15 People Share Their Most Unsettling Glitch In The Matrix Stories

From Redditor /u/Hedgerow_Snuffler:

A long time ago I had a conversation with an old workmate who described [the following]: 

The detail is hazy, but he said one day he was in his house when he felt a sudden need to go outside and stand on his lawn. He claimed it was the strongest, clearest feeling ever, and on doing so he experienced a sort of "wobble"; he just said everything was screwed up for moment, and he experienced a feeling of detachment/outside-ness. When it passed, he turned to go back inside.

While talking to me, he got quite upset at this point, and asked me not to think him crazy... The next thing he saw was his car parked in the street and it was the same model/registration, but a different color.

He was so thrown at this, and then more so because then his wife came out to ask what he was doing, and he said he realized she was in all appearance his wife, but somehow not his wife. He said from that point on she liked foods she had claimed to hate before, and sometimes brought up memories he said he had zero relation to. He said things like his route to work was still the same but somehow different, he said there were buildings on the way that either he had missed in the six years he'd driven past them five days a week, or had just "appeared" overnight. He even said some people he remembered from other departments in work had just vanished, and asking about them brought total incomprehension from other people.

He was a totally regular healthy guy, but he said he measured his life in relation to that afternoon. He went on to say he was now living his life with a feeling that about 15% of it had spontaneously changed that afternoon.

From Redditor /u/A_lot_of_italics:

One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.

I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about fifteen feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension. All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits. They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black.

When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed.

I've never done any hard drugs, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me. The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal, I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.

From Redditor /u/Bugs_Nixon:

When I was a kid in England, in primary school, around 1987ish, a new kid joined the school on a temporary basis for a term. He had an American accent and was ginger. His name was Lee. Before he left us, he brought into school what today would look sort of like a tablet computer but this was very thin with brown tanned glass. He had cartoons on it - he totally loved cartoons and movies. I swear this happened. I didn't dream it.

It was amazing. There was a crowd of kids who saw it and their reaction was interesting because they liked it and wanted one, comparing it to the Nintendo Game & Watch and calculators, but sort of accepted it and didn't think it was magical - but it certainly was. I said to him it was like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy prop used in the TV series. He didn't know what I meant. He kept it away from the teachers and didn't bring it back in. I kept asking him questions about his 'calculator TV' and he just gave vague answers and saying he didn't know, but when I asked where he bought it, he said his Dad got it from the US. One other thing he said, he saw a movie which "had every cartoon character ever." A few years later I realized he was talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which came out soon after.

This was 30 years ago and you can imagine how difficult in all this time it's been to describe this thing, as we haven't had ubiquitous tablets everywhere. I used to draw diagrams of it and show it to people. I went crazy when I saw the Tom Hanks movie Big - the scene where he pitches a hand-held comic book video device... my parents just sort acknowledged it, just humoring me. When Star Trek TNG came out and the Padd was shown on screen, I went "That's it! That's the thing!" 

Eventually, the tablet PC came out and I remember thinking "finally at last," [and] the video iPod was further confirmation. Today, it's obvious that it was a tablet computer, and my story sounds more convenient.

I suppose I could track some of the other kids down on Facebook to prove this - I bet they would remember. Naturally, no one believes me.

From Redditor /u/TheNamesClove:

I vividly remember this girl at my school dying in a car accident [after she] drove over the side of an exit ramp that was having construction done on it, and the reason she didn't realize it is because she was texting. I remember my sister and her friends going to the funeral (she was in my sister's grade). We lived in a small town and I remember everybody talking about it for weeks.

Fast forward almost 10 years, I've told my fianceé the story enough times she knows the girl's name by heart - mainly to try to convince her not to text while driving. My fianceé is from the other side of the country, and I never go back to my hometown, so she doesn't know any of the people I went to high school with personally. One day she's looking at my sister's Facebook page and says, "Hey isn't this that girl who died?" and I come over to check it out. Turns out she's alive, married to an old friend of mine, with a kid, and no one remembers the car accident/funeral. I'm still so confused.

From a former Redditor:

I knew my uncle had died. My mom had called me and told me the news. It was very sad. She told me in the middle of work and I told one of my coworkers. He expressed his condolences on my loss.

A couple weeks later, my sister mentioned my aunt and uncle doing something. I said "but... he's [gone]." And my sister said no, he wasn't. I called my mom. [He was alive]. 

To this day I'm still not sure how much of it my brain imagined and how much was real. Did I really talk to my coworker? Was I even on the phone with my mom at all that day? It still freaks me out knowing that my mind could fabricate so complete and real a memory like that.

From Redditor /u/BrAnders0n:

I got a call from a police officer telling me if I didn't pay some old fines within a week he would come arrest me. The total was $267.63. It was about two weeks before Christmas, so I was really sweating it. The very next day I got a check in the mail for $267.63 for overpaid child support throughout the year. Craziest, most unexplainable thing I've ever had happen to me.