The popular idea of memory is a machine model. Memory is a hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability.
This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is an Otherworld. It is a place we visit which exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.
The rules of the waking world do not apply there. There we meet the dead and re-experience events no longer available to us in the waking world. Tick-tock time does not apply in Memory. Not only can we travel across decades in an instant, subsequent events alter previous events.
Memory is built of stories. It has a strong relation to history—the story of the waking world—but the relation is far less strong than the machine model assumes. Memory is liquid. Subsequent events alter previous events, as I said before. Also, two experiencers of the same event, when they visit Memory, re-experience that event differently. This is often because of other events in each experiencer’s personal Otherworld. That is to say, events in Memory alter other events, of their own accord, against our protestations.
Memory and Dreaming are related in some way. Both involve the waking world fading away. Both absolutely ignore tick-tock time. Memory has a stronger relation to history than Dreaming. Dreaming has a stronger relation to the Imaginal than Memory. The Unconscious is related to both Memory and Dreaming, though more openly acknowledged in the latter.
Synchronicity is a bridge between the waking world and Memory. A being without Memory would never experience synchronicity. Synchonicity is when Memory breaches the waking world and imparts meaning on some event there. It is how we know Memory is alive and creative, not a dead repository.
Memory is a land we most often visit alone. Some parts of it we know extremely well; some parts we’ve never heard of. It is not, however, a personal land existing only within our own heads. Memory has many places we share; in that way, it is like the collective unconscious. Those shared places are the places with the strongest—though not absolute!—connection to History. These shared places, in turn, shape History.
Memory is the land of the ancestors. As the elderly approach death, they spend more and more time in Memory because they are beginning their transition into that land. What we sometimes call short-term memory fails in the elderly because the waking world has taken on secondary importance. Sometimes the ability to transition between the waking world and Memory fails for reasons I do not understand; this is what we call dementia.
Medical professionals tell me that the dying often see people who are not there. I say that death is a moment when the barrier between Memory and the waking world is unbearably thin. In those moments, spirits from the Otherworld of Memory cross over to bear the dying into their new existence.
