“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” – from the 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum‘s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
A knock on the door
Throughout history, a number of individuals – from scientists and writers to artists and everyday people – have reported extraordinary, reality-shifting experiences. These include episodes such as near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), apparent time slips, encounters with non-human intelligences (NHI), and sudden “downloads” of information or inspiration.
Below is a collection of well-documented cases, mixing famous and lesser-known figures, who have taken such anomalous experiences seriously and tried to explain or express them through books, interviews, art, or research. Each account defies easy scientific explanation yet is authenticated by the experiencer’s own testimony, often inspiring notable creative or scholarly works
Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences
- Dr. Eben Alexander – A neurosurgeon who in 2008 fell into a week-long coma due to meningitis and experienced an intense NDE. Despite his cortex being shut down, Alexander later recounted a journey through vivid otherworldly realms that convinced him consciousness can exist beyond the body. en.wikipedia.org
He documented his story in the book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012), which became a bestseller and fueled discussion about the mind-brain relationship and the afterlife. - Anita Moorjani – In 2006, Moorjani was dying of end-stage lymphoma when she lapsed into a coma and had a profound NDE. She described leaving her body and entering an “expanded” state of consciousness filled with love and clarity, even observing events around her hospital room from afar. Upon awakening, her tumors rapidly and inexplicably shrank; within weeks she was cancer-free, a recovery her doctors deemed miraculous. anitamoorjani.com
Moorjani chronicled her experience and its spiritual lessons in her memoir Dying to Be Me (2012), and she now lectures on what she learned about healing and life purpose. - Robert A. Monroe – An American businessman who, starting in 1958, began having spontaneous out-of-body experiences that “drastically altered his life.” Without willing it, Monroe would feel vibrations and find himself leaving his physical body, traveling in a “second body” to realms unbound by physical reality. en.wikipedia.org
He kept careful records of these events and published his seminal book Journeys Out of the Body in 1971, introducing the term “OBE” to a wide audience. Monroe later founded the Monroe Institute to research human consciousness and train others in techniques to achieve OBEs, bridging his personal adventures with scientific inquiry.
Mystical Visions and Spiritual Encounters
- Emanuel Swedenborg – An 18th-century Swedish scientist and polymath who later in life became a mystical explorer of unseen realms. In the 1740s, Swedenborg reported a spiritual awakening in which his “spiritual eyes” were opened – he claimed he could freely visit heaven and hell and converse with angels, demons, and spirits. en.wikipedia.org
Over the next 28 years he wrote extensive theological works (in Latin) based on these astral travels, the most famous being Heaven and Hell (1758) which details the structure of the afterlife and societies of spirits. Swedenborg’s sober descriptions of otherworldly landscapes and beings influenced centuries of spiritual thought (even inspiring a new religious movement, Swedenborgianism) and continue to be studied as early serious accounts of out-of-body mystical vision. - Featured in the Post heading. Altarpiece No. 1, Group X (1915) by Hilma af Klint – a painting she felt was guided by higher intelligences during a séance.
- Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic who claimed that many of her pioneering abstract paintings were created under the direction of spiritual entities she called the “High Masters.” She and a small circle of women conducted séances and meditation; Klint would enter trance-like states and practice automatic drawing to channel images from beyond. en.wikipedia.org
- She wrote in her notebook that the pictures were “painted directly through me… without any preliminary drawings, and with great force”. en.wikipedia.org
Between 1906–1915 she produced a monumental series of esoteric artworks (later titled The Paintings for the Temple) guided by these transmissions. Kept mostly private during her life, these works – featuring vibrant abstract symbolism inspired by her visions – were decades ahead of mainstream art. When finally exhibited posthumously, they sparked major artistic and scholarly re-evaluation of Klint as a visionary who merged art and spiritual experience.
Encounters with Non-Human Intelligences (NHI)
- Whitley Strieber – A novelist who alleges a classic “alien abduction” scenario, though he labels the beings “the visitors” to allow for unknown origins. Strieber claims that on December 26, 1985, he was taken from his upstate New York cabin by strange non-human entities and subjected to traumatizing procedures. He detailed these encounters in his nonfiction book Communion (1987), en.wikipedia.org, which reached #1 on The New York Times bestseller list.
In Communion and several follow-up books, Strieber wrestles with the reality and meaning of what happened, exploring hypotheses from extraterrestrials to interdimensional beings. His sincere, first-person account energized public discussion about abduction phenomena and even inspired a 1989 film, making Strieber one of the most recognized experiencers of alleged alien contact. - Kary B. Mullis – A Nobel Prize–winning chemist (laureate for inventing PCR) who shockingly reported an encounter with an apparent otherworldly entity. One night in 1985 at his rural cabin, Mullis came upon a glowing, fluorescent raccoon that spoke to him, saying “Good evening, doctor,” before he experienced a blackout of missing hours. alumni.berkeley.edu
He later awoke with no sense of what happened during that time. Mullis himself speculated this bizarre talking raccoon might have been an alien or some kind of holographic projection, as he could find no ordinary explanation. He candidly included this story in his 1998 autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, standing by the truth of the encounter. alumni.berkeley.edu, ResearchGate Review
Mullis’s case is often cited for the irony of a respected scientist acknowledging an inexplicable, reality-bending experience – an illustrative clash between scientific rationality and the persistence of the unknown.
Time Slips and Anomalous Time Experiences
- Charlotte Moberly & Eleanor Jourdain – In what became known as the Moberly–Jourdain incident, two English women (both academics and school administrators) reported a startling timeslip. In August 1901, while visiting the Petit Trianon gardens at Versailles, they claimed they “saw the gardens as they had been in the late eighteenth century” and even encountered figures resembling Marie Antoinette and her courtiers. en.wikipedia.org
Everything had a dreamlike antiquated quality, and later research suggested certain landscape features they observed no longer existed in 1901. The women published their joint account anonymously in An Adventure (1911), describing in detail the scenes and personages of a bygone era they believed they walked into. en.wikipedia.org
Their report caused a sensation – some readers thought they witnessed a haunting or ghost tableau, others suspected a prank or illusion. While skeptics offered normal explanations (mistaken identity, fantasy, etc.), the Moberly–Jourdain case remains one of the most famous historical “time slip” claims, long debated in paranormal literature as an example of a possible spontaneous time anomaly. - Time Loops. Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious, by Eric Wargo – He quotes Joseph McMoneagle, one of the most successful remote viewers in the Star Gate program, as saying that when asked what he ‘sees’ during a remote viewing of a given set of coordinates he is not somehow there at the site, although that is how it feels, but “I think I am sending myself information from the future. In other words, at some point in the future I will come to know the answer to whatever question has been put to me in the past. Therefore, whenever the information is passed to me in its accurate form, that is when I send it back to myself.” Spr.ac.uk Book Review
Sudden Knowledge Downloads and Creative Epiphanies
- Philip K. Dick – The science fiction author experienced what he described as an information download from a vast cosmic intelligence. In February–March 1974, Dick had a series of visions and hallucinations centered around a “pink beam” of light that he said “filled his mind with arcane and beneficial knowledge.” theguardian.com
On one occasion the pink light imparted knowledge of a life-threatening condition afflicting his infant son – which a medical exam later confirmed, convincing Dick the source was real. en.wikipedia.org
He characterized the event as “an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind”, something like contact with a superior consciousness or alien AI, which he codenamed “VALIS” (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). en.wikipedia.org
Dick spent the rest of his life pondering these downloads in thousands of pages of a journal (The Exegesis) and explored the experience through fiction – notably the novel VALIS (1981) is a semi-autobiographical attempt to make sense of the 1974 visions. Literary scholars and fans continue to analyze Dick’s “2-3-74” experience as a rich collision of mysticism, psychology, and creativity. - Srinivasa Ramanujan – A legendary Indian mathematician, Ramanujan attributed his uncanny mathematical insights to divine “downloads” received in dreams. An orthodox Hindu, he worshipped the goddess Namagiri, and said she would appear in his dreams to present him with complex formulas. “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood… A hand began to write on the screen… a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing,” he recounted. reddit.com
Many of these dream-given results turned out to be valid advanced theorems. scienceandnonduality.com
With very little formal training, Ramanujan produced thousands of original equations (in number theory, infinite series, etc.), astonishing Western mathematicians. He maintained that his remarkable findings were “given” to him by the goddess – a striking claim of otherworldly inspiration in the realm of pure mathematics. Ramanujan’s case has prompted discussion in both scientific and spiritual circles about the source of genius, intuition, and the subconscious mind’s role in creativity. - Nikola Tesla – The inventor of AC electricity and radio technology often spoke of sudden illuminations that revealed ideas fully formed. From early childhood, Tesla experienced unpredictable flashes of light in which visions would appear, sometimes so vivid he couldn’t distinguish them from reality. teslauniverse.com
In these states he would visualize intricate inventions in astonishing detail – he claimed he could run a device in his mind like an actual working model, making improvements without any physical prototype. teslauniverse.com
For example, Tesla conceived the design of the alternating current motor in a flash of insight during a walk in 1882. He regarded these mental visions as a facet of his neurodivergent imagination (at times calling them a “peculiar affliction”) rather than something mystical. mentalfloss.com
But the phenomenon went beyond normal reasoning. His autobiography and interviews describe how solutions “came to him” in sudden bursts – a reality-shifting creative process wherein the line between conscious engineering and involuntary revelation was often blurred. Tesla’s extraordinary imaginative faculty, though not attributed to aliens or gods, is frequently cited as an example of the mind’s unexplained potential to access knowledge in ways that challenge conventional explanation.
Influence
Each of these cases has been documented in the experiencer’s own words or creative work, offering a window into phenomena at the edges of our understanding. Whether interpreted as evidence of an afterlife, the power of the subconscious mind, contact with otherworldly beings, or simply human imagination, these accounts continue to inspire curiosity and debate.
They have also led to notable cultural and scholarly outputs – from influential books and artworks to new research foundations – as the individuals strove to explain or express what conventional science struggles to fully explain.
These are not isolated curiosities. They are part of a hidden dialogue between humanity and the unknown—evidence that great discoveries often arrive not by force, but by opening.
My main source of inspiration from this esteemed group is Philip K. Dick. Experiencing a sudden flood of information in 1974, which he believed came from a vast intelligence beyond space and time, changed him. His novel VALIS and sprawling journal The Exegesis document a mind grappling with a rupture in reality—one that forced him to ask: What is real, and how would we know?
Ask and it is given.
Conscious Living & Wendy's Coffeehouse 