“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

~ Joshua Foer, National Geographic

I can’t remember anything, which makes my occasional memory dumps all that more remarkable. I think I have what some researchers are calling “external memory,” where you don’t rely on your own organic memory systems because you use external devices to help you remember….books, computers, websites. External memory is not an ennobled concept like “extelligence,” which means a sociocultural system of shared, external intelligence. It suggests the dumbing down of the human race, the opposite end of the continuum that may have peaked with Renaissance Man, who could speak and write his own language, plus Latin and Greek, and if he were a Biblical scholar, maybe Hebrew, too. That man could store whole tomes of science and literature in his memory, then recite it to perfection at a lectern in front of an audience. That’s internal memory, while having external memory is like saying, “I’m a weakling, but I drive a big truck.”

Memory dumps. That’s what I call them because it’s like when a PC has to do a memory dump to analyze a crash. I’ve had times when I’ve been working late and felt so exhausted that my mind feels like it’s beginming to hallucinate. I’ll start to “crash”, or fall asleep, and suddenly wake up with a memory of some incident I had forgotten about for years and years. The last memory dump I had brought me back to something that was not verifiable by anyone else because the people who might have confirmed it, my parents, died years ago. Yet I’m starting to see a connection between things I hadn’t connected before.

As an elementary school teacher, Mr Dyck had a well-documented reputation with his students. In his classroom, when he was chalking up mathematical equations on the blackboard, he had a way of turning slowly, lizard-like, to catch children who were whispering to each other in class. When they looked up, they were startled to find him grinning at them intensely, as if he had never turned away. Even years later, after his pupils had married and borne their own children, they never forgot his spidery arms that seemed to reach out across the rows of desks, or his thighs that towered above their heads as he thundered down the aisle to confront a transgressor.

For many years, Mr. Dyck punished students by locking them in the book storage room with the lights off. Later, when parents complained, he simply locked offending children in the same room, but left the lights on. It didn’t matter. What terrified his pupils and helped enforce perfect discipline in the classroom was not that children were left alone in the room, nor that the lights were off, but that when he was alone with them in the enclosed space, they feared for their lives. He did not verbally threaten, but his presence and his countenance revisited the children in their dreams. Neither the parents nor the school principal could ever accuse Mr. Dyck of any inappropriate language or physically intimidating behavior, but his students knew what he was capable of doing. The fear of the possible was worse than the reality of the present.

After I remembered my experiences with this teacher, being locked in the book storage room, it terrified me irrationally because the experience was once again fresh in my mind…the experience, not simply the details about the experience. Most of our daily memories function like a third-person newspaper report — you were sick with the flu in spring 2003, you were married in such-and-such a place 10 years ago, you paid your gas bill last Tuesday, you were born 32 years ago — this is the meta-data about the experience, not the experience itself. The experience of your senses, the context of who you were and what ruled your life when something happened — these are things we can’t easily bring to mind again because we cannot re-experience a memory. Or so we think. My memory dumps have been the closest thing to re-experiencing the experiences of my memories.

In his song Remembering Marie A., Bertolt Brecht sang about a jaded character who realizes he doesn’t really remember a passionate love he felt in his youth, yet he remembers the mise en scène of that love because of transient cloud in the sky: “As for her kiss I’ve long ago forgot it, but for the cloud that floated in the sky, I know that still, and shall forever know it, it was quite white and moved in very high.”

A.J, the woman in the National Geographic article who can remember every detail of every moment of her life from a certain age onward, seems to prove that we have a record of all our moments locked in a vault. While most of us can never seem to access most of our memories, do they ever surface in “memory dumps” such as the ones I have experienced, or in other ways such as reactions that may seem irrational but are based on subconscious memory? A.J. has the gift of recalling the details of the past, but when she remembers, does she experience it again? Or is it all just a ticker tape of details she can spew out like an idiot savant?

Gaine Ellard, 2007  

But even when we have no memory, we have recognition. The newborn infant has an undeveloped sense of self, and few definitive memories, but it can still recognize its mother’s face, its father’s voice. It can recognize the pattern on the ceiling of the nursery. It can recognize the feeling of the cotton blanket it grasps in its tiny hands. And it can recognize pain. It recognizes pain from the memory of birth.

I can remember my grandparents and the days I spent with them as I grew into adulthood. Those memories, however, are not vivid. They’re not like playing Second Life, where you see simulated 3D animation, interact with the environment, hear audio, and even experience things vicariously. You never see your memories or re-experience them in any way unless you’re on some powerful hallucinogens.

Think of your own memories. A family gathering from your youth. Do you remember what words were spoken, other than a few select phrases of dialogue that your memory has paraphrased over time? Can you remember the exact sequence of events, even from a significant moment during that occasion? Have you ever recalled the subtleties of the expression on your grandmother’s face as she tried to comfort you when you cried? Would you be able to recollect what time it was, what the weather was, what happened outside in the whirling world where your parents were dying, dying apart from you in that secret other place that lies outside your peripheral vision?

Sure, you can remember a vague image or two, but it’s just a hazy afterimage. And you think you know someone’s voice, but try to call it to mind if you haven’t heard that person for years. Can you perfectly recall how someone would sound if they said something to you?

Now recognition, that is another thing. You may not be able to re-experience a memory, but you can recognize a recorded image or sound because recognition is the evidence of memory. That’s how we have proof that we remember more than we can recall. Have you ever recognized something that seems to have no context whatsoever in your daily life or in your memories? You call it déjà vu, attribute it to some kind of vagrant memory from another lifetime, even though you have no personal evidence that would suggest that you have been reincarnated. Or else you call it precognition, a hint of the future, and wait for the meaning to become apparent. But the experience merely becomes another memory, and the memory dissipates like steam vapors.

Then one day you are talking and laughing with a group of friends, and the clock is displaying the time, and a wine bottle is resting half empty on the floor, and a chord of music is sustained, sustained, and then the flame is dancing on the candle wick, and a woman glances toward you as if she recognizes you, and suddenly you realize that you recognize her, too, and suddenly your grandmother’s voice is as clear in your mind as if it were a digital playback, and yet you feel you must have forgotten something critical because the factor of recognition is so potent, so pronounced.

I always believed that if I can be here now, if I can be wholly in the present without any regard for past or future, then I can store memories that are as precise and objective as watching a digital movie. So much memory is caged inside our minds, growling restlessly within the darkest depths of those grey vaults. Is there a way to release them? And what gaps would we see between our selective recall and the objective facts of experience? Or is all experience subjective, no matter how lucid the memory of it? Our memories are always our own, not those of another person, not a collective impression, never a shared memory between many minds.

Never shared.

Gaine Ellard, 2007