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shyscyberchamber.com
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GHOSTS |
Date
Added |
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All in the Mind |
January 2003 |
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The most common type of
apparition is what is called the bedroom visitor. This immediately
suggests a possible solution. For if ghosts tend to occur as we wake
from sleep, how can we be sure that we really do wake? Might they not
simply be dreams or visionary experiences which we wrongly interpret
as events?
Hypnagogic experiences are well know to psychologists. They occur in
about two-thirds of people as they slip from waking consciousness into
sleep. Common among these so called hallucinations are images of
faces. They are transient things usually swallowed up by a period of
unconsciousness so few of us retain any memory of the phenomenon
unless special efforts are made by psychologists to study this
imagery. They do this by waking the subject as soon as their brain
wave patterns suggest they are seeing an image and asking what it was
that they visualized.
It is thought possible that some 'bedroom visitor' ghosts occur when a
frightening image is so vivid that it propels the person into sudden
wakefulness and they then retain memory of what was an hallucination.
They then falsely, but understandably, assume that what they saw was a
real encounter with an apparition.
However, while this idea may well work in some cases it struggles to
explain those where the vision seems to be confirmed by other
evidence. How could a hypnagogic hallucination be of a former occupant
of a house that the person undergoing the hallucination has never seen
or heard about? Certainly it seems likely that all apparitions or
'bedroom visitor' experiences happen while the witness is in an
altered state of consciousness and may even be completely visionary in
nature. But this by itself does not account for the source of the
image in the first place.
Studies have also been made into other forms of recurrent imagery,
associated with schizophrenia. There is strong evidence that
apparitional experiences seen in such circumstances are similar to
those witnessed by people ho are not schizophrenic and merely have a
one-off ghost encounter. It seems unlikely that ghostly witnesses are
closet schizophrenics. More probably both share some process in the
brain.
In March 1979, a teenage girl had a typical 'bedroom visitor'
experience of a small figure with penetrating eyes that entered her
bedroom in Shipley, West Yorkshire. She heard the floor boards creak
as the figure moved closer, then it disappeared.
The interesting difference here is that Nina was an epileptic and she
was in the middle of a seizure at the time. Epilepsy is somewhat like
an electrical storm within the brain which in other circumstances and
with non-epileptic witnesses also leads to an apparitional experience.
Dr Wilder Penfield, a neurologist, found something odd during brain
surgery, which can be carried out while the patient is conscious as no
pain is experienced. If a certain neural pathway was accidentally
touched they could suddenly experience an all senses action replay of
a fleeting image. Frequently the patient was unable to locate this as
anything specific. It seemed very odd, almost visionary.
Presumably it was one of the trillions of memory bits believed to be
stored in the huge network of electro-chemical circuits that make up
the brain, most of which are not accessible to our conscious recall.
If the same process can occur during an apparitional experience then
perhaps the ghost is sometimes nothing but a stimulated vision created
out of a momentary short circuit taking place within the brain. |
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