Deconstructing my ghostly encounter...

Click bait! I don’t actually believe that ghosts are a thing. What I actually saw was a hallucination, which is much scarier to me than a ghost because it’s a stark reminder that my brain can, at any time, can make shit appear in my field of view that isn’t actually there; things that look so real I can’t discern them from reality… and I sure do hate that a lot.

Anyway, back to the story…

I toss and turn a lot when I’m sleeping. A few months ago, I stirred awake, turned onto my left side, and opened my eyes. The room was dark except for a dim light from the closet. It was probably somewhere around 4AM. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, both eyes widened, and I saw the silhouette of my wife walking towards our master bathroom. As she passed in front of me, I saw her skin and her hair. She stopped in the doorway and stood still, lingering just long enough to activate my uncanny valley response. There was no reason for her to stop and linger like that.

Then, she continued walking into the bathroom. Normally, this would be where she just disappears into the dark bathroom, closes the door behind her, and I would see the crack at the bottom of the door glow yellow as she flips on the light switch. That didn’t happen. Instead, after three of four steps into the bathroom, she evaporated into thin air. Then, I quickly turned over and saw her still laying in bed next to me.

It was a jarring experience. I’ve never really hallucinated before; certainly not a fully formed human being with the same features and gait as my wife. Maybe a spider on the wall here or there as I’m falling asleep, sure, but never a fully formed apparition.

It was likely just my REM cycle spinning down more slowly than it should have. But even though it wasn’t a supernatural event, it was incredibly strange and I can now definitely understand how some people can convince themselves, and others, that they’ve seen something supernatural.

After all, people with schizophrenia experience things like this all of the time, don’t they? The building blocks are sitting there in our brains, dormant for most, and just waiting to wreck our notion that reality is stable.

My main takeaway from the encounter was that my brain can apparently project perfect illusions into four dimensional space, and then it can fade them away into nothing like a Thanos snap. Of course, I knew the human brain had this power prior to experiencing it first hand, but it did actually make a big difference to be tricked by it in real time. It shook me a bit.

What’s to stop the rest of reality from evaporating, too? If I suddenly lost all of my senses, would I experience the same hallucination in the same way, and at the same time? Time for a quick foray into an existential crisis…

She walked around our bed — her lower half wasn’t visible at all until she rounded the corner — and then she walked into the doorway, and then into the bathroom. The hallucination was interacting with the objects in my field of view. The hallucination obeyed the laws of physics. Her hair was swaying with her movement, meaning the hallucinated hair had mass and was affected by gravity and motion.

Was I hallucinating the scene as well, or just the figure? Was it a memory being projected like an overlay? When you’re looking at a sunlit object at noon and suddenly close your eyes, you can see the still frame of the last thing you saw, as if burned into your retinas for a few moments. Was it that same mechanism painting my memories of our master bedroom into a dream?

By the way, I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t studied memory, so this is about to piss off people who actually know how memories work! My one qaurrel (not really) with science is that if I know too much about a given topic, I’m robbed of being able to wonder aloud, and that’s one of my favorite things to do. So no, I will not look up how this actually works! Sweet ignorance.

Anyway…

If the hallucination was simply the projection of a memory into four dimensional space, then even if I lost my senses, nothing would change, would it? I shouldn’t need use of my senses to recall a memory from when I had them. The memory was a snapshot of time that was already taken. Even if the entire layout of our master bedroom changed right after I lost all of my senses, then I suspect that I would experience the exact same hallucination.

I was laying on my side. So, if it was a memory, my view of reality was 90 degrees different than it would be if I were standing. The memory must have been a snapshot from that exact spot that I was laying in. But if that’s true, when the ghost evaporated into thin air, why was the bathroom door in the exact same position when I fully awoke moments later? In fact, nothing in the room was different when the hallucination faded. It was a perfect transition from the hallucination back into my waking life.

I sleep with a fan on. Her hair moved with the wind and it bounced off her back when she walked. I do not think that I have ever recalled a memory with that level of detail. The movement of the air, and how it interacted with individual strands of her hair, feels like it requires simulated physics. Her hair moving in the wind changes everything.

Was my brain creating the image of my wife and simulating the physics of the room at at the same time? That’s nuts. To create that figure and place it into reality, my brain would have to process all of the physics itself. It would have to calculate and recalculate, redraw, each frame as the variables in the room shifted as my fan knocked particles around. It would have to simulate gravity and time perfectly.

When I hallucinate, is my brain recreating time, too? When the ghost walked, she didn’t look any slower or faster than she should have. Her steps looks exactly as they should have. The whir of the fan sounded exactly how it always has. Was I hearing the fan as it spun in reality or was my brain “drawing” the sound in a dream that was fading away?

There was a light coming from our closet and dimly lighting the room. Was my brain creating that light and the speed it was traveling at? The hallucination was lit exactly how she should have been. It looked real. Was my brain perfectly simulating her body’s interaction with light from a source behind her?

Does my brain come with a physics manual? Are the rules hard-coded somewhere in there? How else could it create hallucinations that interact with reality so perfectly that I don’t question it at first? How light interacts with the environment, the vibrations of sound, and how all of that interacts with time.

Seeing a ghost made me question reality directly. I had thought about the possibility that we live in a simulation before, but after seeing the ghost and thinking through all that it actually entails to experience a hallucination, I am more convinced than I have ever been that I am living in some kind of a computer program.

Does that matter? Not really. This is still my reality. My views about religion haven’t changed. My outlook on life hasn’t changed. I was the same person after she evaporated into thin air that I was before that happened. I’m just a little more curious, and that’s kind of the point, I guess. Life keeps on keeping on.

It doesn’t make me question who I am, but it does make me question who you are more than I ever have. It’s plausible that you don’t exist, reader. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but now I do believe that I can be completely fooled whenever my brain is properly motivated to do so. That’s a little scary, but I guess it’s no scarier than anything else that can crumble in front of me at a moments’ notice. This is all quite fragile, isn’t it?

I’m just glad the ghost didn’t talk to me. As it stands, all I saw was like a little movie playing. I’m glad I didn’t tell the ghost that I loved her as she walked by. Imagine if she looked at me and said, “I love you, too.”

The fourth wall remaining in tact is safer for my overall sanity. In fact, that fourth wall is probably the difference between sanity and insanity, and that morning I got a little too close for comfort. I also feel much more sympathy for people forced to see or hear hallucinations all day. It’s not fun to question what is and isn’t real, if even for a moment. I can’t imagine the burden of constantly having to question reality.