I’ve come to realize that ghosts are real. Not in the sense that the souls of the departed hang about in old buildings, scaring the bejesus out of the living. Although, you know, that would be cool. What I mean is ghosts in the minds of the living; when one sees or hears things from the past that are long gone. These ghosts reflect the temporal aspect of the universe – that existence is dependent on when we are as well as where we are.
Case in point, over the last few weeks, my travels have taken me to places of significance from my past. Firstly, it was the house we lived in when our daughter was born. Having not visited for seven years, when I returned, I found myself repeatedly looking up at a bare patch of the wall for no reason. I did it instinctively and without much consideration as to why. Then it came to me – that was where our clock had been. I was repeating a behaviour without thinking about it – or, strangely enough – realizing I was doing it. I was like a ghost, locked in behaviour from a past life.
This experience was even more intense during my time in Singapore, last week, when I returned for the first time since we departed. Visiting familiar spots, I saw snapshots of our past life, like reruns happening in a parallel universe. I saw my daughter and me buying cake at a bakery on a rainy afternoon in the monsoon season. I saw my son and I cycle past on the way to the shopping centre to buy him his first pair of football boots. I saw a riverside path where my wife and I walked one hot and humid night after an Italian dinner. Each memory was emotive and powerful and took me instantly back to a different time.
What made each of these flashbacks strange was that I wouldn’t consider them much from day to day, and it was only returning to these places that brought them back to me. I was physically back in the same place, and the only thing that separated me and them was time.
Perhaps not unconnected, I watched the film Interstellar on the flight back and the scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, finds himself inside the bookshelf ‘tesseract’ and is able to view the scene in his daughter’s bedroom across multiple time points reminded me of the strange notion of time as another dimension. Physically, things exist and happen within three dimensions (length, width, and height) but according to Einstein, your location is not just a matter of where you are within a three-dimensional space but also when you are, and time is the fourth dimension. Interestingly, in the film, Cooper’s daughter refers to her father’s presence in her room as a ghost. He was in the same space as her, but not at the same time.
It’s a strangely reassuring thought to think that what separates us from things that happened years earlier – or even loved ones no longer with us – is time. We may be together in the same spot according to three dimensions, and the only thing that keeps us apart is the fourth dimension. Similarly, we are ghosts to our future selves, and where I sit right now may be occupied by someone else in fifty or a hundred years’ time.
Ghosts are real and perhaps in some sense we are all each other’s ghosts – interconnected across time and space – and who haunts who is just a matter of perspective.
