Saturday, February 2, 2013

Mind Eraser

I made a most disquieting discovery earlier today.  I appear to have destroyed my dreams.

Like many people these days, as I go through my life I create so many thoughts and feelings and memories—all the time, in fact!—and soon find that I have nowhere at all to put them.  I can't hold them all in just my head; I quickly forget them.  So, as many other people have elected to do, I long ago decided to store much of my mind on an external brain.   As time has gone on, I had gotten in the habit of trying to organize my thoughts, and so I had bought many different external brains, and tried to sort out the different thoughts and feelings and memories into different exobrains and then transfer them back and forth until they would be orderly enough to find and recall easily.  And of course there was an enjoyment to the organizing of the exobrains as well because it allowed me to revisit the various thoughts and memories I had stored away as I recalled them into my main brain. 

A while back I was moving around a particular part of my mind, my fantasies: all the things I have imagined, wished for, or just made up for fun: the subjunctive section of my mind.  This was probably the most disorganized portion of my mind as it was, because the pieces of it that I was making the most use of, adapting and altering and adding further to, kept on getting brought to the surface and moved into new files, and the older fantasies just got stuck into small folders that sat anonymously among many others. 

As this is the part of my mind that I treasured the most, I tended to have it duplicated on a whole number of exobrains.  Or at least I thought I did.  I can't remember exactly how it happened now, but for some reason while sorting through a collection my fantasies on one of my exobrains, wanting to consolidate the location of all my oldest memories, I took the file containing all of my old fantasies, fantasies that I hadn't taken out and visited in a long time, and deleted it.  You see, I thought that those fantasies were at that moment safely stored on another exobrain, the newer, more spacious one that I was trying to turn into a kind of master copy of my mind.  I assumed all those old fantastical thoughts had been moved to the new master brain back when I purchased it.  No sooner had I deleted these old treasured parts of my mind than an eerie premonition rose over me that perhaps I had acted rashly. 

I booted up my master brain and was consternated to learn that in fact, those old fantasies were not on the master brain at all! 

Suddenly I remembered that when I first bought the supposed master brain, I had only bothered to paste in my most recent, in use memories, and not the ones that were buried down deep in a thicket with other files.  At the time however, I was not much worried.  I had long ago had a clunky, old-fashioned cyber brain, the kind you had to wear at all times and could not take off in order to remember anything that was on it, and I thought, at the time, that all those old fantasies were still on there, largely unchanged, waiting for me to reclaim them, for it was while wearing the cyber brain that most of those fantasies had first been set aside, in fact in which many had first been conceived of!  So they were not lost.  I just have to lug out that old cyberbrain and transfer it's memories to one of the newer exobrain models, and from there I could plug them into my mind anytime I wanted to revisit and remember them.

Well, today I finally, after months and months, after years since this had happened, went into the closet and hauled out the old cyberbrain and booted it up, exobrain at the ready, and found....nothing.  There was only one, measly half finished fantasy on there, one that I have since then drawn out and flowered into something much more complete and coherent. 

Where were all my other fantasies?  My dreams, my desires?  My changes to mistakes, my stories I told myself for false comfort, my wishes for better luck next time, my supposition of the fortunate outcome of future events? 

Gone. 

Gone gone gone. 

Throughly confused, I did the only logical thing, and checked my other memory files.  I scoured through them, and what did I come up with? 

Well, it turns out that when I originally bought my first nice new exobrain, and before I bought my second to last mental processing unit, I had been so frustrated with all the fantasies in my head I had moved all of them to that first exobrain, and left on my cyberbrain only that one fantasy that I had wanted to work on at the time.  I had hoped that my clearing out all the other fantasies, I would be able to finally focus only on this new fantasy, and maybe, perhaps, in this state of focus and concentration, fulfill it. 

I didn't, of course.  That didn't happen until much later, after I had bought my external processing unit (the one before the one I use now, I think) to amp up my intelligence. 

The fantasies upon that first exobrain had been the were the only versions in existence, and I had destroyed them ages ago.  They were never to be returned again.  All the fantasies I had ever had, from birth until just a few days ago, gone!  A whole aspect of myself was gone, had been gone. 

But then, I hadn't missed them, had I?  I had only been trying to retrieve them out of possessiveness, out of yearning.  I had looked around earlier today and realized that the fantasies I have had recently, well, they have been quite few, haven't they?  I haven't been dreaming like I used to, it was true.  I had hoped to have those older fantasies again, to possess them, if not to dream them again, at least to know that they were mine. 

But they are not mine any more, they have flown away, into wherever one's mind goes after it minds itself no more.  That part of me was, in a sense, dead.  I am partly dead. 

But is that really so bad?  After all, I have gone all this time without dreaming those dreams, fantasizing those fantasies.  Maybe they weren't really a part of my anyways, at least not a part of the me that is still here.  Why hold on to an old self, let it bog you down, hold you down to your failures and wishes?   No, better to start over, become a new person. 

A part of you is gone.  A part of me is gone.  Now I can become someone different.  Mind erasure is not so bad, I think.  It just gives you a new place to start from.