Watching one of those animal planet shows about extraordinary animals. Yes, I know, doesn't narrow it down much. The nursing home dog who knew when people were going to die. The animal psychic with all her cockeyed confidence, made me want to throw something at her. The more scientific approach of the animal behaviorist who was sure it was a scent given off didn't impress me terribly either. Not that the latter is necessarily wrong, so much as the explanation isn't based on any real evidence. Just as much a guess as the psychic, however much given with hedging.
I've worked with the dying. I'm sure something happens when someone dies. As hospice nurses on a floor, we knew when to start watching, and knew when the aide called to us it was because of death. Just as people know when they get the call, and don't need to be told the actual words "she's dead." When I had to call a family, I never had to be more specific, only giving the time- if anything. Odd circumstances happened nearly every time, often not obviously related.
I will not try to guess the mechanism. But the best anecdotes of non-local communication seem to be very real crises, with strong emotional components, between people with a bond. Which is why putting it in a lab cannot recreate the circumstances. Not ethically, anyway. Because it inherently cannot be real peril, is not done with people closely attached, and getting the emotional circumstances right is no end of tricky. Not to mention that the response, the message as received, is not quantifiable. Proof isn't going to come in a neat package.
As for what a dog senses? Problematic.
I do think we are capable of more than just the obvious senses, but I' not about to go all wooo wooo! about it. It's not magical, it's just difficult to qualify. The damned data isn't all hoax, not all foolishness. The exceptions have often been the keys to unlocking understanding. The abnormal informs the normal.
8 comments:
Interesting...
This is pretty much where I land. The phenomena are real (whatever that means) but are too delicate to be recorded or communicated. As soon as you start talking about them you start overwriting them with your own stories and fears and wishes.
Something I think about, having been present when 3 of the 5 most important people in my life, passed over. A mystery.
Years ago, when I was starting out on my own, I roomed with a scrub nurse and her sister. Tricia told us one time about experiences she had witnessed in the OR, when a patient had died on the operating table (happened three times in her career). She said they all saw a wisp of something leave the bodies at the moment of death, like a small, thin cloud.
One of the surgeons present at on death said that was the patient's soul leaving the corpse. I've always liked that explanation, even though it is non-scientific, unprovable and borders on voodoo. It comforts me to think that some part of us survives death.
:)
Haven't been out reading blogs as much as I was before but wanted to stop by to wish you, D and Moby a good new year.
As Richard breathed out his last breath, his sister saw a flock of birds rise up from his heart.
D,
Maybe not impossible, but recreating it will take some very special and imaginative testing, and the observing will alter the outcome...
Art,
You are blessed and honored.
H,
I saw the wisp once, the rest were different indications, mostly just a sense of surety. Once a confused woman who never, ever got up at night, toddled down the hall to the nurse's station, upset that two men in black suits were in her room. We went and checked for her, half afraid we really would find someone - so unusual a type of confusion in her case. As soon as we settled her down, we checked on another patient, who died within the hour.
am,
Perhaps the closer we are, the better we see.
When she was bed-ridden and hopelessly ill, my grandmother once claimed to have been bothered by a sinister and impossible man. We saw it as evidence of her age, her mental state, and the effects of the drugs she was on.
Years later, she's still going strong, and a lot clearer in the head. But had she passed away at that time - and death is such a mysterious and portentous thing I'm reluctant to write about such a hypothetical - I'm sure we might have assigned some strange, celestial role to this man.
Exceptional events can be quantified, but only if we also pay attention to the everyday events we want to distinguish them from.
Pacian,
Exactly, the urge to backtrack and self delude is a serious complication. Even more, perhaps, than the intentional cons.
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