scombrid

I'm just going to ramble a bit about my experiences with recent apparitions.

This winter and spring I’ve been training to race my kayak. That means paddling 5days a week, often at night due to the short days. Well I’ve seen more ghosts in the last month than in my entire life. Of course they all turned out to be ordinary objects but I got an interesting lesson in perceptual reality. My ghosts all turned out to be things like a rolled hose hanging on a piling, a piece of light sky visible through the trees, and oilskins hanging on the cabin of a dead rise workboat.

Usually the visions would come late in the workout after pushing at sustained high heartrate for an hour or more. The visions were often very repeatable. In one spot I’d paddle to the end of a creek and turn around (this was about 6miles in ~45-50minutes) and sprint back under a bridge. Just on the other side of a bridge there was a dock with a street light with a rolled hose hanging just at the edge of the area hit by the light. I was startled several times as I came about and my eye caught the image of the hose and interpreted as a person standing on the end of the dock.

The light sky was the most interesting. I was wrapping up 10miles at 75% of max heart rate and was giddy with endorphins. As I glided along the river about 1/4mile from shore a person appeared standing maybe twenty yards from my boat in my peripheral vision. I nearly jumped out of my skin but when I turn to face it there was nothing there. I scanned the shoreline and noticed a gap in the trees about 10yards tall that was just about the right height to have been perceived as a person standing close to my kayak. The night sky was just bright enough in the gap to make it stand out on the horizon.

I think that if I believed in ghosts those visions would have stopped my night paddles because I wouldn’t have bothered to investigate the source of the images. It’s interesting how the combinations of low light and physical exertion led my mind to perceive ordinary inanimate objects as figures. I’m accustomed to sleep deprivation induced hallucinations but these waking visions occurring in low light during an endorphin high are cool.