Extraordinary Experiences Usually Strike When You’re Alone

More than a third of the time someone senses a presence that should not be there, sees a face in an ordinary object, or feels themselves drifting outside their own body, they are on their own when it happens. No one else in the room. No shared moment to compare notes with afterward. That is one of the plainer findings buried inside a new survey of 5,117 Brazilian adults, each of whom described, in careful detail, one moment that stood out from the grind of everyday life.

Psychologists call these nonordinary experiences: moments that stand out as special or strange relative to whatever a person considers ordinary, whether that is deja vu, a strong sense of being watched, or the conviction that someone long dead is somehow present. They are, according to researchers who study them, remarkably common and yet almost never talked about in the same breath twice, since one person’s spiritual awakening is another person’s textbook symptom.

To figure out how people actually make sense of them, a team led by Pedro Fortes and Ronald Fischer at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education in Rio de Janeiro built on an existing tool called the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, first validated in the United States and India. They added nine new questions about context, timing and wellbeing, then tested all 47 items on 160 Brazilian adults using a technique called Response Process Evaluation, in which people are asked to explain, in their own words, what a question is actually asking them. An item only counted as validated once at least 80% of the interviewers agreed it had been understood as intended. Every one of the original questions passed with minor tweaks, and so did every new one.

That validation work matters because the same raw experience gets filed under wildly different headings depending on who is doing the filing. As Fischer puts it: “Experiences like sensing a presence, having a vision, or feeling as though you are observing yourself from outside your own body are far more common in the general population than clinical diagnosis rates would suggest.”

Mostly Alone, Wide Awake

With the validated questions ready, the team ran a cross-sectional survey of 5,117 Brazilian adults recruited through an online panel, published this week by PLOS (Public Library of Science) in its journal PLOS One. Each person reported on one of 38 possible experiences, from lucid dreams to near-death experiences to a sudden, overwhelming sense of meaning. The results landed in a tight cluster rather than scattering all over the place. Being alone was the single most common setting, chosen by about 39% of respondents, and being awake and alert, not dreaming, not medicated, not ill, was the most common state, reported by about 57%.

“What struck us was the mismatch,” says Fortes. “These experiences share features with symptoms used to define psychosis and dissociation yet are frequently observed in a general-population sample.”

Push further into the data and a coherent shape starts to emerge. Nearly half of respondents, about 48%, described their experience as having a religious or spiritual character, while roughly a third said it did not, and the remainder were not sure either way. Asked why the experience happened at all, the single most popular answer was blunt: none of the above, it might have been chance, chosen by about 38% of respondents. Combine every explicitly supernatural agent on the list (gods, the holy spirit, angels, unnamed spirits, energies) and the total edges up to roughly half of all reported experiences, which tracks with Brazil’s broader religious backdrop: a 2026 Pew Research Center survey found 76% of Brazilian adults pray at least once a day, more than in any other Latin American country surveyed. Most people also said they had at least some degree of control over what was happening to them, about 56% in total, rather than feeling like passive recipients of something done to them. Clinical researchers reviewing Latin American case studies have flagged that same sense of control, along with limited suffering and personal growth over time, as signs an unusual experience is not pathological.

None of this was uniformly rosy. About one in five participants said the experience hindered whatever they were doing at the time, and roughly a quarter reported some degree of suffering or discomfort in the moment. Even so, a slim majority, 51%, said the same experience left a positive mark on their life in the long run, more than double the share who called it a negative one.

One Brazilian Answer, Not Yet the World’s

The press release framing this study leans on a broader claim, that people process the extraordinary similarly across cultures and religions. The paper itself is more careful than that: every participant was Brazilian, the sample skewed toward the more educated, and the authors explicitly flag testing other cultural contexts as work for someone else to do next.

“Our findings suggest that how a person interprets an unusual experience matters more than the experience itself in determining whether it becomes a source of distress or of meaning,” he says. Fischer strikes a similarly practical note: experiences like this, he says, “can be meaningful and lead to personal growth and insight,” though he adds that where “these experiences interfere with their daily activities,” people should still “talk to a professional or seek help from somebody that they trust.” Appraisal theory, the framework running under the whole project, holds that emotions follow from how an event gets interpreted rather than from the event itself, which may be why the same near-death experience leaves one person shaken for years and another quietly grateful.

The inventory behind this survey now sits on the open science server, free for other teams to run in other countries, among other religions, against other backdrops entirely. Whether alone-and-awake turns out to be a Brazilian pattern or a human one is, for now, still an open question.

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