My reading material is a bit left of field, and it has been for the past decade or so. Currently I’m reading Myres’ Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), also Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living (1886), and a little more up to date Fontana’s Is there an Afterlife?(2005) I’m on the fence so far as this sort of thing is concerned, but I find the early history of the Society for Psychical Research, and the biographies and life-works of its leading lights fascinating. The research outlined in these works, and the conclusions they seem to draw regarding the true nature of the human personality is compelling, but there’s also something in us that would have us disregard such startling material – no matter how weighty the evidence – because,… well,… we live in a rational, physical world and for their talk of a discarnate dimension, it doesn’t help much when your mortgage is screwed, your pension is screwed, and you’re wondering how you’re going to stump up the fees to send your boys to university.
But I digress.
My family are very polite about my reading habits. My books lie around all over the place – I’m a bit careless in that respect – okay so the weird stuff is mixed in with Louis Lamour, Niall Williams and John LeCarre, but the strangeness of some of my reading has perhaps led to my being labelled as a bit “alternative”, or a bit “mystical”. Now,… when someone has an experience they don’t understand, something that doesn’t seem rational or logical, you can understand them wanting to share it with someone, preferably someone who won’t laugh at them. So,… if you see, let’s say, a ghost, who would you tell? Or would you not tell anyone? Would you keep it to yourself for fear of being labelled gullible, unreliable? Me? I’d blog it to my unknown reader, but other than that who is there? A minster of religion perhaps? Or a close relative who reads weird stuff? I mean it’s not always an explanation you’re after is it – just the simple act of sharing the experience with another human being helps in the acceptance of it.
Several weeks ago now a close female relative confided in me – quite out of the blue – that she had woken at dead of night to see a figure in her bedroom – a woman, unknown to her. It was quite real, she assured me,… startling, terrifying – yet she was unable to move or even speak to her husband lying asleep beside her. What did I think? What was it? Was she going mad? Was it real? Was it a ghost? Would it happen again?
It reminded me of a story told by my newly married grandmother of waking to see the figure of a man staring at her – this would have been in the 1920’s. The story goes she recounted the experience to my grandfather the following morning, describing the spooky interloper to him, and my grandfather told her it sounded like his own father who had long since passed over. One smiles at these tales, repeats them perhaps on Samhain nights, when the family gathered round and feeling perhaps for one day of the year at least a little philosophical, but mostly we shrug and get on with our rational workaday lives,… until someone tells us a similar tale and wants some reassurance that they’re not going mad.
Then, as if this were not enough, my own good lady – no more sober, nor level headed a person on earth – told me that the other night, she thought yours truly was gawping at her from her side of the bed and what the bloody hell did I think I was doing? However, she found herself unable to remonstrate with me as she might normally have done, as she felt unable to speak or even to move. Then she heard the toilet flush and yours truly – the real version – came shuffling back to bed. The apparition, or whatever it was disappeared. The experience shook her and it took her most of the following day to gather the words to recount it to me.
Ghosts or what?
The answer to these enigmas come from the books I’m reading. It was Gurney I think who first mentioned the hypnopompic hallucination. You’re coming out of sleep – perhaps disturbed from it by a careless spouse going to the loo at dead of night, or perhaps even just snoring too loudly, and you see a figure in the room. I’ve never experienced such a thing but those who do are adamant that the figure, the apparition is real, and clearly defined – in spite of the fact that it’s dead of night and pitch dark. In one striking case listed by Gurney a man is asleep in his room, in India, in the 1800’s and wakens to see a native standing by his bed. The native drops at once into a squatting posture. The man, alarmed, leaps from bed and takes the potential sneak-thief by the throat, only for the sneak-thief to shape-shift into a dirty laundry bag, tied at the top. In his long study of so called Phantasms, Gurney calls these borderland cases, in that they occur in that strange hinterland between sleep and waking, and they’re rather more common than one might suspect. They are less the product of of some external, supernatural agency, more the product of the unconscious, dreaming mind. Having said that, they’re still considered a rare phenomenon, one that requires the connivance of a mind that is more than commonly adept at visualisation.
Naturally, if you were to experience such a thing yourself, you might jump to the conclusion that you’d had a brush with the afterlife, but the consensus is that such phantasms are simply the stuff of dreams projected into physical reality, though no less startling and fascinating for all of that. It’s odd though, that they should be so rare, and yet I’m given two fresh first hand examples from my own family, and within weeks of one another.
The Rivendale Review 