Lol re the bat's lighter.
fummydiddled... I've decided to take on a new personality quirk where I say this in every other sentence. Your fault.
As for Carolyn's memory-- the brain seems capable of amazing reshuffling of awareness, and I say the brain rather than the mind because I've noticed something that happens in dreaming, not really a voluntary activity. Some extreme alterations of the basic ground rules of life and living seem to happen, at least in my dreams. In a dream I'll find myself accepting certain bizarre circumstances as being as basic to reality as anything can be... the same feeling as when you look out the window and all the cars are resting nicely on the ground. The bizarre new "rules" in the dream seen as natural as gravity.
As I wake up, that overwhelming feeling of "normality" gradually fades, I come up through more and more layers of it, more and more aspects strike me as strange and I wonder, what the hell was I thinking, accepting all that? What's notable to me is that this overpowering sense of "normality" seems to be part of the dreaming process. It's as if it's arbitrarily switched on for the sake of any bizarre dream premise that comes into our heads.
That makes it seem something physical is happening, like a particular neurotransmitter creating that sense of "rightness" is flooding the right bits of the brain just as we fall asleep. It drains away as we wake, and the feeling goes.
I know Carolyn is supposed to be out from under Barnabas's control by "now" (1968), but.... my concentration and focus are going because of, you know, my own neurological difficulties... but I'll try to wrap this up just by saying that perhaps Barnabas (w/o realizing it himself) controlled certain brain functions of Carolyn's, marshalling the brain's unconscious mechanisms so that they worked for him. These certainly aren't under Carolyn's conscious control, and that absolute sense of "rightness" that the brain is capable of brainwashing us with during dreams, could do wonders in the hands of a really cranky and paranoid vampire.
Maybe she was put into such an altered mental state by Barnabas then, that in coming out of it and recovering her real self, she had to travel so far away from that that it's hard to remember, like some dreams that were extreme experiences just a few minutes before waking... they can fade out of memory very fast. Or think of it as Barnabas's being cured having turned off his effect on that neurotransmitter, whatever it might be. BC is doing it all without thinking of brain chemistry, of course.
I was convinced I'd lost this post. The computer froze, and even the window had disappeared... then it came back. If someone out there decided to help out with the painful minutae (sp?) of my life, thanks....
