Salman Rushdie, writer

a paranormal experience, a strange encounter, or some other anomalous memory 🕳️

It's not something I talk about a lot on this page, but... I have experienced psychosis, and I have a dissociative disorder. Anomalous memories and experiences are something I inevitably live with.

I think the reason I am generally a sceptic of the supernatural is because I'm very aware from experience just how easy it is for perception to become warped or altered, beliefs to form without real basis in logical reasoning, and our memory of experiences (and our ability to recall them) to be shaped and coloured by the state of our brain and all sorts of factors beyond our conscious control.

I'm not saying every person who has ever experienced something unusual "was imagining it". But I hesitate to draw a direct equivalence between experience/memory and objective consensus reality. I think sometimes we experience things because our brain, our body, our subconscious, is trying to tell us something -the experience is real and meaningful but also personal and subjective, internal-become-seemingly-external.

I genuinely think that we often "know" or "perceive" more than we think we do. And our "holistic" self (our entire brain, our entire body) tries to impart info to our conscious verbal mind by whichever tools are available.

So... maybe we feel watched and see shit moving from the corner of our eyes in the creepy house that's not structurally sound (body going "get out of here, I can feel the sub-audible creaking, this place is not safe!") or... we dream of (or even hear!) a deceased family member or benevolent Other telling us to go to the doctor (body going "we're sick! You don't know it yet but this is serious!"), or we just get a bad *vibe* from a person (brain picking up minute discrepancies in body language that seem to indicate there's something off about this person), or...

None of this subconscious "knowing" is necessarily more true or real than conscious thought -it is subject to instincts and biases and mistakes just the same. Our "gut" isn't always right. But it's also not nonsense. There's a reason why "a strong feeling of impending doom" is genuinely one of the warning signs for a heart attack or anaphylaxis, or why many healthcare practitioners over time get a "feeling" for when a seemingly stable patient is about to crash, for example. Our body is a complicated machine that can indirectly provide us meaningful information, about both ourselves and the world around us.

And sometimes it gets fucked up. Sometimes all our holistic self is trying to tell us is that we're tired and scared and overwhelmed. Sometimes we see shit and think shit because things are just kinda bad for us and our physical functioning is in disarray. So there's that too.

And for myself, my dissociative disorder means there's not just the dichotomy of my verbal mind and my non-verbal holistic body-mind, but also a split in my own self-perception, memory and abilities. I contain often-contradictory multitudes. I don't always know or remember or believe the same things, I can't always do the same things or access the same skills. Sometimes the split is incomplete and I can do things I don't recall learning, or have knowledge disconnected from its logical context. It's weird like that.

So...

If the question was, Have I experienced things that, if taken at face value as real objective events, would indicate the existence of the supernatural? Then yes, I have.

If the question was, Do I take these anomalous experiences at such face value? Then no, I don't. I tend to assume even the unexplainable has an explanation, it's just unknown to me or inaccessible to my current state of being.

A few days before I was teaching Hume's scepticism to a group of first-year philosophy students, my toothbrush fell off the sink. It happened right after I accidentally slammed my bedroom door, which was around the corner of the hallway, about five metres away from the bathroom. My natural assumption was, of course, that the latter caused the former. But Hume would question the objective reality of that idea.

I have been piling stuff on my kitchen counter. It's a habit of mine. A bad one, of course, I will admit. Today, some of them clatter to the floor, causing the kittens - who were near me, sitting on the sofa - to scramble under the couch like the devil was on their heels. It broke a plate and a glass jar filled to the brim with rolled oats. I had just bought them four days ago.

Why did they fall? Why then? What caused it? Did a fly land on the edge of the pile? Was there some kind of movement of air, caused by the heating of the flat now that winter is near?

There are days when everything goes wrong.

Today was exactly that kind of day. After dealing with it throughout the daylight, by the evening, when I left the café and was ready to get home, I realized that my helmet had been stolen; who would need it, only God knows. I felt unbearably sad, so l bought strawberry ice cream.

Usually, on days like these, I make an extra effort to cheer myself up and laugh twice as hard—at myself and at life. Sometimes I even succeed. But right before bed, thoughts start tap dancing in my brain. And then I write desperately.

Sometimes I write about what I feel, sometimes about what I can't let go of—hoping it will help me; despite carrying such a bag of skepticism, I can be quite naive.

Words are my feelings. Sometimes they come out on their own, and sometimes it's as if I'm tearing them out with flesh. Poems hurt the most, because they are all dedicated to someone.

But I still write them, because I can't not write, because I can't not feel, because I can't stop being who I am.

I'm a 100 % with you there, anon. Well said 👏👍 Regarding CD - I agree. I thought that this would be Jensen's big break. With an amazing action show. It turned out that it was more of a "swim or sink" offer from Amazon to fulfill their contractual obligations. Like Derek Haas pitched this bad fever dream to Amazon and they needed something for Jensen anyway. And exactly something like that I fear for Jared with Netflix.