Loss of a ghost

I and a girl friend of mine had just walked into a small, messy library that was part of a larger building — a mansion, I think. From the door in front of us, opposite the way we had come in, the ghost of a girl in her twenties walked in and greeted us cheerfully. We'd met her before on several occasions and were friends with her. She came over and talked to us, catching up, and started reading a few magazines with us on the floor.

For some reason, though, my thought process had changed recently and I had reached an unsavory conclusion about the nature of ghosts. I wanted to, yet felt pretty scared to, test my conclusion. But I ended up going through with it...

I asked her to read some of the magazine's text aloud while I was looking away. It came out as gibberish. I asked her to recount a conversation we'd had a few minutes ago, or something we had talked about when we had met previously, but she couldn't think of anything.

I had realized that ghosts didn't have the full human version of sentience/consciousness, but rather they depended heavily on the input of the people they interacted with, and my tests seemed to confirm it.

I became very emotional. I lay down on the floor beside her and put my left arm around her and hugged her as tight as I could. I loved her for all our past interactions, knew that she had been a pleasant influence in my life, and yet I had to cope now with the realization that she wasn't exactly a real person. I had to accept that, whoever I thought she was in real life, there was little to be shown for it in her current form. I didn't want to let go of the lie.

But someone decided to destroy her anyway. She suddenly had a chain attached to her and was being pulled past me and off to the right. I looked and saw a villainous woman there among the bookshelves who seized the ghost and took her out another doorway and around a corner. She stabbed the ghost with some kind of implement, and bright light leaked out from the stab wound until... you know, like, the ethereal plane burst out in a supernatural explosion, and the ghost was gone. As the breeze from the explosion blew past me, I screamed in despair.

The science of wordless spellcasting

I'm Harry Potter. I wake up in my bed, in the bedroom of a pretty normal looking modern Muggle-style house. The opposite wall, across the room and parallel to my bed, had built-in bookshelves from the ceiling down to about 3 feet off the floor. Below each column of bookshelves were three drawers.

In the previous dream, just before I woke up, a friend of mine had used the spell "fermata" to close the front door of a house we were getting ready to go into. I decided to test the opposite spell, the spell for opening things, "abierto" (I have no idea if either of these are real spells in the Harry Potter universe). I point my wand at a drawer and speak, "abierto". I mess around with my pronunciation, at first rolling my "r", then switching to a British (RP) "r". Then I start stretching out the pronunciation slowly. That's when I notice something weird.

I decide to experiment. I point my wand at the drawer, thinking the word "abierto" in my head, while starting to say "aaaah" out loud. In anticipation, the drawer begins to open. I push it shut. Interesting. Now I point my wand, think the word "automatic", and start to say "aaaah" again. This time nothing happens. Iiiiinteresting. I test it a few more times, then rush downstairs to tell Hermione.

Downstairs in the house, there are a lot of other kids (presumably other students) milling around. I walk into the small kitchen, where Hermione is making herself breakfast alone. I excitedly tell her to guess what I found out. She says "Hmmm... could it have something to do with..." (I forget what she referred to, but it wasn't remotely related.) I shook my head, smiling. Then I explained to her what I had found out, with "aaah" and "abierto" versus "aaah" and "automatic". You didn't need to say the whole spell, you just had to be focused on the right spell and begin speaking the spell.

"Woww, cool!" said Hermione, meaning I had told her something she didn't already know. And I was happy that she was excited.

[Note: This has everything to do with me currently reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.]