A Saturday night movie, a midnight shower, and being alone in the blessed silence with my thoughts...

In the early part of the year 2000, I tried out a thought experiment, and enjoyed it so much that I rode it out for a couple of weeks. I tried envisioning myself as a character in a novel. This thought experiment took on a life of its own. I began to recognize plot devices in my every day life. I began to recognize when a new character was introduced whether or not they would be integral to the plot. I saw hints of foreshadowing, and had a disturbing sense of what it meant. I considered it great fun, but didn't give it much serious thought. I checked back in my journal, but that was during a period when I wasn't writing much or often. The only mention of it is ambiguous:

"They say that truth is stranger than fiction. The truth is, my reality has begun, more and more, to resemble my fantasies. Yesterday's daydreams are today's truths." (dated March 2, 2000).

So tonight I watched the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with Will Farrell. This movie was pretty much exactly what those two weeks were like, except that for me, the narrator was imagined, rather than actually heard. My story also wasn't leading up to my death. Unless I did actually die... The funny thing is, I was just reading a story about me with me as the main character. It was my journal. As avid a journal-er as I was back then, it is ironic to now think that my thought experiment was true, and that I was narrating a story of myself, to my later self as I read. As I got to the point during that same time period where I laid out my indecision about whether or not to move to San Diego, I found myself shouting at the journal, "Don't do it! Don't move to San Diego!" Alas, I never listen to my future self, I don't know how. But oh, if I did. What if I tried this thought experiment again, but imagined myself looking back on this time 7 years in the future? What would I be yelling at the pages of the journal I now write?
I also found myself gazing at a collection of badly faded photographs that were all taken on two separate days in 1998. That was an eventful year in my life. How strange it felt to unexpectedly come across a tiny window back onto 2 days of that fateful year. There were the people that were part of my life back then, all gathered in my old apartment on King Street. People just gathered back then, no need to call them up and work with schedules. I'd come home from work and find people waiting for me on my couch, since I never locked my door. I miss all of you who are in those photos. Even those of you that broke my heart.
What if your memory were so perfect that you could rewind your memories back to any point in your life and hit play, and it would be like being there again? Would that be like time traveling in your own skull?