Blog #7: Existence of the Soul and Paranormal Activities

"There is a ghost in this house."

That was what my maid told me one year ago, after my family coming back from our Europe trip.

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because I was the only one staying here," she said, "and every night there were footsteps running upstairs. When I went to check, I heard footsteps downstairs, and they kept repeating for nights. When I went in your room I even saw a shadow of a girl for a second and it just disappeared right after."

I know my maid well, and of all the traits that she has, she is definitely not a liar.

A lot of Vietnamese people believe in the existence of ghosts, and they believe that ghosts are the souls of people who died with regrets. Virgin girls are usually the strongest and scariest ghosts. My friend told me a story about a girl in her school, who went on a trip with her boyfriend. They got into an accident, and the guy got thrown away from the bike to the other side of the street, yet he only had scratches. But the girl, who was pressed under the bike, died instantly. In Vietnamese tradition, people burn incense to see off dead. When her boyfriend tried to burn his incense, it wouldn't burn. An old wise man behind him whispered to him, that the girl hadn't forgiven him yet since he took her away from home but didn't bring her back. He cried and said sorry on her grave, and then he could burn his incense.

An experiment by Doctor Duncan MacDougall (an early 20th century physician) called "Mass of the Soul" proved that the human soul was 21 grams. The experiment was carried out using six patients who were near dead, and Duncan measured the mass of the patient before and after dead, and there was an average of 21 gram loss after the dead of six patients. His result was considered meaningless and never had been reproduced, yet there was a movie in 2003 called "21 grams" which was related to this experiment.

Asian people tend to believe in ghosts more than American and European people do. It might be due to the fact that, as a Vietnamese myself, we live more based on the spiritual side of life, then the realistic side. We believe that the people who passed away are still watching us and helping us going through our lives. The popularity of psychics also makes it easily for us to believe in this non-scientific existence. There are a lot of famous psychics in Vietnam, for example, Phan Thi Bich Hang, one of the psychics who are currently famous for finding the lost soldier bodies in the war. She has found out more than 4,000 bodies lost during the war, and they were also identified as the people she said they were. However, there were a lot of bad rumors about her in 2010 so she stopped doing her psychic work and returned to business. She said that it wouldn't stop her from doing the good work for the future, but back then it was her only choice to get out of stress.

I live in Ho Chi Minh City, where the war was at its bloodiest. I've heard stories about headless ghosts since I was 7, and people wandering on the rivers since I was 9. People find psychics to check the houses they were going to buy before they actually buy it, and my mom does it too. Apparently she got a bad psychic, because even though he said our house was safe, my maid saw a ghost in there. Personally, I do believe in the existence of ghost, because I myself had somewhat experienced paranormal activities before in my life. When I was 11, I usually slept alone on the third floor, the top floor of the house, because there was only one bedroom there and I could get the whole floor for myself. One night, I woke up and heard someone walking outside. I opened the door, and saw the balcony door opened. There was a white shadow passing through the windows. I thought it was my grandpa because he usually walked on the balcony to relax himself, so I came downstairs and checked. His light was off, and it was 2 A.M, so I was confused. I came back up, and saw the door closed, and I was sure that nobody went up stairs because my grandpa's room was right next to the stairs, and my room was the only bedroom on the third floor. After that, I decided to stick to my bedroom on the second floor every night.

Blog #6: On Wearing Clothes Backwards

Blog #6: On Wearing Clothes Backwards

If you were a teen during the early periods of the 90s, or the 90s, you would know what I mean. This was a fad started by the rap band named Kris Kross, to wear your clothes backwards, usually baseball jerseys and baggy pants. Even though this trend has ended and people don't wear clothes backwards anymore, there are still a lot of people wearing small things backwards like their hats or watches after this trend.

Asking my friends who spent their teenager days during the 90s about this trend, most of them find this dumb. People were selling clothes which were meant to be worn backwards. People wore their necklace backwards too (This is actually weird, personally speaking). It was supposed to be cool, to wear clothes the way they weren't meant to be. Imagine a zipper on your butt, that thing is just amazing.

However, asking a few people who were over their teen days during the 90s gives me a different answer to the trend. They found it disrespectful, like people would go in a restaurant with their hats backwards. It's already disrespectful to wear their hats inside, not to mention even wearing it backwards. People got used to this trend after awhile and started to accept it though (well, some of them). The amount of people who thought it was weird/uncool/lame is surprisingly (surprisingly) much higher than the people who thought it was.

Their are different opinions about this trend, however, I personally would want to stay with a normal look and not having zipper rubbing my back or my butt. I believe though, that most people nowadays, when they look back at their photos during that time would be saying "WTF was I thinking?"

Blog #5: On dreams

Blog #5: On dreams

Have you ever experienced a moment when you go "I dreamed about this"? I remembered I felt that way not once, but many times before. Usually I would feel like I dreamed about something which was happening, then a minute later, I wouldn't be so sure about it. The dream just became like an illusion, or I would just forget it right away. Sometimes I felt like I'm a psychic, but the idea just seemed so ridiculous.

Some Asians believe that if you dream a dream 3 times, it will come true (Asians do have a lot of strange and interesting believes). Some believe that when you sleep, the soul leaves your body and travel around, which creates dreams. People might argue on the existence of soul, but there is an experience called "Weight of the Soul", when someone weighed his father before and after he died, and there was a weight loss. There are people with continuous dreams, like you would dream one thing one night, and it will continue on the next night or maybe a while after. You can actually remember what you dreamed in you next dream. Then some people think they can dream the future, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes clear. The mind can do tricks on you to make you think that you dreamed of what is happening, but it's just what you think you did, or de javu. 

Believing that you have seen the future in a dream is surprisingly common, with recent surveys suggesting that around a third of the population experience this phenomenon at some point in their lives. Paranormal believers believe that some people have the gift of precognition, and it happens in their dreams. Scientists, on the other hand, believe that it's the work of probability. You dream on average 4 dreams a night, and when something similar to your dream happens, you get that de javu feeling and it makes you feel like you dreamed about the future. However, there are people who can dream exactly what will happen and they can see and remember it clearly. So do you believe in precognition dreams?