u/Majestic_Jazz_Hands

TL;DR at the bottom, but there’s a lot of pertinent details in the actual post.

I’ve experienced some really weird things in life but I’ve never experienced something like this. I know people can sometimes start kind of day dreaming and lose track of time, suddenly catch themselves doing it and realize time went by while they were on autopilot. That wasn’t what happened here. I was very very focused on where I was and what was going on around me.

I’ve lived up here for almost 11 years, I’ve traveled this same highway, gone this same exit route more times than I can count. So it wasn’t a GPS glitch or me being somewhere where I don’t know the roadways or accidentally getting lost. Bright blue skies too, so no bad weather obscuring signs.

It was still daylight and I was driving to my friends house. From where I was to where my friend lives, the exit numbers go down. I had to get off at exit 5 which is on the right side. Exit 5 then separates into 5a and 5b, I had to get off on 5a.

Now when you have to get off onto exit 5, there’s two lanes of traffic that merge onto the highway from the right. These two lanes of merging traffic are what you have to cross over into get to exit 5a, you have to get all the way to the right hand side.

I say all this to point out that there is a lot going on in this area, there’s a lot of vehicles, you really have to pay attention to what is going on around you when you need to get off onto this exit. What was a 3 lane highway turns into a 5 lane highway at the merging area that turns into exit 5. You have to cross over two lanes to the right while those same two lanes are trying to merge left onto the highway that you were just on. You absolutely have to be mindful of everything going on around you, especially in this area.

So I just passed exit 6, I’m in the right side lane waiting to see the two lanes of traffic to appear on my right so that I could get over. I’m driving. And I’m driving. And I’m waiting. It’s still bright daylight outside, there’s a decent amount of traffic. But absolutely none of it is any kind of road construction or maintenance or utility work or police vehicle in sight (here, the law is that if there’s any kind of utility or construction work done on any road, there’s at least one cop on sight with their lights on the whole time). There was nothing to indicate that there was anything going on with exit 5 that was out of the norm.

All of a sudden I see the sign for exit 4. I’m utterly baffled. Where the fuck did exit 5 go?? I swear on my life that it was like the stretch of traffic from exit 6 to exit 4 suddenly became much longer than it usually is, like exit 5 just didn’t exist while I was driving at that time. Exit 5 comes up very quickly after exit 6, I was so confused while driving through this stretch because it seemed like it was taking so much longer to see the merging two lanes of traffic and the sign for exit 5. Neither of them appeared and then all of sudden I see the sign for exit 4.

I ended up having to get off on exit 4, turning around and going back the other way. Exit 5 came up, it wasn’t just obliterated off the face of the earth thankfully. But this all happened two days ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s absolutely no reason for exit 5 and it’s two lanes of merging traffic on a major highway to just disappear in broad daylight like it never even existed.

TL;DR An exit(on a main highway in my state) the sign for the exit, and it’s two lanes of merging traffic seemed to just up and disappear in broad daylight without there being any kind of construction or closure. Was very awake, aware and paying attention. The town was not obliterated off the face of the earth when I had to turn around and get there from the opposite direction.

Lots of people like to shit on people who have septum piercings. I personally love them and I love the way they look, which is probably its own controversial opinion. But I think gold teeth look absolutely atrocious on anyone wearing them. Far, far worse than any kind of septum piercing ever will.

They look even worse when they have those bits of diamonds (or whatever it is that they put in them). They’re distracting in their ugliness. If I see someone speaking/singing/rapping/whatever while wearing them, I’m 100% not listening to a single thing coming out of their mouths other than staring at how terrible their mouth looks.

It’s not the flex people seem to think it is. Having the money to get them done doesn’t equal having good taste. Not that I’m any prize myself but if I had to choose between dating someone with gold/diamond teeth or someone with a septum piercing, it damn sure wouldn’t be the gold teeth.

It’s such an ugly, tacky, disfiguring waste of money.

I’ve written about these two experiences elsewhere as comments in different posts, but I felt the need to share them here as one complete post. And warning ahead of time, this will be quite long.

The first experience I had was when I was five and my brother was four. I need to explain the way this room was laid out as it’s important to understand the events that followed.

My brother and I shared a room, my bed was on the right and his bed was on the left side of the room. There was only one window and that faced my brother’s bed at the back wall. Our mom’s room was several feet away to the left and before where my brother’s bed was. There was absolutely nothing but woods when you looked outside our bedroom window. No lights, nothing but dense trees and darkness as far as the eye could see and no roads anywhere in those woods.

One night, very late into the night, I’m awaken by this ball of light on the wall facing me, to the left of the window. This light was not like what you would see from a flashlight or a car headlight. It was perfectly round, glowing bluish white and in a perfectly round ball. For as bright as this light was, it didn’t immediately make the entire room light up, nor did it cast any shadows like you would expect a light that bright should have if it shone on the other objects in the wall.

Quick note-about two weeks ago, I randomly watched a video about a guy who also encountered a light that he described exactly like this-incredibly bright but didn’t cast any light onto anything else or cast any shadows. And no lie, all the hairs on my arms and neck rose up when he said that because it was exactly what I saw too.

This light started to get a little bit larger and it started slowly moving around the room. Now, I’m a little kid and even if I was adult seeing this in my bedroom in the middle of the night, it would have scared the shit out of me. But two weird things happen next.

Despite my brother being several feet away, I was yelling for him to wake up, and he would not wake up. Any time in the past if something scared me in the middle of the night and I yelled for my mom, she’d instantly be there. But despite both our door and her bedroom door a few feet away being open, she also did not come when I called her. The next thing I know, this light gets bigger and bigger and bigger until all I could see was nothing but this white light.

The next thing I know, it’s morning time. I tried to explain to my mom what happened but she said she never heard me calling for her in the middle of the night.

Fast forward about 15 years. My brother and I are hanging out and we’re talking about the weirdest experiences we ever had and up until this day I thought I was the only one who experienced this. No. My brother had the exact same experience.

Except that when he looked at me that and started screaming for me to wake up, but all he saw was me still sound asleep. So while we both had this same experience, we both experienced trying to scream to get the other to wake up and to both of us it looked like the other couldn’t hear and we remained asleep.

Fast forward again to when I’m 34. I worked in a town that I’ll call M and lived in a town called R. To get home from work every night, I had to take an hour long bus from M to R. While on the bus, my roommate Elizabeth was already on it so we took the ride back home together. We got off and started walking home together.

Now the road that branches off to the one we were living on was fairly busy. It had a McDonalds, a 7-11, gas station and a fair bit of regular traffic. As we’re walking home it’s early evening but the sun was still very much out.

When we got just about to the street before our street, I remembered that I needed to stop at the store first so I told Elizabeth to go on ahead and I’ll be there in a few minutes.

The next thing I know, I’m looking up from lying on the street. It’s dark out and there’s a group of people around me that found me unconscious on this same road but a few blocks back from my street. I had already walked past these other roads when I was walking back with my roommate. I was absolutely terrified, I had no idea what was going on. They told me to just stay calm, they called 911 for me and they’d be there soon.

When the cops asked me what happened I said that I truly didn’t know. They asked me if I knew where I was. Despite being a block away from my house, nothing looked familiar. I thought I was still in town M that I worked in. I didn’t remember the bus ride with Elizabeth or what happened after that.

When these people found me unconscious, it was 5 hours later. I had five hours of completely missing time.

I went to hospital. I had a ton of tests run. I hadn’t had a seizure. There wasn’t a single thing medically wrong with me. Except that my memory, for weeks afterwards was EXTREMELY fucked up. It took me weeks to remember the bus ride back with Elizabeth and the whole walking home until I decided to run to the store first. But over ten years later, I have no idea what happened in those five hours. And where I was found in the road wasn’t in some dark, out of the way ditch. It was under a streetlight, on the road, right next to where cars would be driving by. Which is why these people stopped to help me, because they didn’t know if I had gotten hit by a car but where I was laying, it would’ve been very easy for someone to potentially run me over while I was laying on the ground.

One amusing thing about this is that I was listening to music right before I lost consciousness and the last song I was listening to was a slipknot song and the lyrics are “I will remember before I forget” l which is completely ironic considering how much I couldn’t remember what happened and how severely impacted my short term memory was after this happened.

I still don’t know what happened in those 5 hours. I don’t think I really want to either.

If you made it through this whole novel, I deeply appreciate it! Thank you!