Sensory Awareness......?

I received a PM form a forum member referencing my research last week with night vision and navigating rough terrain in the dark-DARK. and the more I thought about how to answer, the more I felt it needed a whole new thread.

So do you ever have a "GUT FEELING" about something is not right. Maybe a knot you tied, and you have a uneasy feeling, so you recheck it, and discover it is wrong.....?

Or what senses kick in and stop you in your tracks. A Smell...? A Sound....? A flicker of light.....? or maybe it is just your instinct saying stop, go back, or don't step right there. Don't put the tent right there....you don't know why, but it is a very strong feeling.

If this thread gets any traction I will tell you the most unbelievable story of sensory awareness. It is not understandable, but it is true. Five people experienced it.

well i had a feeling all weekend that something was wrong had that hunted feeling again man its been a decade since i have felt like that. still don't know why i had that feeling but would like to hear your story you know i value your counsel here.

This will be the most out there in woo woo land story you every hear. To this day I only know it happened because other people were there. I want to give the thread some time to mature.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hopeak

This will be the most out there in woo woo land story you every hear. To this day I only know it happened because other people were there. I want to give the thread some time to mature.

---

Time to mature? :D:D:D:D:D

Your complaining your 62 and old now, I wouldn't wait if I were you. :D:D:D:D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BraggSurvivor

Time to mature? :D:D:D:D:D

Your complaining your 62 and old now, I wouldn't wait if I were you. :D:D:D:D

---

Good point, but I have to take my chances......:)

Well I'm only 43. so I'll wait. cheers!

so lets hear the story!!! please?

Hopeak,it isn't polite to keep a lady waiting,and I'm pretty sure owl-girl was logged in last night/early this morning :D

wait let me get a glass of warm milk and some cookies then unca hopeak can read us a beddy bye and tuck us all in

I thought that was normal??? I trust my senses and they have saved my rear end more than once. Nothing strange to me like don't step there, stay off that trail. I have looked stupid more than once, probably will some more but I trust my feelings and I wouldn't be typing this if I hadn't.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ole WV Coot

I thought that was normal??? I trust my senses and they have saved my rear end more than once. Nothing strange to me like don't step there, stay off that trail. I have looked stupid more than once, probably will some more but I trust my feelings and I wouldn't be typing this if I hadn't.

---

History is full of stories of sensory awareness. Many seem to occur during battlefield engagements. The Bible is full of them. Humans are uncomfortable with anything science can't explain. If we can't grasp it, we just dismiss it and say, "He was on drugs, or he had a high temperature". But, composers, and inventors speak of how songs or melodies just pop into there head as they are drifting off to sleep.

This is not "The story" but an example of what I am looking for in this thread. I was on a hike with a lady and as we were about to come around a sharp blind turn, I stopped and put my hand out to stop her behind me. And mega second later, around the rock walks a good size sow black bear and three cubs the size of basket balls. She (the sow) is not five feet away, and the cubs are mostly under and around her feet. Everybody studied each other for a long 15 to 30 seconds, she did not whoosh, or pop her teeth, she just stood there looking up at me. It ended well, no one got hurt. But what made me stop.....?

Another time when I was homesteading up on the upper Susitna River near the McClarin River, I had been alone for several months, and one night I had this feeling someone was watching me. The feeling continued off and on for days. After a fresh 5" snow fall I discovered that a grizzly bear had followed me everywhere. And had left front paw prints on both sides of a window he had been watching through. For the next week I could see that he had followed me everywhere day after day. He even lay outside the cabin door one night. But I never saw that bear. But I knew I was being watched days be for I discovered his tracks. WHY....what is that thing we can't explain, but it happens.

One time up on the Brooks Range I was bathing in a lake, and had the feeling I was being watched, and slowly looked in the direction the feeling was coming from and there is a medium size blond grizzly watching me from 40 yards away. Slowly the bear closed to 15 yards, not stalking, just interested in what I was. I had yelled to my hunting partner, who was in camp about 50 yards away. That bear came up to my clothes on the shore which had caribou blood all over them, sniffed them, rolled them with his paw, then turned around and walked away.

This type of thing has happened many, many time to me. My only shallow explanation is that you sharpen latent instincts when you are alone in the wilderness for long periods.

The big story is coming, but I want some of your experiences first.

wareagle69, about that feeling you had...
were you whistling in the woods this weekend? (no joke or putdown)

Yes, I know what you mean, and have had that type feeling before, couple a times it has saved my butt.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by remy

Everybody experiences what you describe. From your wilderness to our big cities...
Survival instinct yes ?

It has nothing to do with being alone or a specific geographic location.

---

Wow, that it a relief, now I don't have to tell that story, that I really did not want to tell anyway. Good to know it is so common. Now we can close this thread, and move on to survival knives.

Yeah yeah, there never was a story, you just set us up and picked us off....I had a feeling...:D

There are some researchers who make the claim that the "gut feeling" is really all or most of your sensory receptors signaling to you so quickly together that one can't discern whether it was a smell or a sound or something seen. Dr. Remy has probably read up on that and can tell you more about it than I can. Personally, I don't much care what the source is, I've trusted my 'awareness' in many circumstances in my life where, if I hadn't, like Dad said, I wouldn't be here typing.

What I find a little bit alarming is the number of people who are wandering through their days ignoring their basic senses. Example: a friend of mine is a martial arts instructor locally and teaches women's self-defense courses which stress common sense--avoiding the threat in the first place as much as possible. He told me that a few nights ago he happened to be out driving and he saw his teenage daughter walking down the road. He pulled right up beside her, reached out the window and grabbed her elbow. Of course she jumped. He told her "that's exactly how close you are to being kidnapped and/or raped" She was walking down the road with the hood flipped up on her hoody, with earplugs in her ears for her discman and texting someone on her cell.

hopeak,

i'd really like to hear your story. i'm somewhat of an enthusiast of sensory awareness stuff. i've had many experiences of enhanced physical senses, plus sharpened intuition. what i've found is that, although awareness naturally increases when you need to be focused on a wide range of external stimuli (being in the woods, for example), awareness can also be increased though training. for example, cia spooks are drilled mercilessly to remember details of people, places, events, etc., and end up with almost supernatural observational powers. and by increasing the 5 senses, the 6th usually follows.

anyway, if you do indeed actually have a story, i would really truly like to hear it. if not, that would be great to get some other stories coming out on this thread.

here's one of mine.
a few years ago i lived in western washington in the foothills of the cascades. it was dusk and i was going out to my little hangout in the woods. to get there i had to walk through a neighbor's yard. they didn't mind at all, but i always preferred to go undetected. i think it was the complex half-light of that time of day, the humid fragrant air, the warm breeze in the trees all around me and my need for quiet alertness, but my awareness did a little backflip and i suddenly found that i could see myself and my surroundings as if from about 8ft over my head. my vision, touch, and hearing were amplified to vivid clarity. i think my hearing and visual memory must have been really peaked out, because i found that i could practically see backwards, making 360 degrees of sharp perception. i could also feel weird pressure dynamics on the land, giving me an almost tactile sense of my options of where on the landscape i could move without being detected. one of these dynamics felt like the outside of a giant bubble. when i pushed against it (knowing full well that i shouldn't), i felt it pop as a robin exploded of it's night perch. it was as if i knew what would happen.

fun stuff.
any more?

They are called efferent clues, Hopeak, and are as old as mankind. Think about this for a moment. We receive tons of sensory input every second of every day. All our senses are gathering data that the brain has to interpret and correlate. As a result, we only consciously process two kinds of data. That which we are interested in and that which is life threatening. Have you ever been about to fall asleep while driving down the road and have a leaf blow across the road? Your heart jumps to your throat because that small amount of movement was enough for the brain to scream WAKE UP!!!!!! It was perceived as a possible threat.

All the things you described above came to your through sensory input whether you consciously recognized the signs or not. Your sub-conscious was hard at work keeping your safe. The more time you spend in a given environment the more attuned you become to the sensory input and the more easily you process the data. Spend all your nights outside in the dark and before long you'll be able to tell if that big fuzzy pillow is standing 20 feet away. You'll just know. I'll bet some insignificant sign, a cub grunt, a twig snap, a scuff of a paw along the ground, came to you and, like that leaf blowing across the road, your brain screamed ALERT!!!

Efferent clues are what has been keeping us from becoming saber tooth tiger scat for all these years.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by lukegail

hopeak,

i'd really like to hear your story.
here's one of mine.
a few years ago i lived in western washington in the foothills of the cascades. it was dusk and i was going out to my little hangout in the woods. to get there i had to walk through a neighbor's yard. they didn't mind at all, but i always preferred to go undetected. i think it was the complex half-light of that time of day, the humid fragrant air, the warm breeze in the trees all around me and my need for quiet alertness, but my awareness did a little backflip and i suddenly found that i could see myself and my surroundings as if from about 8ft over my head. my vision, touch, and hearing were amplified to vivid clarity. i think my hearing and visual memory must have been really peaked out, because i found that i could practically see backwards, making 360 degrees of sharp perception. i could also feel weird pressure dynamics on the land, giving me an almost tactile sense of my options of where on the landscape i could move without being detected. one of these dynamics felt like the outside of a giant bubble. when i pushed against it (knowing full well that i shouldn't), i felt it pop as a robin exploded of it's night perch. it was as if i knew what would happen.

fun stuff.
any more?

---

OK, You set the stage, so I'll go for it. First let me be clear I have no understanding of how this happens. And this it the only time anything this over the top ever happened to me. I was not on drugs, I don't do drugs, I was not drunk, it happened at about 10:15 AM and I had not drank anything the night be for. This happened in the N.E. part of the South Island of New Zealand. I had been hitching around NZ for about a month. I spent the night in a youth hostel, and at breakfast asked if anyone was going toward the ferry terminal. Two young men (late teens/very early 20's) agreed to give me a ride, but they had a appointment to para sail off a mountain at 9:AM. OK, that works, so I went with. This was Dec. 89' I was near 43, and the adult.

We meet these two guys out of town that have a para sail business, you run off a high Mt. in the morning as the thermals are raising and float around.

We get up the Mt. on a very crude trail in a ratty old jeep. One instructor stayed down below in a field, the so called landing area. The other instructor is strapping one guy in to this para sail thing, and explaining about what to do.

I am sitting on a rock 20' away. I am listening to the instructions. And as lukegail said in the above post, I found myself about 6 to 10 feet above and behind my body, detached and mesmerized by watching myself and all that was happening from this detached weird experience.

Next I get this clear communication, that he is going to crash into the yellow house at 11:20 in 37 minutes. I think about it, how strange that thought is, and if I should tell them. Next thing I am watching my body tell them about this. My voice sounds strange to me. The kid is freaked out, the instructor is mad, and telling the kid It is safe they have been doing it for 4 years, and no one ever got hurt. So the kid makes a run when the breeze comes up strong, but the breeze stops and the instructor stops him because the chute is not full of air.

The kid asks me to repeat what I said, I do, I feel like a jerk, in some surreal dream. I can't believe I am saying this. The kid does not want to go, there is three walkie talkies, each instructor has one and there is one attached to the para sail harness system so they can give him instructions in the air on how to steer the chute. There is another long discussion about the yellow house, and how it it a mile away and he could not go that far, bla, bla, bla.

Both kids had paid to do this, and the one ready to go wants out and wants his buddy to go first.

The wind comes up, both instructors are raving how safe it is, the instructor is yelling go, go, go, run. He goes. Everything is fine. He is sailing, the landing instructor is telling him which rope to pull to steer which way. We on the mountain are relieved, the other kids Say's he does not want to go. I get a small ration of crap from the instructor up top who blames me. We are listening to the landing instructor, as the gear up top is rounded up and put in the jeep.

Everything is wonderful, I am a jerk. Next thing panic, the instructors are yelling they can't see him, then the upper instructor Say's he is over there by the cows, instruction are given, a lot of panic, and you guessed it he crashed into the yellow house which was in a close cluster of about 20 houses that were no more than 20' apart. He is hanging off the chimney of the yellow house. Down the mountain, over to the village, he is alive we that him to the hospital.

And hard as this may be to believe it got much more weird after that. I have no explanation for what happened. I often think about how weird it was for me, and realize it was much more so for the two young men. Needless to say the Doctor could not get wrapped around it either. I caught the ferry a day late.

rick,
googling "efferent queues" didn't give me a single hit. do you know if this goes by another name?

We all have it, some to a greater degree then others Tom Brown calls them concetric rings , science calls it perseption, or telepathy call it what you will but I believe it used to be more powerfull and refined when man lived off the land and not in towns etc where most live now indians were famous for it as well I'm sure were cavemen , mountain men etc.