Author: Don Nigroni

Yesterday on Christmas Day, I was at my filthy rich, albeit eccentric, uncle’s house. And that’s when and where everything went awry.
After dinner, he took me aside to his library to enjoy a cigar and a tawny port.
“We know our current materialistic paradigm is pure garbage, yet we still cling to it,” my uncle said.
“You mean because of the double-slit experiment,” I replied.
“Actually, I’m thinking of terminal lucidity.”
“Huh?”
“We believe our memories are stored in our brains and, when people have dementia, those neurons die, and those memories are irretrievably lost forever.”
“Sadly.”
“But we’ve known for centuries that wasn’t the case. Shortly before dying, some people with severe dementia become lucid, remember their past and recognize loved ones. So, our memories aren’t stored in our brains.”
“Then where are they stored and why can’t people with dementia access them?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out and I expect to change science, like Descartes, forever and perhaps win a Nobel Prize to boot!”
After we had finished our glasses of port, he led me to his huge basement. There was this big chair and a weird helmet with lots of wires connected to many devices resting on the seat.
“I plan on very briefly electrocuting myself and recording what happens while I’m totally unconscious. When I regain consciousness, I’ll see what my monitors detected and what I can remember of the time when I was unconscious. I suspect the monitors will show little or no brain activity, but I will be thinking of my departed wife while I’m unconscious and I may even meet her.”
All I said was that it sounded awfully dangerous. Regardless, he flipped some switches on the devices, sat down in the chair and donned his helmet. When he flipped a switch on the side of his helmet, I expected to see sparks and static electricity but all that happened was my uncle collapsed in the chair.
I had a lot of explaining to do to my relatives and to the police. I’ll never know what, if anything, my uncle learned about memories and materialism. But I do know that eerie experiment terminated his lucidity, at least, in this world.