Of Magic And Memory

In the evening, my cat will occasionally turn her gaze upward and stare at something invisible to me. She will follow this entity with her eyes as it moves, apparently, along the wall just below the ceiling. She does not seem disturbed by what she perceives, just keenly interested. After a moment or two, she will blink and look away, settle back into my lap. Whether the object of her attention disappears or she simply grows bored with it, is anyone’s guess. “It’s their eyes,” a friend says. “They absorb light and then reflect it—like headlights on a road sign. Cats see a whole world we don’t.” I have no idea what my cat sees; I only know that sometimes, in my living room at night, we are not alone.

Recently I met a childhood grief counsellor. She works with preschoolers, children brought to her by over-cautious parents who do not understand that some boys and girls really do see ghosts, only they call them Grammy or Grandpa or Uncle Fred, whatever the case may be, and while the parents are alarmed by these sightings, the children are not. Too young to fear anything but falling or loud noises, they are typically comforted by their visions. Grammy has come to visit, this is all they know. Science has not yet entered their lives. Their world is made of magic, and magic allows for everything. As they get older and start to reason, they lose this perceptual power. By the age of seven it’s all but gone, along with those “imaginary friends” children often describe.

They remember past lives too, the counsellor went on, though only a few are highly verbal and can articulate these memories. One little boy, at two years old, recalled dying in a plane crash. He described the fiery plane and how he couldn’t get out of it, offering so many specifics that researchers were able to “solve” his case by tracing the details back to a pilot who did indeed crash in the ocean during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

What she has learned from children, the counsellor told me, makes her think twice about certain conditions–savant syndrome, child prodigies, even those phantoms the dying speak of. Science is a wonderful thing, she said, and sometimes it’s no help at all.