Of Some First-Hand and Of Some Second-Hand Experiences, Part 6

When my aunt was little her friends’ father had died. During his life, the deceased neighbor was known as a nice, good-natured, good-humored family man. When the tragedy struck, the unfortunate children came over to spend the night. My grandmother made the bed, lined up the little kids like sardines and, soon after, they were asleep. Sometime during the night, my aunt awoke. To her horror, she saw the deceased sitting on the edge of the bed, right next to her feet.

As if seeing a ghost of a man just passed away was not enough, the apparition gave off an evil aura. To my aunt - other than in the body - it did not seem at all the good-natured family friend everybody knew. The apparition stared straight at her and let out a muffled scary laughter of a man getting ready to do who knows what evil. She ran her hands over her eyes, then looked toward the spot where it was sitting just moment ago, but saw nothing was there.

My aunt doesn’t remember if she was dreaming of the deceased prior to waking up as to postulate that she perhaps had a lucid dream. She described to me every detail of her experience and, after we reviewed it, we both concluded that, though horrid, the whole event after all might be soundly and rationally explained.

Namely, everyone - children, of course, as well (perhaps, even more so) - obviously experienced a certain dose of psychological shock due to the sudden passing of their beloved. It is, then, quite possible that my aunt had, in fact, had a dream about the deceased, though she can't recall she had.

At the very point between dreaming and wakefulness, her mind could have simply projected the dream image outwardly making it seem real. Such cases are certainly not unheard of. Some similar (same, perhaps) mechanism could have also been operating when my mother saw the (non) existing spider-web as real.

My aunt believes that behind those ‘visions’ is precisely this sort of dream mechanism. I, too, lean toward accepting her hypothesis. Even so, “I saw the deceased in front of me as I now see you”, are words spoken by a rational person and a skeptic and chilling enough to leave room for discussion. Without further evidence, I am afraid, I cannot render a fully conclusive judgment to this one.

That the mentioned people experienced the above events is beyond question. It is also beyond question that those were not your everyday experiences. I am quite pleased I shared them with you today. You yourself can decide what to make of them.

At the very beginning of this article, I stated that the text wouldn’t run for endless pages. However, I felt I needed to describe the aforementioned events properly and so I opted to take a bit more space than originally intended… But, whatyagonna do?!…  Estimation errors do happen…