One night I saw a ghost.

Click bait! I don’t actually believe that ghosts are a thing, so what I actually saw was a hallucination, which is much scarier to me than a ghost because it’s a stark reminder that my brain can, at any time, up and make shit appear that isn’t actually there; things that I can’t discern from reality… and I sure do hate that a lot.

Anyway, back to the story…

I toss and turn a lot when I’m sleeping. A few months ago, I turned onto my left side and I briefly opened my eyes. The room was dark except for a dim light from the closet. It was probably somewhere around 4AM. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, both eyes widened, and I saw the silhouette of my wife walking towards our master bathroom. As she passed in front of me, I saw her skin and her hair. She stopped in the doorway and stood still, lingering just long enough to activate my uncanny valley response. There was no reason for her to stop and linger like that.

Then, she began walking again. Normally, this would be where she just disappears into the bathroom and closes the door behind her, and I see the crack at the bottom of the door glow yellow as she flips on the light switch. That didn’t happen. Instead, after three of four steps into the bathroom, she evaporated into thin air. Then, I quickly turned over and saw her still laying in bed next to me.

It was a jarring experience. I’ve never really hallucinated before; certainly not a fully formed human being with the same features and gait as my wife. Maybe a spider on the wall here or there as I’m falling asleep, sure, but never a fully formed apparition.

It was likely just the remnants of my REM cycle spinning down more slowly than it should have. But even though it wasn’t a supernatural event, it was incredibly strange and I can now definitely understand how some people can convince themselves, and others, that they’ve seen something supernatural.

After all, people with schizophrenia experience things like this all of the time. The building blocks are sitting there in our brains, dormant for most, and just waiting to wreck the notion that reality is stable. Was it just a double exposed memory?

My main takeaway from the encounter was that my brain can apparently project perfect illusions into four dimensional space that I cannot discern from reality, and then it can take them away. Of course, I knew the human brain had this power prior to experiencing it first hand, but it did actually make a big difference to be tricked by it in real time.

What’s to stop the rest of reality from evaporating, too? If I suddenly lost all of my senses, would I experience the same hallucination in the same way, and at the same time? Let’s think about this…

She walked around our bed — her lower half wasn’t visible at all until she rounded the corner — and then into a doorway, and then into the bathroom. The hallucination was interacting with the objects in my field of view. The hallucination obeyed the laws of physics. Her hair was swaying with her movement — the hallucinated hair had mass and was affected by gravity.

Was I hallucinating the scene as well, or just the figure? Was it an overlay? When you’re looking at a sunlit object at noon and suddenly close your eyes, you can see the still frame of the last thing you saw, as if burned into your retinas for a few moments. Was it that same mechanism painting our master bedroom into a dream?

I suppose that’s what a memory is? By the way, I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t studied memory, so this is about to piss off people who actually know how memories work! My one qaurrel (not really) with science is that if I know too much about a given topic, I’m robbed of being able to wonder aloud, and that’s one of my favorite things to do. So no, I will not look up how this actually works!

I digress…

If the hallucination was simply the projection of a memory into four dimensional space, then even if I lost my senses, nothing would change. The memory was a snapshot that was already taken. Even if the entire layout of our master bedroom changed right after I lost all of my senses, then I suspect that I would experience the exact same hallucination. If… it was a full-on memory being replayed.

I was laying on my side. So, if it was a memory, my view of reality was 90 degrees different than it would be if I were standing. The memory must have been a snapshot from that exact spot that I was laying in. But if that’s true, when the ghost evaporated into thin air, why was the bathroom door in the exact same position? In fact, nothing in the room was different when the hallucination faded after I had been startled and fully awakened. It was a perfect transition from the hallucination back into my waking reality.

If my hallucination was actually memory being replayed in a dream, then the setting — my master bedroom — must have been the real time scene’s backdrop that my eyes were now consciously processing. The figure I saw — my wife — must have been a projection of an older memory, but with the background keyed out like some kind of double exposure — a dreamed object playing over a backdrop of reality. But what about the variables?

I sleep with a fan on. I can’t sleep without the white noise and I feel uncomfortable if the air in the bedroom is too still. In my memory of this hallucination, her hair wasn’t really moving that much other than with the sway of her hips as she walked. She was being tugged down by gravity, but I can’t remember if the fan was hitting her hair.

If her individual strands of hair were interacting with the air current, then her projected form couldn’t have been a memory. The movement of the air, and how it interacted with individual strands of hair, would be too many variables to be written into a perfect memory. I just can’t remember if the ends of her hair were dancing in the wind or not.

If they were, then that would open up an entirely new can of worms… which sounds fun! So, let’s say that the ends of her hair were twisting in the wind of my fan. Is it all just static?

If her hair was moving, then it wasn’t just a double exposed memory of my wife creeping across reality, but instead, it may have been a perfect projection of a stored memory. But from what?

The thing I just wrote is confusing as hell, maybe. What I mean is the difference between watching a movie that has been captured on film by a camera, versus hand-drawing each frame of the scene myself. A film is one thing and perfectly recapturing the movement of my wife’s hair dancing in the wind of our bedroom fan — down to the strand — is another.

It couldn’t have been my own brain creating (hallucinating) my wife and the scene at the same time, could it? To create that figure and place it into reality, my brain would have to process all of the physics itself. Billions — trillions? more? — of moving atoms. It would have to calculate and recalculate, redraw, each frame as the variables in the room shifted. It would have to create the sound of my fan. It would have to obey the laws of gravity and time.

When I hallucinate, is my brain recreating time, too? The ghost. My fan. When the ghost walked, she didn’t look any slower or faster than she should have. Her steps looks exactly as they should have. The whir of the fan sounded exactly how it always has. Was I hearing the fan as it spun in reality, was I looking at a pre-recorded video, or was my brain “drawing” the sound?

There was a light coming from our closet and dimly lighting the room. Was my brain creating that light and the speed it was traveling at? The hallucination was lit exactly how she should have been. It looked real.

It doesn’t make sense and it seems inefficient. Can a hallucination be an ad-hoc creation of my brain? It can’t know all of the physics, can it? How light interacts with the environment, the vibrations of sound, and how that all interacts with time. Wouldn’t it have to be a projection of moving images overlaid on a memorized backdrop?

Do I have an inherent sense of reality? Are the rules of physics hard-coded into my brain somewhere, so that my brain knows how to create perfect hallucinations that interact with the real environment if they need to? What would be the point of that? All the world is a stage.

It seems more plausible, to my unscientific monkey mind, that my brain is just interpreting the signals of projections from an external source. All of the work is being done externally and instead of my brain filling my field of view with projections itself, my field of view is actually a cacophony of signals being interpreted by my brain and organized into reality — like a collage.

That reality is the stage, the lighting, the cameras — and my brain is the television. It can only interpret the radio waves over the air, and but it can’t change them.

Perhaps my hallucination was like a CCTV feed that only I could see, and it was briefly overpowering the signal from outer reality — the one we all share. Perhaps it was a previous broadcast stored in my memory, being rerun as I was sleeping? Was one part of my brain replaying the broadcast while another part was waking me up — were they out of sync? Maybe what I saw was supposed to be a dream? Maybe something akin to deja vu?

And when that rebroadcast ended shortly after I had woken up, my brain picked up the signal from our shared reality again, dropping me right back into this plain and boring world, like a wave lapping onto shore, and back out again; the sand went frothy briefly, but then as the water absorbed back into it, everything looked as it had before — everything in its right place. So where’s the broadcast coming from?

Seeing a “ghost” made me question reality directly. I had thought about the possibility that we live in a simulation before, but after seeing the ghost and thinking through all that actually entails, I am more convinced than I have ever been that I am living in some kind of a computer program.

Does that matter? Not really. This is still my reality. My views about religion haven’t changed. My outlook on life hasn’t changed. I was the same person after she evaporated into thin air that I was before that happened. I’m just a little more curious, and that’s kind of the point, I guess. Life keeps on keeping on.

It doesn’t make me question who I am, but it does make me question who you are more than I ever have. It’s plausible that you don’t exist, reader. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but now I do believe that I can be completely fooled whenever my brain is properly motivated to do so. That’s a little scary, but I guess it’s no scarier than anything else that can crumble in front of me at a moments’ notice.

I’m just glad the ghost didn’t talk to me. As it stands, all I saw was like a little movie playing. I’m glad I didn’t tell the ghost that I loved her as she walked by. Imagine if she looked at me and said, “I love you, too.”

The fourth wall remaining in tact is safer for my overall sanity. In fact, that fourth wall is probably the difference between sanity and insanity, and I got a little too close for comfort. I also feel much more sympathy for people forced to see or hear hallucinations all day. It’s not fun to question what is and isn’t real, if even for a moment.