One of the most powerful feelings, to me, is nostalgia. I’ve felt nostalgic about stuff since I was probably about 11 or 12, which I’d agree is a little bit strange.
Anyway, one night last week I had this recurring dream that I’ve mentioned before—I relive memories from undergraduate school, up in the New Brunswick dorms with my roommate Joe, and then I am climbing a huge spiral staircase. In this most recent dream there was no forest, but I still felt a sense of time stretched so far out in front of me that I could not see the end.
I am one of the oldest students at my school now. Even though I feel no different physically, I am paranoid that I’m going to start degrading; I worry that my current minor ankle pain will never go away, or that I’ll have to start holding papers farther and farther from my face to read them. (I’m 27 and a half at this writing).
It’s strange to be regarded as the older one by others, because as a kid until young adulthood I’ve spent time with people older than I was. I also have a June birthday, which meant I turned 18 after I graduated high school. So it’s weird to feel old.
Anyway, concerning the dream. This time, visiting the good memories in the dream caused a new, extra ache, a sadder feeling that the best times were now all gone, all behind. Future times might be better than right now but they won’t be as happy as the past. It was a bitter dream—not a nightmare, but unpleasant.
Then I woke up. My dreams usually dissolve over about 10 minutes or so after waking so that just a seed of the mood tends to remain to remember it. Sometimes even that gets forgotten, too. I kept a detailed dream journal briefly on my phone, and when I re-read one entry about meeting a girl I’d had a crush on back in parochial grade school at a semi-abandoned amusement park, I was amazed that I had forgotten it completely, since I described it in detail. (Incidentally I don’t think I’ll ever contact her even though we are Facebook friends. Compared to her life, mine would not stack up prestige or interestingness-wise).
This time, I got angry with myself as the dream dissolved because I realized something: the memories I went through in the dream were fake. I never met Keira Knightley on the steps of the dining hall, for instance.
I also know, objectively, that undergrad was actually like 63% class, homework, riding buses, buying books, being stressed about schoolwork, feeling hungry on my meager meal plan, or being sick. Another 18% was screwing around watching Scrubs re-runs, watching “other stuff,” and hoping for Futurama to get put back on the air.
But the remaining 19%ish outshone the rest, and that’s what I remember the best (or, more accurately, prefer to think about the most, possibly distorting the memory’s accuracy).
Anyway, sorry if I’ve posted this song before. If I have, I’ll tell you why it’s personally special this time. If I’ve done that, I’ll tell you what the reason is at present.
There’s no real reason except for the song’s evocation to me, which is: it has rained but now the sun is just beginning to shine and I am ascending toward a stained-glass window, through which I know is a place where I live. Part of it looks like the boss battle room on Quickman’s board in Mega Man 2.
Is the post-rain feeling understandable through the first few peals of the song? It is strange; many of my favorite memories are not about events, but about either feelings I felt during them or even abstractions (or images) I thought about while I was experiencing them; either way, they’re non-sequitur in everyone else’s eyes, despite my persistence in documenting them (as above).
Assuming others are like me, it means that all we can do is show others an index to our inner lives instead of the raw text. I think it’d be a triumphant day when we can share feelings and inner experiences through technology, but it would also probably render art less important.
Maybe that’s what I’m getting at here. Presently, you can try to induce similar feelings to your personal, wonderful abstractions, what I’d call that raw brain text, in other people through art. And that makes art pretty important if you want to demonstrate how clever you are at connecting with others.
I’ll leave this entry with my usual type of meta-observation: I realize that most people don’t read these ramblers, but when I go back over all this far in the future (hopefully, if I’m lucky), it’ll be these entries I read the most closely.
1 month ago • 4 notes
