I’ve always wondered what the inside of my brain looks like.
As a child, my imagination was heavily influenced by the cartoon Once Upon a Time... Life. I pictured my brain as a lively place filled with long corridors, where neurons dashed back and forth, delivering messages like tiny workers in a vibrant city. Back then, memory wasn’t something I paid much attention to. Like any kid, I lived in the moment.
But as I grew older and my memories began to accumulate, I started to imagine my brain as a different place—one that could somehow keep things organized. I was influenced again by another cartoon I loved in my teens, where the main character’s memories were housed in a complex maze of doors and staircases, each door leading to a different memory or emotion. Unlike my earlier image, this maze wasn’t alive with bustling neurons; it was quiet and bare-walled. Over time, I began to picture those walls filled with framed snapshots of moments, preserved behind each door and linked by shared feelings, people, or events. I took great pride in my ability to remember. But as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “Memory is an active and imperfect process. Memories are shaped and selected, often profoundly, in that process. Like souls in heaven, they are saved, but changed.”
That resonates deeply with me. Even when a memory seems crystal clear, some crucial detail may escape you without your realizing it. That happened to me once during a conversation with my father. We were reminiscing about a camping trip he took me on when I was a child. I remembered it vividly: the thrill of chasing rabbits, the freedom of running wild with other kids, each of them with their fathers. I was certain it had only been a father-child trip. But then he said, “No, your mother was with the other mothers, relaxing away from the noise.”
I paused. My mother? I couldn’t remember her being there at all.
That realization unsettled me. My mind had taken a memory, framed it, and tucked it away, leaving out a person who mattered so much. It made me see how memory works more like a hazy snapshot, one that fades, gets cropped, or perhaps even rewritten over time.
And that’s where imagination comes in. When a detail goes missing, the mind doesn’t leave it blank—it fills the space automatically. Imagination becomes the curator of memory, restoring what was lost, even if it never truly happened. In that way, it is both creative and unreliable.
Le Guin discusses this in her book The Wave in the Mind, where she reflects on the role of reimagining memory in fiction writing.
The older I get, the more I agree. We don’t remember as archivists. We remember as storytellers. And in that storytelling, imagination becomes both a helper and, at times, a trickster.
Now, when I imagine the inside of my brain, it’s not just corridors or mazes. It’s a gallery—messy, beautiful, filled with incomplete portraits and half-lit rooms. Some doors I open often. Others remain shut, their memories not easily recalled, locked doors with forgotten keys, opened only by accident, creating a quiet feeling of serendipity.
Reem Alshalwi is avid reader of history and fiction, where the threads of truth begin to dissolve and memory intertwines with story. She’s based in Jubail. Follow her on Twitter (X).
