We can’t even be sure that the story is being recounted exactly as it occurred -no offense to Apathia. Human memory is unreliable and details are often filled in later.
No offense to be taken. I wrote the above account a couple of days after.
I went on to tell people the story for years. One day I went back and read it. Lo and behold, my story had drifted from what was there. In time it became a bit more fantastic. I forget now how I'd embellished it with the retelling. I suspect the two days after memory may be somewhat off. We all like a good story and unconsciously structure our narratives for their audience.
Thanks for sharing yours, or rather your mother's.
"We all like a good story."
It seems to me that the paranormal, the cryptid, the UFO often take a series of unexplained events and add agency and even plot.
A momentary glitch in the wiring and the toggle of a light switch happen to occur at the time a person is dying. My penchant for narration connects those events in such a way as to have a paranormal agent (aka ghost).
So much of the paranormal is story time. F=MA isn't a story. Evolution isn't a story. Science is the repeatable process of what and how. Paranormal consists of single narratives of intention by a protagonist or a cosmic tinkerer instead of a demonstrable process. The self is a protagonist we continue to narrate and want to narrate beyond the end of natural processes.
I think it comes natural to us to craft and tell the story. It's the way we most easily fool ourselves by making the story prior to the what and how.
Before Bacon et al with an empirical methodology for discovering the processes of natural events, we tended to rely on just so stories for events outside the kin of our understanding.
A friend asked me today if consciousness proved the existence of God. There's another solid chunk of story telling!
What are these theologs going to do when we're able to create an artificial sentience? When we'll be able to account for the processes that create phantasm of self?
Will some Buddhist sect claim that karma is being incarnated into these artificial brains? I suspect so. Already popular East Asian Buddhism has reincarnation into household goods or discarded tools becoming sentient. It's story time!
I love stories. I write them for my own entertainment (and to keep my 71 year old head from rusting). But one should beware the tendency to rush to a story.
(especially the ones that make one the hero, the victim, or the villain)
The anecdotal tale does not amount to evidence.
