When I was around eight years old I was laying in my mom’s bedroom since she had the largest and most comfortable bed in the house.   We had just got home from seeing Ghostbusters 2, and I was getting sleepy.   In my state of mind, as plain as day I could have swore I saw Slimer coming from my mom’s bathroom at me.   I tried to scream but I could not.  Pinned with terror I simply waited for the vision to go away, dreadfully fearful of a possible tentacle ravishing or even more so perhaps of a possible sliming afterward, and there was no guarantee that it would be the green kind of slime.   Here’s the thing about that, I could have swore Slimer was really there.  It was obviously my imagination/sleepy state  but there are people, lots of people actually, who take things they see in a moment of say, sleep paralysis and believe it was real.  Another good example of this was one night in my old apartment where I started falling asleep but woke up mentally but not physically, so that my body was lying prone due to the aforementioned sleep paralysis and I hallucinated that a ghostly woman was coming out my closest at me and making my body cold.   When I finally managed to get my ex girlfriend to wake me by breathing loudly (it was the only way, I couldn’t yell and I couldn’t move) I discovered that the cold air being blown on me was the damn A/C vent was blowing right at me and my ex had rolled over and taken all the covers off me.  One of the big things I’ve noticed on dealing with the majority of individuals is that people firmly, and often stubbornly believe things.   Not because they need to, not because it makes sense, and certainly not because they’ve spent a great deal of time rationalizing why, but because, quite simply, they want to.  When someone wants to believe something, you’re about as likely to convince them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, that it doesn’t make sense to go on believing whatever it as, as you are to convince them to stop drawing breath.  It’s practically a doomed enterprise.

You see, believing in things is wanted, because, well, in reality there’s no magic in life… unless you can find a certain wonderment or joy from simply meeting different people and learning new things.   Otherwise, like I said, no magic.   There’s no spirits walking around trying to wrong the bad things that they did or had happen to them in life.   Psychics are just low-level con men that have convinced themselves that the bullshit they believe and sell to other people who believe is in any way something that is actually legitimate and not a series of loose-guesses, perception and deductions that they can wrap in flowery words and package to people.   People who believe are sort of like a cult, because they all secretly doubt in some small way, and need to constantly get around people who believe and convince themselves that what they are saying makes a damn bit of sense.   It’s all about the appeal of the fantastic, real con men know all about the fantastic and the amazing, that’s their bread and butter.  How do you think famous con men like ‘Yellow Kid’ Wiel or Count Victor Lustig convinced people that they had machines that can duplicate money or that The French government has decided to sell the fucking Eiffel Tower?   They both knew one thing, people want to believe.   Those men they conned?   They believed too, and look where believing in the fantastic got them.