Missing Time Experience?
I just like Star Trek - no other reason for this photo
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 (is) 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.
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. Perhaps I’ll discuss some of the others in future blog posts. Meanwhile, I’d be very interested hearing from other people who may have experience similar phenomena.
John Carlson is a husband, father, and business owner. He’s worked as a self–employed Web developer for over ten years. John was raised in New Jersey USA where he currently resides with his wife and two sons.
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!
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!
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!
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
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:
http://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 John,
About 2 hours ago I experienced a loss of 45 minutes. I was on my way to the gym and when I was almost their I got a cell call from the office at 12:09 (I was at best 5 min from the gym at this point). I finish the call just before I reached the Gym, and half way through my work out I looked at the clock and it was 1:30. I checked my cell clock thinking the gym clock was wrong, but it was indeed 1:30. It normally takes me an 30 to 40 minutes (40 minutes if I am talking to people) to do half of my work out on a business day. I spoke to know one so this was very disturbing. I felt no different or anything out of the ordinary, just lost time. I get my card swiped at the front desk of the gym so as I was leaving I asked what time did I come in? The gal said we have no recorded of you coming in today, she turned to the man that swiped my card and said “didn’t you swipe his card” and he responded “I did”. This could be a computer error but I have never seen this person before and when he swiped my card he called me by the name on the card which indicated that the card was on file. Anyway I am at a loss to explain this situation so I went to the internet to see if anyone else has experienced this phenomenon. Anyway, I didn’t then or now feel any different, I just lost 45 minutes.
Thanks for listing
Tom
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.