Yes, ghosts

I Am a Memory in the Head of a Dying Stranger

Owing mainly to a general lack of care for myself, I spent the Covid years (remember Covid?) sleeping on a leather couch (yes) in a strangely proportioned “rental palace” (old Bourgeois mansion, divvied up into many small disproportionate apartments during commie times) in inner city Budapest, while doing my masters’ degree in neuroscience.

It was this weird cocktail of uniquely bad sleeping circumstances (I was also addicted to energy drinks, as I still am) that brought me the most intense episodes of sleep paralysis in my life so far. At least sometimes it was sleep paralysis. I’ve went through the whole gamut of parasomnias, I believe I even sleepwalked at one point but cannot prove it. Most often it was a lucid dream transitioning into sleep paralysis when I realized I was asleep.

I’d taken up experimenting with psychedelics briefly since then and I can tell you it doesn’t even come close to the intensity of these experiences of what I can only describe as waking up wrong. The mystical process of ascending reticular pathway activity spreading upwards through the thalamus and the cortex, assembling you, your very being, piece by piece, simply gets interrupted and you arrive in the world, unfinished.

I had experiences I cannot express in ordinary language. Waking up paralyzed with a choir of voices in my head, knowing they are saying vulgar things and making fun of me despite not making out a single word of what they are saying. One time I had a false awakening in an unfamiliar wooden bunk bed, repurposed from some childhood memory of a school trip probably, and when I tried to move my hand, the texture of the room behind it was sticking to my hand and dragging along with it. I really don’t know how else to put that one because language fails me, but it felt completely real up to that point, and after.

The experience I want to talk about now, one of the most intense and notable experiences of my life was not one of these. I was just lying in bed in a sort of meditative half-sleep, replaying childhood memories in my head. But I still think it must have had some neurological significance.

I believe that I’ve been blessed or cursed with a better episodic memory than the average person. Either that or I confabulate vivid memories more readily, - you never know, do you?

I am at the same time, it seems, prone to dissociation. Not the serious kind like a fugue state, just emotional dissociation. Unfortunate as it may be it most often happens when I feel completely unbothered and happy, in the company of others. Thinking back on those memories they always feel foggy, like they happened in some dream, or I imagined them based on someone else’s description. The person I am in those moments always feels like someone else and not someone I particularly like. It seems only the loner grouch version of myself is ego-syntonic. Oh well.

In any case, on this particular night I was reminiscing on these old memories. Of lying in my childhood bed after a troubled day at school, preparing for the next troubled day at school; of being a teenager and nicking the skin of my thighs ever so slightly with a Gilette razor, not even a separate blade but just one of those plastic disposable razors, because I wanted to tell my equally angsty theater kid friends that I was cutting myself.

During this meditative reminiscing, on that leather couch, as I took turns inhabiting these memories, came the first epiphany.

“I don’t know any of these people".

At the beginning of my adult life I noticed for the first time that my own childhood self was, well, a child. I did not share his concerns or views on the world. I thought his actions and emotions were silly; his plans and ideas about the world would never come true. He was someone else. Someone who no longer exists. Someone dead, living only through my reminiscence.

Then came the second epiphany, with such bizarre and frightening force - for something that shouldn’t have been such a big deal- that I had to jump out of “bed" and pace around my room, a room that suddenly didn’t look real- in which every piece of random clutter suddenly felt placed like a stage prop- until I could calm down.

I realized that in a very real sense, the same kind of “death" awaited the person I was in that moment. That the way this version of me will live on, at all, is also in the memories of a person who no longer has anything in common with him. My concerns, my emotions, my experiences will be similarly alien to the next thing that wakes up in my brain, perhaps the next morning. And ultimately, to the stranger to myself that I will become on my death bed.

I am a memory in the head of a dying stranger.

It is 1:20 am and I’m lying sleeplessly in bed, an actual bed now, in a different place. I indeed, feel very little in common with this person I remember being. He is, just as he feared, dead. I will soon follow.

…

Apparently people find some kind of comfort in the purported certainty of conscious experience; emotionally, many many people feel that they are their experiencing self, the one thing that can never be taken away from them.

I have no better idea; but I cannot imagine finding comfort in the thought that I am my conscious self. Because to me it means I will be dying, just now, just in a couple seconds when this melodramatic bullshit stops and this organism redirects its attention and goes downstairs to brush its teeth, then get its mind off of these thoughts and finally go to sleep.

I’m tired of carrying all these dead strangers in my head.