"Casper!"
--What my three-year-old son shouted when he saw his first Arab man dressed in traditional clothing.
Now we're finally getting to the most spiritual area of our theory. Do not be alarmed if you are reading this in the dark--there's nothing to be frightened of in this theory. When you are watching a movie and shut off the TV, sometimes you see a fading image of the last scene. If you taped over a movie on a video tape and play it back and because of cheap recording media or equipment, you see faint images of the original. Technical professionals refer to these visuals as ghosts as well.
We've covered how the brain acts as an antenna, how our accumulated memories are held in some undiscovered repository and how we may have 'inherited' someone else's memories by being assigned part of their storage space. Now we will be wrapping up parts of our theory by explaining the sequence of life. I feel that the past still exists and is currently playing as present to the 'me' at that specific time. I believe the Mick of the future is examining his receding hairline (which looks far worse than it does now) and is probably still wondering why it's so hard for him to lose weight. I believe that the future is already written and for us lucky sailors still in the game, we are merely sailing to our final destination.
I am sitting in a massive house in England that was originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I certainly don't own the damn thing, but I pay a hefty $3,600.00 per month to the lucky family that does. We also have our own ghost. I've seen him twice, my youngest daughter, Sabrina saw it at least once and my wife called me at the office in a panic after she just chased after it in the front garden.
We think it's our dog, Peeper. He was a sickly, tiny toy poodle that we bought from a grimy pet store in Spain. He was a puppy, no bigger than the palm of my hand and already was growing worms in his lungs. After some last-minute veterinary care, his life was saved, but he was a sick dog the rest of his short life. My wife was especially cruel to the little guy, because she tended to ignore him.
When we were assigned to the Middle East, I decided that Peeper would not come along for the ride. I wanted him to go to a home where he would be the center of attention and be loved by everyone. I know I made the right decision. We found an elderly Spanish lady whose children were all grown and flew the coop. She took wonderful care of him. About a year later, he was dead. They buried him out in the garden and so ended Peeper's life.
When we returned to Spain to visit, Carmen went to see Peeper and came back wearing a veil of tears. She was inconsolable. Deep down, I hoped she regretted the way she treated him.
That was back in 1997. Fast-forward to 2004 and I open my daughter's room and see Peeper run out so quickly that I jump back to make sure I don't step on him. I saw his ears flop and watched his fuzzy back run past my ankles down the hallway. I did a double take and when I looked again... There was nothing there. At no point did I hear anything, mind you--just saw him. I'm very certain it was Peeper, but I don't understand the circumstances. He's never been to this house, much less England. My wife saw him running around in the front garden as she watched from the kitchen window. She ran out to catch him and found nothing. To me, this could mean three different things:
• Peeper is a phantom and has come back years later to exact revenge
• The previous owners owned a white, toy poodle that used to run around this house and is now dead (hopefully not wanting revenge)
• We all have memories of our dog that continue unabated in another time whose echoes or ghost images bleed over in our present
It does make sense that our memories can come back to haunt us as simple reflections that pop up for a short moment, only to fade just as quickly as they arrived. In many cases, ghosts tend to congregate around a specific location that pertained to their residence when alive. I'm now sitting in this big house in the year of 2005. This could mean that in twenty years, a housewife will become startled to see a man, sitting in his underwear, typing on an antique-looking laptop computer.
I'm not dead here, but I am occupying space and writing my mental images to the server. If bleed over is an actual phenomenon of information leaks within the Cosmic Fileserver, who knows what people will see in the future.
