To Novita’s great frustration, I’m a perfected skeptic. Living in a country that is embedded with a foundation of belief in the supernatural, that’s a hard perspective to view things from. Whenever the cheezy tv programs show “ghosts” (otherwise known as lousy video tricks), I simply laugh in amazement that anyone would be drawn to their crap.

Admittedly, I’m very open minded. I will listen to anyone’s perspective, and enjoy reading up on a plethora of subjects despite not necessarily following their ideas. I have yet to find valid reasons to support a belief in many of the ‘oddities’ that people believe in (ghosts, psychics, 6th sense, etc).

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With that said, I’d like to share something with you. Perhaps you can offer this skeptic some piece of mind.

Last night I had a dream. In this dream, a friend and I were viewing a photo of a man. I cannot recall if it was on a screen, newsprint, or magazine. At any rate, my friend and I were trying to recall the name of the man in the photo. Both of us knew him, somehow, from somewhere, but neither of us could remember his name. At one point in the dream, a flash of remembrance kicked in and I said to my friend, “His name is Matthews.” But somehow I wasn’t convinced of that myself. Searching again, I finally realized my mistake, “Matthews” was his last name, not his first. After this, it finally clicked; this was a photo of Jacob Matthews – a guy I went to high school with. The dream ended at that point, or at least nothing more I can recall.

I have not seen or spoken with this guy in 12 years. I was friends with him, but not close. Our mutual friends are far and few – I don’t keep in contact with them either. Dreams are odd like that, long last memories can surface at any time. This was one only a few times in the past 12 years that I can remember dreaming about anyone from my high school.

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This morning, after breakfast I checked my email. My inbox had a “‘Making it in Taiwan’ would like to be added as one of your friends!” from MySpace.com. I’m not a huge myspace user, so it’s not that often that people add me anymore.

I checked out his profile; there was no name on his profile, so I checked how and why I’d know this guy who was adding me as a friend. I found the name of my high school and realized that’s the connection. Since it’s been 12 years, many people look a bit different, so naturally I couldn’t place his face to a name. He only had one photo and it wasn’t drawing any names. I didn’t know of any of my old friends living in Taiwan, and nothing else in his profile caught my eye as being familiar.

Then it clicked. This was Jacob Matthews.

“Ladies and gentleman, we’ve just lost cabin pressure.”

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I have no words to explain how odd this felt. I emailed him right away just to make sure that it was him. Yep.

Like I said, it’s been 12 years and I wasn’t even that close to the guy in school.

I truly have no explanation, this seems to go beyond the “watching tv while reading a book and the same word is heard that’s being read” type of thing. Go ahead, run the numbers on this one:

For those of you statistically minded, put together my variables, I’m sure I’m missing some:

12 years = 4,380 days / nights / potential dreams
200+ = people in my graduating class
10 or less = times I’ve dreamed about anyone from h.s. in the past decade
4 = hours from dreaming about this to the actual time I opened my email

My head is spinning. If any of you can offer this critic some explanation, I’m right here waiting. In the meantime, I’m gonna go watch Fight Club one more time and see if Tyler has some thoughts.