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.