Ghosts but Not Patrick Swayze Ghosts
For someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, they've certainly been on my mind a bit.
In the post I made on Wednesday I told the story about when I had hallucinations after my Dad died. I thought I would see him in the corner of my eye sitting in his chair. Once I turned to look he obviously wasn’t there. It was just my brain playing tricks on me, expecting him to be there and doing a double take when he wasn’t.
Also on Wednesday I found myself streaming some lackadaisical gameplay of space exploration game, “No Man’s Sky”. On this playthrough I had set the difficultly to “Relaxed” because I like travelling between the procedurally generated planets and seeing what I can find. I’ve pretty much given up on the “mission”. I don’t want to shoot a space pirate, get hunted by a space cowboy or race against time to protect a space outpost from poisonous space potatoes. I just want to wander. And yes, being procedurally generated it’s always a possibility I will find rocks, flowers and animals which bear more than a passing resemblance to a penis.1
During the stream an old mate of mine called Scott from the stand-up days popped up. Somehow the conversation got onto my post from earlier in the day. That was when Scott mentioned how when I saw my Dad I was seeing ghosts.
Now I knew what Scott meant here. He meant ghosts like memories, or echoes. He didn’t mean Patrick Swayze ghosts.2
Yet anyone can see how this kind of hallucination could easily be called a supernatural event. The day after your Dad dies you see him in the corner of your eye, sitting in his chair and when you turn around he’s gone. You can’t blame anyone who thinks, “That is a Patrick Swayze ghost” as opposed to thinking “My brain is playing tricks on me because I’m expecting him to be there and he isn’t and the old noggin’ can’t quite sort itself out.”
During the stream I then started telling another story but got distracted. I think it was when a storm kicked in during the game and I ended up being thrown about 70 metres into the air and I had to survive though careful use of the jetpack. Whatever it was that distracted me, I didn’t finish the story.
So I’ll finish it now.
A few days after my Dad died I had a rather strange dream. I was in my Mum’s house and the whole immediate family were there. Me, Mum, my brother and sister. The door opened and in walked Dad. Then we took time to say goodbye. I shook his hand, gave him a hug and woke up.
At the time both me and my then girlfriend were really into the whole ghosts thing. She had always had a bit of goth about her and I was smoking a lot of weed. In fact, I was so into it around this time I was fairly certain if I could get to join a ghost hunt somewhere I would have the mystery of the afterlife solved quicker than you can say, “Isn’t that Charles I?”
When I told my then girlfriend about the dream she said, “That was him visiting you.”
Weirdly, even though I was in that world I didn’t believe what she said. I always saw it as my mind just trying to deal with the shock of Dad not being there anymore. Yet that wasn’t the end of my dalliance with trying to solve the afterlife. It continued right into my late 20’s before dropping aside for sceptism and the scientific method. Just like old people seem to drop their leftist ideals as they age I dropped my beliefs in the afterlife.
And just like those old people who dropped their leftist ideals maybe I never really had my beliefs in the afterlife in the first place.
All these thoughts of my Dad, ghosts and beliefs have been swirling around the dome like the storm in No Man’s Sky. And the main thought is “Why, when I was so believing of the supernatural, did I never even entertain the thought that I was seeing a Patrick Swayze ghost?”
And as is common with these thoughts of mine. I don’t have an answer.
I’m talking of a generic penis. Not necessarily my penis or your penis. Although if your penis looks like some of the rocks I’ve seen in No Man’s Sky you should see a doctor.
Although I almost certainly guarantee if he sees this he’ll say, “No, I meant Patrick Swayze ghosts”.