I’ve just had this recurring dream. I think I’ve had it something like 3 to 5 times before, and the last time I had it may have been over 2 years ago. But perhaps this sensation of having had this dream before, this sensation of déjà vu, is an illusion, and this is the first time I’ve had the dream. This is one of the reasons I blog about dreams, BTW: to verify whether my memories about having had these dreams before is accurate or not.

I don’t remember exactly how the dream begins (which is deliciously ironic, once you see how the dream ends), but the protagonist is a girl, and she’s in an underground parking lot. There’s several cars here, parked tightly together, enough so that people are having difficulty leaving. There’s one guy in particular who seems pretty upset. When she inquires about this, he complains that people are acting like they don’t even see his car, with the end result being that everyone is driving right up against it and scratching it.

She asks where the car is, and he points, but she does not see it at first. She has to focus for a while before she sees the greyish car which is right in front of her. The guy goes off to find someone to complain to while the girl stays to look at the car, except the car is now red. She assumes her memory of it being grey must have been faulty. She casually looks away and looks back and it is now yellow. Now she realizes something is wrong, and she wilfully looks away and back as a test, and the car is green. The car is essentially cycling through the colors of the rainbow, and she no longer even needs to look away: the color change is happening right before her eyes.

When the guy returns (I think he returns with a mechanic, but the mechanic has such a short “screen time” that he really is worthless as a character), there’s a gang gathered around the car, and they get upset when the see the guy touch the car, in a “what the fuck are you doing to my car?” kind of way. The guy explains to the girl that the gang is manipulating memories, so that it would appear that everyone remembers that the car belongs to them (how he knows this, I have no idea).

This being a Hollywood-esque dream, the girl happens to be an extremely accomplished fighter, and has taken a liking to the guy. I don’t want to bother describing the fight scene because it’s quite difficult for me to remember how it goes, and it’s probably less interesting to read about than to actually see yourself. I’ll give out a few choice moments, though. The first blow is a surprise one from the girl who flips one of the gang members over, so that he lands face-first on the hard pavement. She does this while she, and her guy friend are sitting down on the floor. The other gang members turn around and walking towards them. She tells the guy not to stand up, ‘cause then they’d kick his ass. The nearest gang member, after a brief verbal exchange with the girl, lifts his foot to stomp down her, so she kicks at the knee of the only leg of his which is still on the ground, forcing him to bend it, crumpling him, and the fight begins in earnest.

Eventually, guns get involved, at which point the girl tells the guy to run. He does, and the girl is following, though at a slower pace, trying to dispatch the pursuers. When one of them points a gun at her, she is able to essentially twist his wrist backwards, and forcing the gang guy to shoot himself in the face. Then, as he collapses to the ground, she extracts the gun laterally, still upside-down, and shoots at two more people, pulling the trigger in an awkward two handed grasp due to the gun being upside down, and not enough time to right it before those two new gang guys came up. I’m not sure if I’m getting it across in my description of the scene, but the point was to show that she’s a bad ass, having trained with firearms not only in their standard positions, but in various constrained positions specifically in case a scenario like this would ever come up.

The guy finally arrives at his apartment, and the girl shortly thereafter, and this is where we’re nearing the end of the dream, which will soon turn into a monstrous nightmare (for me, anyway). By the way, somewhere along the way, the guy mentions he is an artist, and the girl agree to attend one of his galas. So they’re both in the guy’s apartment, when a robed figure calmly enters, and somehow, it’s clear to me that this robed figure belongs to the gang. I cannot remember exactly what the robe figure says (which renders this nightmare all the more scary), but I think I remember the responses of the guy. The girl is strangely silent (or was she really talking, but I did not hear her? But I think I am inserting too many parentheticals which are serving only to confuse you &em; perhaps if you re-read this paragraph again after seeing how it ends, all will become clear).

“I’m going to call her Horatio,” the guy says, referring to the girl. But immediately after he says this, he appears to be confused. He is saying this in response to something the robed figure said, so you can only try to deduce what the robe figure said, just like I am doing. “We were supposed to go the gala…” the guy says out loud, and then, he says in his mind (but I, the viewer of this “movie”, can hear it anyway) “but you can’t take a dog to a gala…” Finally, he agrees with the robe figure that he cannot, and does not, want to take care of a dog in his small apartment. The robe figured seems satisfied. The “camera” angle was such that you do not see the girl at all once the robed figure appears.

I believe I’ve written several times on this blog that I am fascinated with the concept and workings of human memory. I’ve also read a psychology article arguing that nightmares are a “training” ground that allows your mind to “practice” and prepare for the events that it thinks it is under prepared for. When, as a child, you have nightmares about monsters hiding somewhere or chasing after you, that’s the primal, reptilian, instinctual side of your brain thinking you need to practice predator evasion. I won’t get into too much more details on the dreams. I bring it up just to demonstrate how important I think memory is to me, and how much I worry about my own memories.

There were recent events which, while I don’t want to say they “triggered” the dream, may have been related. I have a friend, but we were upset with each other for a couple of months and were not on speaking terms. She recently told me that she could not believe how I could say certain things which were unimaginably cruel, but unfortunately, she cannot remember specifically what it was that I had said that was so cruel. I thought “Perhaps I did not actually say anything cruel at all, and you merely have the false memory of my having said cruel things”, but I did not speak it aloud, for I think I brought up this possibility before, and she found it very insulting.

I think most people actually trusts their memories and find it very insulting when you imply that their memories may be false. I’m aware that my memory is extremely poor, and that I constantly have to verify everything I “remember” to see if is consistent with all my other memories. However, I’m not sure whether my memory is actually worse than average, or if I am merely more perceptive as to how fallible memory can actually be! It is probably a combination of the two.

Incidentally, I am often told I am of above average intelligence, and I wonder if it may be because of my mistrust for my own memory: Because I must constantly perform “checksums” upon my own memories, I need to actually, truly understand the things that I commit to memory. I cannot verify whether a given memory is actually consistent with my other memories if I don’t actually understand the memory itself. Perhaps other people, on the other hand, do trust their memories, and are happy to store memories which they don’t actually understand. For example, it’s very easy to store “E equals M C squared” in your memory. It’s more difficult to actually understand what this memory means, and whether it is consistent with the other experiences you’ve remembered having throughout your life.

But I digress. The personal events with my friends tells me that this memory-alteration gang is a very real threat, at least in a metaphorical sense, whereas the “monster chasing you” dream may have only been a real threat a couple million years ago, when humans actually had predators. It always bugs me when I forget some details of an otherwise interesting dream, but this dream, understandably, bugs me more than usual. When I first woke up and decided to blog about this dream, I thought I had understood it pretty well, but only in the act of formally writing it out, did I discover how many holes there were. Did the guy and the girl really agree to go to a gala together, for example? When something simply doesn’t make sense, like the pair never having an opportunity to actually agree to such an appointment, it’s a strong indication not that I’ve forgotten something, but that I’ve “remembered” something which never actually happened.

My theory with my friend is that I may have said something that upset it, but perhaps it wasn’t particularly cruel, and may, in fact, have been perfectly reasonable given the circumstances (e.g. “I’m angry at you, so I don’t want to talk to you right now.”) She was hurt by what I said, perhaps unreasonably hurt given the actual semantic content in the statement, because we were in an argument and all emotions are amplified. She stores this memory of being hurt. Months later, she recalls this memory of being hurt, but she cannot make this memory consistent with her other memories. She may remember me making a statement like “I’m angry at you, so I don’t want to talk to you right now.” but because it seems unreasonable to get so angry over such a plain sentence, she assumes it must have been something else I said that made her angry. Over time, we often embellish our memories (we think our the person we dated 10 years ago was much hotter than they actually were, for example), and so that may have been a factor in amplifying the cruelty of the memory as well. That’s one theory of what happened between us, but I don’t want to pursue this argument with her, because I’m not a psychologist, and so I don’t think she would give my words the appropriate amount of weight (she will probably correctly perceive a conflict of interest).

Another possibility is that I really did say some cruel things, and we simply both forgot.

Given these two possibilities (and I’m not denying that there may be other possibilities; I’m merely ignoring those other possibilities for the moment), which one should we choose to believe in, if we both agreed we wanted a harmonious friendship for the future? Is it ethical to even consider choosing memories? Would a rational entity prefer memories that make it happier, or memories which are more accurate? What is reality? What’s the difference between everyone remembering the car being yellow, and the car actually being yellow? What’s the difference between everyone remembering the accused of committing a crime (including the accused person themselves), and the accused actually committing that crime?

We don’t want to punish innocent people, but is a person really innocent if everyone remembers otherwise? Is it even meaningful to talk about what “really” happened, about reality itself, if reality is only accessible through memories? You might think that there could exists paper records or computer records which would reflect “reality” even if everyone in the world had somehow been deluded into the false memory. But note that the memories in your brain only exist as a particular configuration of the particles that make up your neurons. If some occult gang were modifying your memory, what they would be doing is moving around the atoms in your brain in a specific way. If there was an occult gang powerful enough to perform this precise manipulation on all the atoms that make up all the brains in the world, why wouldn’t they be powerful enough to perform this precise manipulation on all the atoms that make up the ink particles on sheets of paper, and the atoms that make up the hard drives storages of computers? In this sense, if you change a memory, you truly are changing reality.

From another perspective, think about what punishment is really for: It’s a deterrent. You punish bad behaviour so that it doesn’t happen again. If everyone remembers someone committing a crime, then you “should” punish that person. It doesn’t matter whether they “really” did commit the crime or not (assuming it is even meaningful to talk about a distinction between global memory and reality), if you don’t punish them, the deterrent effect will be lost, because everyone (and every computer, and every paper record, and every clay tablet carving, and more generally, everything) remembers them as having committed the crime.