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Professor Richard Wiseman is explaining a particularly common sighting of a “ghost” – where people claim to see a shadowy figure standing by their bedside. “Most of them happen as people are either drifting into sleep or coming out of sleep,” he says. “Basically the brain creates an overlap between your dreaming world and the real world.
“You see a figure when you’re waking up because you’re coming out of a dream. When you’re in a dream your body is paralysed so you don’t move around and hurt yourself but because you think you see a figure and you can’t move people are often terrified because they assume it’s the figure that’s trapping them. That’s a very common paranormal experience. And of course the ghost slowly vanishes because you’re becoming conscious.”
This is one of the “paranormal” phenomena that Wiseman, a pro- fessor in “public psychology” at the University of Hertfordshire, has investigated in his new book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. The clue is in the title and it is safe to assume that Wiseman, a former magician who has worked with the illusionist Derren Brown, is a sceptic when it comes to things that go bump in the night. He believes all forms of the paranormal are illusions.
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