Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

On occasion, I ask my brain to go through its memory banks and search for something I know I know, but which I cannot at the moment remember. This search method is a technique honed by decades of living in a pre-Internet world, before Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, and all the rest.

What is her phone number? Didn’t I read a book about this subject? Who wrote that song? Where have I seen that actor before?

I got so good at this that I could do it in my sleep. Literally.

It’d be late, and there’d be a question that had been nagging at me all day. I knew the answer—I’d known it for years—but it was lost, huddled in some  dark cupboard of my mind where it had collapsed in a comatose heap, surrounded by dust bunnies, reeking of gin. To solve the problem, I would set my mind a task: Hey Brain. See this problem? Run it to ground. Bring me the answer in the morning.

Usually, when I awoke, I’d have the answer. I’d recall that phone number, knew the title of that book, flashed on the cover of the album, or could recite lines from the movie where I’d first seen that actor on screen.

Then the Internet came, and smart phones, and in a virtual flash, I didn’t have to remember anything, anymore. Whatever I wanted to know, I could look it up, on a whim. It was just the work of a moment.

As a result, I’m a bit out of practice at my background dreamstate searches.

Last weekend, I was struggling with the scene I’m writing. Petra (female lead) is heading toward a critical point in the plot, and is reflecting on past events en route. There is some information that I needed to incorporate in the scene, but I couldn’t figure out how to fit it in, not without using a shoehorn, that is. I needed a seamless transition, and couldn’t think of one.

Now, this is just the sort of conundrum I used to set my brain on solving overnight. So before bed on Sunday, I did that.

Hey Brain. See this problem? Run it to ground.

And it did.

And I got an answer.

At 3 o’clock in the bloody morning.

I should have been more specific.

It’s been a while since I used this technique, and I forgot the final part of the instruction: Bring me the answer in the morning.

At least I solved the damned problem.

k