40 Times The Matrix Glitched Out, As Shared By These Internet Users Who Had Incredibly Bizarre Experiences

The legendary The Matrix movies (we like to pretend the fourth installment doesn’t exist, but we’re huge fans of The Animatrix) popularized an idea that philosophers have been wrangling with for thousands of years. Namely, how can we tell what’s real and what isn’t? And the fact is that it’s sometimes incredibly difficult to trust your senses alone—if the stories featured in this post are anything to go by, they aren’t always reliable and can betray us when we need them most. 

According to Scientific American, there’s roughly a fifty-fifty chance that we live in a simulation. However, if we assume that we are, in fact, living in ‘reality’ (whatever that means!), then glitches in the Matrix aren’t problems with the gigantic quantum computer we live in, but rather issues with how we perceive and (mis)remember things.

Like it or not, our brains are far from perfect. And our memories are fallible. So a glitch in the Matrix can, at its simplest, come down to us misremembering how things actually happened. We might have forgotten some details and imagined others. Or someone might have convinced us that things happened a certain way. We’re not computers that can store ‘perfect’ copies of events. And every time we remember something, it’s going to be slightly different from the last time we did so.

“Memory illusions can be as simple as misremembering whether one saw a Stop sign or a Yield sign at an intersection to misremembering entire experiences such as being lost in a shopping mall as a child or even being abducted by a UFO. Such illusions can emerge spontaneously in an individual, being created endogenously, or can arise due to the suggestion of another person, being created exogenously,” explain researchers Mark L. Howe and Lauren M. Knott, the authors of ‘The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences.’

Meanwhile, our senses aren’t accurate all the time, either. Our state of mind, mood, and expectations can change how we perceive our environments. For instance, someone who’s anxious and fearful and expecting to be attacked might see threats everywhere. Someone who’s on cloud nine because of a recent success might see things in a more positive light, ignoring the negatives. And someone who’s utterly exhausted might not notice important details.

To bring it closer to home, we’ve all had moments where we read a headline wrong and could’ve sworn that the Matrix rewrote it when we read it the second or third time around. Or an object we had in our possession simply… disappeared. Without a trace! Even though we spent hours looking for it.

The simplest explanations would be that we were distracted, tired, inattentive, or had certain preconceptions of what a headline is going to say or where a missing object might go. That’s the logical answer. But some events are so weird that even skeptics wonder about the alternatives. Not to mention that it’s a lot more interesting to think we live might live in a simulation than that we’re just bad at noticing and remembering details!

Which of these stories did you find the most interesting, dear Pandas? Were there any that captivated you far more than you expected? What are the oddest glitches in the Matrix that you’ve experienced in your life? Share your thoughts in the comments. Meanwhile, we’re off to watch Neo save the world once again. We swear, it sometimes feels like Zion and the Nebuchadnezzar aren’t real and exist in a second layer of the Matrix…