Strange non-event made me feel strange, almost sick

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So, today I was sitting in the chapel at a funeral for my wife's uncle, a man I barely met once. I felt no excess emotion, other than my usual minor anxiety being amongst a crowd of people, some of whom I know, but not well. The chapel was a modern looking catholic thing in a country town, and the padre seemed a down to earth kind of guy in his early 60's. The last time I was there was for another funeral. The last time I voluntarily went to church (not catholic) was when I was a believer, several years ago.

The padre led people through an informal catholic service. Early in the service, I looked through the back window and saw the base of a windmill, maybe ten feet from the building. As I looked at the base of the windmill, I started getting a headache and felt an overwhelming need to get up from my seat and flee the building. I felt ill just sitting there. I have no idea why the legs of the windmill seemed to focus this feeling.

I resisted and distracted myself with looking at people and other things. After maybe 15 min, the feeling subsided.

Maybe 20 min later, after I had noticed a slight agitation in the padre's demeanor, he broke into the order of service and apologized to the many gathered, saying that from his posting in the army, he had suffered PTSD and his instincts at that point in the funeral service were to feel overwhelmed and flee. He said that his psychiatrist had told him to retire, but he continued to serve. He apologized for any hurt he had caused previously, and that it hurt him too. Then he went on with the funeral service and didn't flee. Someone said later that he had fled in other services, which explained his words.

First my own incomprehensible reaction, then his... At least he had a reason. I had no emotional or anxiety prompts. It just happened.

Is this an Aspie thing? I have had it before, though not often. Maybe once a year or so.

I don't think it's an "Aspie" thing.

I've known people (NT's) who have had intuitions like this.

Your focus on the windmill: that COULD be an Aspie thing.

At least you didn't flee.

It seems to me that the general understanding of mind is that there are many background cognitive processes going on of which we are usually unaware. Some of these are doing technical system maintenance jobs for the central and peripheral nervous systems, but some are processing semantic content and episodic information including emotional content. Some of these background processing tasks, particularly those working on strong emotional content, can produce unexpected and disturbing effects. Sometimes we are aware of these without understanding their origins in "subconcsious" or background processes.

This is a normal feature of a functioning human nervous system and will be experienced by neurodiverse and neurotypical people alike. Neurological differences may modulate the responses to those experiences.

I've had something similar happen two or three times. Once I was able to trace my discomfort to a very deep sound caused by the rumbling of large trucks nearby.

I've also read the federal government is experimenting with large sound systems to create subsonics to generate fear for the purpose of crowd control.

Perhaps you and the padre were stimulated by some subsonic sound the rest of the congregation were unable to notice?

I would bet that it was an experiencial memory triggered in the subconscious by a physical sensory input, - like how a scent can make you feel a certain way and/or re-live a complete memory experience from long ago.

Isn't a major theory about ASD that people on the spectrum are oversensitive to emotional/connection/sensation stimuli. We can't process the data well because it is a flood of data. Maybe your focus on the windmill helped focus the processing and you sensed the change in the padre subconsciously. It's just a theory.

Sounds very much like an effect of ELF's, extremely low frequencies.
Would be interesting to know if a seismograph would have picked up an
earthquake or similar rumbling disturbance which was taking place just below the level
of conscious perception. The American government is experimenting on their citizens
with such fear inducing frequencies and other psychotronic warfare weapons.

Thanks for your input folks.
As for subsonics, if there were any, it would have had to be something unusual, like the earth-tremor ELF thing. It's a country area, a long way from the city, and in the back streets of the town. A colleague thought I meant wind turbines, but to my knowledge there aren't any within 50 miles of the place. The reaction of the priest was understandable - a stressful situation, from which he has fled previously. The base of the windmill is just 4 steel legs with some supports. It was odd that sighting the windmill base seemed to trigger it for me, or perhaps it was just coincidence. It did seem an odd thing to be in the backyard of the church, even a bush church. lol. Ah well.. It'll probably remain a mystery. Maybe next time I visit up that way, I'll drop in to the church and see what happens.

As others mentioned maybe the windmill triggered a memory, without you actually remembering what it was, but if it is the case it was probably something unpleasant. But I also think it is a bit strange that both you and the priest felt discomfort around the same time (he possibly started feeling agitated before you even noticed that he was). Or maybe, also as others mentioned, you felt what the priest felt (or vice versa).