I remember when I was working for law firms in downtown DC.  This had to be in the 1990s.  I was leaving work in the dark or semi-darkness, so this would have been in the winter.  My memory tells me I was walking toward DuPont Circle Metro. There was a certain side street that I’d walk through (I was obsessed with patterns at the time, so I regularly took the same path home — as opposed to later, when I became obsessed with entropy and would take extraordinary measures to AVOID patterns — and along this path, there was a certain streetlight that, more often than not, would switch off as I passed underneath it.  There were stages of acknowledgement of this phenomenon.  First, acknowledgement that a pattern was developing. Then, anticipation. Then, familiarity, and some sort of odd internal pleasure (confirmation bias? validation?) when it occurred. Then, wondering what the phenomenon was. Then the realization that to even bring up the possibility that it could be anything but malfunction and coincidence would lump me in with the crazies. As in, even further than I had already lumped myself in by my strange associations, writings and cultivated friendships.

Looking back, I should have known there was probably a working theory. But back then, information was not as plentiful or easy to come by as it is now. Even I, who collected fringe texts and even ran fringe text-based bulletin board systems (BBSes), had not come across this particular phenomenon discussed in print at the time.

This weekend I decided to look into it further, and discovered that there are texts regarding the phenomena.  It’s called Street Lamp Interference, or SLI, and the people who cause it, or to whom it occurs, or who notice it, are called SLIders.

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/05/streetlamp-interference-a-modern-day-paranormal-mystery/