Personal experiences with ghosts

[dknightx]

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It seems like a lot of these "experiences" seem to take place when people are in bed, half asleep, or just waking up. Could it be that these are figments of the subconscious, which, as we all know, are quite active when we are in bed?


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...exactly. Nobody ever sees a ghost when they're sitting around watching TV.

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not saying im a believer (nothing has ever happened to me or someone i know), but it may be possible that the brain is not in a state that can see or hear "ghosts" unless you are in a state of about to sleep or just awaking from sleep. when you are wide awake, there may be too much other stimili to actually see ghosts.

[challenger84]

I'll take the side of Occam's Razor on that one.

[Klompy]

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It seems like a lot of these "experiences" seem to take place when people are in bed, half asleep, or just waking up. Could it be that these are figments of the subconscious, which, as we all know, are quite active when we are in bed?


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...exactly. Nobody ever sees a ghost when they're sitting around watching TV.

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I do agree that it does discredit most stories that the people aren't awake, but I don't think that means all of them are fake. The few other things I've had happen have all been while wide awake.

I was writing a paper on the lord of the flies, and as soon as I wrote the title the space heater that was behind me slammed against the wall beside me. It had to move ~3 feet to do this and was moved with quite a bit of force. then the power to the house went out.

I'm not here trying to convince anybody though, it's really one of those things that I wouldn't believe either if I hadn't had a few things happen.

[Blarg]

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the big prob with these visions is most happen directly before falling asleep or directly after waking up. At these times the brain can be thinking of numerous things and it is hard to decifer reality and imagination.

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This is very true. The hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, I think they're called? You are extremely suggestible during those times.

Once I was falling asleep after lunch and had a newspaper unfolded in both hands that I had been reading. It covered my field of vision basically. Suddenly it lurches up into my face with a loud smacking sound and my guts absolutely writhed in some kind of crazy primal fear. I experienced it as stark terror. My friend, who had snuck up and smacked the middle of the paper loudly, was amazed to see me recoil as if I were facing death itself. I mean fercrissake! But I was in that hypnagogic state where anything can be taken almost any way, and terrifically exaggerated. If I were fully awake, or fully asleep, at most it would have been a bit of a jump. But because I was between both, my defenses were not just down but non-existent, ordinary things could get ramped up to nightmare, and I looked and felt as if I were gonna die or something. Way way too deep a response.

We're not always as conscious as we think we are. Sometimes -- some very very ordinary times -- our perceptions can do the oddest things.

[Blarg]

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It seems like a lot of these "experiences" seem to take place when people are in bed, half asleep, or just waking up. Could it be that these are figments of the subconscious, which, as we all know, are quite active when we are in bed?

I have had plenty of dreams that seem to carry over into the first few moments of me waking up. I have never confused them for supernatural beings though.

Before you conclude that you saw a ghost, doesn't it at some point register how improbable this is, from a scientific proof standpoint?

I think at the end of the day, people want to believe the fantastic? It's impossible that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, ghosts exist, etc. Life would be too boring otherwise.

Bottom line- if ghosts exist, and are so rampant, why is there absolutely no evidence of this that holds up against any sort of scientific testing?

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People are pattern-making machines. We see patterns everywhere. It's one of the ways we can instantly make so much sense of our world and its kaleidoscope of stimuli. When something strange happens in the dark, there's always a temptation to create a story to go with it. Sometimes it's a ghost story.

After all, how many times, for how many hours, over the course of a lifetime, do we spend in the dark, deprived of our full sensory abilities, vulnerable even if only in some small part of ourselves to our childish fears and curiosity? Surely out of all that time, with the idea of ghosts already a part of our common culture, the random creaking of a settling house, rustling of leaves, moaning of wind through the trees, or a clutch of such things all together, is at least once going to seem a little too perfectly eerie to be random. Even if the idea is then quickly dismissed. We've all got the opportunity to connect the dots given to us constantly. Our minds WANT to see a picture. Once in a while, it's probably our nature to see one.

[catalyst]

there's no such thing as ghosts. seriously.

[LonesomeFugitive]

as we are nearing the end of this age the veil is lifting. What separates us from the spirit world is slowly fading away. Reports of supernatural phenomena have been increasing (like ghost sightings etc) but what about demonic possession? one of the top exorcists in the USA from the church says that according to stats demonic possessions have gone up 1000% in like a decade in the USA alone.

It is only a reflection of the evil that is everywhere.

[spyderracing]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror

[/ QUOTE ] I was sleeping over at a friends when I was like 9, and at the time I was terrified of ghosts. Turned out my friend suffered from night terrors and woke up in the middle of the night screaming "get them away from me!" for like 15 mins. Scared the [censored] out of me at the time.

[Lozang]

This ones a little different.

Several years ago my brother had to have a titanium rod bolted to his spine because it was bending out of shape. While he was having the surgery I was staying at a camp site in an old wooden shack 10 kms away from the nearest town and completely isolated. I had no power or a phone to find out how the surgery went. I went to sleep obviously worried about my brother. When I wake up in the morning. I'm staring at a large carving of my brothers name and some strange symbols above it carved into the wall of the shack. After that I think I must have sleep walked and carved it or something.

The only problem was, it wasn't just scratchings but an artistic rendering that is beyond my skill in creating. With no wood shavings around and no tools to do it, not even cutlery. I also didn't know what the symbols meant. I decide not to stay another night. I go back that afternoon to make sure I wasn't hallucinating and copy down the symbols.

I have a friend who studied old languages. He says one of them was an ancient sanskrit symbol for protection but couldn't identify the others.

I really have no logical explanation for this. If I did somehow do it myself which is most plausible than the mind is quite an extraordinary thing itself.

My brother was fine by the way.

On a psychic related note I travelled to the himalayas where I talked to some old monks who had spent a lot of their lives meditating in caves. One of them related to me an event in my life where I had done something stupid and told me not to do that again. I have never told a soul about that event and it was very specific. Another oddity is that whenever he was talking and I thought of a question I wanted to ask him. He would stop and answer specifically my question before I said anything. It really freaked me out after a while. A large number of other strange things occurred after that when I stayed but I could put them all down to coincidence.

If he was cold reading then he beats anyone I've ever seen hands down, because we talked through a translator who would translate like 30sec chunks so I couldn't react while he was talking and I didn't volunteer any information apart from my name when I met him.

[Magellan]

I have never witnessed anything that I would describe as a ghost nor do I know anyone that has.

That said, given how bizarre our very existence is I'm kinda surprised that so many people here absolutely discredit the existence of "ghosts". I mean, whatever your perspective on the big picture there is so much we just can't comprehend right now that I find it hard to completely write off the possibility of, for one example, "ghosts". As we attempt to gain an understanding of the nature of our own existence and try to work out just what the hell is going on in the universe we are bound to stumble upon things that blow our minds. Things we would have previously thought ridiculous, no? Imagine you were the one many moons ago who had just invented the wheel and you showed it to a friend who communicated "that's pretty cool, I'm working on this project to build what I'm gonna call a television, it works by.......". You, having just come up with a radical invention yourself, would've been off to check on your shroom stash, convinced that this guy had just raided it. Yet here we are many moons later and the television is pretty unremarkable in the scheme of things.

Some of the reasons being put forward here to explain strange occurrences are good and have merit, particularly in relation to people who are in near-sleep states. But, while they may very well be the correct explanation, they certainly don't prove that what has happened wasn't a paranormal event. The scientific models we use to describe and predict our surroundings are constantly evolving and may one day effortlessly incorporate a definition of a "ghost". Also, some of these stories relate to people who were wide awake and are much harder to discount (without assuming the person recounting the event is delusional etc., of course).

Now this isn't a topic I normally spend much time contemplating and I'm not saying I assign a particularly high probability to the existence of ghosts being true. It's just that I've yet to see someone prove that they don't exist and apart from how strange a concept it is, I have no reason to doubt that they do.

I fully acknowledge the can of worms that my line of reasoning opens up but I think that anyone giving this topic reasonable consideration can distinguish between what is being proposed here and other hypotheticals that are "yet to be disproved".