And furthermore, everybody's susceptible to delusion. A basic example would be optical illusions, such as the one RAZD posted
here. The mind frequently distorts reality in everyday settings too: not so long ago, I was
certain that I saw an old friend out of the corner of my eye, sitting on the train close to me. Looking up, I found that I was certainly wrong”it was somebody I had never seen before in my life.
Similarly, I remember getting quite a fright this way at least once when I was younger. I was home alone, and saw someone out of the corner of my eye. This got me thinking of ghosts and
the supernatural, even though it turned out to be but a chair, jacket, and other inanimate objects, unintentionally arranged in a peculiar manner.
So, delusions (or rather, illusions) are really quite common. But normally, the most important factor in determining whether somebody reports an experience similar to the above as an "encounter with the supernatural" or not is whether that person
wants to believe or not. I had a dream of my dad soon after he died (just before I was 5), and for years afterwards I was convinced that his spirit had somehow communicated to me through that dream. But I wanted that to be the case, and that definitely skewed my interpretation. Nowadays I'm not even sure that I had the dream. It seems quite conceivable that it was a false memory.
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