Like my apparent encounter with St. Erlembaldo, my MRI experience turns out to fit remarkably well with the view of souls and the afterlife  I’ve come to adopt.

Having the individual soul be an element of the larger entity we call God would quite neatly explain how it’s possible for an ordinary person like me to communicate with the soul of John McCain—a good man, certainly, but not one who’s been considered for canonization, much less deification.
 
It can also explain how McCain’s soul could have known about my distress without my ever having tried to communicate this to him.  Like God (and maybe also like a child’s view of Santa Claus), a soul seems to be present everywhere, transcending space as well as time, and to be similarly able to “know when we’ve been bad or good”—as well as what we’re thinking and feeling.

In John McCain’s case, I’m also struck by how much a person’s unique personality and character seem to endure in their soul.  In the North Vietnamese prison, when McCain’s captors learned he was the son of an admiral, they immediately began referring to him as “the prince,” and tried to use him to erode the other American prisoners’ loyalty to their country, by treating this member of the “ruling elite” far better than the rest of his countrymen.
 
McCain staunchly demanded that he be housed with his compatriots and treated the same.

His fellow Americans never asked him to give up his special privileges.  (What decent person would actually make such a request?) McCain just recognized on his own what was the right thing to do, and selflessly did it.

Many decades later, when a guy struggling to get through another difficult form of “captivity” (this time in an MRI machine) simply thought of him and his prior heroics, what does John McCain appear to have done but spring, unbidden, into action the exact same way he did in the “Hanoi Hilton?”

Could my experience in the MRI machine have been simply the result of positive role modeling?  

If so, why would I have gotten a sense of somebody having joined me in that confined space, and the space somehow expanding to accommodate both of us—with room to spare?  As a practical thought, this proposition is utterly implausible—and I’m not exactly the kind of guy who goes around ascribing real-world occurrences things to magical forces.
 
On top of that, this wasn’t an instance of having thoughts that didn’t seem to be entirely my own.  The only actual thought I had about John McCain was that it would be appropriate, under the circumstances, to try to emulate him as best I could—a thought which I never considered anything other than a product of my own brain.  After that, there were no words in my head.  The experience consisted purely of a sense of presence.  And I can’t recall another time when I’ve felt the presence of somebody or something that wasn’t actually there.