Did you know that when they put spent nuclear fuel rods into the cool-down tanks, they make that water glow BLUE?
What color are the SMURFS?
See my point?
JW Urban Legend....
by on the rocks 11 Replies latest social current
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IsaacJ22
I used to believe these stories because most in my family did--and many of them claimed to have experienced them personally. Then, years after my WT days, I started leaning toward a secular view point and began reading the writings of atheists. Eventually, I read about skepticism too. This began to make me think twice about those seemily supernatural experiences.
MOST of them happened when the person was asleep. Not all, but most. Even the ones in my own family. Which is very telling.
I now know that some people have a defect in their brain that causes hypnogogic delusions. You can literally be awake, but still dreaming and even unable to move. I have experienced these states only twice in my early teens, but I knew I was asleep. Many people do not realize that they are asleep when they enter this state. (So it's hard to tell if I really had a real hypnogogic delusion or just a bad dream where I realized I was dreaming.)
At any rate, it is believed that many experiences like these, ranging from alien abduction to demonic visitations, can be explained by such quirks in the brain. I know several Witnesses and bible studies who claimed to have such experiences, only they had been sleeping when something woke them up. But did it really wake them all the way? Or were they still dreaming? My wife's cousin is married to a guy who used to wake up and believed a giant cat was laying on his chest! He never realized what this was until I happened to mention this phenomena to him. Be a JW, I wouldn't be surprised if he feared it was a demon.
There are other quirks in the brain that can cause similar experiences due to electrical fields or certain states of awareness. It's possible that these oddities of the brain are hereditary.
This doesn't explain every experience with complete satisfaction. It explains most of them and makes us realize that things aren't always what they seem. So while something may remain unexplained, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is the supernatural experience it appears to be.