Memory

<Bluefox> It's established that you can't just walk through your memory.  That would be ridiculous:  your memory isn't indexed and organized like some kind of bookshelf; it doesn't store in the Dewey Decimal System.
<Bluefox> But it's believed you can't traverse the whole of your memory at all, which is wrong.
<Bluefox> Every thought echoes everything ever associated with everything in your memory.{{citation needed}}  Often these echoes are intangible--this is only plainly obvious with the feeling of knowing, when you know you know something, when you can see it there in your head, but you can't grasp it.
<Bluefox> Otherwise you pull up facts and information and you remember associated information, or feel that you can think more on it and remember things, but aren't particularly interested.  Obviously, if you're not interested in what you know you can readily explore deeper, you're also not interested in those feelings of something else that you don't quite grasp.
<Bluefox> Memory is associative.  The things you can't quite grasp can be grasped by throwing everything probably related into your head and seeing what catches on the hook.  You're trying to dredge up something, you know it's there, you can't pull it out; a common strategy to overcome this is to throw everything similar at it--even words that start with the same letter, or similar ideas (different kinds of ships, boats, cruiseliners, tankers
<Bluefox> ... sarong... SANPAN, a chinese boat)
<Bluefox> That means, as well, the more things you bring up on a topic, the more related things you can access.
<Bluefox> And that's pretty much what I learned to do.
<Bluefox> I took an exercise of making absurd associations and took it out into an exercise of grasping for the most distant, weakly-remembered thing I can, and then trying to remember that thing by recall techniques.
<Bluefox> For example:  I was reminded of Stephen King while looking at R.L. Stein books--someone was afraid kids would grow up to be Stephen King fans, and that Goosebumps was a gateway drug
<Bluefox> Later, I was thinking about making pickled eggs.  Boiled eggs.
<Bluefox> I thought on this, and came up with a clown eating an egg... Pennywise the clown, Stephen King's IT
<Bluefox> Nobody gives a shit about that.
<Bluefox> Forget pennywise.  Why did I get a clown eating an egg?
<Bluefox> Eating an egg whole.
<Bluefox> An image of a clown eating an egg whole, from long ago.  Video tape.  Video tape with brown crayon scribbled on it.  Picture Page.  Animation of triangles and ovals rolling over a crack in the road, triangle gets stuck.  THE WHOLE CARTOON COMES BACK.
<Bluefox> Some stupid cartoon about a stupid elephant trying to deliver a letter and carrying every fucking thing in the world with him as he goes (put it in the inbox... okay.  Put letter in inbox, take letter, go to next office, I HAVE THIS LETTER IN A BOX TO DELIVER...)
<Bluefox> BILL COSBY
<Bluefox> and that kept going back
<Charybdizs> mmm
<Bluefox> Once you get a hold of something that you've lost the direct link to, you find it's still linked to all kinds of shit.
<Bluefox> Look at the weird things.
<Bluefox> dismiss the things that are obvious.  The things that seem odd, that feel related to something else, look at those.  The things that you remember something fuzzy about, like SOMETHING is there but you basically don't care, stop and look at that.  What is it?
<Bluefox> Often the absurd comes forward.
<Bluefox> I got as far back as a dream I had as a small child wherein I saw a rip in space open and a zipper tear across it.  Yes, a zipper.  WTF?  And then I woke up screaming.  I was like... 15 months old, somewhere abouts.
* SamW ([email protected]) has joined
<Bluefox> Old entertainment center in that room.  Brown carpet.  That had since become an exposed plastic tile floor, which was then carpeted in blue, then in blue flowery pattern, then hardwood.  I have the earliest memory, and can walk forward through the changes in the floor--they're related.
* djpretzel ([email protected]) has joined
<Bluefox> I can also remember all the other nightmares.  I can remember the development of my nyctophobia.  I can remember psychoanalyzing it when I was 6, trying to understand wtf my brain was doing--I introspected a psychotic episode when I was 6.
<Bluefox> Charybdizs:  nothing magic, just something most people don't think to do.
<Bluefox> You won't be able to just pick a date or a subject and remember it, either.  You'll just find shit lying around, and then crazy amounts of data come flooding back.
<Bluefox> And the oldest memories will be abstracted and compacted:  you'll have them in the third person most likely.
<Bluefox> But, because memory is associative, the more you find, the deeper you can go.