Category Archives: Life

I Had a Dream

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People say that listening to other people talk about their dreams is boring. Freud found them interesting, but there’s a reason psychiatrists now listen to their patients for ten minutes before asking “How’s your supply of pills?” and finishing with “I’ll see you in three months”.

I don’t especially enjoy hearing other people’s dreams either. The ones with lots of strange things happening can be especially hard to follow. 

Still, dreams aren’t the most boring topic of conversation by far. Most of us understand that the most boring topic of conversation is “home improvement”, as in “here’s what we’re going to do with the windows in our living room”.

It should also be noted that some dream conversations are better than others. For one thing, the short ones are better than the long ones. Or if a co-worker says “I dreamed that you and I were in a space station orbiting the earth”. That might be of interest. Or if your spouse tells you about a recurring dream in which he or she sets fire to your hair. 

All of which brings me to a dream I had a few years ago. It was quite short, but also quite scary. If you want to hear it, keep reading.

All of a sudden, the world ended. Everything disappeared. Not just for me but for everyone. Realizing that I was dead but still conscious, I said to myself something like: “Oh no, they were right!”

Which meant that the stories about life after death were actually true! 

Then I woke up. It was still dark but not as dark as the void I’d escaped.

Being back in the world was a tremendous relief. The idea that I was going to be eternally alone in the darkness, doing nothing but thinking and remembering, was truly terrible. Because it wasn’t going to be for a very long time. It was going to be forever.

I can’t think of anything I’d want to do forever, except sleep. That’s the point of resting in peace.

What I Should Have Said

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Earlier tonight, I left a comment on someone’s blog. The topic of her post and my reply was wanting more friends. Here’s my comment:

When I was in my early 20s, I once told someone “I have no friends”. He questioned this and asked me if there was anyone I could borrow money from.

I could have borrowed money from him. But clearly we had different definitions of “friendship”.

As soon as I wrote that, I realized the last sentence wasn’t needed. Without that last sentence, my comment might have had a koan-like quality. I can’t change it now, but maybe I could ask the blog’s owner to strike that last sentence? And maybe do some more trimming:

I once told someone “I have no friends”. He asked me if there was anyone I could borrow money from.

I could have borrowed money from him.

Much cleaner. It’s probably greeting card-worthy.

But wait a minute! The point of your comment was to share a thought with someone who was feeling low. You thought you could give her a different perspective on making and keeping friends. That was the important thing, right? Stop worrying about how you said it. It’s not as if people are going to be reading these blog posts 1000 years from now, you neurotic jerk! In fact, you could have been even more explicit — talked about staying in touch with people you like, pointing out that having three very close friends is more than many people have, you know, that kind of thing.

Ok, I get your point. Sorry to make such a big deal about it. But just in case people are reading this stuff 1000 years from now, maybe I could tweak it a little? 

Would You Forget About It, If You Could? (Part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about some scientists who have erased memories by injecting a drug into the brains of rats (our memory appears to work the same way as rat memory, but nobody is currently injecting propranolol into human test subjects). 

Now some other scientists have reported the ability to create memories in rats by injecting a certain kind of virus into their brains. The virus affects the creation of a protein that underlies the storage of memories. In this case, the rats were made to remember a certain environment as being painful, even though they had never experienced pain in that environment. 

Erasing real memories. Creating false ones. We’re a long way from our memories being manipulated like a character in a Philip K. Dick story (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”). But what’s a nice rat to think about its memories these days? Did I have that excellent cheese yesterday or not?

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/26/3811591.htm

Would You Forget About It, If You Could?

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Everyone has some bad memories. Would you erase a bad memory if you could?

That’s the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a wonderful movie from 2004 in which Jim Carrey (playing a serious role) and Kate Winslet use a new technology to erase their memories of each other. As you might expect, things don’t go as planned.

The idea that we might get rid of painful memories raises some interesting questions. Is it right to erase what is part of ourselves, something that contributes to making us who we are? Don’t bad memories help us avoid making the same old mistakes again? Does having painful memories help us appreciate our happy memories and the good things that happen to us?

We might have to consider such questions in the relatively near future. Scientists aren’t yet ready to erase our memories, but some of them are working on a way to make bad memories less painful. It isn’t clear from the article below whether the details of a memory can be changed, or whether it’s the emotion associated with a memory that can be changed. What is clear is that ingesting a certain drug (propranolol) within a window of time after a memory is formed or after it’s recalled can change the memory’s emotional impact. In theory, a traumatic memory can become relatively benign. 

The premise of the article is that this method will work because it takes a certain amount of time for a memory to be “consolidated” (added to our long-term memory), and each time we recall a memory, it is “reconstituted” (reconstructed from some underlying arrangement of the stuff in our brains). If the drug is administered at the right time, the process of consolidation or reconstitution can be modified.

Perhaps it’s a sign of having a “half-empty” personality, but I’d be more than willing to remove a few bad memories or make some of them less powerful. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between getting rid of a bad memory and avoiding a bad situation that you will later remember.

In fact, one of the benefits of being dead (there aren’t a lot, but there are at least a couple) is that you don’t have to remember how you screwed up that time or what that so and so did to you. Even if there’s an afterlife (don’t count on it), you won’t have to remember all the bad stuff unless you’re in hell — or heaven isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515981/repairing-bad-memories/