Ghosts: No big deal, to cats.

Ghosts. No big deal to cats. No big deal to some humans. A huge deal to others, even to some ghosts, who do not realize they are one.

Could be some people you meet are ghosts. They aren't necessarily scary. Some look perfectly normal, whatever that means to you. Watch some Asian ghost movies. Broaden your cultural ghost horizons. Ghosts don't all crawl out of TV sets over there, you know? Good stuff.

Could be some dreams of ancestors are beneficial visits from their ghosts, natural as natural can be. Could be some dreams aren't dreams. Could be some even are, whatever that means to you. And please, get over the notion that visits by ghosts must be motivated by revenge on the living, although there are great stories created around that theme. Peter Straub's classic GHOST STORY novel still brings back fond memories, and Algernon Blackwood's ghost stories, too.

Sure, it can sound (or drive you) crazy. Reality is like that. Twist your mind through some quantum physics and special or, if you're up to it, general relativity, then tell me about the insanity of reality.

But when is a ghost not a ghost? What other "thing" can reportedly pass through walls unimpeded and float as if weightless. Sure, naturally occurring astral bodies from sleeping humans, I'll give you that, but how about space aliens? Aha! Exactly! Whatever that means to you.

You see a U.F.O. aka a "flying saucer" in a dream or when you think (?) you are awake. Maybe you "dream" you are abducted by ghost-like aliens from a U.F.O. who step through the walls of your room as if those walls were not there. Or maybe you really are abducted but manipulated to think it was a dream. Don't ask me which. I only write here, whatever that means to me.

For example, last night I awoke from a dream in which I was watching the sky above my long dead grandfather's long vanished farmhouse in south central Kansas. I did not dream I saw a U.F.O., but I was a little worried that I might, because if I did, it might not just whoosh through the sky but stop, hover, and not go away. Was that just a dream or a fragment of a memory? Did I see one that hovered when I was a kid? Hovered and sent someone or thing down to pick me up? Then made me forget, except that I did not forget entirely, and wanted to see the U.F.O. again, because...I've always consciously "wanted" to see a U.F.O., see?

I did backyard astronomy in my youth and then, in college, studied it and did labs at the university's observatory. So, it's not like I haven't spent enough time starring at the night sky and learning about it. But the U.F.O.s have not appeared to me. Or maybe they have and then made me forget. How would I know? Any more than if I had seen a ghost walk by my window at midnight and thought it was just a passing reflection of a car's lights on the street, a car that I remembered only later had made no sound. Or was the car itself the ghost, headed toward a ghostly reenactment of a fatal collision that happened once upon a time but keeps repeating like a tape loop (if you're old enough to remember tape and loops of it).

The one strange stellar phenomenon that I do consciously (?) remember was one time as a pretty young kid (who wasn’t necessarily pretty) I looked out my window in the middle of the night and saw a very bright light sweep over the backyard. For a moment, everything was as bright as noon. Then the darkness returned. And I waited for thunder, thinking it had been a flash of lightning. But no thunder came. All of which sounds like a dream, except that my dad was there.

Something (?) had frightened me in the night and I'd awakened and needed his reassurance that everything was okay (it wasn’t the first time, folks, which may be why I came to write horror stories, that and hiding from Kansas tornados in spider-haunted storm cellars). So, he had been there with me, and I'd asked him what that bright light was? He had not been looking, of course, so had not seen it. But the point is, we were both awake. Unless I dreamed the whole thing!

I used the event, however, in my novel, I AM FRANKENSTEIN  which makes Frankenstein a manipulated victim of space aliens who use him and his experiments for their own purposes in creating a reincarnated Viking as Frankenstein's Creature, who has more than a little him or itself to say about the situation, of course.

So! What have we learned from these ramblings? Other than that I wrote I AM FRANKENSTEIN to poke fun at the space aliens who frightened me, er, I mean, Frankenstein, as a kid? Probably nothing. Maybe this was all just my version of that great bit Conan O'Brien sometimes does, where Frankenstein wastes a minute of your time. Or maybe these musings sparked memories of dreams or memories "pretending" to be dreams in your own mind. Any thing's possible, I guess. But if you want to know for certain, ask a cat. And if you get answer, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

(The I AM FRANKENSTEIN cover painting is by Richard Newton, who also painted my I AM DRACULA cover.)