Saturday, August 19, 2006

Mind Games

Bus journeys to and from office in the company bus are one very good way of catching some well deserved sleep. The journey to office is like a continuation of morning sleep but for the short break of morning formalities. In the evenings after a hard day of not working (believe me it is really tiring), sleep is but natural. So I save about 2 hrs of sleep.

But once I get into this sleepy state, the subconscious mind takes over, and I am out of tune with the mundane day to day reality. All this means that I tend to forget things when alighting the bus. This habit of sleeping has cost me dearly - a lost mobile, two lost umbrellas, many incidents of books/documents left behind. So I was very skeptical one day while putting my umbrella on the top luggage compartment. There was no place for the wet umbrella down with me, so I had no choice but to put it up there. As I was wary of loosing it, I thought I'd remind myself about the umbrella before alighting. So I created an alarm to that affect in my mobile. The alarm was set to the approx time I would probably alight on.

“I can safely forget about the umbrella now”, I thought. But now I faced a new problem. Neither could I sleep, not get the damned umbrella out of my head. I tried listening to music. I tried reading. But all my efforts were useless. Actually by putting in conscious effort to create the alarm, I had hardwired the thought of the umbrella in my mind. So the harder I tried, the harder it was for me to forget about it.

Now I started thinking of more advanced ways of forgetting. Since it was my conscious effort to forget that was making it hard to forget, I thought I will now try the reverse logic and try to focus on remembering and not on forgetting. But somehow the subconscious mind got wind of this well thought out plan. I realized that you couldn’t hide something from your own self (can we?).

Finally I got bored of these games. A genuine drowsy feeling took over. I guess by now I didn’t care enough about remembering or forgetting. And that is when it happened. By the time I was nearing my stop, the alarm actually startled me. I had forgotten.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. The subconscious does behave in mysterious ways. Its is completely incomprehensible to the logical left brain. Sometimes it can be like a stubborn little mischievous kid who is hell bent on defying you while other times it just doesn’t bother what you do. While mostly I don’t know the existence of my subconscious, but on the rare occasions that it makes its appearance, it sometimes scares me with its potential and sheer dominating power.