Search for "Ogonyok"

My father, a passionate reader, could not live without newspapers and magazines.

But he worked in the morning shift at the factory and I went to school in the afternoon, so it was my duty to buy "Ogonyok" and "Nedelya" in the morning.

The kiosk opened at nine in the morning, but I had to get up at six to stand in line, preferably at the front of the line. Nowadays newspapers are sold on every corner, but back then you could not get them all by mail. Even buying them was a problem. For example, only five copies of "Nedelya" were brought to the kiosk, and even fewer copies of "Ogonyok". The people at the end of the line got nothing at all, except for "Pravda".

I was always the first to arrive at the kiosk on Revolution Street.

Behind me would appear an old woman in a blue coat carrying a cane - the wife of Tatarintsev, a well-known philologist in the city. Another old man, Boris, with a moustache and a hat, followed.

The three of us knew each other by sight, and when one of us was late, we worried: what was wrong with him? Had something happened? Was he sick?

It's good when it's warm outside, but in winter the hunt for "Ogonyok" became an ordeal. I, an eight-year-old schoolgirl, always came home with frostbitten cheeks and no feeling in my toes after several hours of standing in the wind in thirty-degree frost. In addition, a strange thing began to happen to me, and I began to choke. I would inhale air and couldn't breathe, as if there was a hole in my lungs.

Dark Water

I used to dream at night that I was drowning. I dreamed it in my childhood, and I still do. They're not pleasant dreams. It's like I'm in a cave or the hold of a sunken ship and I don't know where the exit is.

It's damp, scary, dark, no air. I'm choking, gasping, desperately trying to get to the surface and I can't. Suddenly I see a faint light in the distance. I swim towards it.

The window of the porthole is so narrow and small, I'm afraid I won't be able to squeeze through, I almost lose consciousness and... I wake up. My heart is pounding. Thank God I'm alive!

Perhaps I am reliving my birth in these dreams. After all, according to my mother's words, it was like this - I was born half strangled, with the umbilical cord twisted twice around my neck.

But was the horror of death so ingrained in a baby's subconscious that it still haunts me in my nightmares?

By the way, all my choking attacks stopped as suddenly as they started. Without medication. But they were replaced by blows to the stomach. I still don't know what triggered them. Every time I was just standing somewhere, waiting for the bus or running cross-country in gym class, when I suddenly got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and realized with horror - this is only the first "bell," the main action is ahead...

A mild attack of nausea was always followed by a wave-like tingling sensation. My arms and legs would feel like they were being pierced by thousands of needles, my body would go numb, covered in icy sweat, and my eyes would blur in circles. My tongue seemed to swell and my mouth seemed to be filled with raw dough.

I knew that if I didn't sit down immediately, anywhere, even on the floor, I would be hit hard in the solar plexus. The air would be blown out of my lungs and I'd lose my senses.

I didn't want to faint in public, so at the first sign (it usually took about three minutes from the feeling in the pit of my stomach to the punch) I tried to get away, to hide.

A choking attack

One frosty morning, I was standing in line to buy "Ogonyok" when I had another attack.

There was no way I could hide - I had to buy my father a magazine, so I held on with all my strength.

But my arms and legs were already stiff, and there were only seconds left before the attack...

After warning old Boris that I would be back soon, I reached the public garden and curled up on a bench with my arms around my stomach. It seemed to me that if I took my hands off my stomach I would explode - something soft, like cotton balls, was pulsating there; they were insistently bursting out of me, or maybe, on the contrary, they were trying to penetrate me.

I felt very bad and scared, I tried as hard as I could to shut myself off from the invisible threat, and the pain gradually subsided. I was even able to get up and waddle quietly, without taking my hands off my stomach, to the kiosk.

On the way I found a paper ruble frozen in a puddle. I broke the ice with the heel of my boot and forged it out. It was wet and dirty, but it was a whole ruble!I

I finally bought the magazine. I couldn't disappoint my father.

But those nausea attacks happened to me many times after that. They were not always accompanied by painful gasping, but the end result was the same - a sudden loss of consciousness.

Fainting in church

One day I fainted during the Easter Vigil.

I don't usually go to church, but that night I wanted to go to the other side of town for some reason.

The little wooden church was crowded, it could hardly hold all the parishioners, but I managed to squeeze in close to the lectern. The crowd pushed and shoved behind me. The candles were burning. The smell of wax and incense was suffocating. Half an hour into the vigil, even though the doors of the temple were wide open, the air was running out of oxygen. And I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach...

That's when I regretted that I was far from the exit.

Trying to get out didn't work. The people were like a wall and they weren't going anywhere. "Stay still!" - someone behind me shouted angrily. It's easy to say "stay still" when the light in my eyes is almost gone.

Somewhere a baby started to cry. And at that moment I heard a rustle behind me, as if someone had fallen. I even felt a slight breeze on my back from the fall. Then I heard a cry of alarm: "The girl has fainted!"

I thought, "Well, I'm not the only one. At the same time, I had a strange illusion: it was as if I had split in two and was now in two places at once - standing and falling at the same time. And the next moment I realized that the girl who had fainted was me! It was amazing to watch myself from the outside.

I could not understand how this was possible - the standing "me" could see the one lying on the ground behind me, as if I had another pair of eyes at the back of my head. But the falling "me", for some reason, saw nothing and no one around me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

So which of the two was the real me, and which was just my phantom, my double?

I came to on the ground, and the first thing I thought was how interesting it was: when I wanted to go out, the people didn't move, but when I fell, the crowd moved back and a lot of empty space formed around me.

Someone helped me up and even took me to the door.

Two guys in police uniforms were waiting for me at the exit. One started shining a flashlight in my face and sniffing suspiciously: "Drunk?" but the other one stopped him: "Fool! Can't you see a girl is sick, it's so stuffy in there!"

This second one was very kind, sat me down on a bench in the yard and brought me some water. "Can you walk home alone?" - he asked when I felt a little better. I nodded, although he offered me a ride.

Another time I was walking by a sports field and saw a bar. I decided to do a pull-up. I jumped up, grabbed the bar, and then blacked out.

When I woke up in the morning, I opened my eyes in my bed. Or rather, I thought it was morning and I was in bed. But where is the blanket? Why are there tree leaves and a blue sky above my head instead? I begin to remember: a staircase, a jump, blackness...

I looked around - I was on the floor, my shoulder was sore, it looked like I'd hit it when I fell. How long had I been like this? According to the clock, only a few minutes. But it felt like an eternity.

Two of us

After school I lived and studied in Nizhny Tagil for three years.

One summer I came home on vacation, and my younger sister told me that the night before, when she was going to bed, she looked at the chair and saw me sitting in it.

She wasn't frightened, she was surprised. My sister knew that I would arrive any day, so she thought it was a surprise - I had bought a ticket in advance and rushed to Glazov without telling anyone, opened the door with my own key, slipped quietly into the room and sat down in the chair - as if to say, "What, you weren't expecting me? But I'm home!"

In a whisper, so my parents wouldn't hear, Tanya began to ask me something.

I didn't answer, just sat quietly in the chair and then mysteriously disappeared somewhere.

And now my sister wanted to know if it was really me or if she had dreamed it all.

What could I say? All I knew was that I really missed home.

At night, when I lay in bed, I dreamed of coming to Glazov and seeing my family. I imagined our apartment down to the smallest detail, even tried to guess what my parents and sister were doing and where my favorite dog, Lala, was now - sleeping on my parents' bed or begging for cookies from Tanya in the kitchen?

Maybe my desire to come home, even for a little while, was so great that I somehow fulfilled it. Or rather, my astral double did.

But the most incredible thing was that Tanya had seen me!

It is said that seeing an astral double is bad luck, it means the imminent death of the person the phantom belongs to. But I was not dying at that moment, my health was fine, and nothing terrible happened to me after that.

However, it is absolutely true that leaving the physical body almost always happens as a result of an accident or some deadly threat hanging over a person.

Left and never came back

When my school friend was a child, her father died tragically at work.

He was crushed by a crane or hit by a truck, I don't remember.

It was early in the morning and he died instantly. He probably didn't even know what had happened. And his double, who lost his body so suddenly, did not notice the transition to the next world either. And in that parallel reality he continued to live, went to the factory, did his work, and from work he hurried home to his wife and children.

You can say that parallel worlds don't exist? Keep listening.

My friend's mother recalled that a week after the funeral, she was home alone. The children were asleep when she heard the key turn in the keyhole.

The clock on the bedside table read four in the morning, the time when her husband usually returned from the night shift.

The woman was in the bedroom, but she heard the uninvited overnight guest take off his shoes in the hallway, put his feet in his slippers, and walk down the hallway to the bathroom. He looked into the nursery on the way. He stood there for a while and then went on.

The woman was not afraid that a burglar had entered the house. What was eerie was that she recognized those footsteps. They were the footsteps of her husband. Her dead husband!

She listened breathlessly to the water running in the bathtub, to someone rattling a soap dish and scrubbing his back with a washcloth. But then the sounds stopped. The light switch clicked.

The woman squeezed her eyes shut.

The door creaked open. Someone entered the bedroom, kicked off his slippers in the dark, and sat down on the bed. He sat there for a minute, then got under the covers and reached for his wife...

I don't know what happened next. It seems that the wife, without opening her eyes, asked her husband to leave so as not to frighten her and the children. After that, the night visitor silently got up and left the room. He never returned to the house.

A blow from above

After my parents died, my husband and I decided to renovate their apartment by replacing the floors, knocking down the walls and removing the mezzanine.

Armed with a crowbar, Andrei enthusiastically got to work. I helped, but at ten o'clock I had to go to the newsroom. We had a staff meeting every Thursday, and I could not miss it. Before I left, Andrei told me that he would be breaking down the doorjambs until noon because he had nothing else to do today.

And so I was sitting in the newsroom, listening to a speech by the newspaper columnist, and in the meantime I looked out of the window (our house and the newsroom are in the neighborhood), and suddenly I saw Andrei running out of the entrance. He came closer and closer...

I leaned against the window. There could be no mistake. His jacket, cap, glasses, hurried, a little nervous walk. But if I remember correctly, my husband didn't want to leave the house. Maybe he decided to go to the store? Well, I'd find out when I got home.

The meeting was over. By noon I was home.

Andrei came out of the room to meet me with a huge purple bump on his forehead.

It turned out that he had miscalculated his strength a bit, and the heavy chipboard ceiling of the mezzanine came crashing down on him from above. The main blow came to his head and was so hard that for the first second my husband thought he had lost consciousness. And then, he said, his head rang like a bell for a long time.

- If it had hit the back of my head, it would have killed me for sure! - Andrei gently felt the bump, as if reliving what had happened.

- So you were at the drugstore?

- What drugstore? - Andrew did not understand. - I was at home all the time. And where would I go like that? - he eloquently looked at his dusty pants and T-shirt.

My husband still can't believe I saw his double. He says it was a mistake.

But I swear it was him! I could see him clearly in every detail.

I think the astral double slipped out of my husband's body at the very moment he was covered by a monolithic slab weighing at least a quarter of a hundredweight.

In any case, whoever he was, he looked exactly like Andrei.

Leaving the body

It is a pity that in reality we rarely manage to remember the feeling of leaving our physical body.

I wouldn't be surprised if our astral doubles spend most of their time on their own - traveling somewhere, meeting people - familiar and unfamiliar. And these people then assure us that they have seen us in a city or country where we have never been in our lives.

Often people would stop me on the street and ask, "How was Bali?" or "How was your trip to Vietnam?" Canada, Australia), the countries could have been different.

What are they talking about? - I didn't understand. In response, they would indulgently pat me on the shoulder: okay, we know, we know.

Once someone seemed to have seen me in Kaliningrad, where I was buying real estate. My assurances that I had never been there, and certainly had never bought anything, were met with the same ironic grin: yes, of course...

And what about this episode: I dreamed that I had bought an apartment in a big old house built by Stalin near the "Russia" House of Culture. A week later, already in reality, I was walking past this house and a stranger came up to me. He stopped and said to me with a smile:

- Congratulations on your purchase!

I almost lost the power of speech. What's going on here? Am I dreaming? Am I living in some parallel reality? Who are all these people and what does it all mean? Maybe I'm going crazy, or have I already gone crazy?

The Midnighters

I'll tell you another story.

I used to go to bed early and my dad and Tanya would stay up late. They drank tea, watched TV, and since my mother worked the morning shift, Dad and Tanya were only allowed to watch TV in my room, so I was used to falling asleep to the commercials and explosions in the action movies.

But this time the midnighters lost their conscience and forgot to turn the sound down a bit.

I don't remember what happened next because I was asleep.

But my astral twin, who never sleeps, may have been very annoyed by the noise of the TV.

Tanya and Dad later told me that they were watching their favorite action movie, "Leon," when, at the moment of a particularly loud gunshot, I suddenly opened my eyes, sat up in bed, and yelled at them menacingly: "Keep it down!" Then I dropped my head on the pillow.

They were so stunned by my uncharacteristic behavior - the angry expression on my face, and especially the sharp, commanding voice I used to order them to turn the sound down - that they immediately obeyed the order, turned off the TV, and quickly went to bed. I wish I had done it sooner.

To be continued