Shadow People

[Several persons discussing.]

Person A: Shadow people. Isn’t it a phenomenon that’s quite well researched? It’s an optical illusion… One’s brain fucking you up. The brain seeks to perceive moving images, which kind of produces optical illusions in one’s field of vision.

Person B: Shadow people. Just open your third eye and you’ll see… Not everything is an optical illusion. Something might appear in the corner of your eye that is not an illusion. Once you open your third eye, you’ll see all the ghosts around… The environment will be illuminated, things appear in their full colour, even if somehow in a greenish light. Things might disappear and reappear, once I saw a coffin on the roof, with electrical lightning type flashes of various colours bursting…

Person C: Haven’t seen shadow people but seen shadow cats.

Person D: I once saw a shadow person in the corner of my eye and got really frightened! I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, they had disappeared. A long, tall, lanky figure… I have always thought that if it was not an optical illusion, it must have been someone who had lived in our house and died… An apparition…

Person A: These optical illusions might be used to study your personality scientifically, though…What you’ll see in the optical illusion can reveal how traditional you are, it can also reveal much about your love life, or about the dominant traits of your personality…Don’t know about these shadow people though.

Person D: Just after my mother had died, I was cleaning up her apartment and suddenly saw a long, tall figure dressed in a robe near the wall…Every time I closed my eyes for a second, the figure appeared nearer, even though I thought that “there’s really nothing there”.

Person B: The third eye is a natural part of a human being. There is nothing supernatural about it! If you open it, you’ll see things around you that you don’t normally notice. Do not confuse it with an optical illusion – this is a different thing altogether…

Person A: Shadow people? I do not believe in them, never have. Optical illusions are just the product of our evolution, the evolutionary byproduct of the predictive hardwiring of our brains…

Person B: Some of the ghosts are those of recently deceased people. But not demons! Normally when you die, you’ll soon lose your auric body and wither away… But sometimes it can happen that you become a wraith and start sucking up the energy from other living beings… They will feed on others to linger still… that’s the “shadow people”.

Person C: Well… Probably the shadow cats are just an optical illusion, my brain just keeps waiting to see my cat walking into the room, and the expectation tricks my brain into believing in the illusion.

Person A: Could someone please find the research paper? It was about a flickering near the borders of your vision… Was caused by some physical characteristics of the human eye…

Person B: I’ve been studying the shadow people for years… Previously you only saw them at the corner of your eye and very briefly… Now they have started to appear straight away and for longer and longer periods of time… It’s a sign of the times…