields, and abruptly went dark. There was no noise. Thank you for letting me share.
Hi Paige,
I just don’t know how to respond any longer to these accounts of missing time incidents. I’ve really been getting a lot of them — emails as well as comments on the blog. I wish I knew what to the heck they were all about. Some seem to have a strong UFO connection, as yours seems to, and others defy categorization. I find it both comforting and disturbing that so many people from different areas and walks of life have gone through this. I have to say, it’s starting to sound almost commonplace.
The two aspects of your story that I found the most intriguing were the fact that your daughter claims to have had these alien “dreams”. If you’ve read any of Budd Hopkins’s books, like Missing Time and Intruders, he talks about the abduction phenomena often occuring among families and over several generations. The other part that caught my attention was that you had a haunting experience and ghostly encounters. I know the UFO folks don’t like to mingle with the Ghost enthusiasts, but there’s been plenty of anectodal evidence that these supposedly different phenomena are often linked. This just further cements my feeling that a lot — probably all — of these different phenomena are all, at the most basic level, part of the same thing. Probably why I thought Hunt for the Skinwalkers was such an important book. The people at that ranch also experienced hauntings and poltergeist-like activity, as well as UFO sightings and encounters with bizarre creatures. Wow, ghosts, UFOs, and cryptids all in one place? But one has nothing to do with other, right? I’ve really come to believe that this is wrong thinking.
Thanks so much for sharing that with everyone. Best of luck to you and your family.
John
I’ve had memory lapses twice so far in my life and several very wierd and very scary dreams. The first was when I was about 6 or 7 maybe younger and we were just returning home from a long road trip. My dad put me in bed, said goodnight, switched off the light and closed the door. Not 5 seconds later I swear it, he opened the door and turned the light on and said good morning, time to wake up. I remember telling him “but you just left!” and he said “no you were just tired”. I can’t understand it to this day I’ve never experienced anything like that, I always have a sense of time, my body will even wake itself up right before my alarm goes off, I have an amazing body clock…but that just didn’t make sense. The second time was recent last year when I was in Iraq I was laying in bed thinking about something, I don’t even remember what it was anymore, but I was thinking very hard and all of a sudden I had a feeling that I had been thinking for a long time and I looked at the clock and it was 3 and a half hours later and I was completely rested…very wierd. I couldn’t sleep for the life of me. I also had a couple of alien dreams in iraq and saw what I can only describe as a supernova in the sky when I was on night shift. My friend was with me but he didn’t see it, when I saw it it was like there was someone in the sky taking a picture when the bulb flashes and then glows and dims into darkness, it scared me so much I jumped behind him and the blood went out of my face.The first scary dream I had in my life and the only time I’ve ever fallen off of my bed was of me and my teacher in the classroom, her sitting at the desk and me dancing around the room in a big circle, then a creature came out of a plant pot as I passed it and I ran from it around the room but it caught me and dragged me into the pot with it.
Very interesting experiences. Thanks, Amber. What I found particularly interesting was that you saw this supernova but your friend who was with you did not. I think certain people are more in tune with these phenomena. I was camping in NY State a few years ago with some friends and we walked down to a pier by the lake near where we’d set up camp. I saw an object in the sky that moved in an erratic pattern – very quickly, then stopping suddenly and changing direction, then moving off more slowly. My friend was looking at the same strange object (we initially thought it might have been a satellite because it appeared to be quite high up) but when it began to move like that, my friend simply didn’t see its motion. To him, it was just a satellite, but I’ve never seen an aerial object move in that way before. You might be more sensitive to these experiences than most, and I think this whole missing time thing fits in with that, somehow. It appears to be common to people who see and encounter strange phenomena, but that’s just my observation from the contact that I’ve had with people through this blog.
Reading these accounts makes me realize that experiencing time anomalies is far more common than supposed. I’ve had numerous experiences –day and night — when I lost time. At one point (after seeing “Sybil”) I even worried that these time losses were the result of some sort of multiple personality disorder! But, upon careful reflection, I realized that since at least some of these experiences were in the company of others, I was fairly safe in assuming I was not in the grip of schizophrenia, thank God.
This particular experience was not a time loss but rather a time GAIN.
I was about 19 years old at the time, in college at University of Tennessee-Knoxville campus, and had been invited by a boy I had met to visit him at Fort Knox, Ky over New Year’s. My roommate and I debated the trip and decided at the last minute to go. It was very cold, snowing and the roads (this was in ’67) over the mountains between the two places were an icy mishmash of secondary and short stretches of interstate roads under construction, far different from the smooth interstates we travel on now. It took us about 8 (hair-raising) hours to make the trip in our little Volkswagen bug. When we got there, the whole experience of seeing the boy again was a disappointment, so we simply decided to get back in the car and go home even though it was in the wee hours of the morning. I took what I thought was going to be the first leg of driving and found myself slowly creeping over more an and more treacherous icy roads. To my dismay, my roommate had immediately fallen into a deep sleep. After couple of hours I tried to wake her so she could drive for a bit, but no amount of yelling, shaking or cold air with the windows down would wake her. I didn’t think too much about it as she was an early to bed person and a very sound sleeper, so I drove on, thinking sooner or later she would wake up…but no. I continued driving, rolling down the window, playing music and trying periodically to wake her..to no avail. There were no convenient rest stops or eating places back then. No well-lighted roads, and businesses were few and far between, and didn’t stay open all night back then either. I resigned myself to driving the rest of the way with no help, the roads getting worse and worse.
I seemed to sense myself “fading out” ..like going on “auto pilot” and THEN… I found myself pulling into the parking lot of our apartment complex. at about 7 am–at which time my roommate woke up and asked groggily, “Where are we now?” I told her “Home”. She looked at her watch and said, “That’s impossible.” We had apparently traveled the entire way in less than 5 hours.
Even weirder, though we both realized how bizarre the experience was, we never discussed it again. It was almost as if it was a taboo subject.
Barbara – Hopefully it’s some comfort to know that so many other people have had similar experiences. I’ve had a number of people telling me similar accounts of covering long distances in an impossibly short amount of time. And as for your roommate’s unwakeable sleep, that’s another common element in missing time reports. If this has happened to you numerous times, then you were likely the target of…whatever it is that’s behind this phenomenon. Your roommate was “switched off”, so to speak, because she wasn’t needed and (whatever it is) didn’t want her to interrupt or interfere. That’s my interpretation based on what I’ve read and the emails that I’ve received.
Thanks for telling us about this.
This is an odd experience. Particularly with the whole issue with your mother. It does seem sometimes that people who are close – like you and your mother – can sometimes share a personal energy that connects them but…I certainly don’t have an explanation but interesting story. Wonder if you’ll ever know.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of aliens taking people as a reason for missing time, I just figured people forgot things, and couldn’t explain them. Then last night, I was sitting on my porch, it was around 12am-1am, I had just gotten out of the shower and was watching a movie on my iPod, when I heard a noise in the field next to my house. I was about 45 minutes into my movie, and assumed it was no later than 2am in my mind. I’ve always had a great sense of time. Being able to accurately guess the aporoxament time fairly accurately without looking at my watch. So when I heard a noise, which sounded like a garbage can getting knocked over, I paused my movie on my iPod, glanced out the screen, saw nothing, then hit play on my iPod. When you touch the screen on an iPod, the play/ff/rewind touch controls come up, and the time is displayed on the top. Glancing at the top I noticed the time said 4:06am. My hair still being damp from my shower, I figured the clock on my iPod was incorrect. I knew I hadn’t been outside for more than two hours tops. I didn’t black out, fall asleep, see any UFOs, or even move. But almost two hours of time passed, and passed as if I skipped over it, instead of going through it. My hair is short and doesn’t stay damp longer than an hour. I’ve had no history of anything that could be attributed to losing track of time.and I can recall everything I did from the time I got out of the shower, to the point I realized it was after four in the morning. So I tried to search the Internet to see if anyone else has had a similar experience, and I can’t seem to find anything that isn’t connected to aliens or angels. Medical problem? Or am I experiencing events that I cannot remember?
John – I have an inbox full of similar stories. While some people are driving or walking (as I was) and find themselves elsewhere with no recall of getting there, many others tell me of experiences like yours: time seems to just “skip ahead”, e.g., one minute someone is puttering around the house in the mid-afternoon, and the next thing they know it’s midnight. They haven’t gone anywhere, it’s just that time seems to have jumped ahead or fast-forwarded.
I can’t offer you any explanation of why this happens, but it I do know that I hear lot of stories just like yours from people that sound very sane and credible. I’m not convinced that this phenomenon is necessarily caused by “alien abduction”, but I’m hesitant to just write it off as a matter of zoning out or dozing off on your feet. I honestly don’t feel that this was what happened to me.
At this moment where I live (Midwest US) it’s almost 5AM, Thursday. This past Tuesday I experienced something, which I suppose was some sort of missing time. It wasn’t a shocking or dramatic experience, but it was still quite odd. Bear with me for a moment.
That evening I was in the kitchen making a snack. Trying out something I had seen on a cooking show, I placed store-bought flour tortillas on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven (under the broiler) to crisp up. For the third tortilla I got the idea to brush it with butter (or rather a healthier “buttery spread”) to help brown it. I put the butter in a small, flat plastic container, melted in the microwave, and brushed it on. The results were good, so I decided next to cut some tortillas into triangles and make chips for my mother. She uses a different butter, though; so I placed the container and brush in the sink, filling it with soapy water. A few minutes later I washed the brush and set it aside. Then I washed the little container, and then…
And then what? I don’t know. I remember washing it, rinsing it, and then nothing. A few missing seconds –mere seconds!– and I couldn’t find it. I hadn’t set it in the sink, in the drainer, on the counter, or on the table. I looked in the trash can and even in places like the fridge and oven! But it was nowhere to be found. We have other containers exactly like it, but none were in the kitchen (the plastic storage containers are kept in a different room). I called my mother in to help, but we still couldn’t find it. It just vanished! I never noticed or felt anything weird before or after. I just turned the water off and noticed it wasn’t in my hands, or elsewhere. (And I know weird feelings, having had countless freaky deja vu spells throughout my childhood and adolescence that were sometimes physically debilitating.) In the end, I just got another container and went on with preparing the chips. Still don’t know what it was though.
And I still haven’t found that damned plastic container!
Amanda — I have theory that missing stuff (and sometimes even people) disappear into another dimension. I say that only half-jokingly, because I’ve had the same experience. It’s not like the object is missing, it’s more like it’s vanished before your eyes. Yeah, definitely been through that. I do wonder if this sometimes explains missing persons and children. Can we slip out of our reality and get lost in another? Hey, maybe this will be the subject of my next blog post.
Hey, thanks for the reply. Yes, I also think stuff like that might happen, and that it might have happened to my container. My mother hasn’t given her theories on it (she probably doesn’t want to think too deeply about it), and only told me not to tell my father – “Because you know what HE’LL say if you tell him!” (Which means: “He’ll automatically conclude it was a ghost and then he won’t shut up about it.” )
Anyway, it was an interesting little bit of strangeness to be sure, particularly as I’m not used to such things happening to me. Well – I mentioned the deja vu thing, and I have seen many UFOs (and by that I simply mean Unidentified Flying Object, not “alien spacecraft” or even “top-secret military aircraft”… I’ve had ideas about some of them, but I won’t make claims with any utmost certainty), and maybe a couple of other things; but never something quite like this.
Well I don’t mind a bit of weirdness now and then. Certain things I can do without (I am very glad to never have had premonitory dreams like my grandmother did as a girl!), but I believe in a greater, weirder reality that’s full of wonderfully, frightfully strange things; and I believe that sometimes that reality (or rather “those realities”) intersect with our own. It’s nice to have little blips and ripples to back me up on that belief sometimes. (Mind you, I’m always inclined to look for a so-called “mundane” explanation first. Just because I find something possible does not mean I think it’s the likely, or even plausible, explanation.)
Ah, sorry, I do ramble a bit once I get started. Anyway, I only just discovered this site (while looking for mande burung info), but I will keep an eye on it. And I think you should definitely write that post! Sounds like an interesting read.
(P.S. You say “I have theory that missing stuff (and sometimes even people) disappear into another dimension. I say that only half-jokingly, […]” That makes me think of how I often ascribe minor bits of weirdness around the house to faeries. I, too, am only half-joking. If my mother knew that, I don’t know what she’d say to me!)
I have 2 periods of lost time. The first was when my daughter was 2, she was spending friday night at my mothers. I went to bed at my usual time, no feeling ill or anything, I was woken by the work man who had come to fix my boilder, I thougnt it was saturday morning, but it was monday. The second instance was about 10 or 12 years later, I was going to the supermarket, was walking towards the corner of two streets, next thing I was at the corner going up the wrong street, my husband when I got home asked if I had gone to my sisters for a couple of hours, as usually it takes me 30-34 minutes and I was gone about 3 hours.
Anne – Thanks for telling me about your experiences. Wow, in that first one you lost a whole weekend! The second experience sounds a bit like mine — finding your self in a different area and losing time. Can you tell me the years in which these two occurrences took place?
Thanks again for sharing this.
John
the first incident would have 1984, the second would have be about 96/97. i have also had the experience of waking up when it has been unusually still and quiet, but it was more like time was suspended it was a really strange feeling, that was in 94.
for years i have felt like i am waiting for something, and when it happens i will know. it is a strange feeling. when i was a small child i would lie in bed at night believing that my real family would find me and take me home, but i am an adult and still waiting, i think as we grow we hide our feelings inside. then something happens as you get older that reminds you of those thoughts and feelings.
Anne – Thanks for supplying me with the years. I’m attempting to see if there are some patterns here. I’ve been getting a lot of these types of similar missing time comments and emails, and I want to check to see what commonalities I can find.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean regarding the feeling of “waiting for something”. I feel that way too, as if I was told or shown something that I’ll remember later on in my life, or will have some kind of significance. It’s a very weird feeling.
I have just returned from a trip in which there were three of us friends driving to the Vaal Dam in South Africa. My friend was driving but all three of us knew the route from Johannesburg very well as we have done it many times. About an hour into the journey at midday all three of us feeling disorentated and the driver asked if we had done the turn to head to the Sunset Cove area we were going to stay ? All three of us had no recolletion of the T junction were were supposed to take and were all confussed. The last thing we had remembered was some time back in the journey when i had seen a ‘wirldwind’ and got a strange feeling in my feet.
We all cannot work out what happened to the missing miles we had travelled and had no recollection of passing any of the familiar land markes and stop signs that all three of us should have remembered passing.
No we had not had any alcohole ! It is most weird.
John, happy to have found you here. i’ve told two about this and they think i’m a bit off. within 3 months i’ve had two missing time experiences. i was alone both times. i will go with the second of the two. we friends meet monthly or every other for reasons all mothers meet monthly or every other. to laugh, talk, enjoy adult company. From Katie’s, where we met, i have a 10 mile drive home through gorgeous PA countryside. On my way home, there is a cemetary i’ve been familiar with my whole life. i drove in, as is not unusual. stopped at a random grave. kneeled down and prayed, took in the night, wondered about the life that once was. i got back into my car at approximately 10:15 PM, drove one mile up the road, pulled into a friends drive. i was going to visit, but thought it was too late, as she has young kids. from this point, i had only 3 miles to home. i remember the entire ride home. i remember getting into bed. The next day my fiance asked why i did not get home until 1:30 am….I remember the entire ride and the times of all my stops……
Eva — I’m beginning to think that more people as not have had this experience at least once. I wish I knew what it all meant. Yours is a bit different because you say you remember the entire thing, yet there was more than three hours missing anyway. That’s a new wrinkle to this phenomena. Most people have a lapse in memory. There seems to be some core similarities to this phenomenon, yet a lot of variations. So maybe nothing “happened” to you, perhaps it was just some kind jump or fast-forward in time — i.e., not a repressed memory of something that occurred, but some kind of anomaly having to do with the nature of time itself. Many of the experiences that I hear sound more like this than the “typical” alien abduction-type scenario (seeing a strange light or being, no recall afterward, a missing period of time, a feeling later of something having happened, etc.); more like a jump forward (and sometimes backward) in time. Thanks for telling us about your experience.
I was thinking back to when i was a child, my dad was army, we had moved to germany and it was my first day at my new junior school. I was sat in reception waiting for my new teacher to collect me, and I had this strange feeling that what was occuring was a memory, yet i was actually living that time, but it felt like i was looking back on a memory. which i had not made. I had another strange incident a year later, when i was at boarding school an ex submarine base. myself and a friend was playing in the cellar, where we had a day room, like all youngsters we were jumping from chair to chair and throwing cushions, when the lunch bell rang, we went to the door but it would not open, like someone had locked the door and we could not get out, yet when one of the other girls came to get us the door opened without any problem, scared me for quite sometime, as all out study books were kept in lockers in the cellar, i only went down when i knew there were other students down there.
Hi John,
Again I am thankful for this site and the sharing of so many experiences others have had that are, like mine, simply unexplainable. Reading the accounts of others, I am more curious than shocked that I have had so many similar things happen to me. Back in my late 20s and early 30s I “lost” things only to have them appear where they didn’t belong like my toothbrush upstairs reappearing in in the morning in the downstairs half bath; out of style or just plain “past their prime” clothes I had culled from my closet and drawers, bagged and given to my husband to take to a landfill (no garbage service at the apt complex at that time) reappearing (okay, that one was a creepy shock. I even accused my husband of playing a joke on me, since one of the items was a kind of sexy (but truly ragged) nightgown he liked) but he swore he had tossed the bags in the landfill…besides which tey ALL reappeared in closets and drawers!
Again this summer, odd items started popping in and out of existence, to the point I simply gave up and thought, “ah, well….so be it”,. Th experiences slowed to only occasionally, then stopped.
[That sort of thing has occurred ~to the extent I couldn’t HELP but notice~ more than a few times over the last 30 years. ]It still occurs occasionally, but this summer I regularly started experiencing the “now you see it now you don’t” weirdness~like looking for my keys, which I distinctly remembered leaving on the kitchen table the night before but were no longer there when I was preparing to go do errands, causing a bewildering whole-house-hunt that ended back at the table where~~ I found my keys in exactly the same place on the table I remembered leaving them!
One day, also during this period, while driving to the store (I thought), I suddenly found myself far across town not knowing how I got there, and I looked at the dashboard clock and realized not nearly enough time had passed for me to have gotten that far across town in so little time.It felt exactly like I had “blinked” out and in again.
Physicists say that objects~ because we are vibrating at the same rate, at the same time as the things that appear solid surrounding us ~ comprise our dimensional “reality” and are tangible only because our vibratory rates are the same, and that subatomic particles are not “solid” but wink in and out of existence rapidly giving only the illusion of solidity. I guess the question is, why does our “reality” and our (previously reliable) vibratory rate, become NOTICEABLY subject to change? What is happening in our dimension –maybe outside there, somewhere– that is affecting our “reality” in this way? Einstein believed that time was not constant but malleable, physicists have actually proved it, I have read, although I am certainly not well versed enough in that scientific modality to explain exactly how. But my many experiences in gaining AND losing time as I have described in this and my previous post make me think…something SOMEWHERE is causing our dimension to be altered, affecting– the time space continuum? in some way, creating the “gaps” so many have experienced. I wonder ..what?
Some of us take note of these oddities, while others, perhaps, simply ignore them. I wonder why THAT may be, too.
Hi Barbara — Thanks for checking in again with that contribution. The more I hear about these types of various time anomalies, the more of a mystery it’s become. I still regularly receive comments on the blog and emails about these phenomena. It seems to be far more common and widespread that I ever imagined. Another observation that I’ve made is that people who experience one type of anomaly often undergo others. Sometimes they’re variations of the same phenomena and other times they’re (seemingly) different — e.g., people who have missing time incidents may also undergo poltergeist phenomena — that sort of thing.
I’m not sure if these things are happening to select people for a reason, or, as you said, some people notice them while other simply ignore them. Certain people may be more sensitive and pick up on these events, while others don’t or can’t seem them, screening out those things that don’t mesh with their notion of reality through a subconscious filter. Yours is an interesting case, because when things happen like clothes reappearing in your drawers and objects vanishing and reappearing, that suggests to me that there’s some kind of intelligence behind these goings-on, rather than being random events.
I have no answers, but I truly believe that we live in a bigger, stranger universe than we can possibly imagine. Of that, I feel certain.
Mine was different. It just happened today. 6pm, i was at some place. I checked my wristwatch and saw it was 6.20pm, and then i checked my phone for messages, and saw that the time was the same… and then i decided to ride a bus home, my travel time would be 30-40 minutes maximum, i rode the bus at around 7pm, and when I got off the bus, i walked for around 5minutes to be in our house,. but when i checked my phone,it was 7.52, and i checked my wristwatch, it was 7.35, my wallclock reads 8.20 and my laptop clock is 8.05pm… i don’t remember me making changes on those clocks.
A lot of people have told me about these smaller “blips” in time, where people are fast-forwarded or step back in time. Thanks for letting me know about your experience.
My journey began in the summer of 1996, I was living with a so called friend of mine and on this particular day I was very sleepy, probably from boredom, so I slept for the most part of the day, then around 12:00am my television show, “Strange Universe”, was about to air so I went to the kitchen to get something to drink. I grabbed some ice, a cup, my drink and I was on my way back to the sofa.
As I was sitting down I noticed a commercial was on, and then it was on for about five minutes, which was odd for a commercial to be on for such a long time, so I became upset; I thought they had canceled the airing of my favorite show.
I then went to the kitchen because–oddly enough–my drink had gone warm and the ice had melted, this was too strange for me because; it would have taken a long time for that ice to melt, and almost instantaneously! I thought to myself; “wow, I know I did not just fall asleep because I do not remember ever doing so and the situation does not suggest it to be true”.
In my denial, I went to the kitchen for some more ice and that’s when it all happened, I looked up at the clock and found that it was 2:00, I thought; “this just cannot be possible” so I did a reality check and called my mother and asked; “Ma, what time is it”, she answered “baby, its 2:00 in the morning, what’s wrong” I told her that “it had just been 12:00 no more than five minutes ago” and she answered, typically, “you must have fallen asleep”.
As the days and then years went by I continually asked my inner-self what had happened, only to get little bits and pieces that finally became clear to me. The ordeal slowly started to manifest itself through my twelve years of searching and researching my dreams along with my daily observations of life.
The truth of the matter is, “I blacked out”, or should I say traveled back into a time period many thousands of years into the past, it was like I receded back into the dark region of my subconscious mind, by a trigger unknown to me, only to be confronted by someone who I somehow knew as my father, his name was Saieman.
Saieman was wearing a red and white garment somewhat like a dress suit fashioned with a hood, his face was strange, in a since that he looked exactly like me minus his black and red beard, I almost felt as though I was looking at myself. On his head were locks in the shape of horns which protruded out of his bald scalp. He had this concerned look on his face that expressed joy and resentment. As I looked around I could not see the sun for the area of the sky seemed blocked off for some reason, it was like the sky was hiding itself behind some weird barrier.
Now I am starting to notice that Saieman had a few others waiting with him like they were expecting me. I became anxious because for some strange reason I knew these people like my own family, there was a woman there, she was my mother her name was Ovaiesha. Ovaiesha had to have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Ovaiesha had a reddish Brown complexion, similar to Saieman. She was wearing a long white garment that looked like it was going to be a dress but it phased into pants. Around her neck was a red cloth that formed a braid that extended between her breast. The garments worn by Saieman and Ovaiesha were similar in their functional nature and structural design. You could almost tell that they were companions because their garments were complementary of each other. As I was slowly gaining my composer I felt as though I had awakened in the middle of some ritual and I was the subject.
I really cannot say too much about my own physical appearance outside the fact that my hands were different. I was never one to wear any rings or body decoration and I was adorned with these strange rings, medallions and bracelets that seemed to glow, as a matter of fact my whole body seemed as though it was glowing but I remained calm, I guess it was because I heard Ovaiesha’s voice instructing me to do so. At her side was a priest, he had to be a priest because his garment had an unique arrangement of colored stones that formed a cube, he and Saieman was wearing the same type of outfit but the priests outfit was fully decorated. In his hand he was holding a marble tablet and writing on it using a pen that was, at the same time, a laser, his name was Bwainu and he seem to be taking notes of the event that was taking place.
Bwainu would not say anything at first as if his job had not presented itself as of yet, suddenly Saieman turned to Ovaiesha and asked was I ready, Ovaiesha said yes, then Saieman introduced me to the priest, Bwainu. I had to play along for I had already known this person as Bwainu. It would seem as though Saieman was reintroducing me to a person I had already known but this was a part of the ceremony so my curiosity to intrude was suppressed as I was taken into a temple.
On the outside, the temple resembled a pyramid, huge and majestic, and on the inside, a huge chamber with openings for the sun lit the four areas of the room in sequence. The floors were covered with a colorful marble type design, a series of reds, blues, greens and yellows. There were geometrical patterns designed on this tapestry floor that amazed me. There was a rail molding that flowed throughout the chamber that was smooth to the touch.
There were no electrical devises of any kind; however, there were mechanical drawings displayed along the walls. As I proceeded, there were no instructions given to me other than to drink, I was given a green tea like concoction, by the priest Bwainu, which made me fill euphoric. The taste of this concoction was bitter yet naturally sweet, I will say that at first the drink was bitter but with a sweet aftertaste like apples, lemons and honey. After Bwainu handed me the cup to drink, he stood there watching as though the importance of me drinking this was of life and death.
The drink was very powerful, as the taste went from bitter to sweet my mind seemed to change as well, everything that I had saw began to glow and immediately; Bwanue put on his hood as if he did not want me to see his face. Bwainu then said to me “drink this once a day until you have completed your journey and I will meet with you when you’re done”.
As I entered the temple I noticed a chamber. I felt a sense of calm even though I was having these weird sensations. As I walked around temple I noticed this huge empty chamber, the walls were covered with thousands of pictures and diagrams of a mathematical nature. At each corner of the Chamber, there were glass cups, four in total, and one for each corner. There was a cup of some sort of seed, a cup of water, an empty cup and a cup of soil. I knew these cups had some type of meaning; however, the art work fascinated me more.
The scenes on the walls depicted a civilization of people who lived and studied the nature of their world. The chamber only allowed sun light to shine on a particular area on a different day and every forth day the cycle was completed, I then noticed, with every cycle, my knowledge of the “art work” increased as well as my curiosity and inner-standing of the concepts displayed. Thus I began this journey, first I did what the priest Bwainu asked, I drunk the “tea”, ate what was sent to me and studied what was on the walls.
Interestingly, I began to memorize everything in detail as if the work was implanting itself into my mind and then an idea came to me, while inside the chamber, I had nothing to write with and I felt the erg to convey my experience with the priest, so I took what was available, which was the cups in the corners and held them in the light as I studied the Sun cycles. First I took the empty cup which symbolized the “Earth” or the quest to fore fill a need, second I added soil to the empty cup which, to me, represented “the gathering of information”, and third I placed the seeds inside the soil and added a small amount of water, I mixed with the “tea”, for every other day of the Sun cycle. This went on for about ten Sun cycles, in addition to the twelve Sun cycles I had spent there before hand, which equaled 48 days, for a total of 88 days.
I do not remember ever sleeping and there were periods where I would drift off because of the affects brought on by drinking this strange “tea”, which had some psychedelic effects especially whenever I closed my eyes, that is why I do not remember ever sleeping because when I closed my eyes; I would have these strange experiences. I can vaguely remember seeing a creature that was part goat, part man and part snake. Above its head and between its horns was a sun disk, strangely everywhere the goat would move the sun disk would follow. The goat had these metallic looking horns, its eyes were blue and fluid like, its skin was a mixture of green and yellow. It would not speak through its mouth but it would show its teeth whenever I looked into its eyes, so I reframed from doing so. This vision had no legs or feet, which made it take on the partial form of a giant snake, it had to have been about 60 feet long. Its snakelike body was metallic and to some extent seemed mechanical, in a sense; this thing was part goat and part mechanical snake. For a moment I thought it had built itself because it did not look natural at all.
The vision of this being transmitted its name as Paronadon. I tried not to stare at it for too long but it was the only light source I could see. It was hug standing as tall as the trees, he had to have been about 30 to 40Ft tall, around its neck were gold beads that seemed to radiate as they reflected the light atop it’s head. At the center of the gold beaded necklace was a gold medallion, round in shape with a red jewel at its center. I noticed that whenever I stared at the jewel for too long, I would have these sharp pains in my head.
The top portion of Paronadon had shoulders and arms that spread as wide as a Six foot man. His chest and arms was covered with black fur. Paronadon’s hands both had three large fingers. Paronadon had a beard that was plated and at the end of it was a white jewel. To be honest, this vision was so frightening to me that I had thoughts of not drinking any more of the concoction Bwainu brought to me, for the vision of Paronadon was too much for my mind to comprehend and accept. Even now I can see this entity flowing before me; the fear is still a little strong. The fear is not that, this entity may consume me or destroy my person but it was like; this vision was changing me in some fantastic way. I felt as though this was a being that no one alive and conscious should ever see, I thought I was being disrespectful by looking at it but I could not help myself for I had never seen such a creature before in my life.
During the later periods of my “conscious” experience while studying the “art work” and attending an experiment, I witnessed the sprout of a flower growing within one of the cups, I was observing. This flower had, what looked like, vanes of blue material, while maintaining a green leaf like appearance. Then Suddenly, I was finished with what had to be done and felt a sense of completion. By this time, after studying the diagrams on the walls and attending to the experiment, I was ready to show the priest Bwainu what I had done.
As I exited the chamber, for the first time in many days, I felt excited for I had grown this interesting bluish green flower to show Bwainu, who was standing outside waiting with my Father, Saieman. I presented the flower to Bwainu and he said “you are now a man my son” then my father Saieman and I went for a long walk as he told me the most interesting story I have ever heard…
There is more to this story, unlike most, I can remember what had happened to me during my 2 hours of missing time. The experience is about 40,000 words long and expanding as more memories return to the surface.
Do you have the rest of the story written down? I would love to know how it ends!!
So I was just reading a list on listverse.com that caught my attention, it was about bizarre things that have not been explained and #2 on the list was missing time/time leaps. Now I may only be 22 but I’m no beginner when it comes to the Paranormal or unexplained. but what happened to me and my friend was bizarre. it wasn’t so much a lost time as it was a time leap.
Me and my friend Ben were driving around on the back roads of our tiny town in Wisconsin at around 12:30am. we drove the usual routes that we take. It started to snow hard when we were driving and we spun out on the middle of the road and the proceeded to head the opposite direction that we started off from. by this time the roads were bad enough that we decided to head back to town. there was about 4 inches of snow on the ground at this point in time and i was drive about 20miles an hour. We came to a stop sign and a car passed in front of us, it was then that the strange started to happen. Ben asked me What time it was, and I told him 1:20am, and then we turned to follow the other down the road that would take us straight back to town in about 3miles. the car went around a s curve and we lost sight of it at first. then we went around the first part of the curve and saw the car turning into the second part of the curve. Now our buddy lived on this road outside of town and we should have passed right by his house after the second part of the curve, but as we came around the second part of the curve the car was gone and we didn’t see our buddy’s house.
after what seemed like a little bit of a drive we saw the welcome to Columbia County sign that is on the opposite side of town. we came to the next stop sign just outside of town wondering what the hell had happened and how we had ended up there. at the stop sign i checked the clock, and it was 1:23. When I saw the time I was a little freaked out, we had traveled about 15miles to the opposite side of town going about 20MPH in 2 minutes. this shouldnt of happened. the other weird thing is that my car has a tape deck that i use an adapter so i can play music from my phone as i drive, well before we went around the second curve my tape deck started trying to search for the next track, (which it can’t because the tape adapter i use only reads as having one track) but ever since that night i havent been able to get that tape adapter to work right.
I mean I’ve had some crazy stuff happen to me before that i cant explain, but by far that was the weirdest.
hi john it is richard
i like time slip story
What an interesting site and story! I actually had a missing time-like incident during an interstate move in February of 2010, where my mother and I seem to have accomplished a 17hr drive (according to Google Maps) in 13hrs. We were heading to my new home to set up my apartment in advance of the arrival of my wife and children by plane a few days later, so we were in a rush but not enough to warrant the discrepancy. Particularly considering the vehicle we traveled in was a Toyota Corolla absolutely loaded to the hilt and noticeably sluggish because of it. The drive was from Orange County, CA to Portland, OR and is approximately 1000mi – about half of which is over steep and winding road through northern CA and southern OR. The speed limit in Oregon in particular is only 55mph, and we generally stayed at or below that. We departed OC at 1:00PM and arrived in Portland at 8:00AM the next morning. However, we had stopped in northern CA for dinner for about 1hr and again in southern Oregon for 2hrs to get off the road and rest for a bit. It didn’t occur to me until quite some time later that we’d made the trip at in an unrealistic timeframe. To achive a 13hr trip we would have to have averaged 77mph, which is simply not the case given the slower speed limit in Oregon, the performance of the weighted down car and our need to make numerous smaller stops for coffee, etc to stay awake. No particular memory of anything like UFOs or being disoriented, just missing (or fast forwarded) time.
JR – Thanks! I’ve had quite a few emails and at least one comment on the blog (I think) from people who had similar experiences to yours: a long trip completed in an unrealistically brief amount of time. That seems to be a fairly common subset of the whole “missing time” phenomenon. But how it happens and what it means, I don’t know.
JR – Here’s an interesting story I found that seems to have some elements of both your experience and mine:
https://paranormal.about.com/od/timeanddimensiontravel/a/tales_10_12_27t.htm.
It’s actually more similar to what you experienced, but I found it interesting that this person found herself back before the point where she began driving, but continuing in the same direction. That happened to me. I was still walking north-to-south, but I was about a quarter mile further north of my school, where I’d left from earlier. To this day I’m still unsure as to the length of time of my memory lapse and the point where I awakened behind the cemetery.
We had a similar experience
Driving from one town to another through a gorge
We arrived with no recollection of the trip only becoming aware of arriving
Any questions and we have never reveled this to others
It’s such a common story but most people who have these experiences don’t talk about them, for obvious reasons.
Hi Jon, I just wanted to remind you of a saying. “When the student is ready the teacher will come.” Not meaning to sound criptic but it seems you, the student, are close to having a teacher. Hugs, Elaine
Hi Elaine — You might be right. I know of others who have had similar experiences and they have also said they felt it was a precursor to something. What that “something” is, I don’t know, but I did come away from it with the feeling that it was a significant event in my life. Only time will tell, I suppose. Thanks for your input!
I’ve had two significant events in the last year (even if only significant to me). Both were answers to life-long questions, much like yours stemming from childhood events. I know once I got the answers my life changed. Well not really but I feel differently. My ‘Teacher’ came in the weirdest way. I’m left with fewer questions and more curious than ever. 🙂
I’m all ears if you want to share your story, Elaine — whether on the blog or by email. If it’s too personal, I’ll understand completely.
I’ve been going thru your site here John and although I have no real or concrete answers to anything paranormal I have definitely come a cross a few things that run in the same direction of my own thinking.
i’ve no idea how we will ever ‘prove’ any of these occurrences as most of us who have experiences don’t even know what it was we experienced. Creates a little problem doesn’t it? I like learning about all the research that is being done on the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘spiritual’ level. I think that is the missing piece, not all evidence is physical. Kind of like electricity, if we didn’t know how to use it we wouldn’t be able to prove it either.
Elaine – I’m neither a skeptic or a “believer”-type. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for many (or most) of the strange experiences that people go through, as I’m also quite certain that some are outright lies. However, I know from firsthand experience that there are things that can’t be explained logically or proven scientifically. In my opinion, to say that these unexplained events are false (mistakes, fabrications, and the like) is a very narrow-minded view of the world around us and of the universe. My missing time incident was real. The fact that my mother knew exactly where I was and found me, saying that a voice told her to find me because I needed her — that was real. And my mom’s premonitions and precognitive dreams were too specific and accurate to be dismissed or explained away. They can’t be proven or scientifically measured in any way, but they were also very real. We really don’t understand the nature of reality, but I think some of what we’re learning from quantum physics is starting to bridge the scientific with the mystical.
To JR, I also had this happen. Completed a 7 hour trip in 31/2 hours confirmed. I swear nothing happened on that trip. I had taken this trip many times, I would have had to speed the entire trip to do that and surely would have been pulled over if I had.
A few years before that I had the complete opposite happen. A 20 minute ride home took just over 2 hours. I had called home to ask my husband if he needed anything, he didn’t so I hopped in the car and went straight home, no stops, no hindrances or anything. Husband was frantic when I got home. That still bothers me, I have no idea what took so long, it’s impossible unless I chugged along at maybe 5 mph which I know I didn’t.
When I used to co-host the old Paranomalist podcast a few years ago we interviewed author Marie D. Jones and we discussed my weird missing time incident. She replied by telling me of an incident where she was driving (in California, I think it was) and had inexplicably covered a very long distance in ridiculously short amount of time. I get a lot of these types of stories emailed to me: long distances completed in impossibly short periods, or relatively short trips taking a very lengthy period of time with no recollection of what transpired during that extra time. Something is happening here. I can’t imagine that all of these types of incidents are just a matter of people being mistaken, miscalculating, or simply losing track of time.
John i find this all very interesting, so i ask out of the hopes of finding more pieces to my puzzle. To you what is time? And how do you perceive it?
Agreed, although I don’t doubt alien abductions and such other things it’s obvious there are other things going on too. But I really don’t think all of these instances have anything to do anything paranormal. I feel it is just an anomaly. It’s something that happens so rarely and unexpectedly that we don’t have much chance to prepare ourselves for understanding it.
I don’t necessarily disbelieve the alien abduction phenomenon, although I think it’s probably more complex than some of the UFO enthusiasts make it out to be. But I agree, I think it this whole missing time thing may be related to some type of anomaly; an anomaly possibly relating to the nature of time itself.
Ditto, as time goes on we’ll understand more, personally I’m looking forward to that time. In the mean time we can speculate and work at rearranging our thoughts and who knows…
I’ll never say the experiences aren’t real (except for the liars, cheats and mocker) but I will say that they may not be at all what we suspect. You know we used to think God was pissed when it thundered, well we know better now. Life’s journey and I love this playground.
As to the alien abduction thing, I will not say that I or anyone I know has ever been abducted but there is a shared experience in my family that would qualify… only not. I don’t know how to explain that in anything less than 10,000 words, LOL!
If I told the story some would immediately think aliens but I’m not so sure. Something yes, but what, I just don’t know.
Well, if you ever want to write about your family’s experiences, just let me know. I’ll set you up as an Author on my site and you can log in, type away and share your story with the world. Or at least the few thousand readers I get each month.
Thanks for the offer, I’ll think about it. It’s hard putting yourself out there like that. Goodnight!
Yes it is, Elaine. Some things are so odd that it’s difficult to take about them. I think that’s why I haven’t really mentioned this blog to anyone that I know or tried to recommend it any of my old classmates on Facebook. It’s one thing to talk about this stuff to strangers, but another to people that know you.
I just found your blog. I just woke up from “lost time”. I was upstairs working and woke up in my bathroom on my toilet that I had not used for a few days since the plumber fixed it and I was to give it a detailed cleaning and disinfectant BEFORE using it. I remained disoriented for about 10 mins in a semi-conscious state. This is the longest loss time Ive ever had. Ususally they are about 30 secs with 2 seconds of euphoria. This ephoria lasted longer about a minute. I too “found” a friend parked about 5 miles from where we were originally, backed into a dead-end. I went straight to him, parked, all very calm. Walked to his truck window, told him give me the gun as I was removing it from his hands where he held the gun between his legs. I walked back to my car and drove back to the house. He followed. We never spoke of it. He passed last year, he stopped taking his diabetes meds, had a diabetic shock, driving, coasted into a tree and died. Oh and yes there is always a lady in my loss time.
Dear John,
Thank you for providing this forum and, in particular, sharing your experience and commenting others’
experiences.
I have a story to share that’s confounded me and the person who went thru this with me.
It was 1985 summer, daytime. I was driving my friend and her kids to the bus station in Redding CA. We were on a rural mountain road. The next second it was two hours later. We had lost two hours. We blinked and it was later. There’s a lot more to the story but to this day we don’t know what happened. We call it a “time warp” for lack of a better explanation.
Claudia — Thanks for sharing your experience. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me of experiences almost identical to yours. It seems to be a very common experience and I often wonder what percentage of the population has had this happen to them.
If you ever want to email me the rest of the story, I’m always interested in hearing about these incidents.
Thanks again,
John
John, you say your mother had premonitions and precognitive dreams. I’d like to ask what about you? I’m wondering if perhaps you had a psychical experience more so than a missing time experience. What I mean perhaps you were sharing someone else’s psychi (for lack of a better word) and in the mean time your physical self just wondered around waiting for you to return.
I know that sounds creepy but so do a lot of things. Explore that thought for a while and I would love to know your conclusions.
Elaine — Interesting idea. I’ve had a few premonitions and precognitive dreams, like my mom, but nowhere near as frequent or precise as hers. And I’ve had a lot of very intense and disturbing dreams throughout my life, especially when I was a child.
These missing time (or whatever you want to call them) experiences share some general similarities, but they vary widely. I felt there was some physical aspect to whatever happened to me because it occurred as I was walking and when I awoke I was somewhere else. One of the puzzling things was the fact that I was still walking in a southerly direction, but I was north of where I began walking and quite a ways from where I blanked out. So in my mind, if I’d just somehow zoned out and wandered in the wrong direction I think I would have gotten turned around and would have awakened walking north. Instead, I somehow was walking in the same direction (south) but some distance north from where I’d begun, at my school.
What any of that indicates I have no idea, but it felt as if it was more than a purely psychical state. It’s not as if I was lying on my bed and drifted into a different state of consciousness. I was walking in a very familiar place and I found myself in another area entirely when I regained my senses. Also the strange silence, the unreal feeling and the fact that the intersection that I was walking toward seemed to be getting further away as I walked toward it — these are all aspects of the incident that felt very physical and real.
How my mother fit into it is interesting too. She told me she heard a voice in her mind that said “go get John, he needs you.” I don’t know if that was some sort of motherly instinct/premonition or if she was actually contacted by something that orchestrated…whatever it was that happened to me. She definitely described it as a “voice” that told her to get me. And, she knew precisely where I was, which was not where she would normally have looked for me if she was picking me up after school. So, my feeling is that there very well could have been a psychical aspect to this, but there seemed to be something physical about the experience as well. I don’t think that this came completely from me. It’s always felt to me that there was some kind of outside influence at work that interacted with me (and my mom) in some way.
On Dec 1st 2010, between 1:00AM and 1:30AM, I blacked out while standing in my shed. When I came to/woke, I looked at my watch and it was 5:05AM and I was standing approximately four feet from where I had been, I was then standing in the shed door way facing the back of the shed. When I blacked out I was standing in front of my tool box which stands against the sheds left wall. The temperature was only a few degres above freezing and I wore only a light wind breaker yet I was very warm when I came to. I felt very calm yet very alert at the same time, I was also somewhat angry because I had to be at work in eight and a half hours and could not drink any beer. I have no history of black outs. I didnt think much about what had happened until I woke to get ready for work that day. For about a week or two after I had deep feelings of deja vu and at times something like vertigo. I plan on seeing a hypnotist after I retire from law enforcement. I will not risk that now.
RW — Very interesting experience and probably rather disturbing, too. It was for me. Have any other odd or unexplained things happened to you recently or at any point in your life? I get a lot of similar comments and emails from people and almost ALWAYS they’ve had more than one strange event or episode in their lives. It’s rarely an isolated incident, even if these incidents often seem dissimilar on the surface. I’m interested in hearing about anything else you’d like to share.
John, the only other similar event in my life was in Germany, 1988 or 1989. While driving from Weisbaden to Mainz I traveled 30 kilometers in the blink of an eye. I was a military policeman workong mids (graveyard shift). I exited the autobahn to a feeder road and got out of the vehicle, walked around until I calmed down. I atributed the event to being tired. I never experienced any symptoms then like I did with the event last december. I dont feel disturbed about the recent event and I really dont care to either, thats the main reason im in no hurry to see a hypnotist. I dont really want know where I was those few hours. The deja vu alone almost drove me crazy.
RW — My initial impression, based on all the comments on this blog and the many emails that I receive, is that your experience in Germany is probably not unrelated to what happen to you in the shed. Really, I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear you say that there was a previous strange incident. Whenever someone tells me about a missing time or time slip experience that they’ve had I’ll usually ask them if they’ve had any other strange things happen to them, and there almost always is — if not another missing time incident, it’ll be some other weird event or occurrence(s) prior to or after the initial experience. The deja vu thing is a new one for me, however. I hadn’t heard of anyone else describe that before.
I know what you mean about the hypnosis. I’ve never been hypnotized, partially because I’m relatively well-adjusted and I’ve gotten along fine since my experience. Also, I’ve read so many books on the subject when I was younger, especially those concerning UFOs and the alien abduction phenomenon, that I’m afraid I might have tainted my subconscious if you know what I mean — i.e., I feel as if I went under hypnosis I might have false memories just because I’ve read so much about that sort of thing. I think hypnosis is probably a useful tool, but more accurate if you don’t have preconceived ideas. Not that I think I was taken by aliens or anything, but I have studied the subject pretty extensively and I wouldn’t want that to come to any false conclusions.
HI John, not sure if you’re still around…
I’m looking for answers but I’m not even sure what the questions are.
Throughout my life I’ve had chunks of memory missing – photos with me in them where I still have absolutely no memory of being there. Times where I went missing long enough for groups of people to be out looking for me, only to surprise me with the news I was lost at all. I’ve considered dissociative identity disorder, but there’s never been a ‘different person’ experienced by anyone who’s known me. I don’t drink and never did drugs, so can’t blame it on that. I do have PTSD from childhood, so maybe?
– the earliest one I’ve been told about but don’t remember, my grandmother said I disappeared from school – kindergarten – for hours. The found me sitting under a bush at the school. Ok, no biggie, just a little kid hiding?
– another time I’d been allowed to walk to and from a Sunday school (maybe 4th grade?) I remember walking off the road into some woods (really small triangle between pretty well traveled roads). I was suddenly aware of people calling my name, and a kid came up to me and said how happy they were to find me. I didn’t know I’d been lost – for about 3 hours they said.
Those only happened when I was little – one other odd thing happened about then too.
I took a ‘ride’ with a grandpa who had passed. Leaving school (K or 1st grade) I started to walk home when I saw my grandads car on the curb where you pick up kids. I got in the car, shut the door, and looked at him. I started to say a few things, don’t remember what, but he just stared straight ahead and drove to the end of the pick up area. By then, my little kid warning bells were starting in, I looked at him and said “you’re not my grandpa”. He pulled over and let me out. Never said a word. I told my mother what happened and she told me my granddad had passed away months earlier. (we may or may not have gone to his funeral, my grandmother and mother didn’t get along because of my mother’s behavior so it’s very likely we didn’t go to his funeral – or I might have and just forgot?)
There’s a photo of me as a little girl (10-11) with family who were visiting us. I stare at this picture just trying to recall having met them or that day…or even the clothes I was wearing. Not a thing. That might not be so weird, except that, I lived with my dad then and visitors were so rare (only two other times in six years did anyone come see us) and I wasn’t allowed friends or to come out of my room unless I was doing chores so, having ANY visitors was a big deal. Being allowed to meet them was an even bigger event. I remember every detail of the other two visitors – and uncle and a much older half sister.
Another ‘weird’ thing happened about that time. I’ve mentioned I wasn’t allowed friends, didn’t make any in school so it didn’t matter much. Well, one day I came into awareness in the middle of the kitchen – and there were 3 or 4 other kids in the house, in the kitchen, (my dad’s kingdom), one of them was standing on the counter, another going through the fridge (OMG a HUGE NO) and just acting like fools in general. I was the only one in the house, trying to figure out who these kids were and how to get them OUT before they got caught. Then I heard my dad drive up. To this day I don’t know who those kids were (never saw them in school and we’re talking a school of maybe 100 kids for 4-8 total). They ran out the back door as dad was coming in the front. I have no idea where they went. I don’t remember the ‘before’ but I sure do remember the after. One of the worst whippings I ever got – and that’s saying something.
Later in life, I’ve had friends and even my kids tell me about memories they have that I just can’t recall. Like it wasn’t me who was there. But never once has anyone ever said I ‘became someone else’ or called myself by a different name or anything so I just don’t think it was DID.
I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to understand but I’m just not “getting” it, something I’m supposed to know but I’m missing it.
…and that’s my story
so far
I can tell you things that would shake you to the core and it has nothing to do with aliens
Mitchell Gray, I think I know the kinds of things you’re alluding to.
To put it under a broad umbrella, it’s to do with trauma, correct?
Mitchell – I’m not so sure about the whole “alien” narrative myself. I think this missing time and unexplained phenomena stuff goes deeper than that. I’m open to all ideas though.
Just Me: I apologize for the 10-month-late response. Stories like yours fascinate me because I’ve had some of the same kinds of experiences when I was a child. Half-memories that seem out of place, or flashes of strange events that I’m not sure happened or if they were dreams.
Interesting to hear your mention your PTSD. I’ve sometimes wondered if I suffer from that as well. A few years ago an old friend of mine got in touch with me after a period of about 20 years. He had since become a psychologist, and in the midst of our conversation he paused and said, “John, you strike me as someone who has suffered some kind of trauma.” It was a very out-of-place comment because the comment had been very light. Just the typical catching up you’d do with a friend you hadn’t seen in a long while. When I asked him what he meant he quickly dismissed his comment. But he obviously picked up on something that I’ve long suspected about myself.
I think perhaps we are both “experiencers” and that there are hidden parts of our lives – some of them traumatic and disturbing – that our minds pushes down into our subconscious so that we don’t have to deal with him. That may be a grace from God, however, and bringing those memories to the surface may not necessarily be a good thing.
Wow! Thank you everyone for writing about your experiences. I don’t feel so isolated regarding this issue any longer. I too have had many times experience missing time. Some are just minutes, some are hours, some are days. I have even almost completely misplaced an entire year once. As a science type person (heavy theorist), I truly wonder about the commonalities of the people who have these experiences and the commonalities of the experiences themselves. Fascinating.
Annie – I’d love to hear more about your experiences. Feel free to email me if you’d care to share any. john@theparanomalist.com.
Hi John
I have had a few different experiences in my life. One was a missing time and a two were what I can only call bouncing into another person’s mind. The missing time was about 13 years ago. I was driving on a mountain road I had only driven once the opposite direction. I only remember waking up driving and not being able to keep my eyes open. I had to pull into a little market in a rest area and move around. In the other 2 I seem to jump into another person’s mind. This has only happened when the other person is in a tramatic life and death situation. I have been on either side of the coin victim and perpetrator in different episodes. To me it seems I find the person with the best chance of changing the outcome. I could wright a lot of details but I will say I feel what the person feels and see what they see. It is very intense because the feelings the perpetrator is feeling go against everything I am. I am a very passive person. I have problems talking about this as I don’t want to believe it myself. I normally call them dreams but i dont remember dreams and they are far to vivid to be dreams. This is the first time I have talked about the latter 2 experiences.
Hi Scooter. As I often say, take some comfort if you can in knowing that you’re not alone in these experiences. I hear all kinds of stories from people and I’ve come across some like yours as well. I do understand that it’s all very strange and difficult to cope with when these things happen to a person, and it’s usually hard to share them with people. It’s embarrassing and repeating them aloud sounds often sounds crazy even to ourselves. I totally get that. But, it’s not good to keep them bottled up either. If you have someone close to you that’s openminded and non-judgmental, try to open up to them about it. I have my wife and a few very close friends that I’ve told about my experiences and that helps a bit. They have no experience with any of this sort of thing but at least they listen and don’t think I’m crazy (I think).
Feel free to post here too. The main reason I started this blog was to provide a place where people can share their experiences. I know that it’s hard to live with at times. I had a SUPER weird experience a few years ago that I’m going to write about soon and it’s been very hard to live with. It can really suck to have to deal with this crap and be unable to tell people about it.
— John
John, I was fascinated by your story. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, and had some eerie experiences in the southwest desert, things I have never told anyone to this day. When I was 11-12 years old, at puberty, there was the time I sleepwalked out the front door of a slumber party and woke up hours later in someone’s backyard atop Franklin mountain. This is known as a phenomenon called ‘missing time.’ I have no recollection of what happened during the time I was wandering around in my nightgown, but when I woke up to see the terrified face of a woman staring at me from her kitchen window, and heard my name being called by friends in my mom’s station wagon, I was really scared. Up to that point, I had never sleepwalked a day in my life, and never have since. Someday I hope to find out what happened during those missing hours.
Hi Lydia,
I’m sorry for the delay in approving and responding to your comments. I was away on vacation when you posted this and I neglected until now to check the site when I returned. I’m hoping you read this and I didn’t flub my first celebrity post.
Thank you so much for conveying your story to me. I always find these kinds of experiences fascinating and it’s also nice to know that there are others who have had them. It’s common to feel very isolated after suffering such an incident and then feeling as if you can’t speak about it. It’s been many years since it happened and it doesn’t affect my life on a day-to-day basis, but I’m still bothered by what happened and I have no clear explanation for it to this day. Maybe we will both eventually understand what happened to us.
May I ask, how far it from your friend’s house to was where you woke up on Franklin Mountain? I’m curious about the distance. Was it that night or the next morning that your friend’s mom found you? You alluded to other eerie experiences. Deserts can be very strange places, I agree. I’ve had quite a few people contact me about strange happenings in the desert. I’m wondering if this missing time was an isolated incident or part of a pattern in your life? I think some people are sensitive to these types of phenomena or perhaps we’re given them for a reason.
Thanks again for sharing your experience.
John
Hi Just Me, thanks for sharing your story. I think from your description of it, it sounds very much like symptoms from a dissociative disorder. You mentioned the reasons you think it’s not DID, but unfortunately that could be a misunderstanding- truth is, the alters in a DID system would usually “pretend” to be the host when they’re fronting for the safety of the system. Alters who live in the dark usually will not show themselves or demand to be called another name, instead they would just pretend to be the host and try to talk and behave similarly to the host. The camouflage would easily fool people around them, which explains why so many people live with undiagnosed DID for decades without people suspecting. This happens because the whole point of DID is a defense mechanism against severe trauma, if all alters just show themselves then the protection doesn’t stand.
By no means am I trying to diagnose you, all I’m saying is that if you’re ruling out DID just because other people don’t remember any “strange” behaviours, perhaps you need to consider again. And of course there are other dissociative disorders from DID, such as PTSD, OSDD etc. Here’s a useful test to help you quickly check where you’re at on the dissociative spectrum, a tool professionally developed for diagnostic reference: https://www.mid-assessment.com/
Whatever it is, hope you have answers to your questions and peace in your heart. Sending love to you.
I hope you’re still around, I can’t find anyone else to relay this to. When I was 7 I woke up in a field next to the apartment complex in which we lived. It was the middle of the night or early morning, still very dark. There was fog so thick I couldn’t see more than a couple feet in front of the of me. Here’s the thing, I was terrified of the dark and would not have gone out there alone voluntarily. When I came to, I was calm and at peace. I simply made my way back to the apartments went inside and went to bed. I do not have a history of sleepwalking or anything. One strange aspect is that my oldest brother was babysitting us that night and he was sleeping on the couch. He is a very light sleeper, yet all the noise I made going back inside, and the noise I had to have made when I left never woke him. I’ve never told anyone about this but I have pondered it ever since and I am 41 now.
Hi Tim — Yes, I’m still doing my best to read and reply to the blog comments and emails that I receive. That’s a fascinating story, and I’m sure it’s very troubling or at least puzzling to you. I know that my experience(s) feel that way to me. I have a very odd memory from about the same age. Those childhood experiences stay with you.
Have you been okay since? Any other strange experiences? These things are often part of an ongoing lifetime pattern.
I’d love to be able to give you an answer as to what I think this might have been but I’m still working on that myself. I do know that I’ve had many, many people (probably well over a thousand at this point) who have contacted me about missing time and other strange anomalies that they’ve undergone. You’re definitely not alone in this.
Thanks for sharing your experience. — John