a reply to:
Davg80
People don't just experience those things when stressed. You can have an abduction experience when driving home from a date that went really well,
looking forward to making love to your lover. You can have a "Mandela Effect" apparently, when thinking about a childhood movie. There's no
connection between 'level of stress' and 'likelyhood to experience these phenomena".
In fact, the vast majority of abduction experiences are in the middle of the night, because they're connected to sleep paralysis. Literally the least
stressed a person can be. Fast asleep. And most Mandela Effect stuff comes from misremembering trivia, apparently. Which isn't particularly
stressful for me, but does seem to induce stress in some folk, as they would rather invent an entirely new dimension than misremember an actor.
That's odd to me. That 'weird feeling' you guys are getting is being wrong. That's literally what that is. You're realizing that your memory, which
you count on to /live/ is fallible. This is the same mechanism that you use to remember which things are edible, and which are deadly poison. That's
not an easy pill to swallow. And if you aren't particularly used to it, the first time you have something that you were /positive/ about turn out to
be incorrect can be really jarring, because you're also /positive/ that raw meat will kill you, but now who knows? This idea that you can't trust
your own mind is incredibly uncomfortable, but you /have/ to work through it. You can only do the best that you can do, and the brain is wired to
keep itself alive. So it's more likely that you'll forget whether or not a character has teeth than you are to forget something genuinely
dangerous.
But that is, psychologically, what that feeling is. It's the realization that you can't trust your own perception or count on your own memory. That
doesn't necessitate an outside force at work or anything. It doesn't mean that there's some kind of paranormal or supernatural explanation. The most
likely explanation is that it's an internal force, just being confronted with irrevocable proof of your brain's own fallible nature.
Though in the end, it doesn't really matter, from the perspective of the person experiencing this change, whether the source is internal or external.
The thing is still /real/. Psychosomatic things are /real/ to the person experiencing them. So I suppose that if you /must/ believe that the
universe around you has somehow changed rather than... you were just wrong about a movie, the result is the same. You can no longer rely on your
mind to give you the correct information about the world around you, past, present, or future. The people who accepted that young have already worked
through that, and basically the conclusion that you are /forced/ into, is that you can only do what you can do. You do your best, and you get through
it. Because the truth of the matter is, you want to live as long as you can, but life is a resource with finite qualities. Even if nothing
"changed", that is, even if your mind /were/ infallible, you still wouldn't make it out alive.
If you've ever seen Bojack Horseman, there's a character that gives the best piece of advice I've ever heard on the subject.
www.youtube.com...