Get real

As the inimitable Freddie Mercury and his esteemed colleagues once asked; is this the real life, is this just fantasy?

Ghosts and the paranormal are an interesting thing, the human brain is an interesting thing, and they’re interesting for the same reason I’m about to describe.

If all our senses are in good working order, we live with the continual illusion that we’re experiencing the world around us with complete fidelity to what it’s actually like.

But everything we think we’re seeing, hearing, tasting, etc, is actually our brain’s interpretation of what the world’s actually like.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of time slowing down when we’re experiencing something highly shocking or dramatic or our senses being dulled by fatigue or alcohol. Our emotional state of mind and our neural biochemistry at any given moment (both of which are inextricably linked) affect, filter and colour the picture of the world our senses deliver to our conscious selves.

Usually that picture feels pretty static and pretty faithful to the reality we’re used to – the nature of the human nervous system means we spend most of the time in emotional homeostasis, so things ‘appear’ normal.

But we can’t actually be 100 percent certain what we’re experiencing is what’s actually going on.

When we sense or perceive things we can’t explain or which violate the conventions of the reality we’re used to – whether it’s seeing ghosts, a house pet suddenly speaking to you or a fork leaping off the floor to return to the table – we can’t know with perfect assurance they’re really there, any more than the chair you’re sitting on or the computer or tablet you’re reading these words on are really there.

It’s your brain telling you you can feel the fabric of the chair or your clothes against your butt or the photons of light from the screen are impacting the rods and cones on your retina.

We’re pretty sure they’re actually happening because we both happen to be in our right minds at this moment (unless you’re reading this while drunk or have just witnessed a fatal car accident), but maybe we’re both dangerously deluded and we’re both in padded rooms with straitjackets on right now – the brain is very good at making up outlandish tales to protect the organism as a whole, no matter how unhealthy they are to our emotions.

What does this have to do with Falling? Simply put, if Dale and his friends and various witnesses see ghosts or monsters, are they really there? I address this point several times throughout the novel, and I think it applies to any sighting of the unexplained or haunting.

As I’ve said in this blog before, Falling was partly a way of me figuring out how I think ghosts and hauntings might work. Fields of energy in the environment might cross paths with the fields of energy in our brains, interact with the bioelectrical impulses in our neurons and literally cause our consciousness to see things that aren’t there.

After all, that’s the way it works with the reality we accept every day too. Your eye is an instrument designed to filter and focus light, so an output of energy is interacting with your brain to show you something. Your conscious self – the ‘you’ you can feel yourself being – has no idea if it’s really there or not.

An academic named Richard Wiseman covered this exact thing in a brilliant 2011 book called Paranormality, which was subtitled ‘why we see what isn’t there’ and I agreed with every word of it.

For the record, I don’t actually believe in ghosts or hauntings, I believe they’re our brains trying to make sense of stuff it can’t quite compute by using mild hallucination and liberal doses of confirmation bias.

But for the purposes of fiction, it was an interesting thought experiment. Most of the early appearances of the phenomena are simply the characters appearing to have visions or hallucinations, so it would seem they’re all imagining it.

But later it has real world, physical effects, so the story seems to be asserting it’s all real. But again, just because we all see something doesn’t make it any more certain it exists – can’t countless people share the same delusion?

Is it just electromagnetic pulses or electrical arcs causing blackouts and accidents because that’s the way metal and electrical wiring interacts with the electromagnetic field, but when the characters’ brains interact with it it causes fluctuations in their neurons that make them believe they’re seeing ghosts and monsters?

There’s a particular pitfall waiting for any author who wrestles too much with question ‘is it real or are we just seeing it?’ without answering it, and the best example I can think of is from cinema.

When director Andy Muschietti did a two-part remake of Stephen King’s It across two movies from 2017 and 2019, the second chapter included the Chinese restaurant scene, one that was both iconic and narratively critical in the book.

I can’t actually remember how it ended up in the novel, but when The Losers Club meet to discuss their plans, Pennywise and his glamours appear and the carnage and chaos that follows virtually destroys the private room of the restaurant.

When they pick themselves up and dust themselves off and the waitress comes in to berate them for all the noise, everything’s back to normal – no creatures lying around, no blood splattered on the walls, etc. It seems they’ve imagined the whole thing.

It left me with the uncomfortable question; does Pennywise exist at all? Is he just a talisman in their damaged psyches, standing in for the abuse and neglect many of them suffered as children?

For a demonic shapeshifting creature who can appear as anything to anyone at any moment, the monstrous clown sure takes its time showing itself and trying to kill them. In fact it can be argued it only shows up when they’re at their most emotionally vulnerable in connection to places or people they’re still psychologically scarred about.

Maybe King addressed this (I’m sure countless readers and critics have), but the real horror in It might have been the suffering we visit upon our children because of our character flaws or various evils, the clown who eats kids a cypher.

If that’s the case it’s a metaphor that works for It, but not knowing whether a major road bridge being haunted is real or just fantasy isn’t ever fully explored in Falling.

So while you’re invited to make up your own mind, don’t ask me – the mechanics of human brains, neural psychology and field theory mean I never settled on an answer.