Who's been raiding my mind?

I have been listening to myself from 21 years ago, a voice from a micro cassette recorder, and I have been reading the accompanying notebook entries. The handwriting is small and precise, for me, and I marvel now that I was ever able to write like that, but it was done in the early days of computing when I very rarely used a keyboard. The voice, by contrast, is unchanged. I set the recorder playing on the table where I was working, and Tabby Cat pricked up her ears and moved to sniff the speaker grille, then looked at me with a puzzled frown. Even with the flutter of a tape running at the slower recording speed, it is still my voice.

I have been reviewing memories from so long ago, and although I came across detail I had forgotten, when I read the notes or heard my description I could remember it. For example, I listened to my anger and frustration somewhere near Beerta in Northern Holland, as I crouched in a bus shelter barely 10 inches wide, trying to shield my little solid fuel stove from the gale force winds, desperate to have a hot drink inside of me. When I put down the box of matches to pick up the saucepan the wind swept the box away under the gap beneath the bottom of the bus shelter and I had to scamper after it. The stove, of course, was blown out by the time I returned.

As I listened, I could picture the metal-framed structure, and I could sense the relative positions of the bike, the shelter, and myself. I was facing northwards, with the bike to my right. The stove was directly ahead of me on the ground. I had come from the left, and I was going to the right. Although I could not describe every crack or scar on the lower panels of the shelter, I could feel what it looked like. Fair enough? I know we all remember things slightly differently, but that is how I generally expect things to pop up inside my head, a definite sense of direction and alignment, a vague sense of colour, a general idea of shape and form.

A little further on, In Germany now, I read of how I rode along a dirt track in the darkness beside an autobahn until I came to a drainage ditch where the track stopped abruptly, because the ditch ran into a culvert beneath the embankment of the autobahn. In my mind I saw the rising ground to my left where the lights of cars rushed past, the blackness of the ditch running from my right to my left into the white concrete of the culvert, and the lights of Itzehoe further over to the right beyond some low trees. The sense of location, position,and direction is all there, as is the pale whiteness of the concrete parapet gleaming in the moonlight, only a foot wide, across which the track appeared to run. I slept underneath a tree a few yards back the way I had come, and pushed the laden bike across the parapet the next morning.

So, to the shock. Someone has stolen something from my head. I know it was there, because I listened to my voice describing it, and I read the entries in the notebook which I had written only a few hours later. I heard my voice describe my arrival at Spodsbjerg in Denmark, on the island of Langeland. My voice told me that:

"I wheeled the bike along a sandtrack for a klick, and parked it against a giant piece of old tree trunk in the sand grasses. Three hard-boiled eggs done in seawater, and a cup of hot chocolate, roggerbrod, cheese and an apple made an excellent supper."

"I fished for a couple of hours but had no luck, so at midnight I went to bed in the mist, with the sound of fishing boat engines muttering somewhere in the darkness. The sky was clear through the mist, stars and a half-moon D showing, so although I had the bivvy sheet ready, I slept uncovered in a grass hollow beside the bike. There were one or two blue flashes from Rudkobing way, couldn't be a train as there are no railways on this island, but no thunder either."

But I have no memory of this. Did I go North or South from Spodsbjerg? Was the log to my right and the sea to my left? What about the fishing, did the spinner make a plop as it arced out into the water? Did I sleep with my head towards the rear wheel or the front? Was the moon to my left, or my right?

Try as I might, I cannot recreate a single image or sensation of this, which, compared to the turbulence and frustrations of the other two scenes, must have been a pleasant episode. It's gone, some bastard's half-inched it. Do we only store vivid memories of painful experiences? Or has a passing spacecraft lifted some of my better memories out of my head for their entertainment?

I feel robbed, incomplete, taunted even, knowing that I experienced something, but am unable to recall it. What has captured my attention is that, in this case, I know a crime has taken place and something stolen from me because I have the records to prove I used to own it. But how many other things have I possibly lost, that I didn't write down or describe to a cassette? How do you know you've lost something if you have no memory of ever having it in the first place?

They say that you carry all of your memories within you, for all of your life, although they sometimes get locked away. Is this true? If I were to visit a hypno-therapist, would I be able to unlock this scene, and would there be others like it? Supposing I regress too deeply and see the flashing lights and the little green men with the memory-suction device going zzob-zzob-zzob-zzob, would it drive me insane? I'm scared now, I don't know what to do about it.