Transferable Memory

Memories are a wonderful thing. When you think about it, they kind of make up your whole identity. But, man, talk about limiting! We have to carry them in these lousy meatbag bodies.

Let's use our phlebotinum to fix that. Memories aren't just things you hold in your head anymore. They can now be deleted, manipulated, sold, backed up in case of death, shared with the world, or kept secret even from yourself.

This trope is most popular as a central issue in a plot and it's easy to see why. Memory manipulation brings some pretty heavy issues to the forefront. Are we people without our memories? By removing them, do we indirectly kill a part of ourselves, or others? If memories are interchangeable, are we really any different from machines who upload and back up data in the same way?

Alternatively, this trope can also be used simply as a clue in a mystery. Being able to acquire a reliable narration of how events actually happened goes a long way toward giving us a definitive answer.

Compare Liquid Assets, Genetic Memory, Memory Jar and Powers as Programs. See also Brain Uploading, where some or all of the subject's personality is copied/transferred along with the memories. May be used in Memory Gambit. This trope can intersect with Ghost Memory if memories from one person are copy-and-pasted into another.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In The Big O, memories are a MacGuffin.
• Tsukimiya from Bloody Cross is a Dhampyr who can read people's memories by drinking their blood.
• Call of the Night: Vampires can get the "feel" of a person's emotions by sucking their blood. By ingesting blood through more indirect means (such as a blood bag), they can also experience their memories, even if the blood sample came from a person that died years ago.
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has virtual reality simulations based on people's memories called "braindances" like the games. David is introduced watching an illegal braindance made from the memories of a dead cyberpsycho. He later meets the editor of that braindance, and after some fanboying gets kidnapped and almost used for new material.
• How memories shape our identity is a major theme in Death Parade.
  • Since the central premise of the show involves Arbiters judging the dead, the system relies heavily on processing their memories and condensing them down to the most important ones for the Arbiters to analyze throughout their judgment period. Arbiters receive the memories through some kind of Telepathy, and they are set up to periodically forget them so as to not be bogged down by the extra information. The guests arrive without any memory of their death, and they are made to play games that are set up to trigger their core memories, along with some prodding from the Arbiters themselves.
  • The Information Bureau that handles memory compiling is so overworked and understaffed that they often make mistakes, leading to the Myth Arc of a character who remembered dying and was unable to be judged properly by the Arbiter she was assigned to. She then had her memories completely erased and was put to work with him.
  • Fake memories are able to be stuffed into dummies to give them temporary sentience.
• Characters in Ghost in the Shell often store memories in external storage devices via their cyberbrains, it's apparently a similar mechanism to that which hackers use to insert Fake Memories.
• Pakunoda, a membress of the Genei Ryudan in Hunter × Hunter, can copy her memories into bullets and then transfer those memories to other people by shooting them in the head (Memory bullets don't inflict physical injuries). When Kurapika grabs and ensnares her with his Nen Chains, he tells her that if she uses this power to give her companions hints about their leader Chrollo, she will die. Pakunoda does so anyway.
• Kaiba takes this trope on front and center. Only the privileged can afford effective memory treatment, and on many planets the poor sell their good memories (and sometimes bodies) to make ends meet. We're introduced early on via newscast to a group of known terrorists who sabotage memory treatment facilities, but little is elaborated on that topic until about halfway through Kaiba visits a memory theme park. When it closes down, several memories scream to be taken out of their misery as they're forced to remain in a state of not-quite-life-or-death. The elderly patrons Kaiba was with just thought it was All Part of the Show.
• In One Piece, the Memory-Memory Fruit (Memo Memo no Mi) allows its user to view any person's memories and make any changes to alter them. The current holder of such a fruit is Charlotte Pudding, one of Big Mom's daughters.
• Queen Millennia:
  • In order to skip training, Yamori uploads into Hajime digital copies of all the books they have, turning him into an Ace Pilot next time he wakes up.
  • Queens Millennia pass their memories to the next, which is how Yayoi knows what happened in prehistoric times and has embraced all of humanity's struggles.

Comic Books

• In Last Days of the Justice Society, the Spectre transfers his memory of how history was altered in 1945 to Dr. Fate so he could relay them to the rest of the Justice Society of America.
• Wonder Woman (1942): On both Earth-One and Earth-Two, the Amazons have a memory device on Science Island that allows them to record, read, erase, overwrite and implant memories.

Fan Works

• Between the Lines (MrQuestionMark): Chapters 9 & 18 take place during the Daihaseisai and are about Saten's and Misaka Imouto's respective uses of Indian Poker cards, which are used to share dreams, and the ones they use contain 'the best-selling dream among females of ALL ages in Academy City'. Said dream happens to be a date with Touma, which ends as they are about to kiss.^note It is part one of a three-part dream, with two others sold separately. Part two involves kissing/making out and part three is implied to involve sexual intercourse. Afterward, they approach Touma and tell him to 'take responsibility' (as did over one hundred other women and some men); true to character, Touma is baffled by said declarations and gets a beating after Saten's declaration.
• The Stargate SG-1 fanfic Bless the Children — both the Gen version and 'Ship version — sees SG-1 visit a planet where the locals have technology that allows them to download memories from others. They can control how much information is downloaded from the memories so that the devices are often used as teaching aids, but they can also use this to copy and upload memories directly from the subject. The natives use this to create clones of visitors as a means of improving their own low population numbers, which creates a crucial challenge when the natives create a clone of Daniel himself; the clone, known as "Danny", has all of Daniel's memories up to the moment when he witnessed the deaths of his parents. When SG-1 discover the eight-year-old clone in a state of trauma-induced catatonia from having the memory of seeing Daniel's parents die transferred into his memory, they take Danny back to Earth, which leads to Daniel adopting him and working to get Danny help coping with the memories that still trouble him to this day.
• In Divided Rainbow, Twilight Sparkle's five Element Bearing friends transfer memories with one another, causing huge shifts in their personalities.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami explores the topic with Tiger, a youma who has lost her mind and memories when entering Keeper Mercury's service. Due to Ami using her body a lot, once Tiger regains consciousness she has a hard time separating Ami's memories from her own, and thus suffers from a huge identity crisis.
• The Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Days Of Future Smurfed" has a circular example in that Empath (as Great-Grandfather Smurf) supposedly transfers all his memories to his great-grandson, who as Traveler Smurf goes back in time and transfers those same memories to the younger version of Empath, who then transfers those memories into a magical memory crystal.
• Fallout: Equestria makes frequent use of "memory orbs" as a form of Apocalyptic Log. As well as a Memory Gambit by the protagonist.
• Harry Potter and the Ritual of Love's Memory features Harry using this to basically try and change the past. After the Battle of Hogwarts left most of Harry's friends dead, he and his remaining allies discover a ritual that would allow him to send back a brief memory to his past self of some future event, using this to send the younger Harry a memory of a moment he spent with Ginny that features him thinking about horcruxes, both alerting Harry's past self to his feelings for Ginny and making him aware of horcruxes earlier than before.
• The Harry Potter fanfiction The Ollivander Children has an Obliviator as a main character, who deals with transferable memories as a matter of course.
• In the Charmed (1998) fic Tempus Fugit, a chain of events lead to Paige and Henry from the end of Season Eight travelling back in time to save Prue's life through a Heroic Sacrifice, only for Paige's spirit to essentially possess her past self, giving her brief flashes of her future life (Henry's spirit is directly transferred into his past self by the Elders). Once the present Charmed Ones establish what has happened, they attempt a spell to fully restore Paige's memories of the future, but this results in those memories being 'distributed' between Prue, Piper, Phoebe and Henry, who start experiencing flashes of Paige's future from her perspective, such as Piper seeing herself pregnant, as well as Paige losing some of her own memories.
• Vow of Nudity: The Sisters (aka matriarchs) of the shifter clans use encode thoughts to deliver encrypted messages to each other via clansmen who act as runners between villages. Since only Sisters are allowed to know magic, they can ensure nobody else will eavesdrop on their private messages. (Of course, they don't know Fiora taught herself the cantrip in secret...)
• Your Heart a Haven of Thorns (Naruto): Not only do the Yamanaka clan possess techniques that allow them to view the memories of others, they can effectively broadcast and share these memories with others. Inoichi walks his daughter through this technique so that she can show him, Shikaku and Chouza just what happened during Sakura's preliminary match with Kabuto. During the process, Ino is able to look back and "see" her father behind her, despite how he wasn't present for said match. Inoichi also remarks on how focused she was on Sakura, making it harder to perceive things that Ino wasn't paying as much attention to at the time.

Film — Live-Action

• In Blade Runner, Rachel is given memories copied from Tyrell's niece to improve her emotional stability.
• Criminal (2016): An experimental procedure is used to put deceased CIA agent Bill Pope's memories into the brain of sociopathic convict Jericho Stewart, which is stated to only be possible because Jericho's criminal behaviour is caused by brain damage that made his mind receptive to the treatment (with the additional twist that Pope's memories restore Jericho's own capacity for emotion).
• Dr. Schriber of Dark City (1998) implants Fake Memories into people's heads with syringes, and he's later seen concocting the fluids that make up these memories.
• In Self/Less, a dying billionaire is approached by a man who offers him a medical procedure he invented called shedding which will transfer his consciousness into a younger artificially created body. However, he discovers that the body isn't artificial and the hallucinations he has been having and taking medication to suppress are in fact the man's memories.
• Sleep Dealer: Sharing memories is depicted as an inexpensive (discounting the cost of getting a Node job) and unremarkable procedure in the near-future world. Luz is a "writer" who makes a living selling her memories to TruNode, a service that runs much like a stock photo website for memories. She also creates a sort of "mix tape" of happy memories with Memo and mails them to him as an apology for publishing the memory of their first meeting on the bus from Oaxaca to Tijuana.
• In Strange Days, the SQUID technology means anyone can partake of a recorded memory.
• Total Recall (1990), as well as its source material "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", uses these as a central plot point. The memories in question are intended to give a person the illusion of having had an exciting vacation on Mars without incurring the extreme expense of such a trip. A central plot point is how these memories can possibly have any sense of being genuine if the man who "owns" them knows that they're false — this leads to the movie's central ambiguity as to whether the uncovering of Quaid's secret agent memories is real or whether they simply must appear to be real to make the memories seem plausible. This differs from other incantations of the trope in which the internal consistency of conflicting memories is rarely at issue, largely because characters know the difference between their implanted memories and their real ones. Some people consider this a clue that Quaid's experiences are real.
• In the Underworld (2003) movies, vampires can access the memories of other vampires by drinking their blood. This is used by Vampire Elders to catch up with the events that transpired while they were in torpor.

Literature

• The Dreamweavers from The Age of the Five can 'link' to swap memories. Ironically, the best way to avoid having your personality drowned out by link memories is... more linking.^note Or more accurately, the ritual of asserting of one's identity at the end of a link session.
• The Memory Bulbs from the Ambergris book Finch allow the Graycaps to access the memories of recently deceased individuals. You simply sprinkle some spores on the corpse, wait a while for the fungoid bulb grow from their head and then eat it. The experience is extremely confusing, at least for humans, trying to perceive range of events in a non-linear fashion, like picking them up randomly from the air. Since the memories always belong to a dead person, experiencing the memory of their deaths can be traumatic, as well. But worst of all, sometimes the process simply goes wrong when a human ingests the bulb; one detective's body breaks down into a mass of spores after going through the process one too many times.
• Animorphs:
  • The Iskoort aliens have a technology that allows them to buy people's memories; and the alien explaining this technology is quick to reassure the Animorphs that they don't lose their own memories, it just means making a copy of their memories. These copies of human memories turn out to be very useful, because it seems that when they force their Omnicidal Maniac enemies the Howlers to experience the memories of a human, this makes the Howlers not only cease to be "pure evil," but it's so much of an impurity that the Howlers's evil master is no longer able to use them.
  • The Helmacrons are also really close to this, since their minds are fungible and when one dies, the mind is absorbed by the rest of the group.
  • When Jake is infested by the Yeerk that once controlled his brother, the Yeerk's memories of its hosts are dumped into Jake's memory as the Yeerk is dying of starvation.
• Apotheosis (Swann): Uploaded minds can be downloaded into either Artificial Intelligence-level computers or living brains. The colonists of Salmagundi download the minds of their ancestors as a religious observance.
• In Baccano!, immortals can transfer memories to other immortals by placing their right hand on the recipient's head and willing it. Of course, since this is also the method immortals use to kill each other (the only difference being what you think when you're doing it), most potential recipients aren't willing to take the risk.
• A variation in Mikhail Akhmanov's Call of the Abyss duology. After the first manned expedition arrives in orbit of Mars, the psychic among the crew begins to see vivid visions of historical events from the viewpoint of someone else. Centuries later, an areostationary station is established over the spot where the visions come through with an alien psychic channeling them onto recording devices. Anyone can then play these visions back in his or her mind by sitting on a special chair. At first, it's assumed that these are recordings of Earth made by aliens over millennia. Then they find out that the visions diverge from our history at some point during the Renaissance, meaning they are actually sent by humans from an Alternate Universe. The vision in question is that of Charles Babbage inventing the first vacuum tube computer in the 19th century. The main "vision" of the first novel is the life of an Ancient Egyptian named Unamun, whose journey to Byblos is verified via a papyrus in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The second book is focused on the vision of the life of a 17th century English Privateer named Peter Shelton.
• Cradle Series: "Dream tablets" use Dream madra to record memories directly, where they can be copied or experienced by any number of people. They were invented by Emriss Silentborn long ago as part of a campaign to spread knowledge across the entire world. She was killed for that, and when she came back she was much more careful. The only problem with Dream tablets is that the differing Power Levels in the world mean that often the memories of higher-advancement people are difficult for lower-advancement people to comprehend. There seems to be a thriving industry in making sure there are Dream tablet recordings of important events available for all advancements.
• The Dresden Files: The jewel Harry Dresden's mother left to him contained a specific set of her own memories: the ways and paths she learned through the Nevernever.
• The Elric Saga: A Magic Mirror in Elric of Melnibone steals memories from people.
• As shown in The Forerunner Saga, the Forerunners of Halo could transfer memories and experiences so perfectly into another person's mind that they essentially become the person they're copied from. When Bornstellar is given the Ur-Didact's memories and returns to the latter's wife of thousands of years, she treats him no differently than she would her husband, even though she knows full well what's happened.
• The short story "Futures in the Memories Market" by Nina Hoffman involves an ingenue whose intense memories of visiting other planets are sold by the corporation she works for. She's not allowed to keep the memories herself though — to prevent her getting jaded — so tries to enlist the help of her bodyguard to get hold of one of her memories on the black market.
• The Giver transfers memories to Jonas. Also, those memories can be transferred to the general population if something happens to the Receiver.
• Physical memories appear in the Harry Potter series with the Pensieve. Interestingly, the existence of these objects is revealed a book before readers find out about wizards' ability to force their ways into other minds, which requires the use of Occulumency to guard against. It turns out that extracting memories from a person willingly to use later is a decidedly less evil use of these skills. Skilled wizards can draw their own memories out of their heads - they take the appearance of silvery wisps of an almost cloud-like string.
• One The History of the Galaxy novel has a scientist/politician create a device that probes the mind of a person and downloads the memories. He mentions that it would normally be a very difficult process to figure out how to interpret the memories, but the fact that there was a war on allowed him to convince the top brass to fit each soldier with such probe, coupled with a camera. Then all he had to do was analyze the millions of probe scans with their respective video footages to create a "dictionary" of sorts. In Black Moon, he is able to use the device to extract memories of a group of frozen Delphons. However, he hits a wall in attempting to decode the data, as no computer is capable of doing that. He then downloads the memories of a Delphon into the mind of a human, hoping the human brain is powerful enough to interpret the alien memories. It works.
• In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, Exalts store copies of their memories in their nanomachine colonies. They can trade memories by exchanging pieces of their colonies.
• In the Known Space novel World of Ptavvs, a human telepath mindreads a much more powerful alien telepath. Identity confusion and plot result.
• Mistborn: Copper Ferrings have the ability to transfer memories into copper metalminds. By default, these memories can only be accessed by the person who stored them; however, unsealed metalminds can be created which allow memories to be transferred from one person to another. Wax is given one such metalmind containing Kelsier's memory of first meeting the Southern Scadrians.
• In Nexus Nine, main character Mazel Rheun's "Rheun chip" is a Precursor brain implant that has recorded the memories of hundreds, if not thousands of hosts over the millennia. It gives her a bit of an identity crisis.
• In So I'm a Spider, So What?, Shiraori eventually determines that her memories of her life as Wakaba Hiiro aren't her own. They were transferred into her by Evil God D, the real Wakaba Hiiro. D grafted a portion of her soul and a set of modified memories onto Shiraori's original self, a simple spider, with the intent that its eventual death would confuse D's subordinates in the afterlife.
• Star Wars:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong from the New Jedi Order can literally manufacture memories. Usually this is used as a way to learn new skills quickly, but with time and careful application can also overwrite entire personalities. For the latter, though, as it requires a very complex set of memories, it's easiest to just use someone's preexisting ones rather than grow a whole new set, however.
  • The gentle Caamasi can make memories of important events into a memnis, an especially vivid memory that can be telepathically transferred between related Caamasi, and which are passed down like family photos. Memnii can also be transferred to Jedi that are good friends with Caamasi, who can use the Force to share them further.
• In Ukiah Oregon, the Pack and Ontongard can both transfer memories between themselves by drawing out blood and handing the resulting animal to another member to be absorbed.

Live-Action TV

• The third episode of Black Mirror focuses around a device called a Grain. It records memories and is capable of replay with all kinds of features like zoom, crop, reconstruction. You can also share memories with people and there is a black market for people's grains.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Angel's explanation is that when a person is vamped, the vampire demon gets their memories and body, but not their soul.
  • Slayers inherit memories of previous Slayers, albeit through dreams.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor does this in the episode "The Lodger" to help explain what's going on to his temporary companion — by headbutting him.
• Dollhouse: A very central concept, along with the ability to transfer and back up etc personalities.
• Don't Look Deeper: Android memories can be transmitted to other androids and stored in their own brains as a backup for restoring them later.
• In Earth: Final Conflict a device is introduced that allows one to vividly relive their own memories, but is also capable of recording them and playing them back for anyone else.
• The New Avengers: In "Three Handed Game", a device is invented that allows memories and skills to be transferred from one mind to another. It is stolen by a mercenary who intends to use it to steal espionage secrets. When the Avengers get too close, he uses it to transfer his mind to anew body.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • A bit of a variation in "Donor". After Dr. Peter Halstead receives Timothy Laird's body in a full body transplant, he experiences flashes of Timothy's memories and related attributes. The first sign is a craving for a cigarette in spite of the fact that he has never smoked a day in his life. About six weeks later, he sees visions of Timothy's wife Deirdre and daughter Kylie, which he at first mistakes for a hallucination. One day while driving aimlessly, he arrives at Timothy's house, having been drawn there, and sees Deirdre and Kylie in the flesh. Under the pretext of being an acquaintance of Timothy, Peter starts to spend time with them. He assists Deirdre in coaching Kyle's soccer team, having essentially inherited Timothy's soccer skills. Peter eventually comes to share Timothy's love for Deirdre and tells her the truth about his identity. She is extremely upset at the revelation, but she comes to terms with it after a while.
  • In "Blank Slate", Tom Cooper's memories are contained in several crystal vials in a small box. He is gradually able to restore his memory by injecting himself with the crystals in sequence. He cannot take them all at once as the interjector works on a timer, only releasing one crystal at a time.
  • In "Fathers and Sons", the residents of the retirement home Silver Sunset have their memories systemically removed and transferred into data chips using a process created by Dr. Benton Adler, the home's administrator. They are injected with memory suppressing chemicals so that they forget having the procedure done to them and are kept in stasis unless their families are visiting. While they are awake, they are given pills, supposedly for high blood pressure, which help to suppress their memories. After several memory transfer sessions, they begin to develop symptoms similar to Alzheimer's. The process eventually kills them. The extracted memories are sold to people who want to increase their knowledge and skill sets. The curiosity of Ronnie Dell, the grandson of the Silver Sunset resident and famous blues musician Joe "Madman" Dell, is piqued when a man on the street plays a song entitled "Sitting There Blues" which Joe wrote for him. Ronnie is greatly disturbed when he learns that his father Hank is one of the people who has bought Joe's memories, not to mention the technical skills and business acumen of other people who have been subjected to the same procedure. After Hank has a change of heart, he uses his newfound technical skills to remove Dr. Adler's memories so that the procedure can never be performed on anyone else.
• In Power Rangers Ninja Steel, Brody meets who seems to be his long-lost brother Aiden, which he proves due to having memories of Brody prior to his kidnapping. It's eventually revealed that "Aiden" is actually a robot created by Madam Odius and given the memories of Brody's brother whom Odius had kidnapped. Upon the robot's destruction, the memories return to the real Aiden, who is revealed to now be known as the country music star, Levi Weston.
• Red Dwarf: In "Thanks for the Memory", Lister gives Rimmer his memories of one of his past relationships. It goes so badly that the entire crew have their memories of the past few days erased.
• A planet visited in the ninth season of Stargate SG-1 developed a device that allowed memories to be copied from one individual and transferred to another, but not changing what happened in existing memories. They could delete memories, too, although this wasn't the primary function of the device. A jealous scientist used this to try to frame SG-1's leader Lt Mitchell for the murder of his ex-wife (the lead scientist on the project), whom he had murdered after she and Mitchell spent the night together, by transferring his memory of the murder to him.
• In the Star Trek universe, Trills are an alien race that are capable of living with a separate symbiotic lifeform inside their bodies. The symbionts are long-lived and are highly prized, so they are frequently transferred from one host to another at the end of the Trill's life. They also retain the memories of their hosts, and transfer them to their new hosts. Thus, a newly-joined Trill suddenly gains the memories of all their symbiont's previous hosts, which in some cases can be many lifetimes' worth. This can be very confusing and distressing for the new hosts, even leading to temporary loss of a sense of personal identity, so special years-long training programs are needed for any prospective host, in order to prepare them for the new experience.
• Star Trek: Voyager.
  • In "Random Thoughts", an ostensibly peaceful telepathic race has a black market in violent thoughts. The Crisis of the Week occurs when B'Elanna Torres has a violent thought illicitly stolen, which leads to a murder for which B'Elanna is held legally responsible.
  • In "Remember", B'Elanna Torres finds herself experiencing Erotic Dreams of an alien love affair. The dreams quickly become Darker and Edgier and it becomes obvious she's actually experiencing the memories of a Dark Secret that's been repressed in that society.
• In Supernatural, seraphs and archangels have the ability to read, delete, edit, replay, or straight-up create fake memories.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Mind of Simon Foster", memories can be copied, removed and transferred to other people in 1999. The pawnbroker Mr. Quint offers to take the title character's memory of his high school graduation in exchange for the money that he desperately needs. Simon reluctantly agrees and, although he intends it to be a one-time thing, his financial situation means that he must return to the pawn shop and sell his memories on a regular basis. Over the next few weeks, Quint takes his memories of his fifth birthday, his first steps and a trip to the circus, among others. When Simon has an interview for an engineering position, however, he finds that he can't remember anything that he needs to know as he has sold his memories of attending college. He nevertheless returns to Quint's shop and sells his memory of making love for the first time. After he does so, Simon realizes that his memories were a vital part of him and demands at gunpoint to have them back. Since Quint has already sold them, he can't comply but gives Simon's other people's memories. At another job interview, Simon discusses his contradictory memories including graduating from numerous different high schools and colleges (including the women only Sorworth College), being an only child and having a brother and sister.

Tabletop Games

• Cyberpunk: Through the use of an Alternative Reality Process (colloquially referred to as "braindancing"), people can record, edit and distribute tactile experiences to others — including the sensation of death. Those who experience a braindance resulting in death can have their own heart stop from just the visceral reaction.
• From Wraith: The Oblivion, we get the Mnemoi and their Arcanos, Mnemosynis, the sole purpose of which is to transfer and manipulate memories. In a place where memories are important for maintaining one's existence, the Mnemoi are far from welcome, and are therefore one of the three Forbidden Guilds. In actuality, the Mnemoi are using their talents to store the memories of Charon for his return, and the whole persecuted thing is a ruse. One that, sadly, works a bit too well in the end.

Video Games

• In Cyberpunk 2077, there are braindances, which are human memories saved as computer data that with the proper equipment allow the viewer to relive the recorded memories of someone else with all the senses they experienced at the time, including emotions. This being a Crapsack World, there's also the illegal Snuff Film variant called Extreme Braindances (XBDs) that allow people to relive gruesome and bizarre scenes, including violence, torture, and even rape and murder.
• In Fallen London, you can sell off your Memories of Light to the anarchists in an apparently distressing procedure involving a hook. A straighter and seriously played example is Red Honey, which is made by having bees crawl into a victim's eyes and extract their memories like pollen. Drinking the resulting honey allows you to dream the victim's memories.
• Final Fantasy:
  • This is a common theme in Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia. Most of the cast lack their memories at the start of the game and slowly reacquire them throughout Act 2 from their Dark Manikins, who have been holding onto the lost memories for them after the goddess Materia took them away to spare them from pain.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, one of Jenova's abilities is copying the form and memories of other beings. Just knowledge of this is used to great advantage by Sephiroth to give Cloud even more psychological problems than he already had.
  • If one compares the "Sephiroth in the reactor" cutscenes of FFVII and Crisis Core, one comes to the conclusion that Cloud has memories of things that happened to Zack when he wasn't there. This makes his accidental identity theft much less embarrassing, since apparently Project S genuinely put some Zack in him.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • A truly bizarre version of this occurs with Xion, a whole character made out of memories. When she died, all memories of her went with her.
  • In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Roxas meets with Sora in a dream and transfers the memories of his life into Sora.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Link can recover various memories of his own past by going to certain locations he once visited and/or looking at specific objects involved in those memories. However, upon pulling the Master Sword from its pedestal, he sees a memory of when Princess Zelda placed it there after he fell in battle and right before she went to seal away Calamity Ganon, an event he was not present to witness.
• In Mass Effect 3, the Protheans are shown to have been able to absorb the memories of other beings by merely touching objects they've handled. Whether this is a biological or biotic power is never really explained.
• The Sensen brain implant technology of Remember Me allows people to transfer memories between each other. In one of Nilin's memory remixes, a bounty hunter is trying to cure her husband by transferring her memories to him while he is in the hospital.
• Professor Eri Anzai is kidnapped by Ze Balmary Empire in Shin Super Robot Wars because of her rather detailed Mu civilization theory. No item confirming the existence of this mythical people has ever come to light, but the Balmar sure seem convinced. They went so far as to digitize all of Professor Anzai's research data plus her brainwaves, despite the fact that even Professor Anzai herself has no clear idea of where the Mu might have dwelt.
• The Tiamat Sacrament: While dragons don't have a Hive Mind, they can share memories with each other through Blood Memory, allowing young dragons to quickly copy the knowledge of old ones. Unfortunately for Az'uar, most dragons are dead and he can only access a few memories and skills of the Soul Gems he acquires.

Web Animation

• In Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction, the Epsilon AI was created from the Alpha AI's memories. Agent Washington eventually receives these memories when he implants Epsilon into his head, providing the catalyst for the series' events.

Webcomics

• Discussed in Freefall regarding the robots. While transferring memories to a new frame is possible, they don't feel that they would still be themselves.
• Ancients in Gifts of Wandering Ice used various methods of memory transfer as a way for chosen individuals to live forever.
• Spells in The Herder Witch are taught in such a manner. Morie and Padora in the fifth issue transfer each other knowledge of their exclusive spells in such a manner, Morie learning Padora's water spell and Padora Morie' light spell. The memories can also be extracted in solid form (as a small capsule) to be absorbed later. Romantic implications also abound, with the intimacy depicted in passing each other spells.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Amorphs have this as a part of their Bizarre Alien Biology. Since they evolved from a type of biological computer memory their entire body is essentially their brain and memory. As such they can exchange memories by breaking off a part of themselves that contains a copy of the memory and giving it to another amorph to "eat".
  • As Petey begins experimenting with memory-backup nanites, he finds ways to turn someone's memories into something like a movie for someone else to watch.
    Elf: Couldn't you also put Kevyn's memories straight into my head?
    Petey: I could. Subsequently observing and recording your descent into dementia would be very educational.
    Kevyn: That's psycho-bear for "Can, but won't, thank-you-very-much."

Web Videos

• NOC +10: The machine behind the channel is noted as "assimilating" dead bodies in the research station as part of a top-secret project, part of which appears to be the transferring of memories into the machine, with grainy footage of children shown in certain videos.

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