I've never believed in ghosts and used to think ghosts were explained by the usual suspects:
1 People in white sheets play pranks.
2 Miss a night's sleep and you are open to suggestion.
3 Trees backlit by street lights cause shadows on the bedroom wall.
4 After somebody dies you keep seeing them, wishful thinking.
Sight and miss-sight
But now there's a sensible explanation.
I had read about this just after my late father's death. He was an optician. I scanned through all the copies of optical journals he'd saved because I knew he was not a saver so I thought they might have something vital.
One of the journals had an obituary of a friend of his.
Another had an article on macular degeneration being a suspect you test for if a patient confesses to seeing worrying images.
If I remember the article correctly, it suggested that large heads and large hats might be caused by blurred after-images or negative images, especially if you sees white light in darkness with a silhouetted of a person or tall object and then turn to the light, you see the reverse.
But now, out in the daily newspapers, to reassure everyone, are accounts of sensible people suffering from Charles Bonnet syndrome. Another theory. With a useful name, giving it an air of scientific credibility.
Add on this new theory. That when you have a blank in the middle of a picture, caused by deterioration of the eye, your brain tries to fill the blank with familiar images.
The eye and brain are amazing. You know if you acquire bifocals, invented by American Benjamin Franklin, or trifocals, you may have difficulty seeing through them.
However, if you persist, as I did, some time between three days and a week, you will find you automatically adjust.
Let's go back to the question of the relationship between eyes sending messages to your brain, and ghost-like images, interpreted as ghosts.
The trick to confidence and control in life is to attempt to acquire knowledge from checked sources, and not to allow yourself to believe that weird forces are performing spiteful or unpredictable random acts.
Science analyses theories. Takes all possible causes. Checks whether a causes b, b causes a, or both a and b are caused by c. Can c be reproduced in a laboratory, observed by more than one person, recorded for all to see, not just hearsay from one person. Can the experiment be repeated, after other causes are eliminated.
Most of nature and science follows regular patterns. If you find a regular problem, a pattern, persist long enough until you find the pattern which provides the answer. That's what I learned today.
Simple. Macular degeneration and after images create blurred or remembered images.
I checked on Wikipedia under Macular Degeneration for an image.
| A scene as it might be viewed by a person with age-related macular degeneration. | |
| Source | http://www.nei.nih.gov/photo/keyword.asp?narrow=Eye+Disease+Simulation&match=all (TIFF image) |
| Author | National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health |
I dream of my dead parents. But when I wake I cannot reproduce these images. I cannot show them to anybody else. I cannot resurrect the same image the next day. Nobody else has seen what I dreamed of in the night. I had a dream, a night dream, a day dream. If you like, a ghost.
Useful Websites
UK National Health Service On Causes and Cures For Images or Hallucinations
Wiki on Macular Degeneration with images and links to text sources
The Sight seen by the eye and other images with USA origin details
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_disease_simulation,_age-related_macular_degeneration.jpg
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