If qualia is real, why does it have to be paranormal

I know from past discussions that you place most empahsis on personal experience. I can't give examples of personal experience because those I have had, while suggestive, are not rock-solid enough for even me to accept as beyond doubt. I've talked about them with family and friends who either believe me or think I'm remembering something that happened in a dream (or other similar explanations).

However, I am prepared to believe others who I have known for years and know to be neither delusional nor prone to dishonesty. Even more telling is the fact that some are (or had been) vehemently opposed to "all that psychic crap". Friends who have been lifelong atheists yet have had an experience that has shaken their worldview. Unfortunately, it tends to be common for people (including myself) to lose certainty that such-and-such an event really happened - or happened in the way that I first related it. Doubt creeps in quickly because, I think, we fear what others will say - that we may be mocked or even pitied. 

Lastly there are those who used to be hard-line sceptics. Those who used to be the ones to mock and sneer. We have them here and I've lost count of the serious parapsychology researchers who claim to have started out as a sceptic, determined to debunk the nonsense. Bruce Greyson describes that journey in his recent book on his NDE research.

You can't take someone who has had an NDE into a lab, turn on a recording device and say - ok, show us. So I choose to accept that at least some of the anecdotal accounts happened exactly as described.

I was supporting your points, not criticising them, in case that wasn't clear. Anecdotes are paradoxically the best and worst forms of evidence, and everything is ultimately an anecdote. all you can really do is try to put more and more peoples good reputation behind certain ones, which is ultimately how the peer review process and etc work. But it doesn't change the fact that its ultimately just words on a page that you can't prove unless you do the experiment yourself and then get your own anecdotal results. For some experiments that's impossible for the average person. So yeah, it makes sense that people would doubt certain claims, and even the claims that certain devices or similar operate off that claimed effect, there's no way to check any of it. So you do need to rely on reputation to get some semblance of trust that anything is real.

But that's also why I do expect skeptics to put their money where there mouth is. None of these things are that hard to test. And the refusal to try tells me that deep down they probably feel helpless in the world, and they won't do anything that could shatter that worldview. They need to shout down anyone who dares reach higher than they ever tried as someone succeeding at something they said was impossible exposes them to themselves.