Memory Corruption
2/26/01
Studying Huna has done incredible things for my dream life. I've been keeping a dream journal for several years. Jung and the Hawaiians both got the first main rule right--always acknowledge with thinks, and do something concrete about every dream you remember. This tells your unconscious mind that you want to communicate with it.
The Hawiians, with their exquisitive understanding of the unconscious mind, saw it a simple being, like a 4- or 5-year-old child, communicating mostly through emotion and symbols. But having a real love for, and trust in the conscious mind. And it is delighted to be in communication with the conscious mind, through dreams and other ways. Most people don't listen--they respond to their unconscious with fear or distain. If you listen, over time you begin to get some powerful messages.
And, according to the Hawaiians, our communication with the spiritual, with God, with the collective unconscious, all goes through the unconscious mind. So if we don't understand this particular lens, what we see through it is distorted and can be harmful.
All that being said, I sure had a strange dream last night. I spent almost the entire night designing a memory allocation routine (a kind of computer program). This particular one had to run on many different planets, and it had to be able to resist corruption while replacing the current version, which allowed memory to be corrupted. The author of the current version was a former boss of mine, who indeed was a somewhat puckish character not very good at details. And how, just coincedentally, reminds me a lot of my father.
In the early part of the evening, I was working on the design. In the middle of the night, I was doing a kind of design review, where I looed for flaws. I realized that I needed some help from the hardare, "memory protection", in order to write a totally accurate routine.
As it became close to morning, I began to dream that I had waked up and was writing about this in my dream journal. At one point, I even finished the dream journal and went to the computer and started to compose this entry about the dream. Then I would realize I was still asleep, and tell myself that I must remember to make the dream journal entry when I woke up. Variations of this process happened at least a dozen times before I finally woke up for good (my bladder led the way).
So all day I have been thinking about memory corruption. Such a vivid word. Religious in tone. Literally, I think of computer memory with maggots and weevils crawling around in it, eating all the bit-rotten data. "Nor did Thou suffer thy holy One to see corruption," says the Messiah.
It's interesting that so many computer terms are emotionally very laiden but are used by nerds without a tremor of emotion. The application aborted. Now there's an emotional word for you. But not the way techies use it.
And memory. Memory corruption is rather like Alzheimers, no? So if my unconscious mind is enlisting me to build up my anti-Alzheimer antibodies, it was a night's work well done. Maybe those images of the people in the retirement home on Sat., minds nearly gone, a wisp of personality clinging on to the body, who knows why? Did they send the unconscious on a third-shift crusade to strengthen the quality of my coding?
Memory protection, that's what I needed in the dream. And didn't the end of my dream bear that out--take the memory of the dream, and write it in the journal over and over again, until, conscious, I accomplished the deed in fact.
Yes, I had to keep the memories alive and uncorrupted on many planets. My father's program lead to corrupted memories--a loss of perspective, squeezing myself into his suit of moral armor even when it clearly did not fit. Giving rise to ethical weevils that made so much trouble in my life. But I will fear no weevils. The program is fixed, the hardware is in place, my father's program has been supplanted, the memories are safe from corruption.
And I've made the entry in this journal I dreamed about, for the few souls who have perhaps discovered me and my writing. So they, and I, will not forget.
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2001 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
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