Glitch in the Matrix Examples
Hi friends! For today's blog post, I thought we could take a look at some newer/more recent examples of glitches in the matrix. Enjoy!
Check out my blog "The Sociology of the 'Glitch in the Matrix'" (8 min read) for a deep dive into what is really going on. I do want to quote myself here, though:
"Let’s clarify what we mean by a "Glitch in the Matrix." The term comes from the 1999 movie The Matrix, where characters experience déjà vu as a sign that something has been altered in their simulated reality. Over time, the phrase has evolved to describe any odd, inexplicable phenomenon that seems to defy the rules of our everyday existence. You know, like seeing someone who looks exactly like your friend, only to find out your friend was miles (I want to say kilometres but it doesn't have the same ring) away at the time. Or objects disappearing and reappearing in places you’re sure you didn’t leave them. And even weirder - finding ANOTHER item that you only thought you had one of - seems to be very common, with false nails appearing or extra shoes appearing out of thin air. I've also seen a lot of earrings do this too!"
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Glitch in the Matrix Examples
"My wife and I both lost the same 10 minutes on the drive home" Reddit user trammeloratreasure says: "Most of the posts on here are just people not paying attention. I read them and roll my eyes. So I know exactly how this is going to sound. But I don't have an explanation for what happened to us, so here it is. We were driving home from dinner at my parents' place. They're about an hour and a half out. I'm driving, my wife is in the passenger seat, both kids (7 and 9) are asleep in the back. Probably 7 or 8pm, fully dark. My wife was looking out the window like she always does. She gets carsick so she basically never touches her phone in the car. We were just talking. The thing you need to know about this drive is the last stretch of it. You go through a long mountain tunnel, then take the exit immediately after it, and that exit is lit up by big box stores on both sides of the highway. It's not an easy area to ignore. And we know the drive well enough that we don't need GPS, but not so well that we're running on autopilot. Last thing I remember is being maybe two or three miles from the tunnel. Next thing I remember, we're 10 miles down the highway. Past the tunnel. Past our exit. I kind of snapped to and said out loud, "wait, where are we? Did we miss the exit?" Here's the part that gets me. My wife turns to me and says she has no idea where we are either. I pull up GPS on my phone, set it for home, and we are about 7 miles past our exit. Neither of us remembers the tunnel. Neither of us remembers the exit. Neither of us remembers the shopping center... If it were just me, fine, I zoned out, it happens. But both of us losing the exact same ten minutes??? Like I said, no explanation." I don't know if I really believe this one; it kinda sounds like both people zoned out for 10 minutes and weren't paying attention - like similar to how you drive home and don't remember the drive because you were on autopilot, and maybe you just kept going for whatever reason (or to play Devil's Advocate here, maybe just maybe something bad was going to happen to you and the universe intervened - idk, that sounds crazy to me, haha).
"The same family passed me twice on a path with no exits"
Reddit user sunshinemellox posted the following story.
"This happened last October, and I still haven’t found an explanation that makes any sense.
I was walking my dog along a canal towpath in the West Midlands (UK). It’s a route I use regularly with canal on one side, a tall railway fence on the other, and no exits between two road bridges roughly a mile and a half apart.
At about 8:25am, a family approached from the opposite direction. They were unusually easy to remember. The woman wore a red wool hat, the man was pushing a bright yellow three-wheeled buggy, and they had a tan dachshund in a green harness.
As we passed, the woman stopped and asked, “Do you know if the little café by the locks is open yet?”I checked my watch and said, “Not until nine, I don’t think.” She thanked me, and we continued in opposite directions.
About eight minutes later, I saw another family walking towards me. It took a few seconds for my brain to register why they looked familiar. It was the same woman in the red hat, the same man, the same yellow buggy and the same dachshund. They were also approaching from the same direction as before.
When they reached me, the woman smiled and asked, word for word, “Do you know if the little café by the locks is open yet?”I just stared at her. Eventually I said, “You’ve literally just asked me that.”Her smile disappeared. She looked at the man, then back at me and said, “Sorry?”I explained that I had passed them less than ten minutes earlier and had already answered the exact same question. The man laughed awkwardly and said, “Must have been our doubles.”They both seemed genuinely confused, so I checked my watch again and told them it was now 8:34. The woman thanked me, although she looked uncomfortable, and they carried on walking.
I immediately turned around. They were still there, walking normally in the direction I had come from. They didn’t disappear, run off or behave strangely. The problem is that there was no possible way for them to have got ahead of me. There are no side paths on that section. They couldn’t have crossed the canal, and the railway fence is far too high to climb. Even if they had turned around after our first conversation and sprinted to the previous bridge, they would then have needed to travel more than two miles by road, reach the next bridge and walk back towards me all in about eight minutes, while pushing a buggy and walking a dachshund.
They also would have had to do it without passing me. When I reached the next bridge, I checked the walking app on my phone because I wondered if I had somehow become confused and doubled back without realising. The map showed one continuous line along the towpath. No loop, no missing section and no pause.
I was completely sober, well rested and not wearing headphones. It was broad daylight, and both encounters lasted long enough for me to remember what everyone looked like.
The obvious explanation is that I saw two extremely similar families. But identical clothes, identical buggy, identical dog and the exact same question in the exact same wording feels like a ridiculous number of coincidences.
Nothing like it has happened to me since. I still use the same path, but every time I reach that section, I find myself looking ahead for the yellow buggy."
I have to admit, I am struggling to come up with an explanation for this one. Did OP hallucinate the first family? Did he have a premonition? Or were there genuinely doppelgängers of these people with the same dog? Freaky.
I think this experience is more common than you might think too. Just the other day, when Luke and I had been for a walk with Benji, we saw a couple with a dog, and then when we were in the car, we saw the same couple with a dog, but where they were would have taken at least 30 minutes to walk there. Maybe there are just a lot more doppelgängers out there than we realise.
"I think I visited a gas station in the future/alternate universe"
Reddit user i_fart_chemtrails (lol at their username) posted the following story. It kinda sounds similar to some I've heard in YouTube videos, so I don't know how "new" it is. Anyway, here's the story. "In February of 2022, I was driving through the Midwestern US. Not sure how much detail I'm supposed to put, but I was approaching the outer limits of a bigger city in Ohio around 2 AM, out of cigarettes, almost out of gas, and still had about 3 hours left to get home. Maps said the next open gas station was a travel center on the other side of this city, car said I had barely enough gas to get there, so I'm just trying to drive as conservatively as I can. Then I see a brightly lit Speedway that looked open! You can see it from the freeway! So I exit and go to fill up. I'm the only car there. The pump does not accept my credit card and gives me an error each time I punch in my zip code. Ok, I figure it's the card reader. So I go inside to pay, and ask the cashier for a pack of cigarettes. I'm telling him the brand, but he finishes my sentence, then says "I thought you were quitting?" in a sort of joking tone. Which my tired brain didn't think too much of--a lot of places I regularly get cigarettes remember the kind I like and recognize me. And as a baby-faced woman, I get a lot of comments/jokes about how I should quit. So I didn't think much of it until later, when I realized I'd never stopped there before and didn't recognize the cashier. Anyway, he rings me up, my credit card declines again, I pay cash and go on my way. Didn't think much of it again, except "weird, that cashier must have worked at a different gas station where I've seen him before," and assumed that I must have tried my card too many times at the pump and it got locked for fraud or something. I drive the same route 2-3 more times in 2022. One time I'm running out of gas in almost the same place, and I remember that Speedway and which exit it was at. But as I approach the exit, during the day this time, there's no signs for the gas station, and you can't see it at all from the freeway. I assume I passed it/remembered wrong, but it's day time now and way more gas stations are open, and I just go to one at the next exit. Then end up moving to that city in 2023, and occasionally drive past that same exit. Once in a while, thinking "I swear there used to be a gas station there," even though it'd be kind of a weird spot for a gas station (on a large verge). This spring, they started construction in that exact spot. Now there's a Speedway that hasn't opened yet. It looks exactly like how I remember, on the verge, retaining wall on one side and multiple one-way ramps entering and exiting the verge on the other side--I don't think I could have remembered that wrong. I can't help but wonder if I somehow glitched into the future. I went to a gas station 3.5 years ago that still hasn't opened yet. I think my card got declined because I moved and the zip code for my billing address would be different now (or maybe it was "expired" in the future?). I'm also kind of hopeful because lately I've kind of been considering quitting smoking. But my "visit" implies that I keep smoking after the new Speedway opens at least long enough for the cashier to recognize me before telling him that I'm quitting. IDK. I'm kind of scared to go there once it opens and get a slight sense of dread whenever I drive past it. At the same time, I really want to like...sketch a picture of what it looked like inside and then go visit and compare. It would be both vindicating and terrifying if it's how I remember inside too though. Either way, it feels like a sign from the universe to quit smoking, so maybe I'll just do that and never go back."
Okay, so it's not the story I was thinking of from YouTube, but it has similarities. I think the one I was thinking of was a different woman who went back in time in Georgia and found a petrol station. I also thought this reply to OP was interesting! User Almost-Jaded said they had similar experiences; here are a few:
"I spent about 45 minutes in an AU where a major road and interaction didn't exist, or had changed names. There were other physical differences, such as street signs being a different color. I eventually made it back by changing my route. When I "returned", almost 3 hours had passed.
similar to yours and #1. I ended up in a place where an entire planned community disappeared. I stopped at an intersection that doesn't exist in my "primary" universe because that community interrupts the two roads that would otherwise intersect.
the biggest and most relevant. A major construction project involving overhauling several roads, building a mini cloverleaf, and a whole series of ramps that I not only witnessed being built in the early 2000's but drove on frequently for almost a decade disappeared. In 2019, I watched them build it again, almost exactly as I remembered it."
Our brains are crazy, man - I wonder if we will ever get more research into these sorts of experiences.
Anyway, have you ever had a Glitch in the Matrix story? Let me know in the comments below!!
Stay safe,
Ash xx
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