brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote2021-02-15 10:07 am

All that will be left is the terror of dying

[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.

[personal profile] contrarianarchon 2021-02-24 07:50 am (UTC)(link)
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)