I feel your pain

My only explanation for this is that I'm an old soul with many lives under my belt: When I am listening to someone tell me a story about hardship, deadly circumstances, or survival stories I will often become so absorbed in the tale that I do a sort of zoning out and actually become part of the story, a player experiencing the hardship, the near death experience, the situation through which I must survive. I am overwhelmed with emotion. I feel real, raw fear.

My example of the evening is the story from The Deadliest Catch where a boat in 1976 sank during a storm that started while the crew was travelling home after catching all their fish. The crew members were able to put on their wet suits and get into a lifeboat, but that capsized as well. Luckily they caught the rope of it, climbed back onto the lifeboat, travelled all the way to the Kayak Islands, but there were very nasty breaks 10-20 feet tall and they had to leave their lifeboat and swim to shore. Only two crew members made it to shore and were eventually rescued. While I was listening to the story I was feeling the fear, the adrenaline, the panic, the worry, the need to survive, but I was just sitting on my couch in my Winnie-the-Pooh jammy bottoms and my Halifax t-shirt (I'm sick, no pretty here).

My husband will pull me right back out by saying it's just a story, but until I'm pulled out or until the story ends I am right there with those people. It's very traumatic, I really shouldn't do it to myself, but I crave my next opportunity to safely experience someone else's danger, to feel the completely draining sadness that comes with the experience. Is this what all humans do? Just the "sensitive" ones? Or, am I abnormal? (I'm really asking, I have no idea what's "normal".)