Singular Cerebrations: An Aptitude for Apparitions

I've seen and experienced weird things my entire life, and I often question the circumstances and meanings of these events.  While I've never had an experience with any shadowy entity as harrowing as the one described in Part of the Darkness Is Darker Than the Rest, I do continue to see human-sized shadows flit occasionally across my field of vision.  I'm certain that some of them can be explained as brief hallucinations or an unusually eerie, but otherwise mundane, shadow; but there are many that can't, and I've covered most of them thoroughly over the years.  So today I'm going to talk about apparitions.

I've been seeing people that aren't there; or, at least not there in what we might consider an objective materialist way.  I've seen people in this state for much of my life.  As a young man I would notice people walking down the street who would suddenly vanish, and this trend continues today.  I was out walking my dog the other day when I noticed a fairly banal-looking middle-aged woman across the street.  She had short, brown hair done in a perm, glasses, and was wearing a white sweatshirt and bluejeans.  This is not in-and-of-itself unusual.  Things only got weird when she suddenly disappeared.  I watched her for the span of maybe three seconds or so before she was gone, and nothing other than her sudden disappearance seemed odd about her in any way.  And yet here I am having apparently witnessed the impossible in the form of a phantom frumpy housewife.  

Basically this, but wearing a white sweatshirt and bluejeans, and 1000% more inexplicable.

Basically this, but wearing a white sweatshirt and bluejeans, and 1000% more inexplicable.

This sort of thing has been happening quite a bit since we moved, and I can't seem to wrap my mind around why.  The other day Bullett--he's the dog you see all the time if we're friends on Facebook--and I were sure a small, white dog lunged at us from out of the bushes while we were enjoying our afternoon constitutional.  Before I could even guess its breed it was gone, apparently as ephemeral as our earlier ghostly guest.  Bullett looked and jumped at the same time I did, which makes me wonder under what medium these visions appear.  If they're all in my head, then why did the dog seem to see it?  Was he simply reacting to something to which he perceived I was reacting?  If so, he did it awfully quick, since he seemed to do it at the same time or even a little before I did.

So what are these strange visions when they appear?  Why do we sometimes see visions of people who just as quickly vanish?  Are these merely hallucinations?  If so, why are they so detailed?  I've seen shadows move out of the corner of my eye, or briefly mistaken a lamp for a person in the dark before.  It's pretty apparent when that's the explanation.  Are these the spirits of the dead?  If that's the case, what a terrible afterlife; doomed to walk the streets of my--honestly pretty cool, but not infinitely so--neighborhood for eternity.  What about parallel universes?  Is it possible that some part of our consciousness is non-local, and can tap into places and events far beyond that of our other senses--even reaching across into other universes that run concurrently to our own?  I don't know, honestly.  It's a wild idea, but, then again, it's not exactly impossible.

Yours in Impossibility,

Tobias

Tobias & Emily WaylandSingular Cerebrations