Done This Already
Have you ever had a dream in which you recall an event that never happened?
It happens to me all the time. The other night I had a particularly vivid dream - I mean crying, screaming, gut-wrenching stuff - and the drama revolved around the discovery of something I'd done years in the past.
And when I woke, and I realized it was all a dream, I incredulously asked myself "Does that mean that [event] didn't actually happen, years ago?" It took about an hour to wake up enough to realize that no, it didn't.
Now, of course, looking back lucidly, it's quite obvious that it was all part of the dream. But to remember something so clearly, and to have such a sense of the passage of time - having a memory that was solidly planted at a particular place in the past - makes one wonder about all of one's beliefs.
If all it takes is to be in the dream-state to suddenly bring about new, fabricated memories, experiences that are no less real in the emotional responses they provoke for being fiction, and most bizarrely, perfecly concrete thoughts, feelings and occurrences that rapidly and surely vanish from the mind as easily as one opens one's eyes in the morning ... then what gossamer catalyst would it take for our waking beliefs, emotions and experiences to suddenly be proved fiction - or worse, vanish entirely?
I don't know. But I think I might have an idea about something else.
I think our memories are tagged, if you will, with a sort of date-stamp. Things that happened yesterday are filed ahead of things that happened last year, and so on. And in a dream, which is already full of fiction, one particular fiction is tagged with an artificial mental date-stamp and the mind files it away, in order, between graduation and the Grand Canyon.
I think déjà vû is the same thing. I think it's just the same sort of artificial date-stamp, applied in error to short-term memory. Vonnegut called it "bad chemicals". Just some weird synaptic misfire. Immediate memory is interpreted as long-term memory.
Sometimes, when I get déjà vû, I try and 'remember' ahead of schedule, see if I can predict what's about to happen. I don't recall ever being successful.
It happens to me all the time. The other night I had a particularly vivid dream - I mean crying, screaming, gut-wrenching stuff - and the drama revolved around the discovery of something I'd done years in the past.
And when I woke, and I realized it was all a dream, I incredulously asked myself "Does that mean that [event] didn't actually happen, years ago?" It took about an hour to wake up enough to realize that no, it didn't.
Now, of course, looking back lucidly, it's quite obvious that it was all part of the dream. But to remember something so clearly, and to have such a sense of the passage of time - having a memory that was solidly planted at a particular place in the past - makes one wonder about all of one's beliefs.
If all it takes is to be in the dream-state to suddenly bring about new, fabricated memories, experiences that are no less real in the emotional responses they provoke for being fiction, and most bizarrely, perfecly concrete thoughts, feelings and occurrences that rapidly and surely vanish from the mind as easily as one opens one's eyes in the morning ... then what gossamer catalyst would it take for our waking beliefs, emotions and experiences to suddenly be proved fiction - or worse, vanish entirely?
I don't know. But I think I might have an idea about something else.
I think our memories are tagged, if you will, with a sort of date-stamp. Things that happened yesterday are filed ahead of things that happened last year, and so on. And in a dream, which is already full of fiction, one particular fiction is tagged with an artificial mental date-stamp and the mind files it away, in order, between graduation and the Grand Canyon.
I think déjà vû is the same thing. I think it's just the same sort of artificial date-stamp, applied in error to short-term memory. Vonnegut called it "bad chemicals". Just some weird synaptic misfire. Immediate memory is interpreted as long-term memory.
Sometimes, when I get déjà vû, I try and 'remember' ahead of schedule, see if I can predict what's about to happen. I don't recall ever being successful.
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