Spider Dreams: Chapter 19 “Memory is a Stone Thrown in a Pond”

The surface is cold and water ripples backwards, waves emerging from a far away circumference pulsing inward toward the center where my index finger touches. A leaf lifts off the ground and returns to a tree branch. A bird flies backwards and a stone returns from the pond.

I look down at my odd reflection. I do not recognize myself, this self, someone else?

“Am I me?” I say out loud.

Bubbles reach the mirror’s surface and disturb the reflection of the sky; Its lips gurgling air.

“If you are not yourself, then who are you?” The Catfish asked, blinking in the bright light.

“I do not know. Who else could I be?”

“You could be many things.” The fish said. “You could be the dreamer. The sleeper, the thief, the victim, the evil, the good, the Godhead slumbering in the eternal game of hide and seek. So lost within your very own dream.”

“How would I know?”

“Is there not a thought scratching, like a strange suspicion that you are not you, the you, you think you are?”

“Something like that.”

“You are the actor, fully absorbed in the role. You are the director leading the great play, a theater for the soul. You don’t know your original nature. All these faces you play, masks you wear: the villain and the hero in the drama and the comedy. You are fooled by your own act, as is the purpose of this entertainment, so convicted and determined to latch onto identity, impossible to separate, step back, and ask that one gnawing question: are you really who you think you are, and what is the validity of it? A thought you won’t admit to yourself.”

“Perhaps.” I continue to swirl my finger in the water watching the waves return to their origins.

“Don’t make it a burden to be in your skin. It isn’t your looks at all that should bother you,” said the fish.

“Then what should be?”

“How do you feel?”

“Good. I guess.”

“On the inside?”

“On the inside, where else would I feel things?”

“Never mind,” said the fish. “Your true identity may be at rest and hidden while your conventional self lays open for dialog.”

“My conventional self?”

“It’s a starting point at least.” Said the fish. “The identity that you created for yourself, a sense of self composed from selected memories. What you think you are when you say ‘me’ often derived from your history, what you’ve done, experienced, and want to be. These are easy items to associate with because they seem to be as set in stone, fixed, and indelible. Where in the contrast an individual could also be what they are doing at the present moment, a sort of fleeting and intangible palette to work from. Sometimes the future can create an image of what an identity wants to be, a sort of wish to become. I guess that’s why we always return.”

“Return?” I ask.

“To the eternal dream.” Said the fish. “To this place.”

A memory of my childhood flashed through my mind. Laughing under a bridge, hiding. “What’s wrong with any of that?” I asked.

“Nothing of course.” Said the fish. “This is what makes you and me, and everyone else out there all so different. We all house memories and experiences interpreted and perceived uniquely to mirror ‘us’ from an infinite of possibilities picked out, abstracted and given significance by conventional standards.”

“So all meaning is subjective?”

“Meaning can be abstracted,” said the fish. “Almost at times simplified and yes, filtered into recognized attributes. All these events become objects.”

“Objects? I can feel and move and place objects. How is a memory anything near like an object?”

“By being aware of such memories and this world of collected processes an individual has the ability to build memories selectively and thus shape themselves. A self-created identity. A memory has a particular weight, consistency, significance, size, impact, and shape. How is this not like an object, a building block to the creation of self? You move these around, keeping some, losing others, consciously or not, often giving negative events and emotions more meaning and relevance that build walls, prisons within the self.”

“But I can pick up this rock and throw it into the water. I no longer can get this rock back, but here it is in my hand. I can’t do this with memory. As hard as I try to forget it, the memory remains like a blood stain.”

“A memory is an experience and should never be completely thrown into the forgotten depths. That would be saying it was never worth living in the first place. You would be making the past worthless.”

“What if it were a really bad memory? I’d like to throw those away.”

“Learn and grow from them. Everything is in a constant process and not separate isolated events. A memory, an action, a feeling is a part of this continual internal process. A process of creating the self.”

“But isn’t the self a lie?”

“You make lie such a negative word. Let’s call it, a game we play,” said the fish. “All I am saying is, be aware of the processes of self creating the self through this medium of time. See how the waters keep moving?”

“Yeah.”

“That rock you threw caused ripples and those disappeared.”

“Yeah.”

“The ripples are like echoes of thoughts. Inside are the reactions we choose to experience. Evolution is a process of self-awareness to events and intentions in a self-created world. At the current state of humanity, people are in a mixed puddle of confused, accidental, intuitive, yet unconscious stupor, sleep walking toward self destruction if they don’t wake up and get their finger off the detonator.”

The fish spat water in my face. “You must use conventional thought as an instrument instead of being used by it. Nothing has defined lines, nor equal boundaries. Try and understand the nurturing of reality rather than the nature of reality, and the latter will follow.”

“The mind needs liberation from the bindings it self-imposes and creates: boundaries and patterns of habituation, safety, security, fear driven behavior in a system producing humans caught in a feedback loop producing the environments it needs to grow in. It’s like an infected body bleeding to death while feeding itself more or itself.”

I sat listening, palms resting on my cheeks, elbows on my knees, feet in the cool flowing water.

A worm crawled up through the damp soil.

Thanks for visiting.

Copyright © 2018, Charles Denton
All rights reserved

Previous Chapters:

1: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-one

2: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-two

3 & 4: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-three-and-four

5: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-5

6: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-6-the-voice-inside-the-mind

7: https://steemit.com/steemit/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-7-coble-stone-ruins

8 & 9: https://steemit.com/steem/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-8-and-9

10: https://steemit.com/fiction/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-10-fish-s-monologue

11 & 12: https://steemit.com/story/@ghostfish/spider-dreams

13: https://steemit.com/story/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-13-attic-revisit

14: https://steemit.com/story/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-14-frailty

15: https://steemit.com/story/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-15-day-job

16: https://steemit.com/story/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-16-family

17: https://steemit.com/writing/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-17-bad-coffee

18: https://steemit.com/writing/@ghostfish/spider-dreams-chapter-18-a-dream-within-a-dream