I had a funny dream last night.

I dreamt that somebody came up with a symbol that would cause you to die if you looked at it. I’m not sure exactly what the symbol was, but it was an 8 by 8 grid of single-digit numbers and a few lines. (Matrix mathematicians beware!)

The funny thing is this: Nobody believed it when told. They’d demand to see it, snatch it out of the person’s hands, and as they are collapsing to the ground loudly declare, “See, I told you so.”... their final words.

And this would happen over and over again. One person watches someone kick the bucket right in front of them, refuses to believe it, grabs the symbol out of the dead person’s hand, and again proudly announces in their last two seconds of life that they knew it wasn’t true.

My dreams are pretty light on metaphorical meaning. I don’t get the sense this means anything in particular. But it’s still interesting to figure out what this is a metaphor for. Mail me an entertaining one and I might just post it.

I’ll tell you what it reminds me of, though. There are people who will get certain ideas in their head, and will not let go of them, even as reality is repeatedly kicking them in the head for it.

One stereotype I see on TV a lot is the inveterate skeptic who refuses to believe anything “supernatural”. Perhaps that is a fine way to function in this world. But I gotta say, when you’re sitting the middle of a room where everything not nailed down is spinning around you, amorphous beings are darting in and out of the walls giving off horrific screams that you hear without your ears, the air is a-sizzle with energy, and somebody you know is long dead is staring at you from the other side of the table reeling off specific, verifiable claims that you later validate are true when you couldn’t have known them earlier, it’s time to reconsider the idea that ghosts don’t exist.

Ironically, the worst offenders probably show up on Star Trek; any given season is enough to show anyone with an open mind that there is a lot of stuff that occurs in the Trek-verse that is not currently explicable by their science. It’s one thing to believe that science may explain it someday; in that universe that’s a pretty rational belief. It’s quite another to deny that the phenomena exists. Usually it's a Vulcan doing this. Honestly, you’d think that Starfleet Academy alone would break every recruit of the idea that weird stuff can’t be true nonetheless, let alone a year of field experience.