From a candle burning alone to terminal lucidity before death

What we call paranormal: from a lone candle to terminal lucidity

Picking up a dead bird with one finger and, looking at your hand, finding it covered in maggots. No ghost, no haunted house, no Ouija board. That is the first experience that appears when someone asks if you have lived something paranormal, and it sums up the problem of the whole matter: most of what we call paranormal is biology, suggestion or simple bad luck. What trinc is an account of 169 contributions spread over almost two years, 711 days, in which jokes, sincere testimony and a theological discussion that gets out of hand coexist.

From the "miracle" of getting paid to the two balls of light

Some of the responses do not seek the inexplicable, but rather laugh at the predictable. Someone being given a day off, a woman saying she loves you for who you are, a colleague going out for a run or an acquaintance being discharged from the hospital: all of that is told as if it were a phenomenon from another dimension. The joke has a deeper meaning. When the ordinary is scarce, the ordinary seems miraculous.

Along the same lines, someone tells how, in a civil service exam, they found no trick question, answered with plenty of time to spare —90 minutes for the test, and they had time left— and passed without a problem. For that person, the strange thing was not the difficult question, but that something went well on the first try.

And then there is the other block. Here appear the experiences that no one knows how to place. Two balls of white light, one the size of a futsal ball and the other somewhat smaller, that enter a flat, move through the dining room, the hallway and the bedrooms for a couple of minutes and fly out the window. They were seen by a person who was awake and standing, mopping the floor. There are no substances involved, which in these stories is not a minor detail.

The candle that burns alone and the door that closes without a slam

To the balls of light are added more domestic stories. A candle that lights by itself in the village house, accompanied for a few days by a strong smell. A door that won't open when someone wants to leave the house and that, the next day, something pushes and closes gently when it seemed it was going to slam. There are also those who claim to have seen a UFO while driving and those who say they have contacted presences since childhood.

None of these episodes is verifiable, and that is precisely the point. They cannot be dismissed out of hand nor can they be taken as true. The only thing that can be stated is that whoever tells them lived them as real, with the discomfort that entails: sleeping alone in a house where something has moved changes the night.

Terminal lucidity: the phenomenon that healthcare does look at sideways

The most solid fragment does not come from esotericism, but from hospital corridors. A person with experience in palliative care describes terminal lucidity: seriously ill patients who, shortly before dying, regain consciousness, speak clearly and recognize their loved ones. According to their account, it occurs in a little more than a third of patients and can last from hours to several days.

The explanation offered does not resort to the supernatural. The body, in its preparation for death, releases hormones —adrenaline among them— that reactivate pulse and breathing and improve blood flow to the brain. The result is an unusual mental clarity within the severity of the condition. It is a phenomenon that those who live with death see often and that most people only know from the movies.

From Crowley to sammaddhi: when the paranormal becomes a system

At the same time, the conversation drifts into terrain where there are no longer data, but doctrines. Egyptian revelations appear, the figure of Aleister Crowley, twelve dimensions, states of deep meditation and gods such as Nuit, Hadit and Ra. The mix is striking: Eastern tradition, card-deck esotericism and Gothic architecture all in the same sentence.

The correction comes from within. Nuit and Hadit are not born in the channelings of the 1980s, but in Crowley's Liber AL, from 1904; later popularizers simply recycled his vocabulary and added UFOs. And the bodily practices mentioned —control, restraint, breathing— have a Sanskrit name and centuries of tradition. When a story mixes an American manual pantheon with a millennia-old discipline, the smoke detector goes off.

The explanation that swallows everything

The underlying problem is the usual one. There are phrases that sound deep and distinguish nothing: "everything is time, idea and emotion." Try to deny them and you will see that they do not fall apart either. What withstands both yes and no is not a truth, it is smoke with good syntax. And in the middle of that fog, the stories themselves drop the least mystical clue: many of these intense states coincide with very specific chemical moments.

That does not disqualify the experience of the one who lives it. It only returns it to familiar ground: the brain, emotion and context. What remains outside that ground is what is truly hard to explain.

The fact that unsettles

In the end, the most difficult phenomenon to fit is not any ball of light. It is that a little more than a third of terminal patients regain lucidity just before dying and that, outside palliative care corridors, almost no one has heard about it. The paranormal, sometimes, is just what we have spent years without looking at.

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