After I had finished my studies at San Digo State University, I returned to my native city of Hong Kong in June 1979. From time to time, I visited my married sister who had 2 children, a 5-year-old boy and an 8-year-old daughter. During one of these visits, my sister told me that her husband's uncle had just passed away and that the next day she had to go to the funeral parlor to prepare for a buddhist ceremony which would begin in the evening. She asked if I could look after the children while she was away and took the children to the funeral parlor around 7pm.
It was OK with me and I arrived with the children as I had been told. There were rows of chairs and people were waiting for the monk to pray for the soul of the dead so he could be in peace. There was the casket and a big picture of the deceased in the front. I immediately found a place to sit down and then I noticed that actually everybody bowed to show respect to the deceased before they sat down. I wanted to leave my seat to bow but then, I had to ask several people to excuse me. Besides, it might seem awkward to go out to bow after being seated. So I did not pay respect to the dead, like people say.
After the ceremony, my sister suggested that I spend the night in her house and I slept in my niece's room. It was then that something happened, which to this day, after 28 years, still puzzles me. So I went to bed and for some reason I woke up and saw my sister, in a white night gown, at the foot of the bed, walking away. Thinking that she might be looking for a pillow or something, I went back to sleep.
The next morning at breakfast, I asked her what she was looking for when I was sleeping and she said that she had never gone into the room. I told her what I had seen and she said that it might have been her daughter looking for something in her room. But I told her that the person I saw was about 5 foot 4, an adult, and her daughter was only about 4 feet. Then my sister, who is a timorous person, began to look really scared and did not even want to stay in the apartment. Finally, her husband told me not to talk nonsense and I never mentioned this again.
So, did I really see a ghost who was annoyed with my for not bowing to him?
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Shelley I don't know what to make of your story. It is interesting, but I think you were just dreaming. Sometimes the mind cannot differentiate between dreams and reality. It happens when the mind is anxious and worried overly about something. You attended the ceremony, but the fact that you, did not pay your last respect to the deceased, troubled you to a certain degree, but it probably troubled your sub-conscience even more, so much so that the sub-conscience enacted a scene for you, which was what you were dreaming and it got you so deeply involved in it, that it left traces on your conscience. When you woke up, you thought whatever you saw really happened, but the truth is that it was just a dream.
The sub-conscience is a bank of data that never shuts down. When you sleep the frontal lobe of your brain becomes inactive rather dormant and only the sub-conscience remains active. The sub-consciences stores tremendous amount of information comprising of every thing your eyes see, your ears hear, you feel, knowingly or unknowingly. When you look around a place you see a lot of things, but you notice only things of interest but unlike our known conscience, the sub-conscience registers everything you see.
For e.g. Your making your way to the mall, which is just a block away, on the way you see a mother with a child. The child appeals to you in many ways, you feel good about yourself, happy, you notice the child and the mother, you even wish you could play with that child, pull its cheeks etc. They move past you on the opposite side of the road and you look back to the front and keep walking. Now you consciously imbibe the image of the mother and the child. What you missed out on were things like, what was happening in the background, the texture of the pavement they were walking on, who walked ahead or behind of them, you won't even remember the color of the clothes the mother was wearing, you wouldn't know if there was a street artist whom they walked past.
All this that you missed out, in reality has been registered in your brain, in the sub-conscience.
Dreams are a result of the sub-conscience generating a story for you to witness or be a part of.
So what happens is, when you dream, you sometimes see things that you've never seen before and are totally unfamiliar. But the truth is your mind has seen all this in reality in different bits and pieces, at different times, at different places, doing different things, on television, while playing PC games, while reading about something, while listening to others speak.
Basically all these references contribute to the making of a dream, be it weird, scary etc.
When weak, tired, exhausted, anxious and you go to sleep, you get into state where you are deeply involved in the dream and when you wake up, you cannot differentiate between the dream and reality and you eventually convince yourself that it was real.
So you've probably seen that 5'4" girl somewhere before, on television, might be a description from a book that you must have read, might be something that you've heard about somewhere. There are numerous possibilities, but relax and keep calm because that was not a GHOST!
Take care!