NEW FALSE MEMORIES

In the Boston Globe recently, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie tells the story of a British man named Alpha Kabeja, who came out of a coma with clear recollection of memories of things that had never happened.

Kabeja, McRobbie writes, was biking, when he was hit by a van with enough force to knock his brain out of place inside his skull. When he came out of a medically induced coma three weeks later,
McRobbie writes, "doctors told his family he might not remember anything from before the accident, or remember them or who he was, that he might have amnesia." But Kabeja woke up full of memories.

The only problem: None of those things were true!

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Kabeja clung to his new memories, and his family and friends played along. But there was no pregnancy. There was no private plane. There was no job interview, which Kabeja realized only after he called MI6 and learned their offices had been closed the day of the accident.

But the "memories" weren't totally fantastical — related things had been happening in Kabeja's life before the accident, leading him to believe that his subconscious had twisted real pieces of information into new forms:

In that sense, McRobbie argues, Kabeja's brain was simply going a step further than ours do, every day, when we recall a piece of the past. No autobiographical memory is a fixed, literal record of what really happened; memories are malleable, morphing each time we call them forth, to accommodate new information stored elsewhere in the brain. Sometimes, this means small tweaks; other times, it means we're left with recollections that others might see as outright fabrications. Even people with extraordinary capacities for recall, research has shown, are prone to inadvertently making things up.

Kabeja's false memories then, may have been an attempt to make sense of the long gap when he was unconscious in the hospital — without any real autobiographical memories of that stretch of time, his brain may have simply pulled other memories from elsewhere to fill in the lost weeks. "When you wake up, your brain is trying to reconnect pieces because your brain is trying to recover that sense of you, that sense of memory, that sense of history," Julia Shaw, a memory researcher at London South Bank University, told the Globe. "And in that process of recovery and essentially healing, you can make connections in ways that are fantastical and impossible" — but not so far removed from memory as we might like to think.

If our brain has its own operating program where it writes, stores and re-writes information like a computer hard drive, then any interruption of this normal brain function could lead to dramatic "new false memories" being created to explain one's current situation.

Memories (or in LOST, at times, the loss of the collective memory of the characters) was an ebb and flow in the story lines. Where the flashbacks and backstories really true? Or were they the reconstruction of different bits of information and fantasy caused by brain injuries to the surviving passengers of the plane crash?

ZOMBIE TRAIN WRECK

Another functioning LOST fan site had its review of Wrecked, the TBS parody of LOST. It concluded that the show was awful.

Some commentators remarked that the Wrecked show's monsters were going to be jungle zombies.

Another commentator replied:

I wonder whether the makers of this show are either insiders or figured out "Lost" themselves.
The makers of "Lost" kidded about a season 7 of zombies, and that was actually a funny clue to the plot of "Lost", because it recalls the way zombies are said to be produced: You induce brain damage in someone, then convince hir that s/he's a certain identified person risen from the dead. That's close to what some of the principal characters on "Lost" had undergone. They were knocked out, convinced they'd been in an airline wreck that in reality killed everybody aboard, and made to believe they were particular individuals known to have been on the flight. It helped that they'd been selected for their resemblance to those persons, and in some cases given plastic surgery to improve the resemblance. They were threatened with disillusionment when they found out flight 815 was found on the bottom of the ocean, but the cover story was that that had been a fake wreck populated with dug-up dead bodies. However, planted among these characters were those who knew all along what was going on, or discovered it at some point.

 I had not heard about the potential LOST tangent theory of the characters actually being zombies. But it does contain many of the plot elements of LOST.

LOST was filled with medical experiments and military-industrial complex stations. To hijack a plane or create a plane crash to re-program other individuals into believing that they are someone else falls within the Big Con aspect of the series tangents. There was really never a reason for the castaways to be told that the Flight 815 wreckage that was found was a "fake." (In previous posts on the subject, I found it an unrealistic and unbelievable plot point - - - if wreckage was found, investigators would have retrieved the black boxes and bodies for positive ID. But when the alleged black box showed up on Widmore's freighter, all sense of truth was lost in that story plot.)

Room 23 was used for mental conditioning experiments; brain washing. The Hydra island was used to implant control technology into sharks. There was a scientific foundation to explain was what really happening on the island.

Can you take a bunch of "lost" people from around the world - - - loners, unhappy folks, fugitives and the depressed - - - and crash their lives to the point where they are living the life of another person? Jack was not Jack but someone playing Jack.

Why would this be important? If a person or government could perfect this personality implant in a stranger, that stranger can be weaponized to take the place of generals, presidents or powerful people in the real world. Dopplegangers could be controlled by an elite group, such as Dharma or Widmore or the U.S. military.

The Zombie Theory to LOST seems as plausible as any other fan theory.

INFECTION

One of the compelling plot points was the concept that the island had a mysterious "infection." People had to be given shots to ward off death.

Claire was told that she had to take shots in order to save her baby.

Desmond was told outside the Hatch was a hazmat zone, but he still had to take shots to ward off the infection.

The Others pregnant women continually died while in their third trimester, which some blamed on the island/infection.

Without a clear understanding of "what" the island really was, many people believe the "infection" story line was merely a ruse to control people.

But Juliet, who appeared at first to be an ethical doctor, gave Claire injections - - - if false, would violate her duty and oath as a physician ("do no harm to a patient.") Even a placebo that causes mental anguish as an intended result would violate that oath.

Perhaps, at one time, the infection plague was true. It was just passed down as a story, a myth, by the island natives and Others as a means of making visitors leave their island.

An infection is defined as the process of infecting or the state of being infected by a disease.
It is also defined as  the presence of a virus in, or its introduction into, a computer system.

The origin of the word is late Middle English: from late Latin infectio(n-), from Latin inficere ‘dip in, taint.'

The dictionary definition raises two points. The island infection could be a metaphor for people becoming "tainted" or infected by something, such as evil, if this was a place of the underworld, or judgment. The events on the island were merely tests of character and morality.

Another possibility is that the infection was actually a computer virus. Computer avatars would see a computer virus as a disease that could kill (delete) them (their program).  If you buy into the theory that LOST was merely a large MMOG, then the infection was one of those booby-trap hurdles one had to pass in order to level up to the next mission.

In any event, the infection angle showed a great deal of dramatic promise. But it quickly faded away without resolution.

JACK WAS NOT A DOCTOR

Jack was not a medical doctor. He was never a great spinal surgeon. He never saved Sarah. It was all a lie or illusion.

Jack's back story is that of an incredibly talented surgeon. In 2001, Sarah's spine was severely crushed, and Jack told her she would never walk again. This bluntness bothered Christian. Sarah's fiance responded superficially upon hearing her condition, and Jack overstepped his professional relationship with Sarah, promising "to fix" her. He initially believed he failed, but a stadium runner named Desmond  suggested he may not have. Jack tearfully informed Sarah of his failure. She then wiggled her toes, and Jack realized he'd fixed her. The problem is that medical science would not have allowed such a miracle to happen. One cannot reconnect severed nerves.

In July of 2004, a nurse observed Jack's  intoxicated father botch a surgery. She called in Jack, who failed to save the patient. Christian asked he sign a falsified death report absolving him of blame, and though Jack initially refused, he later agreed. He then saw his father console the deceased woman's husband, who was threatening legal action, and learned the woman was pregnant when she died. Jack revised his statement, blaming his father's drinking for the patients' death. This cost Christian his medical license. In reality, Jack's conduct also would have cost him his medical license due to unprofessional conduct and malpractice under strict California regulations.

So Jack's back story is highly suspect. However, he could have "believed" that this happened to him because of the inner, subconscious desire to be "better" than his father, so Christian would acknowledge him. But if Jack as a boy was driven to prove himself to his father, but failed because he lacked the talent or will, then one could assume that would lead Jack down a dark path, emotionally and psychologically.  It could have led him into depression, drugs and alcoholism.

On the island, "miracle doctor" Jack had a horrible track record. Jack could not save the Marshall, Boone, Shannon or Sayid.  He refused to help an injured Colleen, which violates his oath as a physician. Beyond basic first aid, Jack really did not perform any highly skilled medical miracles on the island.

But it was his conduct with Ben's medical problem that is a real issue. Jack's review of Ben's spinal x-ray was wrong. The tumor was diagnosed on the wrong lumbar number. He later incorrectly stated that Ben's symptoms would be in his fingers and toes. Such symptoms are generally characteristic of cervical tumors - in the neck, not lower back (which would be toes only). Then when Jack now agreed to operate on Ben,  he deliberately cut Ben's kidney sack during the surgery, which based on the state of the OR and lack of personnel and blood, would have killed Ben, especially after he woke up during the surgery!

So what about the two different "versions" of Jack? The pre-island miracle doctor vs. the ordinary man on the island.

It could be argued that the pre-island version of Jack was Jack's own ego. A dream, fantasy, a mental condition of greatness because Jack could not equal his father's accomplishments. This puts Jack as a candidate for the theories that the LOST premise was all made up in the mind of a mental patient, or at least someone trapped in their own deep fantasy world.

It would stand to reason then that the pre-island back stories could also not be true. They could be the fantasies of the characters - - - such as Kate murdering her abusive father. She never did it; but she thought about it. The same would be true for Sawyer. He never became a con man to track down his parents killer.

But that still opens the question of whether the island was "real" or part of an imaginary, collective community dream (or massive on-line game, the latter being characteristic for all the "loners" in the series). Assuming that Jack landed on the island under his own cover of being a doctor, it is odd that no one challenged him when he made medical mistakes. Was everyone else naive, scared or plain dumb? Or, again in a game setting, it really did not matter. You chose your own character.

The idea that Jack was not really a doctor is intriguing because it opens up other avenues of investigation into the unanswered mysteries. If one part of the LOST experience was not "real" in the sense of actual events (such as Jack's back story), that may help explain the massive continuity errors in island events. It could also give us a clue to the basic premise of the show.

THE SPIRIT THEORY

In reading an article about ancient neurosurgery, I came across an interesting sidebar on how some South American cultures used the process of cutting holes in skulls to treat "spirits" inside a person's head.

It seems strange that ancient priests would crack skulls to release spirits that had taken over a person's mind and body. It could have been a way to explain a person's seizures, epilepsy or swelling of the brain casing to a primitive people.

Many medical researches do not believe ancient cultures performed neurosurgery. However, several archeologists and medical doctors have concluded that ancient people  had trepanned skulls, under the cultural significance to release spirits trapped inside the brain. Forensic archeologists claim that by using sharp glass, one can open the skull of a recently deceased 2-year-old in four minutes. Cutting a similar hole in an adult skull required 50 minutes.  The studies fall back on various finds in Central and South America where skulls had various holes in them. These holes did not have the signs of being from blunt trauma like a pick-axe or spear, but a deliberate round opening in the skull.

However, other researchers have come to the conclusion that that ancient neurosurgeons were removing bone fragments from injuries sustained during combat. Modern research has provided strong evidence for this, especially among the Inca. For one thing, far more males than females had trepanation holes, likely because most warriors were males. For another, the holes were usually located on the left side of the skull—where a right-handed assailant would aim a slingshot or smash his club.

If the spirit theory is that trepanation released evil spirits, it plays into stereotypes of ancient people as described by the first European explorers who called them savages, even though their cultures had vast knowledge of astrology, mathematics and engineering. Many tribes—despite wildly different supernatural beliefs—probably did trepan people to treat epilepsy and hallucinations, maladies often associated with spirits.

From a modern medical perspective, the idea of making holes in the skull makes sense: Doctors today still trepan people to reduce pressure on the brain after injury. The practice is meant to reduce swelling and the buildup of blood and other fluids, which can kill brain cells.

But if you take a primitive belief system of ancient people, who believed that various spirits lived in every living thing—a logical treatment to release evil spirits trapped inside a person makes sense if the process was to cure a 'cursed" person.

This has an application to LOST. One that is new spin on the main characters. We have discussed the possibility that the characters were under mental stress, hallucinations, mental illness or coma in order to explain the events that they encountered on the island. Some have even suggested that the characters, having perished in the plane crash, were reincarnated as smoke monsters and the island was just one big smokey playground of illusion and make believe.

Likewise, if spirits invaded the characters brains - - - either in an attempt to infect, control or manipulate a human being - - - does that help explain the disconnected story lines of the series? Perhaps. Many ancient cultures, including several modern religions, believe that there both good and evil spirits in our world. Some are messengers, some are guardians and some are tricksters that like to make misery on human beings by allowing them to make bad choices. Those spirit elements could be applied throughout the LOST story sphere, but we don't have a strong clue about it except for the re-creation of MIB by the smoke monster, who could have been an evil spirit.

ALTERED REALITY STUDY

The BBC reported on a recent study that has LOST like aspects to altered reality, the observation of time and how certain people's brains may view time differently. It is something scientists refer to as "temporal trickery." The brain apparently freezes motion to make the world around you slow down.

The concept that certain people see things differently is not new. Professional athletes such as baseball players have keen eyesight and perception to pick up the spin and location of a 95 mph fastball within nanoseconds of release. Ballet dancers train their brain to allow them to perform pirouettes without feeling dizzy.

In a case reported in the NeuroCase journal, doctors recount the experience of a patient who one day had a headache, went to take a warm shower to relax but found himself staring at the water droplets hanging in mid air like something out of the Matrix movies. The patient said he could see each droplet hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”

The next day, the patient went to hospital, where doctors found that he had suffered an aneurysm. The experience was soon overshadowed by the more immediate threat to his health, but in a follow-up appointment, he happened to mention what happened to his neurologist, Fred Ovsiew at Northwestern University in Chicago, who was struck by the vivid descriptions. “He was a very bright guy, and very eloquent” says Ovsiew, who recently wrote about Baker in the journal article.

What authors, scientists, doctors and individuals observe in daily life is an assumption that time flows at the same rate for everyone; that time is a constant of nature and physics. But what if that assumption is wrong, or it has variables.

It’s easy to assume that time flows at the same rate for everybody, but experiences of the patient show that a person's continuous stream of consciousness is a fragile illusion, stitched together by the brain’s clever editing. By studying what happens during such extreme events, researchers are revealing how and why the brain plays these temporal tricks – and in some circumstances, they suggest, all of us can experience "time warping."

Although the journal's subject is the most dramatic case, a smattering of strikingly similar accounts can be found, intermittently, in medical literature. There are reports of time speeding up – so called “zeitraffer” phenomenon – and also more fragmentary experiences called “akinetopsia”, in which motion momentarily stops. Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke.

The question is why a person's condition affects time perception.  Some clues could come from studies that have attempted to pinpoint the regions responsible for our perception of time. Of particular interest is an area of the visual cortex, called V5. This region, which lies towards the back of the skull, has long been known to detect the motion of objects, but perhaps it has a more general role in measuring the passing of time. When Domenica Bueti and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland zapped the area with a magnetic field to knock out its activity, her subjects found it tricky to do two things: they struggled to track the motion of dots on a screen, as would be expected,  but also found it hard to estimate how long some blue dots appeared on the screen.   One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. For the journal patient, stepping into the shower might have exacerbated the problem, since the warm water would have drawn the blood away from the brain to the extremities of the body, further disturbing the brain’s processing.

Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots," like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” saysresearchers at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.” We may all experience the normal smooth picture breaking down occasionally. For starters, if you’ve ever looked at overtaking cars on the motorway, their wheels appear to be standing still.   This happens because the brain’s intermittent snapshots fail to capture the wheel’s motion fully. If, for example, it has made a full rotation between each “frame," it will seem to be in exactly the same position each snapshot, giving the illusion that it is stationary.

And users of LSD often report “visual trails” following moving objects, a bit like the trails of bullets in The Matrix movie. VanRullen suspects this might arise because the brain "overlaps" so sensory snapshots,   rather than refreshing its picture anew to capture the actual motion.
 
Reports of time standing still are also common during a life-threatening accident; in one survey of people who had skirted close to death, more than 70% reported the feeling that the event occurred in slow motion. Some researchers claim that they are simply an artifact of memory, since intense emotions led people to remember more details,  so that we believe that the event lasted for longer only in hindsight. But the descriptions certainly sound close to those reported by the neurological patients, suggesting there may be some overlap. In stressful situations,  many subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude."  Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter concludes that stress hormones trigger an automatic brain mechanism that may speed up the brain's internal information processing to help it handle a life or death situation.   “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” researchers says. It is even possible that some athletes havetrained themselves to create a time warp on demand;  surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead.
 
For the journal subject, the experience was a one-off, and after surgery to remove the damaged blood vessels, he has now made a full recovery. The experience of time freezing around him, meanwhile, has given him new wonder at the fragility of our conscious experiences. “It was a really concrete example of how something very localised in brain can change your whole perception of the world,” he says. “One minute I was fine, the next minute I was in an altered reality.”

All of the elements of time warping, slowing down events in a life or death situation, and medical conditions affecting the brain and its processing, were part of the fabric of the LOST story. Real science has opened up the possibility that the altered reality that the main characters experienced "on the island" may have been caused or contributed by brain trauma, illness and/or massive stress hormones released by a person. So the show could have been set in the time altered illusion inside someone's mind during a major stressful event, such as a plane crash.

AWAKENING

There was a great emphasis on the main characters "awakening" in the sideways world - - - to remember the "importance" of their island time together - - - in order to "move on" in the after life.

The term "awaken" refers to a process which most fans do not acknowledge as a premise for the show.

To "awake" means to stop sleeping; wake from sleep; or to cause (someone) to wake from sleep. It could also mean to regain consciousness or to become aware of a realization. It can also be to become active again, such as "there were echoes and scents that awoke some memory in me."

However, the adjective of awake means not asleep, i.e.  the noise might keep you awake at night.

So what did this mean in the context of LOST?

The most obvious would be that the characters were in a dream state; that they were not awake. If we put that into the situation of the island, that means all the characters and actions were part of a complex dream world. If it was a complex dream world, was it the dream of a single person or a collective network of separate dreamers interacting with each other.

If the latter is true, then how would the main characters be "together" in the dream world. There are a few possibilities:

First, all the characters are together in one place. For example, a medical hospital undergoing various treatments. As they are hooked up to their medical equipment (including life support and computer EKG readings), their subconscious filters through the system and interacts with the other patients who are in a similar dream state.

Or, all the main characters are actually children in an orphanage. This would explain, in part, the deep rooted parental issues, betrayal and abandonment. It would also feed the persistent character trait of personal loneliness.  Children in an orphanage would naturally dream intense fantasies because they believe their current lives are dark and lonely.

Second, that the characters are in a coma state - - - either as a result of accidents or as part of grand scientific research experiment. The latter would tie into the Dharma experimentation in mind control and manipulation of unique energy systems. The human brain is the most complex energy system in the planet; and one which most mainstream science still does not fully understand. By containing the brains of diverse individuals in a deep control group (such as in a coma state), the researchers could feed their minds with various scenarios to see how they react. For example, inject the terror of a mysterious smoke monster into their minds to see how they would process that information in their patient's dreams.

Third, that the characters were actually "awake" but in a virtual reality that was the island. This could also be an experiment on how the brain works in regard to virtual soldier technology. We know that the defense department and government agencies have used virtual reality systems to train soldiers for combat missions. This would be a leap forward in technology, almost Avatar like, dealing with missions in real time. Perhaps in the future, as referenced in an old Star Trek episode, wars would be fought by soldiers in a virtual reality setting, to avoid the human pain and suffering of real warfare.

But if the characters were participants in this virtual combat world, why would they not "remember" it. If the technology was sufficient to implant the game program into their minds, it probably would have been just as easy as to erase or block those memories once the characters were no longer needed in the experiment.

So the concept of awakening in the series had to mean that the characters woke up or remembered something critical in their past (i.e. the island). After losing their conscious to a virtual dream world called the island, the characters were put back into normal situations to live normal lives as shown in the sideways world. Now this would work perfectly as a reasonable explanation of the entire series except for one critical plot detail. In the sideways world, everyone was dead.

This gets us back to the last definition of the word: to become aware of a realization.

I have thought for a long time that knowledge is power. If one knew what was going on at any moment in time, they could control their own destiny. Early on, I thought that Rose became fully aware of what the island really was because the pain of her incurable cancer was gone after the plane crash. Rose became aware on the beach that she had died in the plane crash. That is why she thought everything would be alright; that she would meet up with her husband soon.

This is also why Rose and Bernard later broke away from the survivors and their dramas with the island inhabitants. They knew that what they were up to was not "real." Rose and Bernard wanted to keep to themselves so they could enjoy the "extended time" they were granted, together.

It would also explain why we did not see Rose and Bernard "awaken" in the sideways world. They did not have to awaken. They already knew of their deaths while on the island.  It would seem that all the LOST souls had to awaken by themselves - - - and once each individual came to the realization that they were actually dead, could their souls move on in the after life (as depicted at the ending of the sideways church scenes).

Everything up to that point was the individual's subconscious not wanting to let go with "life." It was fueled by the regrets of the characters; the things they never experienced in their life (such as Hurley finding a true love in Libby). Somehow, some one gave these lost souls the opportunity to live a second life on the island in order to experience those past events and maybe soothe their regrets.

If that is the case, then Jacob would be more like Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life than the Devil. He brought the people to the island. And the island gave them a second chance to find trust, love, friendship and a sense of purpose. It gave those lost souls a second chance before final judgment.

NURSING A CONCEPT

It is hard to imagine, but the story lines of LOST contained more than 35 "nurses."  In battlefield medical tents, nurses were called "angels of mercy." They have the difficult job of treating people in difficult to life threatening situations.

There are some interesting patterns with some of them.

Locke's nurse at St. Thomas Hospital where he donated a kidney to Anthony Cooper later showed up as his nurse at St. Sebastian Hospital with Jack. It is odd that a nurse would change hospitals. It would seem that this nurse was "assigned" to follow Locke, to watch over him.

A nurse worked at the Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute in which Hurley and Libby were institutionalized as patients. When Hurley came back (after being released) to visit Leonard, the nurse would not allow Hurley to see him, as he didn't know Leonard's last name. Eventually Hurley was let in by Dr. Curtis.  This nurse must have been hired after Hurley left because she did not know him. The odd part is that Hurley was good with names, so he would have remembered Leonard's last name.

But the more mysterious nurse was Susie Lazenby, a nurse from a prior episode, "Dave."  She was the nurse who gave medications in the day room to both Hurley and Libby. Was there something important to keep both Hurley and Libby "drugged" to the point where they would not remember each other?

Ayesha was a nurse at the local Tunisian infirmary to which a severely injured Locke was brought to after he turned the FDW.  She was on duty when three men entered carrying Locke. A doctor shouted out loud for her twice while he was treating Locke, but she was unresponsive until another nurse pointed out to her that the doctor was in hurry. When she finally responded to the doctor, Matthew Abaddon  was watching from behind a curtain where she was standing. Abbadon was Locke's orderly after he was paralyzed by Cooper's betrayal. Ayesha was the last person Locke seemed to recognize before losing consciousness.

Debra was a DHARMA nurse who assisted Juliet while operating and caring for a young Ben who was shot by Sayid during the time flash period. She worked with Juliet and later informed Juliet that Kate was there to donate blood for Ben because she was a universal donor.

In the End, Nurse Jean assisted Jack with patient Locke at St. Sebastian Hospital when Locke awakened. Jean's name was said on screen by Jack making her the final named character ever to be introduced on LOST.

In the theme of Life and Death, nurses as angels can be powerful symbols. Or they can be sinister agents for powerful forces. For example, in Locke's story his life "ends" when he is thrown 8 stories from a window. As part of his miraculous rehab, an orderly called Abbadon (which is a reference to the devil) imparts wisdom and hope to Locke to continue with his rehab. Abbadon, who is working for Widmore, returns to help Locke gather up the O6 survivors to return to the island. But not after being present when Locke is treated after his time flash. Abbadon and the nurses around him clearly were pushing, guiding and advising Locke on important decisions that Locke had to make in order to survive.

I also think nurse Susie Lazenby was carrying on exterior motives by being the one medicating both Hurley and Libby. She could have been an operative to keep Hurley or Libby from remembering their past or their future (see prior post about the sideways world being first in actual time).  Who would suspect a nurse who has an oath to help patients, actually dispensing drugs to keep souls in the state of darkness, despair, illusion or depression? It is the perfect cover to control, manipulate and brain wash patients.

Perhaps young Ben learned these manipulation techniques when he was shot by Sayid. Kate took on the role of being an angel of mercy by donating blood to save Ben's life. Juliet, knowing what Ben would become in the future, decided that her own personal feelings and desire to kill the monster called Ben in 2004 had no place in 1977. It was one of those ethical puzzles with no clear answer.

If one thinks the series was an dreamy after life state where the characters had to sort through various ethical, moral, immoral and judgmental decisions, the nurses weaved into the stories could be the good messengers to the dark forces trying to manipulate lost souls. And it was the various choices, changes of direction and final decisions in the maze of series events led the main characters to the sideways church reunion, all with some contact to a nurse sometime during the series.