[ WP ] Every time you wake up you are someone different .

Every time a human being sleeps they loose something. Memories that they would once have never dreamt of forgetting slip away, never to be thought again. Feelings of the previous day, and moments. Daydreams, sensations, the petty annoyances and pettier triumphs. All of them slip away when we dream. 
 
 Dreams recombine them, they smash them together like protons in a collider, and from their combustion new sensations, marvelous sensations, bloom in the mind like fireworks in the night sky of the deep north in midwinter. But after the light comes the dark, and while something is gained something is lost. It is human to create. It is human to forget. 
 
 Neurons want novelty. They are greed incarnate, consuming blood and sugar and information and space. Twenty percent of the food we eat goes to feeding them, and they are always hungry. In return, they excrete new patterns. The new gets analyzed, stored, and sorted over the charred corpses of the old. 
 
 I have a distinct recollection of a scene. I was sitting at the state fair in my hometown. I was staring at a sign overhanging the side of the building on the opposite side of a narrow path. I was nine. I remember this because at that moment I thought `` I will forget this tomorrow.'' And that filled me with sadness. Because I knew that I would loose that moment of happiness. And I have. 
 
 At age ten I could still remember the scene, in vivid detail. But I had lost the detail in the edges. At age twelve I could not remember the seat, only the building and the sign, and the food. At age eighteen I could remember the colors and shapes, and feelings. Now I know only the facts. 
 
 I can not remember what it is to be nine. I can not understand how I thought, how I felt and sensed and lived. But I can remember times. That time I bullied, the time I was bullied. The time when I was happy. But I can not remember the happiness, the sadness, the wonder of being nine. I can only remember the facts, and the feeling. 
 
 That is what the brain does. That is what sleep does, it destroys something. Every day you wake up a new person, having died and been reborn the night before. I am a different person than that nine year old who sat on a bench at the state fair and was happy. 
 
 But I have his memories. He has done things that I would be ashamed of doing now. But he did things I would never dare to do. He was innocent, and an idiot, and it is easy to think that I am still innocent and an idiot. When I wake up tomorrow, will I think the same about myself? 
 
 I cling to those memories. They are precious to me. I dig into them with my hands, claw at them, seek to remember them. But sleep destroys. Each morning I try to pick up the pieces, try to reassemble my memories. Each morning the memories are memories of a new person. As I change the memories change. Eyewitnesses are terrible at recalling the truth. Red becomes blue, and false becomes true. I am just a witness to my past.
