How many of us have had Fortean experiences that were also witnessed by one or more other people?
I've had two or three such things happen to me, starting with the weird thing I and a friend of mine saw in the cathedral some years ago (it's way down in the depths of IHTM somewhere). If I'd been the only one to see and hear it I would have instantly dismissed it as a trick of the light, but the fact my friend Madge also witnessed it means I can't easily do that. And that's what makes a shared experience different isn't it? Two people hallucinating the same thing from different perspectives is massively improbable. I'm not even sure what the mechanism for such a thing could be even in theory. I'm stuck with a puzzle I just can't solve. And that's why I turned up here in the first place.
Since then I've had two more such weird little moments, and I'll tell the most interesting one here.
Few years after the cathedral thing. I was sitting watching TV, and my sister's youngest son was draping across the am of my chair. He was about twelve at the time, just big enough for his sprawling to be a nuisance. The room was fairly dark, just the light from the TV and a dim table lamp in the corner.
Anyhow, as I was watching TV I seemed to see a movement just to the left f of the television , and my eyes turned to look just in time to see a momentary image of what looked like the lower part of a person doing some odd sort of dance.
Imagine the glare of the TV sort of obscuring everything but the lower right quarter of a person, so you can just see the bottom part of the right leg, and maybe just a hint of the left leg in the shadows. And the right leg you can most clearly see is sort of jerking or kicking.
Well, that is what I briefly seemed to see as I looked over. It was VERY brief, no more than a second or two, and, as with the previous experience, I was almost immediately dismissing it as a weird little eye/brain moment, when I happened to look at my nephew sprawling on the am of my chair. He was sitting bolt upright and looking at the same part of the room I'd seen the legs in, with a slightly startled disbelieving look on his face.
I asked him if he'd seen anything. He said yes he thought he'd just seen some weird dancing legs.
After that we compared notes - and what we'd both seen seemed to be as near as dammit identical. Same colors (muted olive-browns), same restricted view (just the lower right side of the 'person's' body).
It seems ridiculous - just a momentary glimpse of some guy with twitchy legs. But yet we both saw it. Whatever it was.
How common are these shared experiences? How do we explain them?