Ghost Stories and the Waking Dream

Fuselli's "Nightmare," inspired by 18th century misunderstandings of sleep paralysis

I love the feeling in the air during this time of year.  The crispness and chill after the warmth of summer reminds us of mortality.  With that comes the hopes and fears of life after death, coupled with the limitless imagination of the human mind.  It’s beautiful, frightening, confusing, and a whole lot of fun.

I’m going to tell some ghost stories.  I’m going to tell as many personal anecdotes as I can.  Despite my personal beliefs on their credibility, I believe that it’s important that certain of these kinds of stories repeat in our culture.  There are important things that can sometimes only be conveyed through the personal anecdote of unverifiable paranormal accounts.

So I was watching the first of these ghost story documentaries that they’ll be playing for the rest of the month.  The formula is pretty standard now.  Tape some people sitting in a dark room, throw some dramatic lighting and the optional odd camera angle, and get them to tell ghost stories.  Meanwhile, actors reenact the events, complete with film-student camera cuts and special effects.  Cue creepy music and suggestive text or narration that pretends to act ‘objective.’

Now, there are a lot of standard stories that you hear on these shows.  I propose that they’re always similar because 1) people hear them a lot already, 2) people tend to make judgments and leaps in logic toward those things they already believe in, and 3) there’s something about the values and beliefs of our culture that bears repeating again and again in similarly coded symbolic interpretations of events (as I said above).

My favorite television show ghost stories are ones that involve children waking up in the middle of the night and seeing something at their bedside.  Creepy in the extreme, surely.  These stories are followed by the child (now an adult) insisting to their parents that what they saw was real and not a dream.  This is usually followed by coincidental experiences after the event that seem to support the idea of a ghostly encounter.  The moral of the story is that children are somehow more attuned to things that adults take for granted (as symbolized by the ’spiritual’ world), perhaps due to their perceived innocence (i.e. lack of full cognitive ability and the talent to blissfully ignore social norms that adults are conditioned into), and that adults should really listen to children more often.

I have a kid of my own, who woke up in the middle of the night last month screaming that there was something in her room.  I ran in there, fueled by parental instinct and ignoring the voice of reason telling me that she was mistaken.  Sure enough, there she was, sitting up in bed in terror, pointing at a stuffed monkey sitting on her bed that she had won at the fair.  We shared a good laugh, but she still ended up sleeping in my bed.

In the words of Bill Cosby, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  My heart sank when I heard her scream, not because I thought there was something there, but because I empathized with her terror.  My childhood was fraught with sleepless nights due to nightly events that would leave me frightened and exhausted.  I spent a lot of time either getting to bed as early as I could, to get as much sleep in as I could before things happened, or staring at the walls, not sleeping at all.  When I would drift off, my eyes would snap open, my heart would pound, and I’d wait for whatever it was to happen.

First, I would wake, but I would be frozen in place.  I would be incredibly drowsy and have a hard time fighting the inevitable return to sleep.  I would be in a panic for seemingly no reason at all.  Worst of all, I was convinced that someone or something was at my bedside, forcing this experience on me.  For some reason, I was trapped, unable to move, while something was there, doing God-knows-what.  Sometimes I was convinced it was a ghost, sometimes a demon, sometimes aliens.

While I was getting used to being used, the events started to take a new turn.  Sometimes I would wake up, not feeling paralyzed, and see things in my room.  I once saw a prison inmate, complete with striped suit and shackled to a ball and chain, crouching in my closet, grinning.  Once, I saw a man in black clothes standing at the foot of my bed, looking at me.  Another time a man and a woman looked at me over their shoulders while I woke up, saw that I had noticed them, and rushed towards me with malicious intent.  Every time I saw these things, they would fade in a few moments.  I started to get so used to seeing them that I would casually discount them.  One night I saw only a floating pair of hands that motioned around like a stage magician, clearly there just to try and scare me.  I yawned and went back to sleep.

I never knew what the hell this all was, but it would happen to me regularly until I was about 22 years old.  I never quite knew if all of this was just in my head, if my soul was in danger, or if I was experiencing some kind of psychic feedback from the alien abductions.  These things weighed on my mind so much through my life that they would of course enter into my dreams.  Nightmares of ghosts, demons, aliens, government experiments, etc. never ended.  Then one night that all changed.

I was sleeping on the lower bunk of my dorm room, alone, after my room mate had dropped out.  I started to wake up, I felt the usual feelings of terror, and I struggled to open my eyes and fight the sensation.  That’s when I saw him walk past my bed:

He walked past my head, looking towards the door.  He stopped, looked down at me for a second, then he moved on.  I woke up as soon as he was out of my field of vision, and I jumped to my feet.  I was alone, of course, except for the big cardboard cut-out of Jason Voorhees that I bought at a video store just two weeks before.  This was the sign from my subconscious that I have been making all of this up myself for years.

When I realized it was just a sleeping disorder, I felt great.  I would still have episodes on occasion (my last one was a few months ago), and the immediate feeling of terror will always come with it, but I started to get a lot more sleep and the problems declined immediately.  I spent the next few weeks looking on the internet for people with similar problems.  Lo and behold, I learned about ’sleep paralysis’ and how it occasionally comes with hallucinations (both visually and audibly – I have had some, but very few, sound hallucinations in this state).

I would encourage anyone who has had childhood imaginings like this (and at least three people I have known have) to look into this.  Alternately, don’t do anything of the kind, and keep spreading ghost stories.  I like to hear them, but please keep them out of science classrooms and academic discourse.  They do not belong there except as examples of contemporary folklore and mythology.  Fascinating!

The Motion Picture of Dorian Gray

I believe now that the war is lost.  The film Dorian Gray that is due in theaters September 9th is perhaps the most offensive thing I’ve ever been accosted with.  Note the title of the film, and watch this trailer:

Did anyone notice something missing?  In the title and in the trailer?  That’s right.  WHERE IS THE PICTURE?  Oscar Wilde’s novel was about the relationship between art, artist, critic, subject, and how the population is affected by artistic movements, particularly the decadent/aesthetic movement of his time.  What happens when you remove or downplay the art aspect of that story?  I can’t tell if the portrait of Dorian Gray is in the movie, but it’s certainly ignored in the trailer in favor of Gray’s personal decadence.

Removing the role of the picture, if not the picture itself, and replacing it with mirror images makes the story focus on the personal, post-modern, self-interpretive, self-subjective, self-interested, selfish trend in art and general media that we’ve seen building for years.  I doubt this is intended as a criticism or social commentary.  Most likely it is a Hollywood response to ‘people don’t want to hear about that art stuff.  Let’s focus on the decadence and the individual.’  In the end, this movie can say, is that there is no real art, or that it doesn’t matter.  Critic and artist are one in the same (with the merging of Basil and Lord Henry into one character, it seems), and their opinion shouldn’t matter to you because they are manipulating you into belief rather than allowing you, the individual, to make decisions on your own.

I have never heard before, in my life, that Dorian Gray’s problems were all because of ‘what Lord Henry did.’  His curse extended from a pledge that he made himself, based on the unpracticed philosophy of Lord Henry and a painting created by Basil Hallward, followed by the choices that Gray made after being linked to the painting as he was.  We’ll see how that all plays out with this new movie, and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

What I expect, though, is another confused ‘message’ being sent out by Hollywood.  They produce a sensationalist movie that gives warning about individuals (the audience) indulging in decadent behavior, all the while giving the audience a means of experiencing that behavior vicariously through the characters in the movie.  And that’s it.  From what I saw in the trailer, if there is a portrait of Gray, it was created by Lord Henry almost in secret, and he’s using it against Gray, or some stupid thing like that.  The entire point of the story is pissed on and thrown right out the window, while at the same time, the movie stands as an unintentional metaphor for the state of Fine Art in the world – all gone, replaced by selfish individualism at the cost of understanding anything outside one’s limited personal experiences.

A New Topic

Here is a partial list of searches that have lead people to this page:

anime,  time travel anime,  badger anime,  anime yearn,  swimming anime girl, anime hands

Let’s change the subject, already.  Here are some possible topics:

1. Crazy conspiracists.  All I can say about this is “woah.”  What boggles my mind the most is the time and effort put into the posts by PaCmAn himself.  Every day he has a new 1500 word essay about something.

2. New Fossil from China lake bed.  The Theory of Evolution remains constant.  This only changes our ideas of where it might have happened.  It is still entirely possible that multiple cases of animal evolution occurred in different places at the same time.  For some reason, people want to believe that evolution is something that happens ONCE to this ONE ORGANISM in order for it to reach some pinnacle of existence (i.e., humans are an inevitable result and that they are somehow ‘better’ or ‘more evolved’).

3. Harold Ramis on Indiana Jones 4, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Batman… oh, and Ghostbusters 3.  “It all looked like the same movie to me, with diferent titles.”  Just awesome.  He echoes (much more diplomatically) the things I have to say about these same issues.  Suck it, Transformers.

Welcome Home, Astronauts

Space shuttle Atlantis landed safely on May 24th at Edwards Air Force Base at 11:39 EDT (10:39 Central).  I wasn’t able to watch the landing because I was preparing for my 9 year-old cousin to spend the entire day with us.  I’m glad to see the mission was successful despite setbacks in landing since Friday.

Welcome home, lady and gentlemen.  It was a noble and daring risk to take in the name of scientific discovery and in the spirit of American exploration.  Kudos.

Sadly, this will be the final shuttle mission to the Hubble space telescope.  After updating the equipment there with cutting-edge technology (which should remain so for about two weeks), NASA has no more plans to bring any of their remaining space shuttles to the telescope.  Presumably, there will be more advanced spacecraft and/or space telescopes developed in the future.

Please visit the NASA homepage for more information on this shuttle mission, as well as info on previous and future missions.  There aren’t many left, (the final missions will be in 2010!) so watch them live on NASA video when you can.

Today, while my cousin was visiting, he found an old, heavy, die-cast metal space shuttle sitting on a shelf.  It’s actually a transformer rip-off (not even a Go-Bot), and despite how unlikely it is that a covert giant robot would choose a space shuttle as its ‘disguise’ form, it was always one of my favorite toys.

People forget how incredibly excited we all were to watch the Challenger mission.  Space shuttle mania had hit the brains of every middle-schooler in the nation.  In 1985, the year before Challenger exploded, NASA had nine shuttle missions, the most ever in one year.  In fact, considering how often these ships have gone up and back, it’s amazing to think of how few accidents there have been.  Out of 126 missions, there have been only two disasters.  That’s pretty incredible, considering we’re firing off 240,000 pounds into space at 17,000 miles per hour.

Ida know…

Talk of the fossil that was discovered in Germany a little while ago is incredibly important to scientific study, but calling it the ‘missing link’ is just a little unnerving.  The problem is that animals taks so very long to evolve from one distinct form into another, and there are many many many transitional forms between them that we just don’t have.  Because of the odds of finding such pristine preservation, the odds of finding each and every form between stages is astronomically small. I don’t have much of a problem with that, considering the forms we do have are remarkably similar and show the transitions nicely.

Here’s the problem: because so many fossils will not be found, fundamentalist groups that doubt the validity of scientific study, particularly evolution, will never be satisfied with the number of finds.  There are already pseudo-scientific creationists out there attacking the discovery of the century (granted, the century is only 9 years old…) in an effort to promote their agenda of spreading ignorance on behalf of their world view. But, maybe I’m just a pessimist, and the creationist community will understand the findings, and stop working against the rest of the human race.

At any rate, I found a creationist opinion on the find, located here, and I’d like to quote the main opposing points, and offer counter-points to them:

…rather than an apeman-like missing link that some media sources have irresponsibly implied, the real story is quite underwhelming and should in no way faze creationists. Let’s first review the facts:

–The well-preserved fossil (95 percent complete, including fossilized fur and more) is about the size of a raccoon and includes a long tail. It resembles the skeleton of a lemur (a small, tailed, tree-climbing primate). The fossildoes not resemble a human skeleton.

–The fossil was found in two parts by amateur fossil hunters in 1983. It eventually made its way through fossil dealers to the research team.

–Ida has opposable thumbs, which the ABC News article states are “similar to humans’ and unlike those found on other modern mammals” (i.e., implying that opposable thumbs are evidence of evolution). Yet lemurs today have opposable thumbs (like all primates). Likewise, Ida has nails, as do other primates. And the talus bone is described as “the same shape as in humans,” despite the fact that there are other differences in the ankle structure.³

–Unlike today’s lemurs (as far as scientists know), Ida lacks the “grooming claw” and a “toothcomb” (a fused row of teeth) In fact, its teeth are more similar to a monkey’s. These are minor differences easily explained by variation within a kind.

1. The skeleton resembles both a lemur and a human, suggesting that the human race evolved from primates much more like lemurs than monkeys.  A brief overview of skeletal and muscular anatomy would clearly show how human-like the fossil is.  To the uneducated, or the ignorant (not the same thing), the skeleton certainly doesn’t ‘look’ human.

2.  The fossil was found in two parts because they had to keep digging to find the rest of it.  But find it they did, and it fits together perfectly.

3. Humans are the only creatures that have OPPOSABLE thumbs.  Not all thumbs are opposable, though many animals (monkeys, raccoons, lemurs, gorillas) have semi-opposable thumbs.  Touch your thumb to the tip of your pinkie finger.  Now, quickly, touch your thumb to the tip of each finger rapidly.  Right.  Only humans can do that.  Fine manipulation is beyond the ability of any other primate.

4. Similar to a monkey’s and not consistent with the lemur group.  This is how we know animals are transitions between species.  Like the platypus.

More information about the fossil can found here, at the National Geographic website.  And here’s a Youtube video for you to enjoy:

Anime still blows

I just saw an ad on Adult Swim for their anime Saturdays and that 20 second hyper-flash clip collection they called a commercial reminded me, in just that brief amount of time, that anime is ridiculously asinine. I used to watch it back in the day because I thought the overblown emotional reactions of every character, and the total lack of consequences for them, was one of the most hilarious things I had ever seen. Why this shit-fest became something respected was beyond me. That is, until emo music got popular, then I realized that this concept is pretty attractive to repressed selfish assholes who only care about their own problems or how the problems of others directly affect them. Blame an internet society, or a lack of beauty and truth in art, or a media concerned with sensationalism over substance, or Joe Quesada for shitting on how comic books are interpreted, both contemporary and classic. I saw the last five minutes of the Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon today, and in the end, Peter Parker almost missed a high school dance where he was supposed to meet Mary Jane, not his actual high-school sweetheart, Gwen Stacy, who Spider-Man accidentally killed later in their relationship. THAT’S RIGHT. Spider-Man killed her. People like to remember Green Goblin being to blame, but that’s only part of the story. It was Spidey’s own arrogance that did it, and HELLS BELLS that was an important part of Spider-Man’s history AS WELL AS comic history. Misunderstanding that, or ‘reinterpreting’ that idea misses the point entirely. We like to see heroes stomp in with no regard for anything other than winning the day, but there was a time when they actually gave a shit about innocent bystanders and BLAMED THEMSELVES when they failed. Add that complaint to the reasons why Batman Begins blew baboon balls, while we’re at it.

UFO vs. Windmill: CNN’s expert reporting strikes again

Here we go again. CNN doing their damndest to avoid actual reporting in favor of promoting sensationalism, superstition and stupidity.

I found in a blog attached to CNN that a real explanation was given by authorities: the thing just snapped apart. I can’t find this guy’s source, but it sounds like these kinds of things happen all the time. Things break when under stressful conditions. Or, as John Bender would say “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.” But no, people jump to conclusions based on several factors:
1. Lack of reasoning skills, both deductive and inductive
2. Irrational faith in the physical products of mankind
3. Inexperience
4. Beliefs bordering on religious fervor, wanting to believe in ’something else out there’
5. Sheer ignorance

And CNN won’t report “oh, it wasn’t a UFO after all. It was just mechanical failure based on a faulty part and bad weather conditions.” No, they’ll let the UFO story stand and promote ignorance among the population. Thanks, CNN, for making everyone stupider.

…the season is upon us.

Eggnog done did me wrong, I tells ya. Them there milk chug 1 pint eggnogs ain’t meant to be drank all at once. I’m sick just in time for turkey day. Maybe it had something to do with it being ULTIMATE Egg Nog!! As in the last dose of eggnog I’ll drink this year. Somebody call a doctor. And tell him that when the word ‘ultimate’ shows up on eggnog cartons, it’s time to stop using that word.

Hipsters are douchebags

Appaling to all five senses (decency, style, humor, accomplishment, and ethics), I can no longer abide hipsters. Those who know me have heard my diatribes against modern hippies (useless, ignorant, selfish and an insult to the social movements of the 60s), but the modern hipster is quickly replacing them as Aardvark’s Hated Enemy #1.

My biggest pet peeve is the misuse of the word ‘ironic’. I’ll admit to being in high school and college during the 90s. I’ll admit to giving Alanis Morissete a few props. But that stopped with that “Ironic” song that didn’t include one irony in it. As for hipsters, every time I hear or see something done ‘ironically’ I throw up in my mouth a little. Doing something that makes you look like a jackass, even if you know you look like a jackass, does not make you trendy. It makes you a jackass. You see, irony requires a perspective from someone not directly involved in the ironic action, i.e. a viewer or audience. The only irony in someone doing something ‘ironically’ is from the perspective of someone like myself, who knows the definition, and can say ‘that guy wearing a trucker cap because he thinks truckers are jackasses is truly the jackass.’

Back when I was kicking heels at ska shows, as the scene was slowly dying from the inundation of pink-haired Gwen clones and kids who first saw the BossTones on MTV, those of us who were old enough to shave and remember better times would comment on the shittiness of people who adopted a cultural identity based on image alone. Much like the kids who bought their concert t-shirts online instead of at a concert (here’s a tip: neither Rancid nor the Misfits are together anymore – a sure sign of a trendy fuck), hipsters lack substance. Everything they have is appropriated from other scenes, and have been stripped of their meaning. Pre-faded t-shirts, Buddy Holly glasses, and fucking tweed indicate a lack of understanding of the world rivaled only their uselessness.

Back when ‘alternative’ was getting popular, I coined the phrase ‘conformity to nonconformity.’ I was struck by an advertisement in Spin magazine (the leaders in nonconformist conformity) with a giant picture of some guy with piercings all over his face. The caption read ‘EXPRESS YOUR INDIVIDUALITY.’ In other words, in order to be an indivvidual, you have to be just like this guy. So the idea of doing things just because they’re ‘different’ is absurd to me, especially when everyone is doing the same thing. These hipster assholes are the worse than corporate execs in their shallowness and image-based ethic.

All these things I can almost forgive. What I can’t forgive is how that attitude carries over into the rest of the culture. When a word like ‘meh’ finds its way into the dictionary, you can bet a hipster is the cause of it. They revel in finding things that are impractical, meaningless, or purposeless and trying to convince everyone else how important they are. Psychologically, this is just an extension of themselves. Filled with their own uselessness, they yearn for meaning. The only way they can find that meaning is by manufacturing it in other useless things. And those poor, pathetic bastards are the ones making their scratch online, so those are the inane views that make it into the news stories looking for something ‘cutting edge.’ Idiots.

(A side note: Because the above video is a short version of the commercial and left out the line about the beret, here’s another video…)

…and Papa said, “Go forth and cast thy rod…”

Last night, I had a vision.  Papa Hemingway came to me in the midst of my detestable sloth, and spoke unto me:

“Look at you.  Pathetic.  You’ve spent the entire Summer sitting on your ass on the couch stone cold sober, when you could have been drunk off your ass in a fishing boat . . . in the rain.”

I looked upon him with bleary eyes, made crossed by the flashing of late-night infomercials, and repented.  Papa then spake thusly:

“This is your last weekend before you have to go back to thinking.  Get out there and gut a fish.  Like a man.  In the rain.”

And when I awoke, and saw Bassmasters at 4am before me, I knew the vision to be true.

So it was said, and so it has been written.  This weekend I go to Lynxsville with my father, get in touch with my Inner Hemmingway, and sit on an old broken down pier hanging over the Mississip’, Hubbard’s Fishing Float and Cafe.  There will be much drinking of fermented barley and hops, and consuming of cheese sandwiches.  And we will return victorious, many walleye and pike strung in buckets too small in the back of the Chevy pick-up.

In the rain.