The Drink of Forgetfulness and illegible notes: The Key, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, and Tim

I've been reading Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Eleanor Cameron's 1956 sequel to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. The titular stowaway is Horatio Q. Peabody, a self-important scientist who hopes to make  his name by publishing a description of Basidium, the Mushroom Planet, the very existence of which the boys have been keeping secret, and open it up to explorers, miners, tourists, and so on.

In order to prevent this, the Mushroom People bring out The Drink, which they present as a great honor -- "Such a person, worthy of The Drink, rarely comes to us -- he is hard to find" (p. 134). The pompous Horatio takes it for granted that he is the person they mean, and he downs The Drink. The boys are disgusted at Horatio's arrogance, but later one of the two Wise Men explains to them the true nature of The Drink:

"You see," went on Mebe, "that was The Drink of Forgetfulness. Only once or twice in a lifetime is it necessary to give some misguided person this drink, usually someone very conceited . . . . The Ancient Ones have decreed that The Drink is never to be forced on the guilty person. But it is never necessary to force him to drink. Out of vanity and pride, he always takes it eagerly and drinks it all -- every drop" (p. 137).

The Drink works slowly. By the time they arrive back on Earth, all the details of the journey are beginning to fade from Horatio's mind. Horatio, however, had been taking copious notes the whole time they were on Basidium, and he reassures himself that even if his memory fades he still has his notebook.

In this he is disappointed. For reasons that are never really explained, when humans visit Basidium they find themselves speaking and understanding the Mushroom People's language quite naturally, but when they return to Earth they find that they cannot remember a single word of it, but are left only with a vague sense that it was a tonal singsong language that sounded a bit like Chinese. When Horatio opens his notebook, he finds that written language has been similarly affected:

"All gone," he whispered. "All gone. Hen-tracks -- that's what it is, just hen-tracks."

Now Chuck darted over and picked up the book and opened it. Then he turned and held it out, his eyes wide with wonder.

"Sure," he breathed. "That's it. It's all in Basidiumite, of course. So now he can't read it. It's just scratchings, just gibberish. He can't remember the language, so now he can't remember how to read it. Poor old Horatio!" (p. 160).

 

Now compare this to the afterword to Whitley Strieber's The Key (2011 version). Strieber wakes up the morning after a nighttime conversation with a stranger I have identified as Tim:

As I rose from the bed, I saw my yellow notepad on the floor, covered with scrawls. It had been in my briefcase when I went to bed, so I must have pulled it out and taken notes. I grabbed it and looked at them.

They were pretty much just squiggles. They didn't seem to relate to any sort of a conversation.

Had he been real, or a dream? If you took nots in your sleep, they might look like this.

Then I remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had.

Then I thought of the Milk of Nepenthe, the drug that was mythically given to people who had visited the gods, in order that they would not suffer the anguish of remembering the pleasures of heaven when they had to return to mortal life.

I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused.

What's the connection between The Key and the Mushroom Planet novels? Tim. After my Tim dreams, I connected Tim with two other characters: the stranger from The Key and the character Tim from the William Alizio story. After posting a bit about the Little Skinny Planet from the Alizio story, and speculating that it might be connected to the Moon, I received a comment from Kevin McCall saying that The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet featured a very small planet closer to Earth than the Moon. The two books have no connection at all other than this synchronistic link with my Tim dreams -- and yet they also turn out to share these two themes: drinking a Drink of Forgetfulness, and taking copious notes that turn out to be unreadable gibberish.

The phenomenon in the Mushroom Planet stories, where people returning from Basidium can clearly remember that they have been speaking a different language but are unable to remember a single specific word of it, is also a link to my Tim dreams, of which I wrote:

I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used.