The System
How I learned to hold onto the only images my mind could produce.
A Mind Without Pictures
After the accident, I could not visualize anything. Not an apple. Not a cow. Not my spouse.
I knew what things were, but only through word descriptions. If you asked me to picture something, there was nothing there. No image would form.
My inner world was completely dark. This was not a matter of poor memory. The mechanism itself was broken.
The part of my brain that produces images had stopped working.
Then One Night, an Image Returned
After months of nothing, I had a dream.
It was the first visual experience my mind had produced since the accident. It was not like a normal dream where the brain compiles fragments and puts them together.
I was not a participant.
I viewed it like a movie.
I was accompanied by the same figure each time, and I was allowed to ask questions about what I was seeing.
Sometimes I received answers.
Sometimes I was dismissed, like a child being told to just be quiet until you have seen the whole movie.
That first image was a breakthrough. Not because of what it contained, but because it proved my brain could still produce images.
I Was Told to Write Them Down
I was told to write them down as Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy. CRT is a set of techniques used after a brain injury to help rebuild function through practice and repetition.
Recording the Visions and reviewing them was meant to help rebuild neurological pathways and strengthen my brain's ability to visualize again.
So I developed a process.
Wake. Write. Reread. Recall.
Every morning after a night of Visions, I would wake and immediately start writing. Every image. Every detail. Every impression. Before it faded.
Then I would reread what I had written and try to recall the images. Not just the words, but the pictures themselves.
This was the exercise. Write the Vision down. Read it back. Try to see it again.
Over time, the process worked. But it only worked for the Visions. The only visual memories I have from that entire period are the Visions themselves.
I cannot visualize birthday parties, vacations, friends, or animals. Nothing.
I only recall the images of the Visions.
Everything else from that time remains dark.
What the Process Revealed
At the time, I believed I was simply performing a mental exercise. Something to help my recovery.
I had no idea what I was actually building.
Years later, when I rediscovered those hurriedly written pages, I found something I did not expect.
The Visions were not random.
They formed a sequence. One led directly into the next.
They unfolded in order, like chapters of a narrative that had been given to me one piece at a time over eight years.
The written record, I call my Paper Memory, became the only proof that the Visions had happened at all, and the only way to see that they were connected.
Paper Memory Is Not a Metaphor
The only images I had were the Visions.
The only visual memories I have from that entire period of time are the Visions. Everything else is dark. I cannot picture a single moment from those years outside of what was shown to me.
The writings, the recorded records, are what allowed me, 20 to 30 years later, to recall the Visions with clarity. Without that documentation, the detail would have been lost.
Those records are what made it possible to write the book.
That is what I call my Paper Memory.
Not a journal.
Not a diary.
A recorded account that preserved the only images my mind could hold, long enough for me to understand what they were.