Whether you’re a scientist at heart who looks for logic everywhere or an out-of-the-box freethinker, you can’t deny that there are moments in life when you genuinely start thinking that the supernatural might be real. Or that we’re in a simulation. Or both! And it’s something that many people have faced in their lives.
Redditor u/mailseuuu sparked a very interesting internet discussion after asking people to share their stories about glitches in the Matrix. We’ve collected some of the most bizarre, unexplained, and unsettling stories to share with you, Pandas. Scroll down, follow the white rabbit, upvote the posts that you enjoyed the most, and think about your own similar experiences. And remember—there is no spoon…
#1
I used to have a weird telepathic bond with my dad. We lived in different countries, and every time I’d think of him, he would call me, or vice versa. It happened so often that I stopped questioning it after a while; it just was. He passed away a few years ago and I miss him every day.
Image credits: ShinyNarwhal
The legendary The Matrix movies (we like to pretend the fourth installment doesn’t exist, but we’re huge fans of The Animatrix) popularized an idea that philosophers have been wrangling with for thousands of years. Namely, how can we tell what’s real and what isn’t? And the fact is that it’s sometimes incredibly difficult to trust your senses alone—if the stories featured in this post are anything to go by, they aren’t always reliable and can betray us when we need them most.
According to Scientific American, there’s roughly a fifty-fifty chance that we live in a simulation. However, if we assume that we are, in fact, living in ‘reality’ (whatever that means!), then glitches in the Matrix aren’t problems with the gigantic quantum computer we live in, but rather issues with how we perceive and (mis)remember things.
#2
I left the office one day to pick up some lunch. On the way I saw an old colleague I hadn’t seen for years in the petrol station. I was going to pull in and say hello but I was busy and hungry so continued driving. About 3pm that day I was told he had died in a car crash that morning about 50 miles up the same road I saw him on.
Image credits: harg7769
#3
I have a very visually distinctive necklace. Well one day. After I took it of just it disappeared . I looked and looked for it finally giving up and wrote my necklace off as lost forever.A few weeks later I was dusting the ceiling fan when I noticed a shadow in the light globe.
So I undone the globe from off the fan. Thinking the shadow was maybe a bug.
No bug. The shadow was my necklace.
Image credits: Bunnystrawbery
Like it or not, our brains are far from perfect. And our memories are fallible. So a glitch in the Matrix can, at its simplest, come down to us misremembering how things actually happened. We might have forgotten some details and imagined others. Or someone might have convinced us that things happened a certain way. We’re not computers that can store ‘perfect’ copies of events. And every time we remember something, it’s going to be slightly different from the last time we did so.
“Memory illusions can be as simple as misremembering whether one saw a Stop sign or a Yield sign at an intersection to misremembering entire experiences such as being lost in a shopping mall as a child or even being abducted by a UFO. Such illusions can emerge spontaneously in an individual, being created endogenously, or can arise due to the suggestion of another person, being created exogenously,” explain researchers Mark L. Howe and Lauren M. Knott, the authors of ‘The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences.’
#4
One time when I was like 8, I was rolling a toy plane (I distinctly remember it was an F117 stealth fighter) across my desk.It rolled off my desk and just disappeared. I didn't lose it. It just disappeared. There was nowhere for it to go and I never found it again.
Image credits: anon
#5
This isn't really a glitch, but occasionally I will fall asleep and dream at night and recognize the dream from when I was a very little kid (I'm 31) and basically pick up from where I left off. This has happened with 5 separate dreams now.As in I'll dream I'm in a particular place doing a particular thing and remember inside the dream that I left off here when I was 6 and this is what happened before I reached this point.
Image credits: Deswizard
#6
My brother got a lucky rabbits foot keychain. I was tossing it in the air and catching it. One time it went up, but didn't come down. 30 years later I was working in the ceiling and found it on the heat duct that was covered by a drop ceiling.
Image credits: DarrenEdwards
Meanwhile, our senses aren’t accurate all the time, either. Our state of mind, mood, and expectations can change how we perceive our environments. For instance, someone who’s anxious and fearful and expecting to be attacked might see threats everywhere. Someone who’s on cloud nine because of a recent success might see things in a more positive light, ignoring the negatives. And someone who’s utterly exhausted might not notice important details.
To bring it closer to home, we’ve all had moments where we read a headline wrong and could’ve sworn that the Matrix rewrote it when we read it the second or third time around. Or an object we had in our possession simply… disappeared. Without a trace! Even though we spent hours looking for it.
#7
My reply from the last thread like this>Ok my sister and I were playing the age old game of "Get the f**k out of my room." If you've never played it before, all you do is try to get the intruder out. I managed to get her outside the door, but she always tried to push it open while I was attempting to close it in a sort of reverse tug-of-war situation. Suddenly, I slam it shut, meaning I won. I turn around and there is my very confused sister wondering how she ended up back in my room. In her confusion, I managed to get her back out.
Image credits: Gamermii
#8
I once found a 20 sided dice (that I had lost a few years prior in America) in the middle of a desert in Israel.It was the exact same dice as well. I remember because it was the same coloring and had the same scratched off number as well.
Image credits: BW_Bird
#9
A friend in high school told me she had a 'gift' and asked me to give her a personal item that meant a lot to me. I handed her my bracelet and she held it for a couple of minutes, then told me that she saw a yellow house on a hill and that something bad was going to happen there. My grandma, whom my friend had never met, lived in a yellow house on a hill in another city. I didn’t think too much about it until a year and a half later, when my grandma was murdered in her pool at her yellow house on a hill. I’ve always believed that some folks have a gift, and my friend definitely did.The simplest explanations would be that we were distracted, tired, inattentive, or had certain preconceptions of what a headline is going to say or where a missing object might go. That’s the logical answer. But some events are so weird that even skeptics wonder about the alternatives. Not to mention that it’s a lot more interesting to think we live might live in a simulation than that we’re just bad at noticing and remembering details!
Which of these stories did you find the most interesting, dear Pandas? Were there any that captivated you far more than you expected? What are the oddest glitches in the Matrix that you’ve experienced in your life? Share your thoughts in the comments. Meanwhile, we’re off to watch Neo save the world once again. We swear, it sometimes feels like Zion and the Nebuchadnezzar aren’t real and exist in a second layer of the Matrix…
#10
I was watching The Santa Clause 2 and looked up who played the Tooth Fairy — it was Art LaFleur. I looked at his IMDb page, expecting to see a death date, and was happily surprised to see he was still alive. Literally the NEXT DAY, it was announced that he died.
Image credits: DarthJarJar
#11
I have 2 dogs. One has medical issues and needs pills at very set times 4X/day. Because of this, everything we do is very routine. The other night, I let them out to potty after dinner. They go out in the normal order, go to their normal spots for sniffing and doing their business, I give my normal verbal reminder after a few minutes to stop sniffing and messing around and finish potty so we can go back in. Same thing every day. They came running back in, in the normal order; big dog first, not quite as big dog next, but for some reason the short hair medium size overweight brown dog didn't come in. I stood there a few more moments waiting for this dog I KNEW for certain was coming next, just like every day. Having to answer natures call myself, I was going to call the brown dog to hurry up. When I tried, I realized I could not remember this dogs name. Then, it all came crashing down on me.. I only have 2 dogs.I don't know it if was a glitch in the matrix, a momentary lapse of sanity, or a quick slip into an alternate dimension, but I was so absolutely certain and could describe in detail what this other dog looked like. I've never had a dog matching what I expected, nor do any of my neighbors.
Image credits: indigowulf
#12
I woke up in the morning and saw a trailer for a movie named Hannah. I was then scrolling through my Google calendar and saw it was my friend Hannah's birthday. Later on in the night I had some friends come over and we were about to go to a bar, I ordered doordash and the delivery girl's name was hannah. I went out that night and got a girl named Hannah's number who I dated for about 6 months. Nothing else came up the relationship but that was an extremely bizarre coincidence and follow-up circumstance. It made me really consider the matrix theory.
Image credits: Ok_Process_9611
#13
I used to have visions/daydreams that I was driving high above a winding road through hills, stopping at the top of a valley with a small village spread below me. The vision was incredibly detailed — I could see a farm down to my right, a church and cemetery down to my left, as well as a handful of houses. Well, in 2012, I was driving through Saskatchewan in my RV, looking for some land to buy. Every potential place fell through, but I decided to try one last option even though it was a bit off the beaten path. Next thing I knew, I was driving high above a road winding through hills. And sure enough, the land I was going to look at was nestled in a valley. Everything was there: the church, the cemetery, the farm, even a log cabin. It was all exactly as it had been in my vision. I made an offer on the spot and didn't lose any sleep waiting for the offer to be accepted — I knew I'd found my land.#14
I recently rode the bus to a hospital appointment listening to my playlist on shuffle. As I was walking into the hospital, "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister was halfway through, and I switched my phone off. I checked in with reception and could still hear the song playing. I checked my phone — it was off. The song was playing on hospital radio. I caught the second half of it. I mean, it's a top tune, but this was 30-plus years after release and it wasn't even a massive hit here. Totally bizarre.
Image credits: peggee
#15
A few years ago, I was crossing the street and this little old lady wearing a pink and blue jacket was joyously crossing in the opposite direction with a smile on her face. My view is temporarily blocked by a tall man between us. As the tall man walked past me, the lady is gone. I looked back three times in disbelief. She was gone. The street wasn't super busy or anything, just a few people walking, quite a lot of open spaces, so there was no place she could have hidden into; why would she anyway? This was the first and last time I had such an experience.
Image credits: TheFitnessGuroo
#16
Get a package delivered at the house. It had a battery in it, so the box had that big battery warning sticker on it. I didn’t open it - just grabbed it off the steps and put it on the counter and went to work. When I walked in there was an identical box with an identical sticker on the reception desk.
Image credits: Thirty_Helens_Agree
#17
Had a major Deja Vu two days ago. Little person walks by carrying a blank canvas and heads into the stairwell and descends to the parking garage. Half a minute later the scene repeats. Without him ever coming back up the first time.
Image credits: SammyGotStache
#18
Earlier this year, my mom, sisters, and I were going shopping out of town. The night before, I dreamed we were at Target and a shooter came into the store. I woke up terrified and was on edge all day. During the drive to town, my mom told me she also dreamed of a shooting. While we were shopping at a store, it suddenly went into lockdown because the mall next door — where we planned to go next — had a gang-related shooting. That whole day was weird and horrifying.#19
Ejected the CD and the music kept going. Four of us in the car were like "we are dead, this is limbo, what is going on"
Image credits: tobeofuse
#20
Lying in bed with my wife, I called over for our cat Prince to come so I could pet him. My wife also called for Prince to pet him. Except we were each petting a cat. Two identical cats when we only had one.#21
Years ago, I used to get up for work around 3 a.m., so I’d go to bed by 8 p.m. Three nights in a row, I woke up at the same time because of something weird. The first night, I had a vivid dream about a ghost. The second night, I had sleep paralysis and saw a demon in my room. The third night, I woke up to a loud bang. The morning after the last night, I was off from work, so I managed to sleep in. When I got up, I heard helicopters overhead. I flipped on the TV, and the news was running a story about a guy being swallowed by a sinkhole while he was sleeping. It was on the street behind my house, and it happened at the same time I had woken up those three nights. The bang I heard the previous night was the sinkhole.
Image credits: tomb4adc7727a
#22
I work as an EMT. My partner and I play a game where we try to guess the name and age of our patient before we go in to pick them up. All we know are vague details about the patient's condition and where they're going. I've been right about both the name AND age at least seven times. I mean, really, what are the odds that out of all the names and possible ages, I happen to guess the ones that are exactly right for a particular patient? Gotta thank those gut feelings!#23
A coworker was suddenly married with kids.I have been at my job since September of last year. I work in a female-dominated field and there is only one male that I interact with with any regularity. When I first started working my new coworkers gave me the lowdown on everyone we worked with—including this guy. They tell me this guy is in his 40s, he’s single, and has never been married. I pay special attention to this information because I think he’s cute. I even look him up on Facebook, and yep, he’s a bachelor.
Without giving too much detail, this guy emails me about an issue a month ago. His wife (who apparently exists and works for our company) then also emails me. I’m flabbergasted. The wife mentions their two teenage daughters. I’m further flabbergasted. I grill my coworkers about all this and they’re confused—this guy has been married for 15 years, and they definitely never told me he was single. I look for his Facebook again and he doesn’t have one. There’s no possible way I could’ve gotten him mixed-up with anyone else, either. He has a distinctive name and like I said, he’s the ONLY man I work with. Also, any single person knows damn well they commit to memory the relationship status of someone they find attractive.
Still don’t know what to make of it. It was like the wife didn’t exist until she was relevant to the plot.
Image credits: hannnnnsoloed
#24
Okay this is a bit weird but I definitely remember smoking cigs when I was like 17-18 in my parent's house. The thing is I never did but there are these vivid memories of me hiding cigs and smoking in the house. It is like some Mandela type s**t. The memories are vivid but I know I didn't. It is like from another timeline or something lmao.#25
Years ago I lost a can of tuna. I took it out of the pantry to make a sandwich, but then decided to just have cereal, and put it back. Before I got the cereal I changed my mind again and took the can back out of the pantry and set it down. I had been craving tuna on toast with extra tomato and had bought it the evening before specifically to make that. I get the can opener and the can was gone. I looked all over the kitchen and never found it. I even checked the pantry and sure enough I was missing a can. I had bought a certain number like 4 for a dollar or something. This was in the 90's.#26
When I was in high school, I had a vivid dream where I was in science class sitting in a different seat than usual. I also had a different “clicker” (the remote used to enter answers during quizzes), and one of my friends said a very off-color joke to the teacher. The next day, a couple in the class had to be separated, so I moved seats and was given a clicker based on my new seat, and my friend said the joke from my dream that I was convinced he wouldn’t due to his personality. I remember sitting in my chair completely confused and in awe.
Image credits: Jessica Nilsson
#27
I was leaving work one night with a co-worker, we worked on the fourth floor of this building and take the stairs down to the parking garage. He's about half a flight of stairs behind me and at a certain point I have a thought that we have just walked down way too many stairs. It's like eight half flights of stairs and we definitely were going too long, maybe an extra 4 or 6 I don't know. The second I have that thought I see the door for the emergency exit which is one flight up from where the door is for the parking garage. It was like instant, had the thought and then saw the door, then everything was back to normal. We weren't talking at all the whole time and then my co-worker was like "hmmm... that took longer than normal". We weren't walking slow, I practically run down the stairs, but it was like we got stuck on a stair master stair case or some s**t for a minute and he knew it too.#28
My first job after college. One night I was working a bit late, and ended up leaving the office at roughly 6:30. I was living with my parents at the time who were a 17 minute drive from my office (there was rarely any traffic on my drive home so this was usually pretty consistent). I got in the car and drove straight home. I arrived back home at my parents house around 8:15. I still have no idea where that extra 88 minutes went.The only rational explanation I could come up with was that I somehow worked an extra hour without noticing it. However, this would have required me to misread both the clocks in my workplace as well as the one in my car which I recalled looking at before pulling out of the parking lot. I checked all of my clocks the next day and none of them were wrong.
It's been several years now so my brain is more inclined to believe that I somehow made a mistake, but at the time I remember methodically going through all the possibilities and disproving them one by one.
#29
When I was in school, grade 5-6, I went through a phase of having very very strong déjà vu. And during the same timeframe at school, there was this one incident I will never ever forget as long as I live! During lunch break I turned around and everything was pitch black. And the people and buildings closest to me were the first things to come into view again, as if my world was loading you know? Behind the buildings was all still pitch black and further and further away the image of the world was loading like in a video game. Like how the graphics aren’t loaded far off in the distance? It was EXACTLY like that. It was a very momentary thing and I remember asking my friends if they saw that.Not sure if this is related or not.. but I was recently diagnosed with “depersonalisation/Derealisation disorder”. Which may or may not explain things, although I do believe back then was different from what I experience now.
#30
As a kid (7) I had a n64 and owned 1... 1 copy of Mario Kart.. Years later (12) while in my kitchen i see something under the fridge, another copy of Mario Kart, now there were two. I kept them both in a drawer. Then like 2~3 months ago (16) I was looking for both copies. only one. the one i found under the fridge was gone. (I knew which was which because I labeled them "Fridge" and "Original" since the fridge one didn't work) it was so strange cause i remember finding the fridge one the first time and being weirded out, because the family never bought a new one, and we were the first people to own the house so no one could have left it there#31
We visited the spaceflight center in Huntsville a few years ago and I got an A-12 (looks like the SR-71) coffee cup. I started drinking coffee in it every day and for more than a year, everything was normal. I wake up, go pour coffee, drink it downstairs, wash it, then go back to work in my office upstairs.Sometimes, I get a second cup of coffee and bring it up to my office and then bring it down when I'm done to wash and reset for the next day.
On May 1 of last year, I forgot to bring it back downstairs from my office. Next morning, I wake up and go downstairs to have a cup of coffee like usual in my A-12 cup I got from the Space & Rocketry Center in Huntsville, AL. When I'm done, I wash it and put it away and go upstairs to start work...
...and there's the cup from the day before with an inch of cold coffee in it.
I bring it downstairs, trying to figure out what's going on and **the one I just used is still sitting in the drying rack**.
I now have **two** A-12 coffee cups. In the months since, they've both picked up a little bit of their own character, but at the time I brought the original and its doppelcupper together, they had the same scuff marks and were in every way I could tell identical.
I don't have an explanation for how this happened. I don't know how this cup somehow duplicated or why or how to do it again, but what I DO have... is two A-12 cups even though I only bought one.
#32
I dropped a piece of A4 paper at work and it landed stood up on the short edge. It wasn't bent or folded, literally a fresh sheet of paper just standing all by itself.Whats more, it happened twice whilst I was at that work place. Never seen it happen again
#33
I had an out-of-body experience many years ago. I don't remember any of it, but all I know for sure is that, for whatever reason, I MUST go to Chillicothe, Ohio. I don't know if that's where I die or if I will find something there. All I know is that I have no choice. Still haven't gone...#34
This happened about 2 months ago.. I went to visit my friend at her new apartment. I had never been there before. I google mapped it and my other friend drove me. We parked and walked up to apt B. At the bottom of the stairs was this weird guy who immediately started trying to talk to us and ask us questions and proceeded to follow us up the stairs. (mind you, this is not a great part of town). I knocked on the door and as soon as the door cracked open, before looking I started pushing my way inside..to get away from this creep. The girl who answered is Not my friend and obviously stops me from entering. I said "oh my god I'm so sorry" and we took off while she yelled at the man whom she apparently knew.. saying "are you bothering these people?" etc..SO.. my friend and I ran back to her car where I called my friend and told her what happened.. she said she lives in the next block of buildings over. (apparently they are the same apartment complex and have the same numbers. I'm not sure how that's supposed to NOT be greatly confusing). We park a little further down the road and walk up to the complex and the SAME creep is sitting at the bottom of these stairs. Doing exactly the same thing. Says the same thing to us again .. IDK .. it was weird. WHY is the apartment the SAME. Looks the same. Same numbers. Same creep at the bottom of the stairs. Just... no.
Image credits: juhsca
#35
(I've posted this before so I'm just gonna copy/paste my old comment)My bedroom at the time lead into the living room that you could see into the kitchen. We also had a bathroom that was directly off our room, in the corner. You couldn't get to it unless you were in our room.
I woke up one afternoon. I remember sitting up, checking my phone and lighting a cigarette. I got out of bed, opened the bedroom door, walked into the living room to turn the thermostat up. I saw my ex in the kitchen fiddling around with the coffee pot. Then he started walking towards the back of the house, into the other bedroom. I said "Hey! You're up early." He looked at me, and kept on walking. I went back into our room and sat on the bed. After a few minutes I called his name, and he opened the bathroom door and said "yeah?"
Apparently he was in the bathroom the whole time. I was very confused and super freaked out because I could have sworn I saw him in the kitchen. There's no way it was him if he was in the bathroom. It shook me up pretty bad.
#36
As a young kid I was playing my He-man action figures in my bedroom in a sunny afternoon. I remember getting a feeling of being watched in a loving manner by someone I sensed to be a male. I looked around, looked out of the door, the window and saw no one. I was kind of excited because I thought it was my father, who had split from my other and I hadn't seen in person since (still haven't). As there was no one around, any family member in the house was in the kitchen, I resumed playing with my toys.Almost three decades later, my mother had gotten deep into reincarnation beliefs. I don't believe in that because frankly, the idea of being born again and living again and meeting the same people again in different bodies doesn't even begin to excite me as it excites her. Coming back again and again sounds like a cruel prison to me. Anyway, I read a book in which someone mentioned doing a past life hypnotic regression and decided to look for that too. If it was real, I should be able to experience it too, if it was b******t I would be able to tell. Found someone who could do it in my town but didn't want to pay for a charlatan. Found a youtube video of someone guiding a session like that. He didn't go straight into past life, but asked you to go back to childhood, then the womb, then beyond that. When I guided myself back to my past as a childhood, I found myself watching me playing with the He-man action figures, from the place where I, as a kid, felt the presence of an adult male watching me. I found myself full of compassion for that kid, for what was about to come about in his life, wanting to protect him and help him flourish. As a father would.
#37
I was maybe around 5 years old. Pretending to be a magician. I put a pen in this big activity book and waved my hands over it and said “abracadabra” to make the pen disappear. The pen literally disappeared. The bulge you would see of a pen being in a book was gone. Looked through the entire book. Look around the floor. Couldn’t find it. Never found it. We moved out of that house when I was 11 and never found the pen#38
I walked by my colleague who was having a conversation. The convo definitely continued after I passed. I walked another 150 meters, went up a staircase, and walked by a room. My colleague was in that room, talking to another person. I was shook. Later in the day I verified that I had indeed passed her. I asked how she could have gotten past me and she just said “I’m a fast walker.” You ain’t THAT fast. She would have had to run up a different staircase, outpace me in the same hall but one floor above. I just didn’t see how it happened.#39
One time I farted really loud in the middle of a classroom of about 30 students and no one even acknowledged it.I had known almost everyone in the class for at least 10 years, and I know if they heard it they would all bust out laughing.
#40
Through my 30 years of existence I've had about 50 premonitory dreams since I was like 6 yo, nothing special or important, but they are future dreams, some happened 1 week after I dreamt it, some took years to happen, but they always happened, and I thought them to be cool until I realize maybe I couldn't choose anything in my life and everything was preordained...I got in a s****y depression about feeling like a puppet from life and decisions.
Until I could change 1 of them like 3 years ago, and all that s**t stopped, I guess that was a glitch in the matrix and eventually get out of that stupid depression and I now have a work I like, not great money but i can live well with the wife.