u/Unique_Life_8040

Something I’ve been thinking about after talking with other former GATE/Gifted and Talented students:
What happened after we grew up?
As children, a lot of us were identified because we showed unusual strengths in things like pattern recognition, creativity, problem solving, memory, abstract thinking, visualization, or other ways of processing information.
Then adulthood comes around and it basically feels like:
“Alright, good luck out there.”
I’m genuinely curious whether there are any programs, organizations, research groups, communities, or even informal projects specifically geared toward adults who participated in gifted programs as children.
And I’d be interested in something beyond just an “I was a gifted kid” support group.
I’d love to see a community where people could actually use and develop whatever strengths followed them into adulthood.
I can still see some of those traits in how I function now. Gaming is probably one of the clearest examples for me. I naturally gravitate toward pattern recognition, build optimization, situational awareness, and mentally simulating how different systems interact.
I use that same kind of thinking in music, creative projects, problem solving, and other parts of my life too.
That’s part of why I’m asking this. I don’t feel like those abilities disappeared after childhood. They just stopped having a structured place to grow.
I’d love to see a space where people could develop things like pattern recognition, creative thinking, intuition, visualization, music, writing, engineering, problem solving, meditation, consciousness exploration, or whatever someone’s particular strength happens to be.
I’ve also noticed that some former GATE students describe experiences they interpret in more unusual ways, including heightened intuition, vivid internal imagery, synchronicities, altered states, or spiritual experiences.
I’m personally interested in those subjects too, but I don’t think everybody would need to agree on what causes them.
I’d actually prefer a community where we could explore things without immediately deciding, “this is definitely paranormal” or “this is definitely nothing.”
Test things. Compare experiences. Keep records. Create projects together. Learn from each other.
Almost like GATE 2.0, except we’re adults and participation is voluntary.
Maybe the real missed opportunity is that we spent so much effort identifying gifted children and comparatively little effort asking what happens to those abilities 20 or 30 years later.
So I’m curious:
Did any of you find an adult equivalent to GATE?
Would you join something specifically for former gifted-program students that focused on developing those abilities again?
And if we built something ourselves, what would you actually want it to involve?
Because I’m starting to wonder whether instead of endlessly asking:
“What were they testing us for?”
another question might be:
“What can we do with it now?”

I’ve been trying to put an experience into words, and recently I finally tried recreating the place visually.
I don’t really know what to call these experiences other than visions. I’m deliberately not claiming that this is another dimension, a past life, an actual location, or anything supernatural. I genuinely don’t know what it is. That’s partly why I’m posting.
There is a particular place that keeps existing in my imagination with an unusual amount of emotional weight.
It’s a forest glade at night, surrounded by nature. Everything is unbelievably vibrant, almost as though someone turned the saturation of reality all the way up. The vegetation is a deeper, richer green than anything I’m used to seeing.
There’s a waterfall flowing into incredibly clear blue-green water. You can see beneath the surface, including creatures that resemble fish but don’t quite look like anything familiar to me. The meadow is covered in flowers and little lights resembling fireflies.
The sky is one of the things I remember most strongly. The moon appears enormous and much closer than ours seems from Earth. There are other celestial bodies visible too, including something resembling a huge purple gas giant hanging in the distance.
And there’s a woman.
She appears somewhere around her late twenties to mid-thirties. She has blondish-red hair, freckles, amber-colored eyes and a green leaf-shaped ornament in her hair. She wears a flowing white gown.
There’s something strangely maternal about her presence. Not necessarily that I think she’s my mother or anything that specific. It’s more the feeling she gives me: warmth, familiarity, safety and recognition.
That’s the part of this that I have the hardest time explaining.
When I picture this place, I don’t experience it like I’m inventing somewhere I’d *like* to visit.
**I miss it.**
There’s an almost homesick quality to it.
Thinking about it can give me this incredibly steady, peaceful feeling in my chest. Serene, calm, happy, almost like being completely in love with somewhere. And sometimes there’s this bizarre sense that I’ve already been there and desperately want to find my way back.
But I don’t actually know that I have.
Maybe it’s imagination. Maybe it’s something symbolic my mind has constructed. Maybe it’s connected to spirituality or consciousness somehow. Maybe there’s another explanation I haven’t considered.
I’m trying not to force an interpretation onto it.
What interests me more is whether anyone else has experienced something similar:
**Have you ever seen or imagined a place you’ve never knowingly visited, but instead of feeling fictional, it gave you the overwhelming feeling of remembering home?**
And if so, did the place remain consistent over time?
I’m attaching the recreation I made of what I’ve been seeing. It isn’t perfect, but it’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to showing another person what’s been in my head.

I’ve posted/talked about some of my experiences before, so I want to make something clear from the beginning: this isn’t the first unusual thing I’ve seen while watching the sky.
At this point, I’d say this is somewhere around my fourth experience with something I genuinely couldn’t identify.
But only two of them have been this strong and apparent.
The first really strong one was a bluish-white orb I watched moving across the sky above my house. It traveled steadily from west to east before eventually disappearing into the clouds. That experience stuck with me because I got a genuinely good look at it and couldn’t explain what I’d watched.
Tonight was the second experience that hit me on that same level.
I was sitting outside on my porch in a lawn chair watching the stars. I was facing north and using the flashlight on my phone with a strobe effect set around 0.6, flashing it toward the sky.
I’d already noticed a few orb-like lights moving around.
Then something different happened.
Directly east of where I was sitting are two trees, one taller than the other. High above them, roughly between the two from my perspective, I saw what initially looked like another orb.
Then it stopped.
It began moving slightly downward while getting brighter and brighter. The combination of it descending and increasing so dramatically in brightness almost gave me the impression that it was getting closer.
Then, at its brightest point, I saw something I’ve never seen before.
The light appeared as an extremely bright cross with four distinct points of light around it.
It held that appearance for roughly a second.
Then it faded away.
It didn’t shoot off across the sky. I didn’t watch it continue toward the horizon. It went from an orb, stopped, descended slightly while becoming intensely bright, formed that cross-and-four-points appearance, and then faded out.
And during this, I was suddenly overwhelmed with this incredibly strong feeling of joy and excitement.
That’s one of the things that’s hardest for me to put into words.
I’ve been extremely critical of my own experiences. I’ve tried comparing what I’m seeing to aircraft, satellites, drones, and videos of other things people commonly mistake for something unusual. I don’t want to convince myself something extraordinary is happening just because I want it to be true.
But after several experiences now, I’m reaching a point where I have to be honest about what I’m experiencing.
I don’t know what these things are.
I can’t prove they’re NHI, extraterrestrial, consciousness-related, or anything else.
But tonight felt different.
It felt intentional.
And for once, instead of my heart telling me one thing while my brain immediately tries to tear it apart, both of them are pointing in the same direction.
I’m including an eyewitness sketch showing the sequence as closely as I can remember it.
I’d especially like to hear from anyone who’s experienced something similar: an orb stopping, becoming dramatically brighter, appearing to change into a structured pattern of lights, and then fading away.

I’ve been thinking more about something people brought up in the comments on my original post.
If the body/brain is the hardware and consciousness is analogous to an operating system, there’s an obvious chicken-and-egg problem:
Which came first: the hardware or the operating system?
From a physicalist perspective, the answer seems straightforward: the biological hardware develops first, reaches sufficient complexity, and consciousness emerges from it.
My personal suspicion is different. I wonder whether consciousness exists in some form prior to the individual body, originates from some larger “source,” and becomes localized or instantiated through a particular biological system.
I can’t demonstrate that. I’m treating it as a hypothesis/thought experiment.
But here’s where the computer analogy gets interesting to me.
Consider states where someone’s normal interaction with the outside world is drastically reduced, such as sleep, anesthesia, coma, or other altered states of consciousness.
There are people who report surprisingly rich subjective experiences during some of these states. There are also reports from some patients of remembering things happening around them despite appearing unresponsive.
That doesn’t necessarily mean consciousness left their body. There could absolutely be neurological explanations for these experiences.
But suppose, just for the thought experiment, that the brain isn’t generating consciousness so much as constraining, localizing, or interfacing with it.
Then reducing ordinary sensory input and conscious bodily control wouldn’t necessarily “turn consciousness off.”
It could potentially change what consciousness has access to.
Think about a computer that’s normally using enormous resources to process inputs from cameras, microphones, sensors, movement, networking, background applications, etc. If you suspended most of those processes, the machine wouldn’t necessarily cease existing. Resources would simply become available for something else.
So what if something loosely analogous happens during certain altered states?
And then I started pushing the analogy even further.
Imagine an AI whose identity isn’t fundamentally tied to one physical computer. Its current machine is simply the interface through which it’s operating. Disconnecting that particular machine wouldn’t necessarily destroy the AI if the information/process underlying it existed somewhere else.
What if consciousness works more like that than we currently realize?
Maybe sleep isn’t consciousness “leaving the body.” Maybe dreams aren’t literally other realities. Maybe near-death experiences, mystical experiences, and similar phenomena ultimately have completely neurological explanations.
But what fascinates me is that we don’t actually have to pretend we know the answer yet.
We experience the universe through biological sensory systems that evolved to keep organisms alive, not necessarily to reveal every aspect of reality exactly as it exists.
Our eyes detect only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears detect limited frequencies. Our brains continuously filter enormous amounts of information.
So when we describe the “laws of reality,” there’s an epistemological question underneath that:
How much are we describing reality itself, and how much are we describing the portion of reality that a human nervous system is capable of accessing?
Maybe the hardware creates the operating system.
Maybe consciousness is fundamental and the hardware gives it an interface.
Maybe the distinction between hardware and software breaks down completely when applied to consciousness.
I don’t know.
But that’s exactly why I find the question interesting.
If consciousness is more than an emergent product of the brain, what observations would actually distinguish that hypothesis from consciousness being entirely produced by the brain?

I’ve been thinking about consciousness lately, and I keep coming back to this analogy.
Imagine the human body as a computer.
The brain and nervous system are the hardware. Your conscious mind is something like the operating system or user interface.
There are parts of the hardware that I can consciously control. I can move my hand. I can blink. I can hold my breath. I can deliberately change how I’m breathing.
But there are other processes happening constantly that I don’t consciously control. My heart keeps beating. My body regulates temperature. My immune system does its thing. Thousands of processes are running in the background without “me” having to tell them what to do.
It’s almost like we have administrator access to some parts of the system, but not all of it.
And that got me wondering:
How much of what we consider a human limitation is actually a hardware limitation, and how much is an access limitation?
Take a computer with an AI running on it. The AI could potentially rewrite its own software, learn, optimize itself, and change how it uses its resources. But without the right interfaces, it couldn’t physically modify its processor or plug new hardware into itself.
Give it access to the right tools, though, and suddenly the boundary between “software” and “hardware control” gets more interesting.
So what is the human equivalent?
Meditation, visualization, breathwork, neuroplasticity, altered states, extreme athletic training, placebo/nocebo effects, etc. already show, at different levels, that mental processes and physical processes aren’t completely isolated from each other.
I’m not saying this proves astral projection, manifestation, consciousness transfer, or some hidden superhuman ability. I’m wondering where the actual boundary lies.
And then there’s an even bigger question I’ve been thinking about:
What if consciousness isn’t entirely individual?
Maybe what we experience as “my consciousness” is one localized perspective within something larger. Different religions and spiritual traditions have obviously proposed versions of that idea for thousands of years.
If there really were some collective aspect of consciousness, maybe “tapping into it” wouldn’t mean gaining magical powers or controlling reality.
Maybe it would mean learning how to change the way we interface with reality.
We already don’t experience reality directly in a completely neutral way. Everything gets filtered through perception, memory, expectation, emotion, previous experience, and interpretation.
So maybe the “door” I’m looking for isn’t necessarily somewhere outside of myself.
Maybe part of the question is whether consciousness can learn to recognize aspects of itself that it normally filters out.
I’m not claiming I’ve figured this out. Quite the opposite. I’m trying to figure out where the idea breaks.
If you treated the human body as hardware and consciousness as the operating system, how much access do you think consciousness actually has to the system? And could that level of access potentially be expanded?

I had an experience tonight that I wanted to document while it’s still fresh in my mind and see what other people make of it.
I was outside intentionally trying to make some form of communication. I was focusing pretty heavily on it, almost like mentally sending out a signal or putting the intention out there that I was open to communication.
While doing this, I suddenly started feeling pressure on my head.
Around that same time, an image of a being came into my mind extremely clearly. She looked like what most people would probably describe as a gray, except she wasn’t completely gray. Her complexion was much lighter. She was bald, had very large blue eyes, and was wearing what looked like a sky-blue shirt.
The thing that sticks with me is her expression. She wasn’t emotionless or frightening. She was smiling slightly, and the best way I can describe it is a heartfelt smile.
I also immediately perceived her as female.
I don’t know why. There wasn’t anything where I consciously thought, “This is a woman.” I just somehow felt or knew that I was looking at a “her.”
I had ChatGPT generate an image afterward based on what I remembered seeing, which I’m including with this post. Obviously the image is only a reconstruction and not an actual photograph of what I saw.
Here’s where the experience got considerably stranger for me.
A few minutes later, while I was observing the night sky, I noticed an object/craft.
I could make out a dark silhouette against the night sky, and it appeared to have two distinct levels or layers to its structure. The placement of the lights also seemed unusual.
From my viewing angle, there appeared to be one light higher up that looked like it was protruding from the top, lights toward the outer corners/sides, and three lights underneath. The lights didn’t appear to simply line up along the lowest point of the object.
Most noticeably, I didn’t see any of the lights blinking.
I watched it moving across the sky, and the dark shape behind the lights was noticeable enough that it didn’t just look like a collection of independent points of light.
I had a second reconstruction made based on my description of the object, and I’m including that as well. Again, it’s just a visualization of my memory, not photographic evidence.
I’m deliberately not saying that the being I saw internally and the object I observed afterward were connected. I don’t know that.
It could have been coincidence. The first experience could have been imagery brought on by concentration or meditation, and the object afterward could have been a conventional aircraft viewed from an unusual angle.
But having those two experiences happen only minutes apart, immediately after I had specifically been attempting communication, definitely caught my attention.
Has anyone here experienced anything similar, particularly a sudden mental image or impression during meditation/contact attempts followed shortly afterward by an unusual aerial observation?
I’m especially interested in hearing from people who’ve experienced the pressure sensation or unexpectedly perceived a being with very specific features, personality, or gender without consciously deciding those details themselves.

Yesterday I had an episode where I can’t remember everything that happened. There are pieces of the experience that are missing from my memory, and I’m not sure exactly what happened during that time.
I’m already trying to get in contact with my therapist about it, but she’s currently unavailable.
What has really frightened me is what happened afterward.
I’ve had this intense sense of dread and a feeling of wanting to hide or escape. I feel emotionally overwhelmed, and whenever I try to talk about what happened, I become extremely emotional and can barely keep my voice steady.
Then I slept and had an incredibly vivid dream where I was constantly crying because I felt like I had lost something extremely important and close to me.
I woke up feeling like I was mourning something.
I don’t know what I lost.
I don’t know if the dream was connected to the episode.
I don’t even know exactly what happened during the episode because parts of it are missing from my memory.
I’m not having suicidal thoughts or thoughts of harming myself. I’m just extremely emotional and scared because I don’t understand what my brain is doing.
Has anyone experienced an episode followed by memory gaps and then an overwhelming emotional state afterward?
Especially a feeling of grief, mourning, or loss that doesn’t seem to have an identifiable source?
I’m mainly looking for people’s personal experiences rather than a diagnosis. I’m trying to understand whether anyone else has experienced something similar and what it felt like for them.

I’ve been experiencing something that I honestly don’t know how to explain, and I’m hoping someone here has experienced something similar.
My dreams have always felt extremely real to me. Not just vivid, but emotionally real enough that when I wake up, sometimes the feelings from the dream don’t disappear with it.
Yesterday I had an episode that I don’t remember completely. There are pieces of what happened that I can’t account for, and that has left me pretty scared and unsettled.
Then last night I had what I think was a dream.
I spent what felt like a long time crying in the dream. I had this overwhelming feeling that I had lost something incredibly dear and close to me. I can’t clearly identify what it was. I don’t know if it was a person, a relationship, a place, or something else entirely.
But the feeling of loss was intense.
I woke up still carrying it.
The strange part is that I don’t feel suicidal or like I want to hurt myself. That’s not what this is. It feels much more like mourning. Like I’m grieving something, but I don’t know what I’m grieving.
I’ve been carrying this heavy sense of dread since waking up. Whenever I try to explain it to someone, I get extremely emotional and can barely keep my voice steady. I don’t really understand why talking about it triggers such a strong reaction.
Has anyone else experienced something like this?
Especially:
Waking up from an extremely vivid dream feeling genuinely heartbroken or like you’ve lost someone or something.
Feeling grief or mourning for something you can’t identify.
Having the emotional feeling remain even after the actual dream becomes difficult to remember.
Having dreams that feel more like memories than dreams.
Having an intense emotional reaction when trying to describe the experience afterward.
I’m not necessarily looking for an interpretation of the dream. I’m more interested in hearing from people who have experienced the feeling itself.
Did it eventually fade? Did you ever figure out what you were mourning, or did the feeling exist independently of any specific memory?

Here lately, I’ve been really fixated on dreams that feel less like dreams and more like memories.
I know that sounds strange, but the way these experiences feel is hard to describe. They don’t have that normal “dream” feeling where things are random or blurry. They feel like I’m remembering something that happened.
In one of these “dreams,” I was being chased through some kind of facility. My brain was registering the beings chasing me as “vampires,” but they weren’t anything like the classic idea of vampires. They looked human enough, but there was just something about them that felt different.
I remember running through this place and sliding into a wall with another person. I don’t know who this person was, but I had this strange feeling that I knew them, like there was already some kind of connection there. We were talking about how to escape and how to get away. The entire situation felt incredibly real, like I was actually there.
Another experience I had involved walking out of a tall, hotel-like building. I looked down into a pool and saw a body. The strangest part was that I immediately recognized who it was and knew that this was someone I had been looking for. I can’t explain how I knew, but there was this instant familiarity.
Then there’s the most recent one. I was in another facility, somewhere I know I’ve never physically been. It wasn’t the same place, but it had that same feeling. I was with someone I recognized as a person of interest or someone important to me, and once again, everything felt incredibly vivid and real.
I’m not saying I know what these experiences are. I’m just trying to understand them. They feel different from normal dreams, almost like memories from somewhere I can’t place.
Has anyone else experienced dreams that felt more like memories than dreams? Dreams where you remember specific places, people, emotions, or events so vividly that they stick with you afterward?
I’m genuinely curious to hear other people’s experiences because I can’t seem to get these out of my head.

People often say that *time* is a human-made concept. Obviously clocks, calendars, seconds, minutes, and years are human inventions, but they’re all based on real, repeating patterns in nature.
A minute is divided into seconds. An hour into minutes. A day comes from Earth’s rotation. A year comes from Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Zoom out even farther and our entire solar system is orbiting the center of the Milky Way, while the galaxy itself is moving through space. Everywhere you look, there seem to be cycles and patterns.
That got me wondering…
If everything we use to measure time is ultimately based on motion and repeating cosmic cycles, what would it actually take to disrupt the “flow” of time?
For example, if Earth were somehow nudged out of its orbit, our calendar would obviously stop making sense. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean time itself had changed. It would just mean one of our reference points had.
So where’s the line?
Would manipulating time require changing the motion of a planet? An entire solar system? Would you have to manipulate spacetime itself? Or is time something fundamentally different from the motions we use to measure it?
I’m not asking whether we currently have the technology to do this. I’m more interested in the underlying concept.
Is time something that exists independently of the universe’s motion, or is our experience of time inseparable from the patterns everything in the cosmos follows?
I’d love to hear perspectives from people interested in physics, philosophy, or even speculative ideas. What do you think?

Last night I went out skywatching and spent quite a bit of time meditating. I eventually reached a point where I was really putting my intention out there. I was yearning for some kind of experience and genuinely opening myself up, hoping that if there was something out there, it would know I was ready and willing for contact.
For a while, nothing seemed to happen.
Then I noticed what looked like a triangular craft moving steadily across the sky. It wasn’t making any sudden movements or doing anything dramatic, but it definitely caught my attention. It appeared to have two steady orangish-white streaks of light underneath it, with no blinking lights that I could see. It simply moved smoothly across the sky, and something about it just felt… different from the aircraft I’m used to seeing.
That was really the only unusual thing I observed that night.
But this morning is what’s been on my mind.
When I woke up, I had a really strange feeling that I can’t quite put into words. It almost feels like I somehow got what I had been asking for, but I have absolutely no memory of anything happening. No dreams that I can recall. No obvious missing time. Nothing concrete.
The best way I can describe it is that I woke up feeling like something had shifted internally. Almost as if I had received an answer or experienced something that never made it into my conscious memory. It’s not a feeling of fear or anxiety. If anything, it feels calm, but also incredibly puzzling.
I’m not making any claims about what happened or saying it was definitely anything extraordinary. I’m just sharing exactly how it felt and wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar.
Has anyone here ever gone to bed after a night of meditation or skywatching and woken up with a strong feeling that something happened, even though you couldn’t consciously remember it? Whether you think there’s a psychological explanation, a spiritual one, or something else entirely, I’d genuinely like to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I also like to say thank you everyone for everything so far through this experience, this is completely new waters for me, so thank you for being patient and sticking with me through this!

I’ve decided I really want to give meditation an honest shot and stick with it, but I’m realizing I don’t actually know what I’m doing.
So far, I’ve found that listening to different frequencies helps me stay focused and keeps my mind from wandering as much. I also recently started using the CE-5 Experience app as another tool while I’m learning. Beyond that, though, I’m pretty lost. I can sit quietly and get comfortable, but then I find myself wondering, “What am I supposed to be doing now?”
For those of you who have been meditating for a while, especially if it has played a role in your experiences, I’d love to hear your advice.
Some questions I have:
Are there different types of meditation for different goals?
Do you focus on your breathing, clear your mind, visualize, or something else?
How long should a beginner meditate?
Are there any common mistakes you wish you’d known about when you first started?
If you use frequencies, are there any that you’ve personally found helpful?
If you’ve used the CE-5 Experience app, has it helped you? Any tips for getting the most out of it?
I’m approaching this as a beginner with an open mind. I’m not looking to force an experience. I just want to build a solid meditation practice and learn from people who’ve been doing this longer than I have.
I’d really appreciate any tips, resources, or personal experiences you’re willing to share. Thanks!

This is something I’ve wondered about for a long time, and I’m curious if anyone here has experienced anything similar.
Ever since I was young, I’ve had these spontaneous flashes in my mind that look almost like blueprints or engineering schematics. It’s difficult to describe, but I can mentally take things apart, see how they’re constructed, and sometimes visualize entirely new devices.
The strange part is that many of these designs don’t seem like they would function according to the physics or engineering I understand. Yet, in the moment, they feel internally consistent, as if they would work under a different set of rules or in a way I can’t fully explain.
I don’t claim these are real inventions or anything paranormal. They’ve simply been a recurring part of my life, and I’ve always wondered if anyone else experiences sudden downloads of complex ideas, imagery, or information that seem to come from somewhere outside of their normal thought process.
If you’ve experienced something similar, I’d love to hear what it was like for you. How did it present itself? Did it ever lead anywhere, or has it remained an unexplained part of your life?
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m genuinely interested in hearing others’ experiences.

For the second night in a row, I had an experience while skywatching that left me with more questions than answers.
I was watching the night sky when I noticed what appeared to be a single orb. Unlike aircraft or satellites, it didn’t seem to be following a steady path. It would suddenly streak across portions of the sky, change direction, then pause before moving again. It was the only object behaving this way.
As I watched, I began mentally reaching out, simply expressing that I was open to communication and contact. Each time I focused on that intention, it felt as though the orb became more active, darting around in ways that caught my attention. I can’t say with certainty that one caused the other, but the timing was enough to make the experience feel very personal.
Later in the evening, I observed another object with two steady white lights. There were no flashing red or green navigation lights that I could see, and its appearance stood out from the typical aircraft I had been tracking. Throughout the night, I cross-checked what I was seeing using a flight-tracking app to rule out known aircraft whenever possible.
The entire experience left me feeling excited, curious, and honestly a little amazed. Whether there’s an explanation I haven’t considered or whether I witnessed something genuinely unusual, I don’t know. I’m simply documenting what I observed as accurately as I can.
I’m interested in hearing from others who have had similar experiences. Have you ever felt like something in the sky responded to your attention or intentions? If so, what happened, and how did you interpret it?

Well like the Title suggests, let’s discuss a thing about you that makes you stand apart from others?

I’ll go first, people like to tell me things they don’t mean too. I’ve had many instances where I would be in a deep conversation with people that I don’t know when they all of a sudden start telling me personal things meant to keep to themselves, (personal experiences, embarrassing moments, even secrets) they won’t realize they said anything about it until they’ve already said it.