"I once awoke from a dream convinced that
I could learn the meaning of life by looking into a paper bag,
but the magical formula also required a pair of scissors,
a carton of 2% milk, a green marker, and something else.
Problem is, I haven't been able to remember that something else.
If it ever comes to me I'll look inside and let you know."
[Shaman of Luthur (me), "Welcome to My Mind" (30 May 99)]

The green marker is the indelible nature of human communication, both written and spoken. Once words come out, they don't go back in. You must learn to live with everything you do and say, to try to direct your life in a that can leave you with nothing to regret. Words expressed in haste, in anger, can have disastrous results. And while they say "time heals all wounds", the reality is that forgetting - truly forgetting - takes considerably longer than forgiving. It's like the old parable about the nails in the fence - words can leave wounds, holes, that can never be undone.

I know what the final thing is, and also why I couldn't remember what it was when I woke up.

In both my dreams and in my waking mind, I find my memory is not always concrete. Sometimes when I think of an event, a time, a place, I don't get a visual image in my mind, or hear words spoken... I don't remember how something felt to the touch, or smelled or tasted... rather, I remember how it felt, or what it meant to me. It's very ethereal, and even now I'm finding it difficult to describe. In trying to bring myself back and envision that time, place, occassion, instead I regurgitate how I felt at the time, but without the details. I've no idea if this is how other people's brains work. I've never really discussed this with anyone, though I'm now very curious to. And often, it can be troubling. If for instance, I'm feeling anxious or annoyed about something, and then get distracted, after the distraction passes and I think "now where was I?", the anxious feeling returns, but without the "why", and I'm left stuck in that state, feeling that way but not being able to resolve it until I remember how I got there.

This is actually something about myself that drives me quite crazy. My feeble memory is something about myself that I curse. Right now, for instance, there are events of my past, conversations, interactions, that I had 11 years ago, which I know happened, but I simply, despite all efforts, cannot bring to mind. (And I really really want to.) Nothing I can do will conjure up these memories. But these experienced happened! I was there. Why can't I simply dig it up from the catalogue of my mind? It's in my head, so why won't it come out?

They use things like hypnotherapy to help people remember painful repressed memories. Why isn't this available as a simple and effective service to us all, for hard-to-conjure memories that aren't painful? It's been 4 days and you still can't find those car keys? Head down to the local hypnotist and find out you left them in the freezer when you took the chicken out. Lost that phone number you wrote down? Pay a small fee and in 15 minutes you can relive the event while your guide jots down what you're mumbling. If there truly is a legitimacy to these techniques, why are they not more widely available? Surely this is a marketable service.

But getting back to the magical bag... when I awoke from my dream, I couldn't remember what that 4th thing was, because it wasn't a "thing". There was no simple solid object that could represent this 4th "lesson in life", because it was an idea, an ideal, that I couldn't actually conceive a simple single symbol to represent. And I still can't. I remember now what that idea, that ideal was, but I can't conceive a symbolic object to represent it. I could express it (but not fully explain it) in a single word, but there's no object that really jumps out at me to use as its icon.

Which is probably just as well, since I'm not telling you what it is anyway.