All that will be left is the terror of dying

[brin_bellway]

[strong cw: amnesia, unreality]


(somewhat related to the previous post; also inspired by this short story I read recently)

You know those mystics who claim that this world is a roleplaying game higher beings play? That we're all higher beings who deliberately blocked off our memories and otherwise cut ourselves temporarily down to size, so that we could properly experience what being mere mortals is like?

I feel like quite a bit about my personality and history makes a lot of sense if [this is true, and my higher self *immediately regretted the hell* out of this decision].

Like, some subconscious part of me that's still Aware is going "what the hell was I *thinking*, it's *horrible* having a memory so small and fragile, oh god make it *stop*"

---

P.S. I drafted these last two posts on the morning of October 25th, 2019, but decided not to post them until I'd had a chance to actually *do* the book scanning I planned on, to make the previous post about the present and not the future.

That evening, I was re-reading some old dream-journal entries and came across this one:

Aug 26th 2012
The worst part is knowing there's nothing she can do. Nothing she can cling to, nothing to anchor her. Nowhere to keep those oh-so-fragile pieces of self for safekeeping. She's trapped in a bubble universe and it's about to pop. That book she was reading will be gone, and so will the girl reading it. All that will be left is the terror of dying and the Dalek viewpoint of her lovely book and I was so *afraid*...

And the bubble pops and I wake and I scramble and there's nothing almost nothing fragments so few and so small and why.

(For the record, I remembered that this entry existed but hadn't known it was in the particular section I was reading.)

'Well,' I thought. 'Fitting to see that one again, today of all days.'

I hadn't originally planned to give this post a title. I changed my mind.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Not *all* of my lucid dreams are nightmarish: often I can just shrug and go "maybe I'll remember and maybe I won't, nothing I can do about it right now either way, might as well operate under the assumption I will since that's more useful". I'm pretty sure the deciding factor is whether or not I was *reading* something. Text has so much *detail*: even if I remember the dream at all, there's no way I'm gonna remember word-for-word what it said. Something is *definitely* going to be lost. Other dreaming mes have a chance, but readers are always doomed.

(...I feel like there is probably some interesting relationship between this and the fact that I know large chunks of my blog by heart.)

Yo dawg, I herd you like memory play

[brin_bellway]

[addenda from January 28th, 2021]

Me: *gets blindsided for the umpteenth time by porn with untagged memory play, because of course everyone's into that, right, we don't need to content-warn for that*

Me: *witnesses mainstream romance novels with memory-play scenes*

Me: *grumbles about selection bias in the kinds of people who get incarnated onto this planet*

---

There's this bit of Jewish folklore that says that God grants fetuses access to divine omniscience, then takes it away and makes them forget right before they're born. This makes people more inquisitive and eager to learn, as they desperately try to heal the wound in their psyche where that knowledge was first ripped from them.

Which, one, asshole move there, God, but also it implies that this or similar feelings are common enough for people to create just-so stories about them.

Do other cultures have legends that specifically frame the loss of pre-this-life memories as traumatic? Is this feeling particularly common among Jews for some reason?

Re: Yo dawg, I herd you like memory play

[thedarlingone]

Do other cultures have legends that specifically frame the loss of pre-this-life memories as traumatic?

--

I know there's a bit in one of the Mary Poppins books (which are very odd overall) where babies can understand the language of animals until their first tooth comes through, and that's why they scream so much when they're teething, because they don't want to lose that knowledge. I mean, personally speaking from when I was getting my wisdom teeth in, teething is quite agonizing enough by itself, but that and the sort of Peter Pan "grow up and forget" concept definitely seem potentially related. I don't know if PL Travers was Jewish or not. Hm, that would actually explain some things maybe? *pokes google*

Doesn't look like she was Jewish, *does* look like she was a big fan of JM Barrie, so there's that. Interesting, I guess? I'm not so familiar with like folklore, but I can think of a George MacDonald bit where babies were angels (not Heaven-angels but naked-child-angels) who turned into shooting stars to become incarnated, and a Rudyard Kipling story where teenage boys writing adventure stories may remember their past lives in great detail until they first fall in love, at which point everything is wiped. I'm not sure if it's a concept that comes from the Victorians in that way, or if I'm simply not as familiar with anything outside of Victorian to midcentury kidlit.

[thedarlingone]

I don't know how to word this, but that concept that we're higher beings deliberately becoming mere mortals -- well, first, I've only encountered it as an SFF concept, not a mysticism one, so my feelings about it are very much in context of why a human would write a story like that. But part of me feels like it's weirdly... hubristic? Like that it's sort of trying to make ourselves feel better about the human condition by expressing the idea that we have something the gods want. One of those types of stories that investigates "what it means to be human" on the premise that of course all the aliens or whatever want to be more human because it's the best of all possible worlds, whether that's by having emotions or whatever. Which... again, not sure if I'm being clear at all, but it annoys me in a very particular way, the same way that I get annoyed about the type of story where some kind of transhumanist power is offered and then it all goes to shit and "proves" that we're better off exactly the way we started.

Another thought or feeling I have about that concept is, that the sort of immortal higher being who would voluntarily become human would probably have to be... I don't know why my brain is saying "a Dorian Gray type", but one of the immortals people bitch about on tumblr who spend three hundred years having
increasingly drunken orgies and then decide the only thing that will make life worth living is even more hedonistic excess, and when they run out of excess they turn into serial killers or start voluntarily dying repeatedly for the adrenaline rush, instead of like... learning every language or mastering every craft or attending every college class or petting all the cats and dogs in the world, something interesting and useful. I'm not sure I'm making any sense, but basically the impression that the personality which goes "I need to experience life as a Mere Mortal" is sort of like a gamer who goes "this game is only fun if you play on hard-hard-hardcore-supreme and the fun comes from failing in a different way every five seconds", which is an attitude I despise.

I'm not sure this is going anywhere. I'm mostly not awake. I probably have more thoughts if I remember to have them later. I almost certainly have thoughts about mainstream romances, but those are warped by the fact that my main exposure is actually to mainstream *Christian* romances which don't include sex scenes, just misunderstandings and misogyny. But I saw somebody once say "vanilla sex is also a kink, just an accepted one", and I go back and forth on that depending on the definition of kink I'm working with, but it's definitely a take that I think would work with the "oh everybody is into X" attitude you describe. Like there's this bundle of Acceptable kinks including PIV sex, mild maledom/femsub, very slightly taboo things which are spicy because forbidden (I think that has to be a Christian thing, spinning off the necessity of being guilty about sex in general and displacing it onto things that are more acceptably guilt-inducing than just PIV sex which the reader is assumed to be okay with), etc.

The memory play thing specifically, I'm not sure I have a theory about. I do know that you're possibly the only person I know whose identity is so heavily formed by being a bundle of memories; I feel like I know more people with quite bad memories who just sort of live with it as something that doesn't interfere with their fundamental sense of self, and for me, even though I have an extremely good memory for the most part, things like having lost 2010 don't destroy me. (I did do a lot of blogging in 2010, but I don't reread it, because when I do it gives me flashbacks, and the feeling of having a flashback to a time you don't have conscious memories of is *deeply* unsettling even for someone like me who isn't as bothered by the simple fact that there is a time I don't have conscious memories of.)

Like, I think I've run across the "you've forgotten all the amazing sex we had so I have to wink-wink-nudge-nudge ~remind~ you". I'm just not sure where it would hypothetically come from. Maybe the... idea is that once you've gotten used to each other's quirks, sex has to be boring, so by erasing memories you get back to the early days of infatuation where you were having wild hot sex at all opportunities? ...jesus. That's *sad*, if so. Taking the concept of the unhappy established relationship that far. Like if you're not having at least as good or better a time once you actually know what each other likes in bed... wow. *headshake*

I mean, maybe that's not it at all, but it's the best hypothesis I have right now.

[brin_bellway]

>>I've only encountered it as an SFF concept, not a mysticism one, so my feelings about it are very much in context of why a human would write a story like that.

I'm not sure if this was my *first* encounter, but I feel like the *central example* of this concept for me is the time I was poking around Erowid and noticed that it was an extremely common feature of Salvia divinorum trip reports.

(Of course, that would probably tend to become self-perpetuating. If they've learned from talking to other salvia users to *expect* a sense of being a higher-plane entity playing a memory game, their brain may well oblige.)

---

>>Maybe the... idea is that once you've gotten used to each other's quirks, sex has to be boring, so by erasing memories you get back to the early days of infatuation where you were having wild hot sex at all opportunities? ...jesus. That's *sad*, if so. Taking the concept of the unhappy established relationship that far. Like if you're not having at least as good or better a time once you actually know what each other likes in bed... wow.

It might be suggestive of, like, a contingent of people who are into casual sex but live in cultures that forbid it, so they try to make the most of what outlets they have.

Personally I really would not be comfortable having sex with someone I hadn't known for years. I feel like it takes time to build that kind of trust.

[contrarianarchon]

... what would be worse, that - the knowledge that your greater self fucked up and will intensely regret even whatever little bit of processing power was spent to be so small and so fragile and so utterly certain that the void was creeping up with every moment - or the knowledge that this is all intentional, that this is the designed and desired experience, and that all this will be treated with all the flippancy of a cheap horror movie once it's over.

(... apologies for relating to the specific horror and then also making it worse)

[brin_bellway]

It's okay, I already thought of that. (Edit: and it's probably meaningful that I *don't* treat horror movies flippantly. I hate horror movies and generally find them psychologically damaging.)

I *do* see possibilities that are in between. There's the possibility that we are, not deliberate *games* of higher beings, but more like *dreams* of higher beings: that this is a thing that just happens to them sometimes unless they go out of their way to prevent it (and maybe even then). Since *I* don't contort my life much around having as few dreams or even as few nightmares as possible, I can hardly blame a version of me who thinks on much longer timescales for accepting the risk of having to be me for a few decades. It's not ideal, but there may very well be lower-hanging fruit for improving their life.

[contrarianarchon]

I don't do horror movies at all but for reasons which are probably more alike to taking them very seriously than not but *also* I am known to have a strong for media recursion, so maybe that's just a trait added in to keep there from being horror movies in the horror movie...

(Less flippantly and more accurately: Clearly I am sufficiently different from my-hypothetical-greater-self that I can't tell why this should be a thing, and that makes me worry that their best interests and mine are not actually well-aligned but if it's pragmatically sensible reason that I'd agree with ... well, fair enough. I hope there is. Maybe it's a teaching tool for skills it's hard to learn when you're used to being ... vast and enduring? To tie into the conversation about practice pandemics and practice famines)