I really enjoyed your episode on dreams last week, though I do worry and wonder about Braden from time to time, any chance of possibly following up on the story in a later episode? With all the talk about the subconscious it made me wonder, have you guys heard of Stranger Dipping? It feels relevant. There is a new drug on the market called Rebraydimite that is being used to help people with dementia or old age, and it is used to regain memories. It really works, apparently, in small immediate doses. You can take it and recall memories that are stuck in your brain that you can’t quite get to. Its obnoxiously used by a lot of seniors but some times its even used in the police force if a witness needs to try to remember certain information on a certain day. Its just a powerful little jolt of a memory boost for your brain, and its pretty effective, apparently. However, people have been getting their hands on this stuff and using it in a sorta dodgy way.
What they will do is they will also get their hands on some Prenalin. Prenalin is essentially the exact opposite of Rebraydimite. Its used to actually attack the part of your brain that stores memories. It puts people in a minor drug induced amnesia. Its used when people suffer from a really traumatic PTSD situation, and sometimes its even used as an anesthetic. If you go through a really painful surgery…and you can’t remember it…I shutter to think.
So what people are doing as a form of recreational drug use is they are taking an excessive amount of Prenalin, to the point that they completely forget who they are. Prenalin has a various amount of effects, if taken in small doses the patient will remember their long term memories and then forget the immediate short term memories for a certain amount of time, around an hour. However if you take enough of it you can actually permanently damage your long term memory as well. Normally in these cases, the individual suffers the devastating loss of their history, their existence, their personality, everything. They are wiped clean and those memories never come back. That is until Rebraydimite was developed. Rebraydimite is actually powerful enough to reverse the blocking of access to your memory banks that Prenalin overdose cases create. And thus this bizarre loophole gets created.
So now, people will intentionally overdose on Prenalin and achieve the “cleaning of the slate” that it creates. In this moment they are a completely empty person. Or maybe they are a new person? A fresh person? This moment of losing all their memory is described as a lot of things ranging from terrifying to truly enlightening. But generally the point is that it allows people to be a new person for a night. The idea is that you take the overdose with some friends and when you lose your memory after a moment of panic and confusion having lost the memory of who you are, where you are, and why there are now people around you you don’t know, they will calmly explain to you that you have taken a drug, you’ve lost your memory, and you will be able to get it back whenever you would like. And then after that, its sort of just whatever you want it to be. So you get to spend a night as essentially a completely fresh person, possibly even a different person.
Things start to get a little philosophical here because sometimes people are the same person they always have been, just kind of lost in a world they don’t know or understand. But sometimes, people who are around this person will comment that the person takes on a completely different and new personality. Is that the person they always were? Were they just hiding that person? Or was the person changed when they were wiped? Could you intentionally impact that change?
Usually when people suffer amnesia, though they can’t remember names or faces or places, ultimately their “soul” stays the same. They are the same person they just have no context for where that person is in their life. This is because these are two different parts of our brains. However, when people Stranger Dip this isn’t always the case oddly. Obviously this isn’t the way either of these drugs are meant to be used and there is a lot not understood about the effects. I’m not sure if its an effect of the drug or the nature of ones identity, but occasionally when people do this a completely new person exists in this state. It, in a weird way, enables people to “become a stranger” for a night and they can go out being someone completely new. However, usually the next morning or possibly a weekend, that person will take a large dose of Rebraydimite and their memories will all come flowing back.
This experience can end up being extremely personal and insightful. Some people talk about it and say that they gain a new perspective on their life, that by losing everything and then having it all come back they see things in a fresh way. And interesting enough becoming that new person, then having the old person they were come back, sort of combines the two people. In a way its sort of like they used to have one character living inside them, and now they have two. I’ve also heard stories about people who are known to actually, intentionally, never come out of it. When they lose their memories and become someone new, they don’t actually want to go back to their old lives, but maybe thats just a myth. That would be quite a life decision to make. I can’t imagine someone never wanting to know their loved ones again.
Another reason people do this is that in that time when you are wiped, the world has this intense wonder to it. The stresses and the painful life you toil in normally is temporarily let go, you feel almost like a child and again, this can mean a few different thing for different people. Some people are able to embrace this state and will just go out and experience the world as if everything is new but some people, when reduced to a state of nothing, when told that they have the ability to regain their memory, will sort of have a freak out moment and just instantly take the Rebraydimite. Which i imagine is a funny moment for them when they regain their memory back and realize why all their friends are laughing at them. But it makes you wonder, is that a symptom of nature? Or is it a symptom of personality? Because you lose your personality so it implies thats nature. But then some people react different ways. So then…what does that mean?
Either way, was just curious if you’d heard of this, made me think a lot about the studies into the subconscious you talked about in your last episode. Makes me wonder about the effects of messing with the different compartments in your brain the more we end up knowing about them. Do you think once we master the human brain, the first thing we decide to do will just be to intentionally mess with it? Big fan of the show, always excited for the next episode, so keep em coming.
Carl
