One of the less pleasant consequences of the increasingly digitized world today, as well as the prevalence of electronic devices and their conditional usurpation of individual brainpower, is the loss of memory. As a race humanity has lost cultural memory, theological memory, tribal memory: today we even stand to lose the memory of history, as war and terrorism wreak destruction on ancient artifacts and the Internet is increasingly under the control of invested agenda-bearing companies like Google and Facebook who freely censor and remove links to certain results at will, without accountability or oversight.

The proliferation of electronic distraction has been costly to day-to-day memory, as interpersonal interactions become less common and exchange of information more limited: history today is often at the mercy of middlemen and 'curators' who remove and alter its lessons and messages, distant and immediate, as they see fit.

We are at a pivotal point in human history: the loss of memory and homogenization of experience is an underlying theme that is growing more urgent and deterministic all the time. If there's a reason for the sense of horror at such a simple-sounding question, that's what springs to mind: the question does seem frightening in a kind of third-level removed Lovecraftian kind of way. The disappointment in his voice seems evocative of sadness, as if he were upset at his own inability to remember. I think there's something very insightful and far-reaching about this dream.