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One evening, while reading quietly in bed, Jacob had a visit from his father. They had a nice talk. Nothing heavy, just the usual fare such as the weather, sports and local gossip. Finally, his dad asked him what he was reading, smiled and bid him goodnight. The odd thing, Jacob told me, was that his father was six years in his grave.
“So how did you react when you saw and heard him?” I asked.
“That was the weird thing. It all seemed matter of fact. Rationally, I knew he was dead, but it seemed so real and ordinary that I just went with it,” he replied.
His alarmed wife insisted he see a physician, fearing some neurological issue, and a shrink (yours truly), and told him she was concerned he was “hallucinating.”
“I’m not crazy,” he told me. “Maybe what I experienced is crazy, but I think I’m in touch with reality.”
“Agreed. But I’m not convinced visiting with your dad was crazy either. Extraordinary? Yes. Crazy? Not likely,” I suggested.
Many scientists attribute “visitations” of this sort to imaginative wishful thinking, sleep disturbances, so-called hypnogogic states, neurological sleights of mind or mental illness. However, it’s clear that entirely sane and healthy individuals have experiences they claim involve seeing or interacting with spirits. Accounts of these happenings can be heard in many a workplace, classroom or family gathering, not to mention houses of worship. While we don’t tend to question the sanity of those who claim to “speak with the lord,” folks who claim sightings of poltergeists rarely enjoy this forbearance.
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Human Perception
Now, a lot of folks waste their breath arguing for or against the existence of a spirit world. Can’t be proven. Can’t be disproven. What I find more interesting than this real-versus-imagined debate is what these visitation experiences tell us about the nature and limits of human perception. Take vision, for example. Our eyes don’t actually see what’s around us, but merely gather and transmit electrical signals to the brain, which then sorts the chaos of incoming data into an orderly image. What’s more, we can’t see everything, being limited within a narrow range of color, wavelength and luminosity. Numerous studies show we don’t experience visual reality directly, but rather, through mental representations concocted by the brain.
Now, if somebody says, “I see that tree,” we can verify that a tree is actually there. But if somebody says, “I see a ghost,” we can’t do the same. Nonetheless, because perception is incomplete and limited, we can’t disprove that a ghost is there either. Because one’s brain processes incoming sensory stimuli to create a mental map that represents the world, and because a map is not the actual territory it depicts, we can’t make absolute determinations of what is really “out there.”
So, the possibility exists that some people are wired, so to speak, to perceive alternate realities that most others do not. If true, this may account for a variety of paranormal experiences, ranging from ghost sightings to telepathy to precognitive dreams. However, how we interpret paranormal experiences is another matter altogether. Jacob might believe he saw the ghost of his dead father, but it’s safe to say he didn’t know for certain what he saw; nor did anyone else.
“Was that really him, his spirit?” Jacob pondered, but I offered a different take.
“We can’t know for sure, but we may be able to discern the meaning or message in what you experienced,” I suggested.
Jacob thought about it for a while, and then teared up, softly smiling at the same time. “Now, I think I get it. When I was a kid, Dad always read to me in bed. It put my mind at ease and comforted me,” he explained.
I smiled back and told him, “Seems like he still does.”
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