The Third Week
Again. I’m most certainly not a psychologist. For years I've dealt with people sharing their stories. Sunday night is not so much a ‘story-telling’ place, as rather a place where we encourage people to go, “I’ve been thinking about this… what are people’s take on this issue?”
As part of that process people do tend to share anecdotes that challenge their world view, or provide information and evidence to go – this LOOKS supernatural, however there is a scientific explanation.
One of the things I omitted to mention in
my summary last week was the discussion of ghosts.
It came up because I mentioned that the
topic of ghosts disrupts our ‘bricks and mortar’ view of the world. I realize
that there are no definitive results from research about ghosts (actually, I
haven’t looked into this recently, so maybe there’s people who AREN’T
crackpots, but I doubt it). However, in my time I’ve spoken to a number of
people who have claimed to have seen ghosts. By and large there’s all sorts of
reasons why I discount them. This said, there are three accounts I don’t discount. Largely because the individuals that tell the stories have nothing to gain by
talking about their encounters and they are reliable individuals that are
honest. I’ll add there are also other accounts where I go, weird, but maybe not
ghosts; difficult to explain.
I won’t go into detail here about the
stories but I recounted them to the group. So, do I discount these people’s
accounts because I simply don’t have room for ghosts in my worldview? Or do I
just quietly accept that, while I don’t have a theory about ghosts, it has to
sit uncomfortably with: these people are sincere, I don’t have an explanation. I don’t WANT to believe in ghosts because it seems ridiculous to me from a
scientific world view, however, I think that position is also in danger of small
mindedness. If I can’t explain something, deny it.
From there, two of the people at the meeting on Sunday night (Week three) spoke
about their experience of night terrors. Both were atheists. One account
sounded like a straight-forward night terror, or alternatively, what might best be described as a demonic
attack. The other, well, the other was fine until he explained that as part of
the night terror a hooded figure next to him took the hood off to reveal a red
headed woman who he met 24 hours later in a pub. Having established she was
not, in fact, stalking him he took all our questions/interrogations. At the end
of it all we were left going, either this guy is lying (and that always has to
be a possibility – except I take his word for it) or there’s no freaking answer
for that particular one.
There is a little confusion on my part
about the reference to Night Terror. Up until this meeting, I thought night
terror was where the person woke up screaming, may get out of bed and even
sleep walk. Both the people who recounted their stories said their experiences
were also classified as night terrors.
Reading up on all this I find that this
doesn’t appear to be the case.
You can check the links for the sites
below, but most of the descriptions of 'night terrors' I read fit in with screaming etc… I did
find one site where they encouraged people to tell their stories. What I found
interesting was that people had vivid encounters with monsters, or demons. This
was very much in keeping with what the people sharing experienced. Is it
possible that these people encountered something supernatural but because they
were atheists, they had no logical explanation other than to go – well, there’s
no spiritual realm, so even though this encounter doesn’t necessarily fit the
‘night terror’ description, it basically was (as they both said) the most
singularly terrifying experience they had had so therefore it was a night
terror.
Update: as part of my further reading about whether there was actually any reputable research about ghosts I came across Henry Stapp. The funny thing about Stapp is he takes us back to the first week where we were discussing consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness; namely, how can you have a physical thing like the brain have a 'non-physical component'. The link I'm putting here is to do with some of his theories about consciousness and free will. He's got a theory that ghosts are something occurring at a quantum level. I had difficulty pinning that one down and unfortunately the sites a search on Henry Stapp + Ghosts leads to your fairly bog standard fringe stuff.
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