[Esme nha Maire]

I'd point out to folks that I am very much a science geek, and do not 'believe in ghosts' etc as such. I simply believe that odd things sometimes happen for which we do not (yet) have the explanation. Here's the standout ones that I've experienced..

Thirty-odd years ago, and a good friend of mine is staying over at my flat; he was shifting between friends homes staying with each for a week or two, as he didnt have a place of his own. It was his habit to go for a walk in the late evening just before going to bed, and he invited me to join him on his walk one evening.

We'd walked across the grass surounding the flats and over the main road into the next estate with the intent of walking once around a park there then returning home. As we got to a green with a little stream and a few bushes scattered about, we stopped momentarily, chatting. I was looking across the green at the houses on the far side, the scene lit by street lamps. There was no moonlight, and teh sky was clear. We both gasped - the light level had suddenly dropped and remained down for about three seconds, the grassy area before us now appearing to be in darkness, rather than being poorly lit by teh street lamps by the surrounding houses. The streetlamps had not dimmed or flickered or turned out.

Suddenly, it was just as it had been before, lit dimly by the streetlamps. Neither of us had a clue as to what caused the effect, but he'd seen it as clearly as I, and to this day I cannot think of an explanation for that one.


A few years later, and I was going for an interview in High Wycombe, a town I had never been to before. As I left the train station, thinking I could do with a cup of tea to steady my nerves before the interview, I suddenly KNEW that just beyond the hump-backed bridge ahead - and out of sight - of me was a cafe with a white painted frontage with blue trim. As I got to the top of teh bridge, there it was, I could see it some thirty metres ahead, exactly as I'd forseen it perhaps ten-fifteen seconds before.

Nearly forty years ago, and I was working in an office. I had a dream in which I saw the pot plant in our office stood on top of a filing cabinet and visible behind the plant was a window into a small room - that didn't exist in our office at the time. I even remarked on thsi dream to someone at the time. Some weeks later, it was decided to move the minicomputer from the room across the hallway into our office, and create a little room for it in the corner of our office. The upper half of the wall facing into our office was glazed. Our boss decided to move the filing cabinet as I was doing my job of data entry. "There!" she said, having completed the job, placing the pot plant on top of the cabinet, in front of the window into our new little computer room - my jaw dropped when I looked up and saw it.

I've had quite a few instances of a sense of deja vu, most of which are readily explained by the notion that Ascot pointed out above, that one part of our brain is catching up with something another part has registered, but those three incidents stand out as being ones which are harder to explain. With the High Wycombe one, it's possible that my brain simply took a guess at what a cafe in that area might look like and hit lucky, but if so, its prediction was startlingly accurate. Even th dream - could just have been random luck that I dreamt what I did and it then came to pass - or something very like it. But that suddenly dark then suddenly re-lit green, I'm still scratching my head over. Any ideas?