Imagine that you are trying to fall asleep. Curled up peacefully in bed next to your loved one and slowly drifting, when suddenly you feel someone lay down behind you and whisper “move over a bit, you don’t need to leave room for that guy.” What would you do? Me, I panicked. I tried to move away from the “being” and scream for my boyfriend to wake-up but he didn’t seem to hear me. What was going on? Why couldn’t he hear me? Couldn’t he feel me struggling next to him in the bed. Several minutes later, my boyfriend finally wakes up enough to say “are you still cold?” My first thought is “WTF! Am I cold?! There is a ghost in our bed and you want to know if I’m cold?”
After about an hour of hyper-vigilance awaiting the spirit to pop his head over the side of the bed, I somehow fall back asleep. The next morning, I let my paranormal friends know what happened and they were more than willing to share their thoughts. Some suggestions included sleep paralysis, night terrors, mercury retrograde, the energy change from the summer solstice, and something having to do with a photo I posted last week of a slice of bread sitting on my windowsill. (The latter was explained as a means for a person wanting to work hoodoo to distract my guardian spirits and thus when my spirits were distracted, badness could be done to me). So, during my run that day, I started to think about these theories and how I would go about proving or disproving them. As a side note, thinking about experimental design is a great way to focus your brain on something other than the pain of exercise.
I will admit to immediately rejecting the hoodoo idea as I couldn’t even form a way to test this other than to ask my medium friends if someone was pissed off with me. Being stuck at home for the last several months made it pretty unlikely that I had done anything too bad to invoke the wrath of spiritual practitioners. Instead, I focused on this idea of the energy of celestial bodies affecting our experiences on earth. This is actually an idea I hear often because Mercury Retrograde takes the blame for a lot of problems experienced by my friends. My question though, how would we confirm that THIS is what is causing our bad day?
We would start with our hypothesis. In this case, our hypothesis could be that the movement of the moon and planets is affecting the way in which energy moves in the brain and therefore affecting perception of reality. Or another hypothesis would be that planetary movement affects energy levels that can be utilized for spirits to manifest and therefore a spirit was able to present itself. This second hypothesis would require a means to measure spirit manifestation which at this time we do not have any reliable means to do properly. We also don’t know what the specific relationship is between spirits and energy, so this hypothesis could not be explored at this time.
As for the first, we do know how celestial bodies move and can predict those movements. We also have a base understanding of how energy moves through our brains to make our body function. We can measure neurological functioning with an electroencephalogram (aka, the funny little hat with wires that scientists use to detect electrical activity in the brain). So, there is potential to study how planetary movement might affect the electrical activity of our brain. Here is the problem, we would also have to consider all of the other variables that can affect energy movement in our brain. Examples of this would include nutrition, sleep patterns, exercise, exposure to sunlight, body temperature, medications, brain tramas, the other celestial bodies, the weather, and the list can keep going. I have been told that because the moon affects the tides via a gravitational force, we can assume that other celestial bodies would produce similar effects on all objects existing on the plant. It seems risky to infer causation in this situation as we have no real scientific data to support the idea (and if you find some, please share). In the end, I decided that a full scientific exploration into this idea would prove exceedingly difficult, time consuming, and likely unsuccessful.
Ultimately, I decided that the most probable cause of my experience was not paranormal but instead due to my sleep stage coupled with a melatonin pill. Sleep paralysis is a very real and studied condition and melatonin dreams are documented as a result of increased levels of the hormone that can disrupt the body’s internal clock and increase dream activity. Could it have been a ghost? Sure, but I really have no way to find out definitively that at that specific time a ghost crawled into bed and asked me to kick my boyfriend out. I could start running DVR cameras through the interior of my home to try to document additional activity but this seems unnecessary due to very minimal previous paranormal experiences within our home. In the end, it is often best to refer back to Occam’s razor in which the simplest answer is often the best answer. You may also want to use the KISS principle in this case.
Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences!