The Dismissal Reflex

Blog Post Two.

Why Ordinary People Ignore Extraordinary Experiences — And Why They Shouldn’t

Most people have had at least one moment in their lives that didn’t fit neatly into the box labelled “normal.”

A strange dream that felt too real. A shadow in the doorway that shouldn’t have been there. A coincidence so sharp it made you pause mid‑step. A gut feeling that arrived fully formed, with no logical explanation.

We all get these moments — tiny flashes of “something odd” — and almost every time, we do the same thing.

We dismiss them.

We push them aside. We laugh them off. We bury them under routine, habit, and the comforting weight of “that couldn’t have been anything.”

We all tend to brush these things off out of habit and that is probably just a natural human trait. Perhaps it is a normal reflex that makes the brain feel more comfortable.

Are we trained from childhood to ignore the edges of our perception?

We’re taught to trust the physical world, the measurable world, the world that fits inside the five senses. Anything outside that narrow band gets labelled imagination, superstition, or nonsense. We learn to treat anomalies as glitches in the mental software — something to be patched over, not examined. This happens when your children are scared of monsters in their bedroom or have an invisible friend. “You’re too old for that now! You know they don’t really exist!”

I readily dismissed the orbs I saw on camera rising from my daughter’s pillow, saying: Oh, they’re just bubbles. But bubbles don’t just appear in broad daylight from a pillow next to a baby’s head and drift towards the ceiling past a camera, do they? No, they don’t.

But here’s the quiet truth most people never admit:

The extraordinary doesn’t stop happening just because we stop paying attention.

It keeps brushing past us in small ways — subtle, fleeting, easy to miss. And when we ignore it, we lose something important: the chance to understand our own minds, our own perception, and the deeper layers of reality that sit just beyond the everyday.

Here’s an example.

Yesterday I walked past a motorbike in the street and thought, Oh, that’s nice, what’s that? Didn’t touch it. Didn’t photograph it. Didn’t say anything out loud. I didn’t even stop walking.

Two hours later, Instagram served me two ads for that exact manufacturer — and the exact model I’d been looking at.

Coincidence? Algorithmic sorcery? Is my phone intercepting my brain waves?

Who knows. But it was weird enough to make me stop and think. It was way too precise.

A friend of mine takes it even further. When his birthday is coming up, he’ll grab his wife’s phone and say loudly into it: Golf clubs! Golf clubs! Golf clubs! Not subtle — but he embraces the idea that his phone is listening and tries to make it work in his favour. He doesn’t brush it off; he leans into it, hoping the algorithm will deliver him a shiny new set of clubs.

And everyone has moments like that.

• You think of someone you haven’t spoken to in years… and they text you that afternoon.

• You dream about a place you’ve never been… then see it on TV the next day.

• You walk into a room and feel instantly uneasy… then later learn something happened there.

• You’re about to change lanes… and something in your gut says don’t — and you avoid a collision.

• You’re thinking about buying a particular book… and suddenly it appears in a shop window.

• You hum a song you haven’t heard in ages… and it starts playing on the radio.

These aren’t dramatic events. They’re not cinematic. They’re not “proof” of anything.

But they’re strange. And they’re real. And they happen to everyone.

My own experiences didn’t begin with a spaceship.

They began with small anomalies — moments that didn’t fit, that I could have easily dismissed. Even a big anomaly like the shadow guy. You can read about that one in the book. At the time I dismissed it because it was too weird.

A shadow figure. A flash of light. A strange coincidence. Orbs. A feeling that something was watching.

Nothing dramatic at all. Nothing that would make a movie trailer.

The only difference was that I didn’t ignore them. Not fully. I just needed time to think about it a bit.

I didn’t collapse them into “nothing.” I didn’t bury them under routine. I didn’t let the reflex of dismissal win.

Instead, I took a moment and went: Well hang on just a minute… that’s not a satellite…

And once I stopped ignoring the edges, the edges expanded.

Most people don’t realise how much they filter out.

The human brain is a master of simplification. It hides complexity so we can function. It smooths over anomalies so we don’t get distracted. It edits reality constantly, trimming away anything that doesn’t fit the model we already believe. It’s like listening to a song in low fidelity: you get the tune, but all the subtle layers that make it interesting are smoothed out or lost.

But sometimes the model is wrong. Sometimes the anomaly is the message. Sometimes the thing we dismiss is the thing we most need to notice. I don’t know what’s going on with the motorbike incident I experienced and I’m so tempted to ignore it and put it down to coincidence, but it is just way too specific. And if the algorithm is listening: stop it. I’m not buying a motorbike.

This post isn’t about aliens. It’s about perception.

It’s about the quiet moments when reality taps you on the shoulder and waits to see whether you’ll turn around. It’s about the small signals that most people ignore because they don’t want to deal with what those signals might mean. “It’s not real because it can’t be real.” That’s a whole cluster of human defence mechanisms wrapped into one neat sentence — much more than just circular reasoning.

A friend of mine told me he once saw a flash of light in the night sky exactly where he was looking. He said in his mind: Oh wait… can you do that again? And it did. It flashed again.

He had probably communicated telepathically with ETs on a ship. I think this because they’ve done the same thing to me many times — and separately to my wife. There’s a pattern there.

But even if you don’t believe that, the point stands:

It’s about curiosity — the kind that doesn’t require belief, only attention.

You don’t need to see a UFO to experience the extraordinary.

You only need to notice the moments when something feels off, or strange, or too coincidental to ignore. You only need to stop brushing away the things that don’t fit. You only need to let yourself wonder, even briefly, whether the world might be bigger than the version you were handed.

Once you stop ignoring the extraordinary, you start seeing the world as it actually is — not the simplified version, but the full one.

So here’s my invitation.

Not to believe me or to adopt my experiences. Not to accept anything you’re not ready for.

Just this:

Pay attention to the anomalies in your own life. Don’t dismiss them so quickly. Don’t bury them under routine. Don’t assume they mean nothing.

Sometimes the extraordinary is subtle, quiet, or small. Barely there at all like the flash of light in the sky.

But it’s there. Remember those events and mull them over occasionally. Perhaps there’s a pattern there.

And if you stop ignoring it, you might be surprised by what you find.