Notes from Maine - 2020/08/07
I’ve never seen a ghost—not that I recognized at the time, at least. One time, in this house, my friend and I both saw a woman on the stairs. It was a flash of color, and nothing more. We both interpreted it as a woman, but it was probably just a reflected light from a passing car or something. Our brains are wired to find patterns in brief glimpses. I’m pretty sure that’s all that happened. In the same way, I saw a man in a tuxedo once in my cellar. Just a shape turned into a vision.
When I was a little kid, three or four I think, I remember staring at a water stain in the sink. I figured that someone had poured something rust-colored there, and that’s why the white sink was brownish-red at that spot. Reaching out a tiny finger to touch the stain, a new idea occurred to me. The stain was from the dripping water, falling from the faucet over a long period of time. There must be something in the water that I couldn’t see that, over time, left rust stains on white enamel.
The origin of the rust stain was a weird thing to realize, but even stranger was the way in which I realized it. A new voice came awake in my head and I explained this idea to myself. To this day, I’m convinced that it was the very moment in which the inner-voice of my conscious mind woke up and started thinking aloud. Before that, I lived completely in the moment. Cause and effect weren’t real things that I could predict. After that, it seemed like realizations came constantly.
Soon after, I understood the difference between the black & white and color TVs. Those were terms that I had heard, but the gray tones of the black & white didn’t really seem all that different to me. I also learned the difference between drawings and photographs. It took me a couple more years to start to recognize logos for the objects they represented.
Like describing dreams, I’m sure these stories are only interesting to the person who has them.
The American Psychological Association has a list of cognitive and social skills to expect from ages 3 to 5. Some of them are fascinating. Here are a few that describe the things I’m talking about:
* Can think about objects, people and events without seeing them.
* Can think of events in the past or those yet to happen.
* Starting to see the difference between things they see and what they really are (a stuffed dog is not a dog).
* Starting to see the relationship of cause and effect (If I do this, then that will happen).
So, before the rust stain realization, I had an imaginary friend. I think his name was Shad. He liked to spin around and he liked it when I joined him. Shad was very small and very real to me, although he wasn’t always around. That’s my adult (ha!) brain’s interpretation, at least. We have to assume that this was before I could think of people and objects without seeing them. I was unable to think of events in the past or yet to happen. I couldn’t tell the difference between a stuffed dog and a dog. So, when I say that I’ve never seen a ghost I can’t really be sure. The dawn of conscious thought erased a lot of experiences because I began to interpret things in the framework that my brain invented to explain the world. I still live under those constraints.
