Body Swaps

by Noxsoma

Many a time I’ve been out on a street corner on cold snowy nights wondering what the person driving past me was feeling; how they were absorbing life. How their senses were decoding their environment and how they were reacting to it. What were they thinking? Where were they going? Home? To a job, as I was? Did they notice the man at the bus stop and wonder the same?

I had no idea this video existed...

Believe it or not these thoughts kept me warm; must have been all that electrical activity in the brain. They made the time pass by faster too.

When I was a kid I watched a lot of television, cartoons mostly. I didn’t realize until adulthood… deep into adulthood, that my favorite cartoons were mirroring the popular culture. Just as The Simpsons have been doing for the past thirty years, The Flintstones, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Under Dog, et al did in their day. The crafty, politically astute and aware writers behind the wackiness of flying (and talking) animals and cave men (and women) lampooned everything from the cold war to weather control to swapping personalities.

Back in the day, I think I was more fascinated by the art than the stories. The plots seemed so “out there” they just had to be the product of someone’s imagination. The patterns never dawned on me. For example, there was an era in television where personality swaps were the thing. This may have been an extension of the strategy in psychology of role reversal. I never really got the idea of that until I started paying more attention and opening up to people.

The most recent example of this idea, that I can remember, happened in an episode of The X-Files where Fox Muldar’s personality got stuck in some other guy. (There was an earlier episode where the body of an FBI agent who’d died was occupied by the spirit of the criminal he’d shot.)

This whole back story is to give you an idea of not only where my head is at, but how it got there.

I have often thought about being able to spend time inside someone else’s body; to see the world as they see it, to feel what they feel. Would I feel trapped inside? Would I be stronger or weaker? More or less sensitive? What kind of skills would I acquire?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the process would have to be a complete body swap… or soul swap, because there wouldn’t be “room” (so to speak) for two in one.

From that idea, I realized that if I were to become someone else, I would indeed be them and stop being me. There would be no way for me to evaluate, me being them. There would be no way for me to remember the experience. And if that’s the case, who’s to say this hasn’t happened? Who’s to say that the changes I’ve made in my life… those pivotal moments when I went from quasi-hippie to Seabee, to photographer, to city employee to semi-free vagabond are not the results of one entity relinquishing control of (I use this term loosely) “my” vessel (body)?

Sometimes I feel as if the dreams I have… are not my own.

We might pick up on this again later.