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The Secret World: Real Life Magic

Not sure exactly where this thread belongs. I'm putting it in world building as it strikes me that ideas people might have along these lines would help with world building, so...

Have you ever had experiences which suggest to you that just maybe there is something deeper (if that's the right word) than the apparent, physical world. That there are unexplained or misunderstood phenomena which are hard to see except in rare and special circumstances and constitute evidence of a secret world where the rules are entirely different...

I regard myself as a rational and scientific chap but I have had glimpses into the secret world (as I call it). Mostly these are weird coincidences which resonate with my personal myth system but once or twice there have been situations, shared by others, which are entirely inexplicable by current knowledge.

The most spectacular of these - to my mind - involved my old cat Sauron (aka Blackie). He was such an amazing cat - super intelligent and full of character. Anyway, Blackie and I had lived in a tumbledown cottage in a small street for six years but then I met a new girlfriend (1992) and we decided to move into a new house together.

So, we moved almost everything to the new house. There were just one or two last things to collect, plus Blackie, so we went to dinner at a local restaurant then went back to the tumbledown cottage for the last time. As we pulled up out front, the yard was full of cats. Every cat in the street was there, sitting in a rough circle around Blackie - as though they'd all come to say goodbye.

And they didn't all scatter in panic as we walked into the yard. They calmly walked away in ones and twos as we stood there in amazement - the hair totally standing up on our necks.

I have never seen or heard of anything like this but that GF and I often discussed it.

When Blackie died in 2000 it was like losing a brother.

But I've long pondered what that was all about and what it means for phenomena that appear - somehow - to offer a glimpse into the secret world. Does anyone have any similar stories?
 
Maybe there is a secret world of magic. Maybe we live in an Urban Fantasy world, who knows?
I myself have had no experiences with strange phenomena such as that (at least none I'd like to share) , but my mom has seen ghosts before.
 
I once had my watch mysteriously set itself about 40 minutes back, while I was wearing it, and there was no one within touching distance of me in the entire time frame when it could have happened. It had been working fine and right on time last time I'd checked (less than an hour before I realized it was off) and it kept perfect time after I adjusted it.

Years later, I learned that's a classic pookah trick.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
Read through giant piles of paranormal books decades ago - psi abilities, ghosts, weird places and objects, all that. Quit in no small part of the various factions that talked *at* instead of *to* each other: militant skeptics, wannabe witches and wizards, religious zealots condemning everything demonic apart from certain miracles, conspiracy theorists who advocated alien/supernatural mind control and more.

That said, there has been a fair pile of legitimate, objective research into the paranormal, though those doing the researching tend to get denounced by all the others...including the skeptics, because their results indicated...'something is going on.' None of it all that reliable, but there. Big areas of interest were mediums, remote viewing, dowsing, telekinesis, and reincarnation (often a sort of deja-vu moment). Also turning up were 'time slip' moments where things happened far quicker than possible, being in two places at once, pyro-kinesis, and levitation. Came time to revamp my worlds away from the gaming stuff, I decided to accept all this stuff and a couple other things as 'real,' precisely because cases of sorts could be made for them, though not especially strong ones.
 
Well, I had several experiences when I was a child, one of which was literally life saving, and these led me to come to believe (after a LOT of my own research in the days when that was all done in libraries and bookstores, pre-internet, and hearing the stories of others) that children are born with the openness and untainted ability to see/experience the world as it truly is. Connected, perhaps, to so much adults have lost the ability to see. I think we arrive with an inherent knowledge of what is possible, phrase of ALL that is posable, until we are taught otherwise.

While some lose this ability sooner than others, depending upon our experiences, parental and sibling influence, social situations etc, some hold onto it longer and bits and pieces may remain well into our adulthoods. For me, I cannot explain the things that occurred in those early years other than to say my world was very solitary, insular and protected formally hours of the day. I filled it with un-critiqued imagination and an open heartedness towards anything and everything and perhaps I held onto enough of that connection to be able to tap into it when it was needed. My grandmother would call it "angels", of course, given her beliefs. And it suited the experiences as well as anything, while being wholly inadequate to my young mind as well. :)

I've spent my entire adult life trying to find my way back to that mind set. Successfully at times. As adults, I believe we can, though experiences like heightened emotions, connection, loss, grief, trauma, reliving childhood-like moments, such as we do with our animals, even abundant happiness, experience moments where we may connect with it all again. But then, I live a pretty removed-from-convention lifestyle. Created the world I live in and managed, for eleven years now, to make a creative living in, so maybe I never lost it all? :)

Is it magic? Perhaps. But I think it's more like a current, below the surface of our own superficial earthly beliefs of our adult world, that never goes away.
 
Had an instance of this yesterday.

Obviously it's not magic but it was a very weird coincidence...

I was out doing my beach run, which I do several times per week. There have been major storms in my area so the beach was quite eroded. In such circumstances you will always see people out with metal detectors (as the numerous layers of sediment have been washed away and who knows what might be revealed...

Anyway...I trotted up the beach, did my other exercises and trotted back...

As I ran between quite a cluster of metal detectors, my eyes down, I just happened to see a coin revealed by receding sand. A goldie (as we call them in Australia). I swooped upon it, among the detectors, who saw me not. A $2 coin which was so abraded I had to get it home for hyper lighting and magnification to see what year it was minted.

That coin must've been there for decades and was uncovered in the very instant I ran past.
 

Futhark

Inkling
The thing is that time is not what we think it is, or how we experience it. We experience ourselves as flesh and blood beings, because that is what our senses tell us, but the other side of the coin is that we are a...'foam' I guess, of quantum vibrations, frequencies, and resonance. Some of this energy is not constrained by the straightforward aspect of time that we experience; of seconds ticking by in a relative constant.

So yes, I have had experiences with this 'secret world'. Strange coincidences that are just too coincidental. Passing souls stopping in to say hello or goodbye. As to the rules; I have my suspicions based on my anecdotal evidence, but then the rules could be different based on what a different individual perceives. All I know for sure is that we are not equipped to experience the totality of reality.
 

KC Trae Becker

Troubadour
When I was a teenager, on several occasions different watches I was wearing reset to 12:00 or died. Once I noticed a reset had happened several yards past a certain spot along a trail that I frequented. That spot felt magical to me because it passed between two trees that were usually large for that area. They grew near the head of the trail and felt like sentinels guarding a new world.

I tried to remember when my watches had reset before and I was pretty sure I had been up that trail recently each time. I looked closely at my watch the next time I went through that spot to see it reset, but it didn't. I kept an eye on my watch times most trips through that spot from then on. My watches didn't always reset there, but once I did catch it just as it reset. It wasn't exactly between the two trees as I had expected, but happened just about the spot I had first noticed it being connected to the trail, several yards past the two trees.

After about ten resets and dead watches, the phenomenon stopped. Maybe I finally got a watch too good to be affected by whatever was going on there.

By the way, this wasn't near any manmade electrical sources. The nearest electrical wire was about half a mile away. There were no utilities in the area either. But it was near water, a mostly freshwater coastal marsh.
 
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