What of Memory If There Is Change?

what of memory if there is change:

it is a characteristic problem in dreams that everything changes so fast that you lose things. i have a recurrent kind of nightmare where for example i am about to travel in a plane, but i've lost my passport or something else i had earlier. the world of dreams is very unstable. however, in contrast, the world of waking life seems very stable and almost permanent, but is it?

the very essence of time is that things change. you may argue that time is most real in dreams, where everything changes fast. and if things change can anything last? can you have reliable mental memory or material records that we trust will not become corrupted in time?

if i wrote something in a book in a dream, i would not be surprised if either the entry changed soon after or even if the entry or book disappeared later never to be seen again. however, in waking life, there was a time when i would be surprised if a book changed magically overnight and a passage disappeared, because i thought the world was more stable than it is. but that's time, if something were truly to stay the same, then time could not be real.

now all this is worrying, i fear my memory is at best only a partially true record of the past, where there are cases where vivid memories have been conflated and i think events happened at the same time but didn't, where some details are now false and never happened, where if the past had certain flavours to it, the flavours of my memories are now mutated, and so on. and why is this so? because time slowly destroys memory through change.

i admit to a minor crisis, where my memory does not quite agree with material records, paper and electronic. logically it's easy to say, well, either your memory is wrong or the records are, or perhaps even both, but they can't both be right at the same time. the confusion is real and disturbing. if my memory is that wrong, i'm in big trouble. if paper or electronic records have mutated to something inaccurate, then they are unreliable and lying to me.

and you then think, if only there weren't so much change, nobody can remember it all! and if material records are subject to inevitable change as well, naturally, and are therefore unreliable, what then? from experience, living randomly and impulsively leads to fragments of memory which are hard to piece together a few years later. one of the biggest problems is conflation of bright memories, and where you assume that other events, less well remembered, happened then or there as well, when they didn't. this is pretty much the case a few years afterwards. however i think that very many years later, your memory is cleaned out somewhat and what's left tends to be true and the confusion is gone, even if only because lots of other memories have been lost.

on reflection it seems that anyone who does a lot is simply not going to remember much. if you really wanted to keep memory organized you would have to devise some kind of repetitive schedule at the very least, like fish on Fridays, then you could say, well, it was a Friday, so then i probably had fish.

CLEARCHARGE