‘What is the most surreal ‘this can’t be real’ moment you’ve ever experienced?’ – 21 events of inexplicable oddness
Some people claim there’s no such thing as coincidence, but how can the uncanny and strange situations we experience be explained otherwise? Serendipity? The universe’s greater plan? The manipulations of our alien overlords?
It’s hard to say. They’ve been chatting about this on the AskReddit page after user Fragrant_Good3174 asked:
‘What is the most surreal ‘this can’t be real’ moment you’ve ever experienced?’
And lots of people had episodes to share that they couldn’t quite explain.
1.
‘Delivering pizzas in my 20s and knocked on a door, realized after I knocked that I was at the wrong address. We’ll call it 9th St SW instead of 9th St NW. So I was exactly on the other side of town from where I needed to be. As the guy opened the door I was about to do my ‘Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you, have a nice day’ thing I usually do at a wrong address but the guy didn’t look confused and was holding money ready to go.
‘Turns out he ordered pizza and accidentally put his address in wrong. Which means I was accidentally at the right place… Our two mistakes perfectly cancelled each other out. To this day I wonder about the actual odds of that happening, it feels like it’s way more than one in a million.’
–runswithpaper
2.
‘I got a postcard in the mail in 2018. It was sent by my parents when they visited China in 1997. I was dumbfounded and thought I was being pranked. It just took a very long time to get delivered.’
–HeadCashier
3.
‘I had an incredible urge to go to my employees house. It was weird and overwhelming; I called my Mom thinking I lost my shit and she said to trust my gut, so I went. It felt weird, who wants their boss showing up after hours? When I got to his house I heard a faint ‘help me’ coming from inside the house. I kicked the door in, went inside, and the dude had a stroke 24-48 hours prior to my arrival. He was just laying on the floor and would’ve rotted there had I dismissed that crazy urge.’
–ShitIsGettingWeird
4.
‘Was hiking alone in the mountains when a sudden fog rolled in. Complete white-out conditions. As I was trying to figure out my bearings, I heard bells jingling, and out of the mist appeared an old man with a staff leading about 20 goats. He nodded at me without saying a word, walked past, and disappeared into the fog with his goats. The entire encounter lasted maybe 30 seconds.’
–PotentialTurnover335
5.
‘Getting a phone call offering me a job I didn’t even remember applying for right when I was about to give up looking. I thought it was a prank at first.’
–KayleeWitherspoon
6.
‘I was on a trip literally halfway around the world, walking around the city by myself. I popped into a tiny museum. There was only one other person there, another woman about my age. We started chatting. I’m from the US, she was from Australia, and we were in Singapore. She mentioned she’d gone to university in the US. I asked where. Turns out she went to the same small college I had, and at the same time. Got even crazier when it came out she’d been friends with my college roommate and had been to my apartment.
‘It is a small freaking world.’
–Gardengoddess83
7.
‘My son and I were riding the train in Chicago. He said ‘Dad, don’t you have a friend from Chicago, maybe we will see him.’
‘I seriously doubt it son, Chicago is huge!’
‘He got on the next stop.’
–middleagethreat
8.
‘I know one man in Glasgow. Was there for a couple of days and tried to meet up but we got our wires crossed and I had no way to contact him once I got to Scotland. One night I was on my way to a restaurant and stopped to look at a cool firetruck. Jim was across the street also looking at the firetruck.’
–Guestking
9.
‘Elephants wandering around just outside of my Midwest town. I figure they they must have gotten out of a train car to walk around, but looking over and seeing four full grown elephants was surreal!’
–Pale-Independent-604
10.
‘I once hugged a stranger on the street because we started crying at the same time for totally different reasons then we laughed like idiots for 10 minutes straight.’
–xo_dreamyyy
11.
‘I had a wonderful moment like this. I was working my bookstore job and had just gotten an email that would change my life. I was completely incoherent. In walks a woman with a blissed out expression. We stared at each other and didn’t say a word. Neither of us could say it out loud.
‘I took a notepad and wrote ‘I got a job at the Smithsonian.’ And beamed at me like a proud mom. Then she wrote ‘I’m cancer free!’ And we hugged like family. She took the note and put it in her purse and walked away on cloud nine while I stepped outside to call my wife to tell her we were moving to Washington DC.
‘The woman and I never exchanged a word, but I think of her often.’
–KayBeeToys
12.
‘It was dangerously freezing temps. I had just gotten off work and was broke, was a dollar short to get on the bus to get home and it was too cold and icy to walk home safely. My rich dad wouldn’t send me the dollar I needed for bus fare. No reason, he just didn’t want to. I went to the library to warm up and try to figure out what to do. Grabbed a random library book, opened to a random page and there was a folded up dollar bill inside. Not as crazy as some of the other stories here, but I was very grateful.’
–bob-omb_panic
13.
‘I got a message from a stranger saying ‘You saved my life.’ Turns out I’d responded kindly to their random forum post a year prior.’
–peachykeen-z
14.
‘I had a lucid dream at 16 years old that I could fly by flapping my arms. I flew around my neighbourhood (in the mountains) and noticed a house with a blue roof at the corner of Pine Ridge and Hook Creek road, back in the late 70’s. The dream was so real. I even went looking for the house, found it, but it didn’t have a blue roof. My teleportation fantasy was crushed. Just a dream, but so real.
‘Five years later I was a crewman on a forest service Helitack crew. We were dispatched to a lightning strike in my neighbourhood. I was hanging out the door of the helicopter looking for smoke, when I suddenly had a deja vu experience. I recognised the flight pattern from my dream. I freaked because I could predict the helicopters flight. I predicted accurately the next couple of turns… I gasped as I looked down, because the house had a blue roof. I just got big goose bumps remembering. Weirdest shit ever.’
–Dirtdancefire
15.
‘I walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and it opened to a page with my full name written inside it. In someone else’s handwriting.’
–bubblebliss2a
16.
‘One time, I saw a woman on the street drop her phone — and five different people around her all reached down at the exact same time like a perfectly choreographed scene. It didn’t feel real.’
–Fragrant_Good3174
17.
‘Doing a puzzle, picking up a piece looking for where it should go – I drop the piece and lose track of it. Couldn’t find it anywhere, then I realised it fell into the exact right place. No chance of that ever happening again in my life.’
–BookkeeperGrouchy913
18.
‘Had a really down and out moment a few years ago. Just totally broke. Wanted to buy flowers and chocolates for my wife for her birthday. It was about $80. Had $6 in my account.
‘Sat out side on a bench and got really sad. It was really windy. And like a movie, I was just sitting in this desert town and something struck me in the face, and ‘stuck’ to me. It was a $100 bill.’
–moebiusgrip
19.
‘I always check copies of Harry Potter to see if they’re rare. Just a habit, obviously the odds of finding a rare one are so low… Until I actually did. Goosebumps. Sold for just over 6k.’
–hrrymcdngh
20.
‘I went into my local pub around the corner for a pint before a taking a taxi into the city, went to a random bar and was served by exactly the same barman that had served me in the pub. Turned out he’d served me as his last customer in the pub and then started a shift at the other bar. I thought he had a twin or something. We both found it really funny.’
–Able_Stated
21.
‘Neighbour old lady came over and asked ‘Want to see something?’ I said yeah and she told me to grab my keys. It’s late at night already but I just shrugged and got my keys and she met me at my car. She gave me directions to a farm with a fenced in area with about 80-100 cows. We stand outside the fence, and she keeps looking at her watch. At this point I was sure I was going to get murdered.
‘But what happened next… I still can’t explain it. One by one all 80-100 cows knelt down. They stayed that way maybe a solid minute or two and then just got up and started roaming around all normal again.
‘She got back in the car and after I picked up my jaw I got in and we drove home silently. When we pulled in, I asked her what the hell I just saw. She made the motion of zipping her lips and throwing away the key. I went back to the farm several times alone and never saw anything out of the ordinary. I even spoke to an employee for the property and probably looked liked a complete psychopath asking the questions I was. She refused to acknowledge anything. This was over 25 years ago. I think about it still.’
–cold-speculum
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