my exprience

[fred]

I Always Thought Of My Self As Well Adjusted And Have No Believe In Anything That Science Can't Prove,untill This Year.while On Holiday I Became Very Ill And Had To Find A Hospital Quickly.being In Germany And Not Speaking German I Pulled Over The Car To Ask Directions, This Is Where Things Went Wierd,i Can Remember Asking Directions To This Man,he Spoke English And Gave Me Very Clear Directions And I Arrived At The Hospital,my Next Memory Is Me Going Into The Hospital But This Memory I Have Is Strange Because I Remember It From Above Like I Was Flying Over Head.i Collasped Moments Later Waking Up Four Days Later On Life Support!days After When I Was Able To Speak I Asked My Girlfriend About The Man Who Gave Us The Directions Saying"he Saved My Life It Was Amazing I Found Someone Who Spoke Such Clear English And Gave Such Good Direction"
Thats When My Girlfriend Said She Was Terrrified Because She Didn't Know How I Under Stood Him At All He Spoke Broad German And Thought We Were Going To Get Lost.i Can't Remember What He Looked Like Really But Weeks Later When I Returned Home I Showed My Girlfriend A Photo Of My Dead Step Dad,she Swears It Was The Man We Met,she Never Met Him Or Seen A Photo Of Him And If I'm Honest I Believe It Was Him Too.that's Why I Showed Her The Photo.i Guess It Wasn't My Time To Go And Since That Day I See Life A Whole Lot Differently.

[bobdezon]

anecdotes ftw O0

[Legaleagle]

Great story. I am sure I have read a similar one by MR James.

[fred]

mine ain't just a story it really happend i've got the scars to prove it from hospital

[Fiona]

Does an encounter with the supernatural mess up the shift key? ::)

[seren]

It's Really Quite Hard To Type This Way. I Keep Having To Consciously Remember To Press The Shift Key.

But It's Still Harder To Read It.

[MischiefMonkey]

IF YOU LEAVE THE CAPS LOCK ON AND TYPE A LONG ENOUGH POST i BELIEVE IT WILL AUTOMATICALLY CAPITALISE EACH WORD.

I WILL BE SLIGHTLY EMBARRASSED IF THIS DOESN'T WORK.

eta: bugger :(

[Matt]

I Always Thought Of My Self As Well Adjusted And Have No Believe In Anything That Science Can't Prove,untill This Year.while On Holiday I Became Very Ill And Had To Find A Hospital Quickly.being In Germany And Not Speaking German I Pulled Over The Car To Ask Directions, This Is Where Things Went Wierd,i Can Remember Asking Directions To This Man,he Spoke English And Gave Me Very Clear Directions And I Arrived At The Hospital,my Next Memory Is Me Going Into The Hospital But This Memory I Have Is Strange Because I Remember It From Above Like I Was Flying Over Head.i Collasped Moments Later Waking Up Four Days Later On Life Support!days After When I Was Able To Speak I Asked My Girlfriend About The Man Who Gave Us The Directions Saying"he Saved My Life It Was Amazing I Found Someone Who Spoke Such Clear English And Gave Such Good Direction"
Thats When My Girlfriend Said She Was Terrrified Because She Didn't Know How I Under Stood Him At All He Spoke Broad German And Thought We Were Going To Get Lost.i Can't Remember What He Looked Like Really But Weeks Later When I Returned Home I Showed My Girlfriend A Photo Of My Dead Step Dad,she Swears It Was The Man We Met,she Never Met Him Or Seen A Photo Of Him And If I'm Honest I Believe It Was Him Too.that's Why I Showed Her The Photo.i Guess It Wasn't My Time To Go And Since That Day I See Life A Whole Lot Differently.

Hi Fred and welcome to UK Skeptics,

I'm glad that you survived to tell the tell and hope that there were no lasting repercussions to your medical emergency.

First if I may ask, what are your reasons for posting here? You mention that you consider yourself well adjusted and until recently didn't feel a need to believe in anything unscientific. Are you therefore here seeking a rational explanation for your experience or are you here to confront skeptics with your conversion.

If the former I'm sure we can be of help. If the latter then you're in for a right old ding dong.

There's a few possible explanations.

The first only applies to someone here for the latter reason. I'm even a little embarrassed have to mention it but you could just be flat out deliberately lying to us. I've no particular reason to believe this as there are far more charitable explanations. Though I do have to ask after a slight incongruity in your story. I assume your girlfriend can't drive or had some other reason for letting you do the driving in your condition.

For the remaining explanations we must spilt the anomalies up. I see three things that you might want explanations for.

1) Help came through at your time of need.

2) You heard a person speaking what you thought was English whilst your girlfriend hearing the same thing thought she was hearing German.

3) You had an out of body experience.

4) Your memories of a person who helped you later appeared to be similar to a dead person only one of you was familiar with.

I'll take these one by one.

1) Receiving help requires no supernatural explanation but it does set the context well for a spooky story. I direct you to a recent thread Relevance - is it relevant (http://www.skeptics.org.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1504)

2) Hearing different languages. This again requires no supernatural explanation. Both you and your girlfriend had differing impediments to hearing clearly. Without accusing you of deliberately lying one of you may easily be mistaken about what you heard.

Your impediment of course is that you were very ill. Your girlfriend's is that the man was speaking to you and not her. You'd be surprised how much difference that can make especially if you're driving a right hand drive car in a country that drives on the right putting you on the pavement side and thus closer to the direction giver.

The most reasonable interpretation is that he did indeed speak a broken accented English that you recollect as being clear English and your girlfriend recollects as being German.

Witness testimony of events is expected to vary by a significant amount. So much so that when police interview people whose stories match too closely they begin to get suspicious. This is quite a divergence in different people's recollection of the same events but a supernatural explanation is not required.

The second interpretation is that he spoke German which you recollect as being clear English and your girlfriend correctly recollects as being German. In it's favour this interpretation put the greater part of the error in your camp where you arguably had the greater impediment to clear recollection. However it does raise the question of how then did you manage to navigate to the hospital using directions spoken in a language you don't yourself speak. This too requires no supernatural explanation. Much communication is non-verbal especially direction giving. English and German have close roots and it's not difficult to guess the meaning of certain words. I'm sure you don't need much exposure to a language to pick up that links and rechts are left and right. I know from experience that after a couple of weeks living in Germany and speaking a mixture of German and English that translating such words happens unconsciously. Afterwards I would be unsurprised to be mistaken about what language I'd been hearing when I picked up certain information. Once you leave the country and stop hearing the language such abilities go. Use it or loose it they say. So in short you may unconsciously have known more of the language than you give yourself credit for. Alternatively you may already have unconsciously known the way to the hospital and in a slight delirium accessed the memory whilst believing you were hearing it from this man speaking German.

The psychologist and linguists on the forum will be able to give you more detail on this but I'm reminded of a case of past life regression were an apparent ability to speak a foreign language was revealed to have come from songs learnt in childhood and accessed through cryptonesia.

As if to demonstrate the unreliability of memory I'm not able to find details of it and so suspect I have some of it wrong.

3) You had an Out of Body Experience. Spooky though these may seem they are not evidence of the supernatural. In fact they can be replicated under controlled conditions (http://www.skeptics.org.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1232). If there supernatural explanation were true then one wold be able to reliably pick up information visi9ble to the astral body but invisble which the physical body would ahve no way of being aware. This is not the case.

You might find Dr Susan Blackmore's (http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/si91nde.html) writings on Out of Body Experiences interesting especially with regard to what appears to be if not quite then almost a Near Death Experience.

4) Later when you remembered the face it appeared to be that of your late step father. Again we fall back on the unreliability of memory for an explanation of this. He may well have looked very similar to your step father. This doesn’t need a supernatural explanation. My brother looks remarkably like Phil Jupitus. Your memory of his face may well have looked more like your step father and once you made the connection your step father's image would have overwritten any linger memory of the man's actual face in your mind. Likewise showing the photograph to your girlfriend would simply have reinforced the memory so that now all she can remember is your step father's face. In fact if somehow the man was tracked down you might well swear blind that he wasn't the guy you remember. This is why police do line ups rather than saying "is this the guy"

Had you approached us before showing your girlfriend the picture of your stepfather we might have suggested you show her a line up of similar photographs and ask her which looked most like the guy you asked for directions.

So as you see whilst this makes a delightfully spooky campfire story none of it actually requires a supernatural explanation.

[seren]

Well that's that one wrapped up.

Cuppa tea everyone?

[fred]

firstly i'm not here to confront anyones believes or to stand on my soap box, i had a strange exprience and decided to share it.As for lying i wish the scar on my throat where they cut it to help me breath wasn't there but it is so that bit is true.i didn't let her drive because i've built that car from the ground up it has cost me thousands and she's the first to admitt she can't drive it plus we didn't know how serious the situation was going to be and i'm one stubborn guy ,we'd been in germany one hour and spoke only to a chemist when i asked for something for my sore throat half an hour earlier.Also i drove to the other side of the road to talk to the guy threw my drivers window.Ifully take on board the other possible things and there's always chance of me finding the hospital on my own,but the whole event just felt strange.

[Cuddles]

firstly i'm not here to confront anyones believes or to stand on my soap box, i had a strange exprience and decided to share it.As for lying i wish the scar on my throat where they cut it to help me breath wasn't there but it is so that bit is true.i didn't let her drive because i've built that car from the ground up it has cost me thousands and she's the first to admitt she can't drive it plus we didn't know how serious the situation was going to be and i'm one stubborn guy ,we'd been in germany one hour and spoke only to a chemist when i asked for something for my sore throat half an hour earlier.Also i drove to the other side of the road to talk to the guy threw my drivers window.Ifully take on board the other possible things and there's always chance of me finding the hospital on my own,but the whole event just felt strange.

Amazingly, that doesn't address a single post in this thread. Now that's spooky.

[Janot]

tHIS iSN'T eASY tREAD eITHER. I had a similar experience in Germany, honest. One minute I was driving a car with my girlfriend, the next minute I was dead, and smelling of fish and chips.

What had actually happened was that I had passed out at the wheel, just round the corner from a Catholic hospital. I woke up on a bed surrounded by nuns (heaven? - my first guess). Whilst waiting for an ambulance, a helpful neighbour had poured vinegar over me, which appears to be a legal requirement in Germany for anybody unconscious.

There is usually a simple explanation for everything....:cheesy:

[fred]

cock

[Matt]

firstly i'm not here to confront anyones believes or to stand on my soap box, i had a strange exprience and decided to share it.As for lying i wish the scar on my throat where they cut it to help me breath wasn't there but it is so that bit is true.i didn't let her drive because i've built that car from the ground up it has cost me thousands and she's the first to admitt she can't drive it plus we didn't know how serious the situation was going to be and i'm one stubborn guy ,we'd been in germany one hour and spoke only to a chemist when i asked for something for my sore throat half an hour earlier.Also i drove to the other side of the road to talk to the guy threw my drivers window.Ifully take on board the other possible things and there's always chance of me finding the hospital on my own,but the whole event just felt strange.

Just so I'm clear you talked through the drivers side window in your own car. Is that car right hand drive? If so how does driving over to the other the road fit in?

Nonetheless if your spoke through the drivers window it's likely that you got the better impression of what he was saying then your girlfriend did. Especially if, as you say, at this stage you weren't feeling so seriously affected as to prevent you from driving. As such it seems more likely that he was indeed speaking English and your girlfriend was mistaken.

It's not too much of a mistake to make. Working in cosmopolitan multicultural London I often overhear conversations of foreigners and am surprised when after a while I realise that they've been speaking English, all be it heavily accented. With that and the fact that you'd spent so little time in the country to start subconsciously picking up the language and less time to subconsciously pick up the location of the hospital it makes it far more likely that your girlfriend was the mistaken one. As for the fact that he spoke good English this should come as little surprise. German school children are taught English from a very young age. They put us to shame.

As I agreed earlier it does make a good story and I thank you for sharing. I apologise for my colleague abrupt behaviour. We get all sorts in here and it appears that they judged you from the quality of your grammar and misinterpreted your reasons for being here.

Do you now accept that there are possible rational explanations for your experience?

[Matt]

why Do You People Keep Deleting My Posts

Well if this one gets deleted it's because you spammed it to four different threads. Spam is not welcome here.

[Cuddles]

cock

Well, I'm convinced.

[dalriada]

cock


Wow that's BIG! >:D

[bobdezon]

cock

Sorry , but if everyone is getting them out, so am I ;D

was this in response to a deleted post btw?

[Julia]

COCK


I don't see why us ladies can't get in on the act... ;)

[Lord Muck oGentry]

I see fallacies. I see whopping great fallacies...

[bobdezon]

argumentum ad knobbinum?

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Or possibly Argumentum ad Baculum?

[ZERO]

Wow that's BIG! >:D
Oh man, I need to go buy a Ferrari.:-[>:-)

[dalriada]

Oh man, I need to go buy a Ferrari.:-[>:-)


Big, RED and THROBBING....

>:D

[ZERO]

Big, RED and THROBBING....

>:D

Nah..its silver.:totty:

It sure is cold today.:shiver: