Memory Jar

This trope is when an object becomes imbued with the memories of a character, allowing others to gain these memories in a Pensieve Flashback or Exposition Beam. The "Jar" may be single use or reusable, and while it is often made intentionally either as an awesome form of journaling or diary keeping, it's entirely possible for it to be made unintentionally. In those cases, it's probably a psychic or wizard using a form of touch-based Psychometry to find out the history of an item.

In some cases, the memory jar can potentially be a complete record of a character's memories, becoming both a biography and potentially a "restore point" if their memories are damaged or a clone has to imprinted.

Compare Soul Jar, Transferable Memory and Neuro-Vault.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episode "Glass Labyrinth", Motoko seemingly gets hacked and finds her way to a curio shop where the store owner holds onto items full of memories from the customers who left them in her care. The psychic imprints that each object gives off allows her to tell the full story behind it. Motoko is soon reminded about the story of her and Kuze's past, and the tragic plane crash that brought them together when they were both just six years old.

Comic Books

• Hellblazer: John encounters a sweet, grandmotherly old woman who sends her son to kill prostitutes and hack off chunks of their flesh with a razor which she then keeps floating in jars. She can then relive the victim's happiest memories, which John compares to a drug high.
• In The Sandman (1989), Odin keeps his thoughts and his memories in his two crows, Hugin and Munin. When he sends them off to gather information, he becomes completely catatonic, being capable of neither until they return.
• Superman:
  • In The Krypton Chronicles,Superman and Supergirl visit the vault of the House of El to learn the history of their ancestors. Most of statues carry objects -a building model, a book, a gun...- which project the memories of the bearer into the head of whoever touches said object. Also, Supergirl's father Zor-El reveals he has built a machine which can use a deceased Kryptonian's headband to draw their memories into someone else's brain.
  • "The Phantom Superboy": As rummaging through a cache of lost Kryptonian devices, Superboy finds a helmet which projects the former owner's voice, thoughts and memories into the bearer's mind.
• Wonder Woman (1942): During the Silver Age, the Amazons use a memory machine to create copies of important memories. Diana uses her own stored memories to restore her mind after it comes to light that her mother altered her memories so that Diana wouldn't remember the grief of Steve Trevor's (second) death or realize he had been replaced with a Steve pulled from the multi-verse whose own mind the Queen had overwritten with memories that wouldn't contradict Diana's. Learning what her mother had done made Diana cut her ties with her.
• X-Men:
  • The Shi'ar gave Jean Grey's family a crystal ball full of their and other people's memories of Jean Grey after she saved the universe, but before The Dark Phoenix Saga.
  • When he recruits his Evil Twin for help in undoing M-Day, Beast is given an injection by Dark Beast of his memories in genetic research. Because Dark Beast is a sadistic Mad Scientist, Beast reacts to the only barely edited influx of information as Mind Rape.

Fan Works

• Fallout: Equestria has Memory Orbs, magically contained memories of ponies either willingly recorded or forcibly removed. These serve as the exposition for the reader on what happened pre-war, but also incapacitate their viewer for the orb's entire duration, and can only be used by unicorns. Once Littlepip gets the hang of them, she at one point uses them in combat by tossing one at an Alicorn and locking it in a memory when it tried to catch the orb.

Films — Animation

• Rise of the Guardians has baby teeth work this way, storing childhood memories that the tooth fairy returns to children when they might forget their youthful dreams or self.

Films — Live-Action

• The Final Cut centers around a special implant babies can get that will record their entire lives so that loved ones can see them after the individual's death. The main character's job is to cut and edit these memories into a film so that only the best memories are seen.
• In The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, Bastian is slowly losing his memories, which Xayide is keeping in glass orbs.

Literature

• In The Gate of Ivory, Ivorans have learned to imbue their memories into "bluestone", and their libraries are generally filled with objects with memories of their ancestors. It is possible to imbue messages for specific recipients as well, and at one point, it's implied that someone is able to grant their skills posthumously during a crisis. A more temporary version is the onyx cat gifted to Theodora by Grandmother, which absorbs feelings and thoughts from a person who touches it with bare flesh and imparts those thoughts on the next person to touch it, something she uses to deadly effect later in the book.
• Pensieves in Harry Potter are used this way and for the selfsame Pensieve Flashback.
• A short story included in Noon: 22nd Century involves the attempt to store the mind of a dying great scientist. The story goes into detail about the limitations of this new technology. The entire town is blacked out and perpetual storm clouds block out the sunlight in order to remove any EM interference. The "town" is actually made up of large warehouses holding a special substance that can contain vast amounts of data. After all, it's not just the information from brain cells but also the neurons that link these brain cells, and neurons that link those neurons, etc. The experiment is a partial success, as the man expires with 2% of his mind still unrecorded. Additionally, the scientists performing the experiment have no idea what to do with the stored memories, as they have no way to actually interpret the information. The idea is to eventually develop the means to allow people to live on as electronic entities, but that is far off.
• The Rambosian aliens of Nursery Crime are filled with a fluid that keeps their memories. They keep jars of this fluid, and regularly back them up with newer memories. If they suffer some fatal misfortune, they can be patched up, refilled and returned to life.
• Belamy in Skate the Thief has stored some of his memories into polished round rubies, and can share the memories with others by pressing the stone on their heads.
• Takeshi Kovacs introduces the "stack", a cigarette-filter-sized implant at the base of the brain. It contains a complete record of the user's personality and memories, which can be backed up, sent elsewhere, or installed in a new body ("sleeve"). If your body dies but the stack is not destroyed, you can be revived. As an added bonus, a human brain is the only thing that can readily make use of the information in a stack, so even if others get access to your backups, they can't view/edit your mind in cut-and-paste fashion. Your memories can only be recovered by creating another "you" in the process. The novels come complete with a very large and well-thought-out list of the technology's consequences.
• Tempest (2011): In the ocean, pearls are called tears of the moon because they can be enchanted to hold regrets. In Tempest Unleashed, Tempest finds a cave full of pearls, each containing a memory that her mermaid mother Cecily regrets, as well as pieces of sea glass containing happy memories. When Cecily picks one up, she witnesses the memory in the third person while feeling the same emotions Cecily had at the moment.
• In Keith Laumer's A Trace Of Memory, an amnesiac alien living as a human on Earth must recover the device in which his full memories are stored. He later discovers that on his home planet almost everyone has this problem.
• In The Worthing Saga, the cold sleep used to enable starflight has the unfortunate side effect of completely wiping a person's memory. The solution: spheres which record memories and replay them into the subject's brain.

Live-Action TV

• In Angel, when Angel makes a Deal with the Devil to give his son Connor a normal life, everyone except Angel has their memory of Connor wiped and Connor is given Fake Memories and a new family. The memories of the original reality were sealed in an artifact called the Orlon Window, and, when the Window is eventually broken by a paranoid Wesley, everyone's memories return (although Connor, at least, retains both sets of memories side-by-side, which allows him to remain emotionally stable).
• The Babylon 5 episode "Deathwalker" has Talia Winters meeting with Kosh and a strange cybernetic man who apparently records her thoughts and saves them on a Data Crystal. Word of God is that it would be used to restore her personality after she was taken over by the Psi Corps personality, but Andrea Thompson left the show, so that never came to fruition.
• The revival series of Doctor Who introduces the Chameleon Arch, a device of Gallifreyan origin that can change a person's DNA and species. Time Lords who use this device store their essence, including their memories in a fobwatch which when opened restores the Time Lord to their original self. The Tenth Doctor uses the Chameleon Arch to hide from an enemy in the two-parter "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", becoming a Upper-Class Twit named John Smith in early 20th Century England. In "Utopia", it is revealed that "Professor Yana" is the Master after using the Chameleon Arch, having used it to escape into the end of time to avoid the Last Great Time War, and in "Fugitive of the Judoon", "Ruth" turns out to have been a previously-unknown past incarnation of the Doctor, who had used a Chameleon Arch to evade the Judoon sent by the Time Lords.
• In Once Upon a Time, Mr. Gold can apparently use a dreamcatcher to capture and hold memories.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Thought Bottle, an item that appeared in Tome of Magic, can store memories, prepared spells, and even a character's current Experience Point total. Possible uses as a relatively secure data medium or Memory Gambit prop are suggested.
  • In Forgotten Realms tel'kiira ("elven lore-gem") are memory storage devices used as write-at-will personal logs and spellbooks, normally usable only by elves and worn mostly by nobility. Physically, it's a little gem stuck on the forehead of its wearer, most of the time sunk in and not visible. Ancestral lore-gem worn by generations of heirs of a noble House has a value much like the flag of a military unit: not waved around in vain, and losing it counts as a major disgrace. An elven kingdom that didn't allowed humans into capital knighted a human just for carrying one of these from a dying heir to the new rightful wearer, past their guards. Variants include books of elven advanced magic, secret agents' tools and occasional hybrids with other enchanted gems, up to ioun stones turned into semi-sentient defensive spellgem following the owner.
  • In the Ravenloft setting's domain of Darkon, the darklord Azalin has a library of self-writing books that document the lives of all that nation's residents. If a non-Darkonese stays within the domain too long, their original memories are supplanted by those of having been born and grown up in Darkon, and a book documenting their real history appears in Azalin's library.
  • The Society of Sensation in the Planescape setting purchases memories from adventurers to stock their library. Anyone who visits them can then pay to "view" the memory as though experiencing it themselves. The goal of the Society is to allow everyone to experience everything, so the library allows their members to experience things they either can't or won't do themselves.
• In Eclipse Phase, one with the "mnemmonic augmentation" implant can make "XPs" (Experience Playbacks) from archived memories stored in their cortical stack.
• In Exalted, there are several means of memory transfer. The most obvious is the celestial exaltations themselves, given that a celestial exaltation is a recycled part of god-soul that holds aspects of all its former incarnations. The other is dream stones and other memory crystals. These can be found in tombs or on the black market (dream stones are apparently nearly as addictive as the Xbox of the gods). Makes sense when you realize that the mortal vessels needed to be brought back up to snuff relatively quickly in order to deal with the Primordials or they'd pretty much be reduced to glittering fodder.
• In Nomine has Memory Pearl artifacts, which are pearl-like objects that can be used to remove/store memories, often used (especially by demons) to remove inconvenient knowledge from a temporary employee/associate often as part of the terms of employment.
• A central part of Mindjammer is the Mindscape, essentially an entire wireless Internet devoted entirely to storing and sharing "exomemories". The name of the setting even comes from the starships used to keep the Mindscape up-to-date across interstellar distances (Faster-Than-Light Travel but no communications).
• While MemoMax technology was really just intended to explain why Paranoia characters can retain their memories and personalities even after being replaced by their own clones, later editions would explore some of the darker implications of the technology.
• "Slinkys" (Sensory links) in Transhuman Space are technically recordings of one's experiences while their "upslink" implant is active, but they fill the same function.

Video Games

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a few unexplained cylinders of Alexander's (each containing a single vague memory) scattered throughout the castle.
• Downplayed by Kokonoe in BlazBlue. She doesn't save her memories per se, but she saves information and news regarding people and the world as backups, put in her special lab in the Boundary where any reality-warping effect (which may also affect her) cannot reach, allowing her to keep track of what happened in case she gets amnesia.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, soul crystals are a form of magical technology that etches the ebb and flow of the holder's soul onto it, thereby preserving an imperfect echo of the holder's memories. These memories may then be viewed by the next holder of the soul crystal to aid in their studies and practice. However, these are only available to the user if one has reached a sufficient level of skill to properly grasp the same concepts, preventing someone from becoming a complete Instant Expert just by grasping a soul crystal.
• The Diary in The Hayseed Knight allows Ader to view Sep's memories. Every entry allows Ader to see the events through her eyes though the events do not occur in chronological order.
• Mass Effect:
  • "Grayboxes", a piece of technology introduced in Kasumi's missions, serve this function, and her loyalty mission in the second game revolves around recovering one.
  • Javik, your potential Prothean DLC squadmate in Mass Effect 3, possesses an artifact he calls an Echo Shard that contains the memories that each Prothean that had it before him placed into it. The player character can advise him on whether to experience the memories contained or not — which, if he doesn't use it, will end up with him wondering what peace will be like, or, if he does use it, becoming a Death Seeker, and he may pass it on to Shepard in London.
• A more mundane version in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice. Sorin Sprocket and his sister were involved in a car accident, and she died from her injuries. The trauma of seeing his sister die and the guilt of feeling that he was responsible because he was the driver has caused him to develop anterograde amnesia — every morning when he wakes up, the last thing he remembers is the car accident, and everything else that's happened since then is lost to him. Once he realized that he was forgetting things, he began detailing in his notebook every day of his life in minute detail and uses it as a frame of reference to remember everything, including his fiancee Ellen's love for him. He quickly becomes panicked when he doesn't have his notebook, and the revelation that his trusted butler Pierce has tampered with it distresses him greatly, as it causes him to doubt the veracity of all his entries, and as such, all of his memories.
• Planescape: Torment, being set in the Planescape setting, also has the Sensory Stones. A few of these are particularly important, and play on the trope:
  • Deionarra's memory of a conversation with a past incarnation of the Nameless One. This recalls the Nameless One's own past memories, and he ends up experiencing both sides of the conversation at the same time.
  • A "memory" of another incarnation (the Paranoid), in reality a trap designed to trap the mind of any other incarnation who uses it.
  • A poor sod's memory of being tortured by someone and asked to bring along a message. The torturer is Ravel the Hag, and you can unlock a "conversation" of sorts with the memory of her.
  • The Bronze Sphere turns out to be one, albeit quite difficult to open. If you do so, the knowledge obtained grants you two million experience points, and a few other bonuses.
• In the RuneScape quest "Plague's End", your clue to "find" the late Lady Ithell is that she "poured her soul into her final work". This is very literal: once you find the blueprints for her last statue and build it, Kelyn inherits Lady Ithell's memories and leadership by studying the statue.
• In Shadow Warrior (2013), the Whisperers are golems that were powered by one of the Ancients sealing their memories of their sister Ameonna inside. They were originally viewed as an abomination but eventually deemed necessary to recover the Nobitsura Kage.
  Hoji: I will always remember the day that led me to you. And that is why I must bury your memory. I will not be ruled by pain.
• In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Raynor is given a crystal that contains Zeratul's memories of what he learned about the Zerg and the Fallen One.
• The Sword of Melqart in Tears to Tiara 2 stores the memories of all its past users. However, they are not easily accessible, and not being strong enough would cause the sword to wipe the memory of the user. Hasdrubal uses this to purposely wipe the memory of his son Hamil so the secrets of their family does not fall into the hands of The Empire.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Soul Tears are objects that Ivy can get from certain people that store a kind of memory that the reflecting pond can display.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin: This is the power of the seventh crystal, which resides in Quellor's black box. It can even project the memories it's stolen, a discovery that reveals images of Teddy himself as a baby contained therein despite him growing up in Rilonia. It's hinted that the crystal formerly only copied memories rather performing a brain-drain, but the crack it's sustained may have corrupted its ability.
• In SilverHawks, recurring villain Zero the Memory Thief stores the memories he's drained on tapes worn on his chest.

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