Girl, Interrupted/Boy Erased
No, I’m not going to write about these two films. They are here to reference the title of today’s post. In fact, I have not seen either of them.
This post is about memory and how it can be altered.
Last night, I had a dream about a murder. This murder wasn’t the focus of the dream. The dream was actually about the photographic evidence about the murder and how it was altered.
The evidence was stored in a computer, with photographs of the scene of the murder in an exact sequence of time. In the middle of these photographs, one of the images was changed, which would have gone unnoticed in the dream, except for an anomaly. The original image was overlaid by the replacement image and the two images merged in a disjointed, misaligned frame.
The following picture is an example of the misalignment:
Memory
In the symbolism of my dream, I know this one is really about memory. We have discussed such issues before: the Mandela Effect, for example. None of us are accurate recorders of history. What we think we remember is actually a figment of our imagination. We remember wrongly.
It’s not a huge step to Alzheimer’s, when we lose the thread of our thinking (and memories) completely.
But does that mean that these memories never happened? Of course not, but unless someone else experienced the events, too, the knowledge is gone.
History
What is written in history books is a consensus of information from the point of view of the winners. The losers get forgotten, or worse, purposely erased from recorded photographic evidence. Stalin was infamous for doing this to former comrades who had been subsequently ‘purged’:
This morning, a post on Facebook was shared by a friend of mine. This friend stated that this was the first she’d heard of the fact that The Great War (WWI) ended because the soldiers stopped fighting to return home, some to labour disputes, and some to overthrow their governments. I suspect that part of history was missed while watching the movie Dr. Zhivago.
Memory: Replaced
Maybe we think were are autonomous individuals. Think again. We are being brainwashed constantly. Just study TV advertisements, for example. And, as I have noted in other posts, the latest tactic is to get the viewing consumer to accept the idea(l) of diversity. If anything, this may be stoking the horrific backlash that is causing the deaths of so many ‘random’ victims in the States.
This leads me to the other point of the dream: the phrase “super T”. It came up at one point and when I woke in the night, I remembered it. At first I thought it should have been ‘superior’ or ‘superiority’, but by the morning I recognized it as ‘super authority’.
Super Authority
Most of us are quite aware that we don’t know everything. In fact, we probably don’t know very much of anything, if we’re being honest with ourselves. That is why we look to others for direction and confirmation.
When a person seeks to truly change him/her self, the work has to come from within. Even Hypnotherapy clients can resist suggestions, although the ensuing battle can cause more harm than good.
The only ‘true’ authority in our lives is that “still, small voice” that tells us what we should be doing. Most of us don’t listen to it. It’s called the Conscience.
Conclusion
Well, that was a long journey from the dream image through the 20th Century to present day. Did we gain any knowledge along the way? I hope so.
The world seems so messed up right now, but if you went back 100 years, people were saying the same thing then. It is a constant in life that we recognize that things aren’t right, but feel powerless to change anything.
Maybe we all just need to look at the (wo)man in the mirror. Bless.
