Heh! Thanks for the various advice, people.

Here's the really weird part. My Dad, who never wanted to "waste his time" discussing anything spiritual had a surprise visitation from his brother's spirit a couple of months or so after the brother died. That was quite a few years ago. At any rate, the brother spontaneously appeared in the passenger seat of my Dad's van while he was driving down the highway and asked some pointed question about whether the inheritance money was going to his children! (my Dad was the executor of the will) My Dad said the money was all tied up by the lawyers at the moment, his brother glared at him and vanished!

Now, believe me, this was NOT the sort of thing my Dad was interested in, believed in, gave a damn about, or wanted to be bothered with. However, he did tell me and my mother about it when he arrived home. After that he showed no further interest in tbe matter.

He just basically wasn't interested in anything that wasn't rooted directly in this physical world, no matter what happened. In the last few weeks of his illness a business friend of his who was quite religious suggested he should pray for healing. He rejected that idea scornfully, saying, "Prayer would NOT help." The last thing on Earth you'd ever find him do was praying, because he didn't believe there was anything out there to pray to.

He also saw the spirits of slain soldiers passing out of their bodies during firefights in WWII...but this gave him no belief in life after death. I asked him where he thought their spirits went. He said that he figured they just sort of dispersed and vanished.

So there you go. Most people believe exactly what they want to believe, evidence be damned! ;-) They will just interpret the evidence to suit their desired beliefs. My Father certainly did.

Or...if all else fails...you can just fall back on ignoring things that raise troubling questions in your mind and focusing on something else instead. That's denial, and it's very common human behaviour.

Bill - You might be intrigued to know that I consider dreams to be real...but not in this physical reality. They're real in their own reality. The rules of the game are very different there, needless to say. Esoteric literature calls the dream reality the Astral dimension, and it's a dimension of emotionally charged thoughts. In it you can do a whole lot of stuff you can't do here, as we all know, and you can avoid certain mishaps that are not so avoidable here (like physical injury, illness, death, being trapped in one scene and timeline until it's over, etc...). It's less static than here, more fluid, far less predictable or controllable (unless you really know how), and can be great fun or really scary or anything else at all. It's also more transitory than here. What happens in the dream reality is certainly connected intimately with one's subconscious mind and emotional issues, but that doesn't mean it's not real. ;-)

I love those flying dreams too, but I haven't had any in some time now.

I did have a dream once in which I was shot and killed by some criminals! I rose out of my dead body, looked at it in some shock, realized I was a spirit now and nobody could hurt me anymore, and then got angry and went after them...and they could see me...and they KNEW I was a ghost! This terrified them and I chased them all over the place quite gleefully for awhile.

This disproves the old wive's tale that if you die in a dream you'll never wake up from it. (For me, anyway.)