you are sleeping, you do not want to believe
2015-08-18 || 12:46 p.m.

I've been having the oddest dreams lately. I wake up remembering the main one but its like inbetween my other dreams are slide shows at great speed. Just masses of constant images. And then I wake up with a headache like I've been wacked on the head with a mallet during the night.

I've been reading this book. There was the suggestion that ghosts are hallucinations produced because the person seeing them has a need to receive information in that way. It seemed like a possibility maybe. Then the author mentioned how, when you are dreaming, a sound outside such as a doorbell, leads to your brain constructing a whole large, completely fake scenario around the sound, in a dream. Wow, that was badly explained. This made me think that maybe ghosts are constructed by your own brain and they are not separate entities outside of it. After all, dreams are so amazingly complex and so totally believable.

Until you wake up.

But of course there's always something that cannot be explained in that way.

When Bex was 20 months old we were visiting her grandparents at their house here. They were actually living in the states at the time but had come home for a visit. All their personal possessions were in storage. Their house contained basic furniture only because prior to their return it had been rented out.

I opened the back door to let Bex into the garden and held her hand as she stepped down onto the grass. Then I let go of her hand. Her whole face immediately lit up. She was pointing excitedly and beaming, running towards what she was pointing at.

"Look mummy! Look at the doggy!" She exclaimed.

She was pointing at a completely empty garden.

"What does the doggy look like?" I asked.

I knew she was pointing at the exact spot where our old dog was buried.

"It looks like Billy, only its brown and white." She replied.

Indeed.

Our old, dead dog was the same breed as our then current dog. The only difference being that our current dog was black and white and our old dog had been brown and white.

It's a shame I didn't stay to see what happened next. I wonder what she found when she got there.

I ran back inside to tell my mum. To tell her that it seemed that Bex was seeing our old dog sitting on the exact spot he was buried.

So how can this be explained?

There's a few possibilities:

Firstly, Bex constructed it all. Waited for an opportunity to use the information we once had a dog. Guessed at his burial spot and then on a fine day, with me as a witness, ran through this whole ruse.

I guess you could say that given her age, that is pretty unlikely. And although of course I think my daughter is a genius, the most creative child ever, a dramatic expert etc etc, I'm not sure she could pull this off successfully at 20 months old.

Secondly, it could be that I had a need subconsciously to know my old dog still existed. So I telepathically produced a hallucination visible to Bex and she then satisfied my need by relaying the details that I wanted to hear. Thus leaving me with the thought that my daughter had seen a ghost, it couldn't be made up because of her age, therefore she was seeing the real thing.

This seems more possible than the first explanation. Although it seems a somewhat lengthy and strange thing for my subconscious to be working away at.

Thirdly, it could be that Bex saw the 'ghost' of the dead dog. That the experience originates from the haunter rather than the haunted and for some reason the dog, although dead, has enough intelligence and purpose to appear to a child, when there is a witness and to be sure to appear where he was buried but never went when alive, so as to leave me in no doubt as to the existence of life after death.

The strange thing is, none of the explanations seem satisfactory.