113 - Contagious Memory

Unnatural Phenomenon: Contagious Memory

Our internal worlds are walled gardens of history and experience stored as conditioning and memory. Memory isn’t accurate recall, it bends and twists to serve purpose. Stories at odds with self-image are recontextualised to sooth the ego, social influence breeds false consensus and trauma looms large. Even innocent intention doesn’t escape its slippery nature, every time you think back on an event you change it by adding facets of your current state to its retrieval and gradually transforming it into the eroded artifact of a lifelong game of telephone. Nonetheless we rely on memory to tell us who we are by what we’ve done and in understanding that conceptualise the self. In smaller doses we learn from past experiences and in even smaller doses share it with others.

Phenomenon that breach the private amnion of this experience and cause our memories to spill over into others or others into us are fundamentally disorienting.

Shared narco-alchemical drug trips, demons hellbent on equalizing the internal states of several people and cabals deliberately marching toward hiveminded bliss: there are no shortage of magickal vectors for the experience. It can come on as hallucinatory vision of other’s experiences, a sourceless implant of a foreign internalised view or temporary dissolution of the self combined with a spiritual spin cycle. One person might share with a group, a group might share with just one person or everyone present could end up in the reminiscence gumbo.

Occasionally a single memory will ricochet or spread through a population over an extended period, along a specific method of contagion. Relational triggers from actions or the environment can provide some small degree of control over exactly what is shared (and give GMs and players a thematic rudder to exploit when using or subjected to it), but the outcome could just as easily be dictated by the source of the phenomenon or subject to so many factors as to seem completely random.

The effect can be unifying and alienating, it can be damaging, it can be therapeutic. What it is never, even in its most mundane incarnation, is ordinary. Although you might not remember it that way.