It’s a weird phenomenon, and while I’m willing to chalk it up to material causes (drug interactions or related blackouts, etc.), the few times I’ve experienced it have felt so drastically different than similar states I’ve experienced I still think about them once and a while. Have you had one, and while you may have chalked it up to a rational cause still aren’t 100% satisfied with that conclusion (or have chalked it up to something else entirely? Interested in those stories too, but while I won’t do it know others may dunk on you).
I have two stories:
-Many years ago, I invited a girl to my place to hang out. We smoked some weed, a normal amount for us, and ordered a pizza. We were chatting normally, then all of a sudden it was three hours later. The pizza guy came and went, and both of us couldn’t account for the lost time.
Rational conclusion: We smoked weed and fell asleep.
Things that make this uncomfortable: We were both pretty experienced pot smokers, and for my part while I had fallen asleep smoking pot before, it’s usually accompanied with a period of waking up. This was more a sudden “Hey, wait, something’s off” experience while still sitting up. And it happened to both of us.
-About a year ago, I visited a bar late and had (to my recollection) about 4 beers. Again, this is within normal thresholds, though I have drank to blackout before. I left the bar and caught a bus home.
As I was getting out of the uber in front of my house, I thought “Wait a second, didn’t I get on the bus?”. I had my map tracking on (I know, dumb, but in this case useful), and apparently I got off the bus, and about 15 minutes later grabbed an uber. I had no recollection of this.
Rational conclusion: Between the lateness of the hour, level of tiredness and alcohol, I hit a blackout threshold much lower than I’ve experienced before, got confused with late night bus routing and hopped off to grab an uber instead.
Things that make this uncomfortable: it was not an expected amount of beer that would lead to this, and based on how I felt the next morning (pretty normal but tired) I don’t think I drank more than I accounted for here. As an aside, where I got off was interesting - there’s an old motel that’s in a kind of weird spot in a very gentrified area of my town (motel was operating before this period). Always caught my attention, but I’ve never had any reason whatsoever to go there. According to the map, I was there for the 15 minutes. That said, looking at the map, my pickup location on the uber app, and noting exact positioning is often off by a bit on the map app, it was likely a coincidence and I was at a nearby intersection, with the map pinging this because it was a nearby landmark.
Again, ultimately I chalk these up to rational causes, but there’s something about them that give me pause anyway. Would love to hear stories from other folks who’ve had experiences like this and what explanations they’ve landed on.
This becomes the problem when telling the first story, as this was a long time ago. The way I remember it, we came to at roughly the same time - but while we’re talking about time and its perceptual quirks, memory is also a weird/not 100% reliable thing.
The only thing that makes me think I’m not misremembering that is the pizza aspect - both of us didn’t hear the pizza guy, and there were some missed calls from the pizza place. You’d figure at least one of us would’ve reacted to that and/or knocks/doorbell rings.
I won’t lie - the situation between me and this girl was an odd one, that in many ways shaped what the next several years afterwards looked like for me (would rather not get into that, but if you pick the most generic boy-meets-girl-at-wrong-time trope you can think of, you’ll probably be pretty close). And the rest of the evening in question after this experience was a highlight to that story. Given that, sometimes I entertain the idea of dimensional shift stuff, some blip that manifests as a perceptual oddity when a critical fork in ‘destiny’ occurs.
But I only ever really entertain it as a hippyish food for thought thing - I find it too outlandish to take seriously when “You both fell asleep smoking pot, didn’t realize you fell asleep, and woke up around the same time” is far more plausible/grounded, even if as I say the words there’s a nagging discomfort (much, much less at this point obviously).