Dr. Candace Pert, a pharmacologist and professor at Georgetown University believes the mind is not just in the brain, but also throughout the body. This school of thought could explain such strange transplant experiences.
“The mind and body communicate with each other through chemicals known as peptides”, says Dr. Pert. “These peptides are found in the brain as well as in the stomach, muscles and all of our major organs. I believe that memory can be accessed anywhere in the peptide/receptor network. For instance, a memory associated with food may be linked to the pancreas or liver and such associations can be transplanted from one person to another.” ~ Transplanting Memories, documentary, Discovery Health Channel, 2003
Two days ago, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I died. Have you ever had a dream where it begins that you are watching something happen, like a scene in a movie, then as it continues you find you are inside one of the characters in your dream, as if you have been transported into the story? My dream began that way:
A young man, 21 years old, with a woolen poorboy cap and a lacerated brown leather jacket, the pockets half torn and hanging from his sides in flaps. His knuckles had the reddish-white appearance of flesh that had been exposed to the damp frost and the dry winds. The leather of his too-small brogans had been cracking from the pressure of his weight and the wet snow that never allowed it to dry. He was walking toward the town in the valley, hoping to find a job in a kitchen where he could feed himself scraps while he worked as a helper.
His anodyne eyes, rimmed red from lack of rest, were young enough to make him appear trustworthy and likeable to a potential employer. The young man thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, looking for a piece of bread he had saved from the day before, when he saw a small hand clutching at a rock near the edge of the valley. He stopped, wondering hat a child’s arm was doing in such as remote place. He knew that the only thing below was a set of train tracks leading down toward the town. The little hand just kept grasping at the rock, as if trying to surreptitiously pull it out. The young man edged closer and heard the sound of labored breathing from the child. He moved closer, still too puzzled to utter a word. Until he reached the edge.
The girl was no more than a year old. She had somehow wandered away from her home and slipped over the edge, but by fortune had managed to catch herself in a small recession in the side of a sheer drop that would have dropped her sixty feet into the sharp, dynamite-blasted rocks beside the tracks, or on the tracks themselves, where she wouldn’t have fared any better. She was beyond hysterics, her round face reddish-blue with the effort of seizing the rock and pulling herself up to safety. Her blonde hair was tangled with dirt and sweat. Instinctively, she knew she had to avoid falling, but every effort she made eroded her platform of dirt and sod. When she saw the young man’s face, it revived her emotions and she began to sob in baby talk.
Startled, the young man finally reached his hand down to grasp her, just as the sod gave way and she started sliding further down. The child shrieked, and the young man looked around, puzzled why no help was on its way already. He urged her in soothing tones to stay calm, that she was safe, that he would see her back to her mother and father soon.
With great care, conscious of the shabby condition of my boots, I ambled over the edge and found a firm footing where I held myself against the loose wall of earth. When I landed there, she clung to me as if I was her father, gazing into my eyes desperately. I had to pry her arms from my jacket to raise her to the top. When she finally let go, still sniffling, I paused a moment, then looked up at her with a big smile. “Now you stay away from here,” I said in a mock stern voice. “We have to take you home to your mummy.” The girl calmed down and put a thumb in her mouth, staring back at me placidly.
Satisfied that she was on safe ground, and wondering how I would be able to locate her family, I started to climb up again, an easy couple of steps up, when instantly the entire ground beneath me evaporated. With almost no time to scream, I fell backwards, striking a rock on the way down. My body slammed into the jagged granite beside the tracks, then rebounded away, where an ugly cloud of descending soil, vegetation and rock fragments buried me anonymously under a camouflaged mound.
The young man was never discovered, not even by railway workers who has to pry some rocks away from the tracks later. The child, who had turned away after young man had fallen, walked away in the direction of her home, where her family was unaware of what had transpired.
When I woke from this dream, I was lying on my stomach in an unnatural position, my arms splayed out, my left on the floor and my right grapsing at the bars on the headboard. My legs were spread apart, on bent upward. It was about 2:30 a.m., very dark outside, and the wind was blowing my curtains out like a full sail on a boat. My throat was aching dry, and my head felt as if a large pendulum was smashing back and forth inside my skull.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the light. As I looked at my face in the mirror, I could see the young man with the cap and the torn jacket. I wondered if he could be real, something I read about, or saw on television or the Internet. The dream was like a scene from a documentary, and it felt as if I could see words scrolling across the mirror that read “THIS WAS REAL. THIS REALLY HAPPENED LONG AGO. THESE WERE REAL PEOPLE.”
Then as the miasma of the dream started to clear, I felt more awake, and laughed at myself, thinking about my strange position on the bed. I imagined what it might have looked like if I had an infrared webcam in my bedroom while I weas having the dream: screams and flailing against my blankets as I felt myself falling to my “death.” Then my shattered bones by the railroad track as rocks loosened from above and covered me. I could see the vid and short summary on YouTube: “Infrared camera shows man dreaming about falling from a cliff. F***ing funny!”
The reason I’m blogging about this dream, though, is because I think I understand why it was so vivid and why it frightened me so badly. This week I was holding a cap that was my great-grandfather’s. It wasn’t 70 or 80 years old, but when I held it in my hands, and touched the coarse wool fabric on its outside and the silk lining inside, stained from the oils of his hair a few decades ago, I felt transported for a moment. For just a moment, or a brief series of moments, I could could remember being a child in the 1970s and pulling his hat from his head when he came to visit. He liked to go walking, and would often stop by my parents’ house on his circular journey, yet even though he was a lean, rosy-faced 75 years old, he seemed impossibly ancient to me at the time, and his hat smelled like a relic from a costume museum. His own father was in his mid-90s by then as well, but I never met him while he was alive.
There are scientists who have studied cases where transplant patients who have had successful surgeries and recoveries begin to experience memories that are not their own — memories that they find out later may be those of the donor who gave them the heart or the bone marrow or whatever. Does this mean memories can exist in organs other than the brain, and if so, can these memories actually be transferred to another when an organ is transplanted? That made me wonder: if memories can be passed to others through organ transplants, perhaps they can also be transferred genetically to your children, and their children, and so on. Maybe the combination of some kind of hereditary memories combined with the tactile experience of touching my great-grandfather’s cap triggered a memory that manifested itslef in my dream about the young man who died.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is that the young man in the dream obviously wasn’t my great-grandfather because my great-grandfather was still alive into his 80s. And if it was something he saw happen, why did I get the sense that no one knew about the young man and how he was killed? How could I ever verify it? I had no idea where the event in the dream took place, exactly when it happened, or who it happened to. I suppose dreams and memories are interlinked, so maybe something I remembered became transposed into this dream along with my great-grandfather’s cap.
Does that explanation seem rational? It didn’t help me. I had to drink almost a half a bottle of rum the following night to help me fall asleep.
Gaine Ellard, 2007
