Imagination vs reality

“If you ever marry or take a mistress after I am gone, I shall return to hunt you,” said a dying woman to her husband.
So when he fell in love again some months after his wife’s death, he was horrified, but not surprised, to see her ghost walk into the house one night and accuse him bitterly of infidelity.
This went on night after night till he could take it no more and went to consult a Zen master, who said, What makes you so sure it’s a ghost?”
“The fact that she knows and can describe to me every single thing I’ve said and done and felt and thought.”
The master gave the man a bag of soybeans and said, “Make sure you do not open it, and when she appears to you tonight, ask her how many beans there are in the bag.”
When the man put that question to the ghost, it fled, never to return. “Why?” the man asked the master later.
The master smiled. “Isn’t it strange that your ghost knew only what you knew?” he asked.

It is just astonishing to see the use they make of their imagination…