- Are you worried?
- A little bit.
- But you’ve had this done a couple of times before. You know it’s not dangerous.
- I know. I am not concerned about something going wrong. I don’t even mind that funny feeling I’ll get in the next couple of days from that camera going into my throat and down through my chest and stomach.
- So what’s the problem?
- It’s the anesthesia, I answered, I hate waking up from it. I feel that I am being pulled slowly from a dark abyss, and I get nightmares and say creepy things to people around me.
- “Well. Let’s skip the anestesia then,” My doctor said with a confident smile
- What? Are you serious? That would be painful, wouldn’t it?
- Not so much. It will be uncomfortable. But instead of making it less uncomfortable, you’re not going to remember anything about it.
I looked at him with interest and suspicion. “Go on,” I said

- You’ll be taking a drug that will cause very short amnesia. You’ll experience discomfort, and may be a little bit of pain during the procedure, but you won’t remember anything about it for the rest of your life.

I was both intrigued and scared, so I decided to try it.

And sure enough, one instant I am laying in bed looking at a cute nurse injecting a clear solution into my IV, and an instant later I am sitting on my bed in the waiting room staring at my doctor who was telling me that there are no stones in my galbladder.

He was talking, but somehow his words weren’t registering in my memory. It was as if every word he was saying replaced the previous word in a very short memory buffer. I looked at the clock on the wall. An hour had passed since we last talked, and yet I have no recollection of anything that had happened during that hour.

According to my doctor, I never went to sleep during that hour. I was fully awake and responsive. He even said that I laughed at something he said to the nurse, and almost choked on the endoscope.

Somewhere in my memory, there is an hour of my life that I have no access to. As if it were password protected, and that drug I took made me forget that password forever.

When I drove back home that day, I had a million questions in mind:

How can I be denied access to an hour of my own life? of my own memory?
What if there are many other parts of my memory that I cannot recall, that lasted hours, days or even weeks?
If I am given the option to suffer for a goal or cause, and never to remember that suffering for the rest of my life, would I do it?
Wouldn’t I be the happiest person alive if I had the option to deny myself access to any part of my memory that holds pain, anger or grief?
If I can’t consciously access some parts of my memory, do I still have access to them subconcsiously? In other words, would I act according to the experience stored in that part without being conscious why I am acting that way?

Creepy!