it's electric

(Photo: Georgia Power)

Electrical phenomena are not that uncommon, but many people either don't notice or decide not to notice. Here are my personal experiences with them. Perhaps if more people read about them, they'll start to notice.

Over a decade ago, I was in a difficult life pattern. Things weren't going too well for me, and I was working with a psychologist to try to loosen the stuck patterns. Some strange things happened during this period, but I was so focused on my confusion and stuckness that the events didn't register in particular way.

Many years later, I recalled one series of events from that time because they seemed to presage what I was experiencing at the time. The events involved streetlights.

I noticed that sometimes as I drove down the highway at night, every streetlight I drove under would go out. This would happen for some distance, perhaps a half-mile or a mile. I can't recall. I thought that there was some unusual power outage happening, and it was coincidental that I was witnessing it. I became suspicious of my theory, though, when the same thing happened several times. Then I thought it was funny. I made a joke of it...a typical way we dismiss the unusual.

A decade or so later, I was experiencing physical phenomena during a retreat. This isn't unusual, as anyone who has done retreats knows. The ones during this retreat, however, were intrusive. My hands and forearms tingled, as if they were constantly on the verge of going numb. It was upsetting to me, in part because I couldn't control the tingling and in part because it was threatening to expand into other parts of my body.

One evening, during a group session such as one I wrote about previously, the tingling started firing up to new levels. I got up from the circle and went to the bathroom, where I ran cold water over my wrists and hands. I don't know why I did that. It was instinctual.

Either right before that evening or right after, I stopped at a filling station to get gas. I put my credit card in the pump, and the pump started acting strangely. The screen displayed random numbers and obviously wasn't working. I drove on to the next gas station. The same thing happened. I thought it must be the credit card, but even a different card had the same effect. I got scared, thinking the pump might explode, so I quickly got in my car and drove away.

Some weeks or months after this retreat, I was reading a book and learned that these types of electrical experiences were recognized phenomena. There's even a name for the streetlight phenomenon: streetlight interference or high voltage syndrome. (There are many documented instances of these highly strange events, but the most well-known is the Pauli effect.) I felt so relieved! I could put the streetlight events and the gas pump events in a context that made sense at some level. Do I completely understand them? No. I do, however, know my own experiences.

Does this sound familiar to you? Have you experienced similar disruptive phenomena? And, if so, how did you process those experiences?