[Nono]

It beats me, knowing the vagaries of human consciousness and the effect on mine of this or that substance (such as booze), how anyone can have any positive convictions on the matter at all.

Here, for what they are worth, are a coupla anecdotes.

1) When my mother became pregnant with my little brother, she got hell from her surgeon on the grounds of catastrophic varicose veins in her legs that he'd tried to fix without success. He urged a therapeutic abortion, which my mother -- a stern anti-abortionist -- refused. Well, she consulted her obstetrician who worked something out with her surgeon.

Anyway, on the day she learned about all this she dropped by to see her own mother, who was dying of kidney disease. Gave her a back rub, during which her (my mother's) hair almost stood on end when she saw her dead father smiling ironically at her from a bedside photo of him, one I've seen many times -- there's no expression on his face at all.

Later that day she (a) leaned that her mother had just died and (b) got the go-ahead for taking the pregnancy to term. My brother was duly born, and a couple of years later toddled into the room to announce to her in a matter-of-fact voice that he'd once been her father. He proceeded to tell her things about herself that he couldn't possibly have known. He also told her that our house -- my mother had grown up just down the street from it -- had once been green (it had been repainted another colour many-many years before). She says she questioned us other three kids, all older, about this, and we knew nothing at all about it. So how could he?

My mother -- raised as a strict Presbyterian (as were we all in our family, God help us) -- spent decades not telling a soul this story for fear of ridicule, or worse. Only recently did she spill the beans.

So I said to my brother "I hear you were once X (our grandfather)." He -- an ultra-rationalist automotive type of guy -- replied "All I can say is that, for whatever reason, I remember this house as green."

2) A lifelong friend of mine, of no fixed metaphysical convictions, is into local politics -- knows a lot of people. One couple (whom he describes as ultra-conventional, unimaginative, money-grubbing yuppies) got a good deal on a beautiful old house in the area. He knows both of them well. When he drove past and saw a for-sale sign, he stopped in to express his surprise and ask what was up. "It's haunted", they replied bluntly. "We see her almost every night."

He says such a notion is so radically out of character with them that it has given him serious pause.

Well they were apparently seeing some sort of apparition, that seems certain. And they couldn't stand it. Exactly what that means I couldn't say. But it suggests that reality may not be all it's cracked up to be.