unspooling ariadne's golden thread
So “Inception” totally blew my mind. A lot of thoughts have been streaming through my head since, and the synchronicity of some of these thoughts have been kind of unnerving.
But this is only going to be a disorganized outline of my scattered thoughts. Much like Ariadne’s literal golden thread, my thoughts are going to go down one corridor, dead-end, then backtrack, again and again. Someday, I’ll come back to this post and reorganize it, but for now, I just want to articulate some of these ideas that have been percolating in my mind.
So, going back to my post almost a month ago, I still remember the dream that disturbed me so. The central conceit was the idea of obliterating memories completely. It was essentially a take on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, except it was a fantasy setting.
A king in some fairy-tale country has the power to delete specific memories. In fact, I think they may have had an entire order of magicians whose sole art was the ability to extract, obliterate, and reimplant memories at a whim, with each specific ability occurring at differing frequencies. Obliteration was frequently ordered by political figures as an alternative of just outright killing witnesses. The problem, of course, is how to tell whether obliteration is actually successful or not. How do you know someone whose memories was supposedly erased isn’t just pretending that their memory was actually erased?
The king’s daughter just so happens to have this specific ability—the ability to look into someone’s mind for specific memories. This differs from just trying to read someone’s mind—something that is always fraught with peril, able to be foiled with magical countermeasures. Her ability to detect successful obliteration appears to be infallible. As such, she is widely sought after by all the obliterators across the land, and has been the subject of multiple failed plots. Because of the turmoil this causes in the kingdom, the king attempts to protect her by obliterating her memories of being a princess, and sending her off into the wilderness.
The dream spiralled into vagueness after that. The last image I remember is that of two swirling whirlpools, which I think was the source of all magic or something like that. But the other thought that I woke with was, how does the king know for sure that he obliterated the princess’s memory?
Now I’ve always been a devoted believer in the idea that more information is always better. The more you learn, the better off you are. This has been tempered somewhat by my medical training, where I’ve since discovered that barraging people with overwhelming amounts of information all at once is counterproductive, and sometimes, it’s simply better not to know, particularly if there’s nothing you can do about it. Of course, you always have to give people the informed choice of knowing or not knowing. But you also have the responsibility to lay down the foundations so that that knowledge is understandable, so that the person receiving that knowledge can act upon it intelligently, and so that the person receiving that knowledge doesn’t plunge into irreversible despair. The freedom of information, while important, is not invariantly good. (And that quote about how information wants to be free is always cited without giving the full context.)
So after this dream, the thought I kept pondering was how would my life be different if I could obliterate some memories selectively? Not necessarily memories about past events or about people, but memories regarding things I’ve learned, things I’ve come to believe. Which, if any, of my memories are holding me back, are keeping me locked into the life that I’ve been leading, which, at times, I’ve been quite dissatisfied with?
These kinds of what-ifs always lead me down to the Borgesian concept of the garden of forking paths, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
It has been an inexorable fact that many of the things I once considered pivotal moments in my own personal destiny have turned out to seem like inevitabilities with fixed outcomes. There was probably no way I could’ve gotten [redacted] to fall in love with me, no matter what I did, for example. There is no escape from destiny, perhaps.
The things that seem to have multiple degrees of freedom don’t have the same emotional freight as some of these fixed outcomes, for some reason. There are a lot of what-ifs that just don’t seem as crucial. What if I had started off with this job instead, or done this rotation at this time, or gone to this city at this particular time? It may not have changed anything. It may have changed everything. We’ll just never know. It could be something good. It could be something bad.
But what if I could wipe-out memories of these what-if moments, so that I could stop wondering what-if, and just get on with my life? What things do I hold on to that continue to poison my very will, preventing me from reaching fulfillment?
These thoughts definitely came to fore when I went to my twenty-year reunion from elementary school. Old crushes, friendships, people I’ve lost touch with. How different would my life be if I had acted on how I felt? If I had kept in better touch? If I had gone to this school instead of that school? Twenty years is a long time.
Which brings me to another Leonardo DiCaprio movie: “Shutter Island” (SPOILERS!) The last scene focuses on this very idea—how forgetting a key fact of your life, even at the expense of your own identity or even your own humanity—may be the only way to reach peace. (There are a lot of superficial similarities between “Shutter Island” and “Inception” which I might go into at some other time. I’m in love with the shifting notion of reality, dreams, and madness.)
I mean, none of this is new. Unreality, irreality, and parareality have all been the realms of science fiction and fantasy. For a while there, Hollywood was churning out virtual reality movies back-to-back, what with “Dark City”, “The Matrix”, “eXistenZ”, and “The Thirteenth Floor”. Philip K Dick’s works wholly inhabited these worlds outside of reality. The Black Iron Prison, the unending Empire, VALIS—which of these are pure fiction, which are useful metaphor, which are actual reality, which are drug-induced hallucinations?
But the dreamscape has always been my favorite realm, ever since I first heard about lucid dreaming. And read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
I always wonder what parts of my dreaming are typical experiences, and which parts are completely idiosyncratic to me. I’m fascinated by recursive dreams.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than two levels deep. But you always start the dream at the deepest level, without knowing that there’s a level between that distal dream and reality. I always wake up in distress, after getting shot, or after falling hundreds of feet, which is usually enough to break me out almost immediately into reality.
But I’ve also had perspective changes, where at first the dream starts off as something I’m watching passively, but midway through I end up becoming the main character.
And I’ve had confusing flips, where two different dreams have gotten interspersed: in one level, I was sleeping in my bed continuously for 18 hours straight, in the other level, I was having chest compressions done on me and getting bagged ventilations in the ER—both states in retrospect seem like dreams now but at the time I couldn’t tell what was fake and what was real.
Which always leads to the solipsistic delusion that I’m in a dream right now, and my body is sitting in some ICU paralyzed and sedated. For all I know the last six years of my life could be just a dream, whereas in reality it’s still 2004, it’s only been a few hours since I’ve coded, but time works differently in dreams.
Which leads to a common theme in my recurrent dreams: the ever-ticking clock. I have all these anxiety dreams where I’m always late for something, and time moves insanely fast. Hours go by on clocks even though I’ve only just turned my head.
But memory is an interesting thing. I’ve spent a lot of time lately playing Sims 3, and much of it has been recreating various buildings I’ve lived in. Right now, I have a facsimile of my parents’ house, and one of my aunt’s old house in Milpitas which she sold over a decade ago. It’s just weird that I remember enough of that place to recreate it. I also have a replica of my old house, which I lived in until I turned six. I haven’t been in there for over 27 years, but I still remember some of my most vivid nightmares from there, in addition to how the rooms were all laid out. Oh, there are some details that I can’t remember, but being able to recreate things in a computer program really amazes me.
I’m definitely losing my coherence. I should probably get to sleep anyway. And maybe one of these days, I’ll actually figure out a way to weave all these thoughts together into an actual essay, instead of the meandering ramblings of a madman.