A dream itself is but a shadow
a shadow's shadow
I promise this is not a post about a dream I had. Its rightfully been said that it’s essentially impossible to convey the strangeness of a dream to someone else because the fundamental events are not necessarily what are weird, but the emotions. Our brains are hallucinating visuals, concepts, experiences and emotions which are, even when we are awake, episodes that are very hard to parse out as real, inflated, level-headed, valid or otherwise. In dreams we are trying these emotions on without knowing it, duped into thinking we have been sewn into these overwhelming trials of feeling so when we wake up drenched in a very real sweat or crying very real tears, it is impossible to declare it was not part of reality.
What sparked these thoughts today was a dream I had that was part of a recurring series I’ve had my whole life. In most of my dreams, I have been separated from my family. I am trying to get back to them and communicate my efforts in some way. Time slips and stretches in a parallel plane—I am moving and organizing as fast as I can but the day I am stuck in sprawls to weeks and years. When I was younger, this was often accompanied by the sensation that I could not see all the way, my eyelids fighting against my efforts to open them as wide as possible. Now, I am usually trying to call or send a text message via a Dali-morphed device of some kind whose buttons do not work, whose form melds with my hands, whose display cannot open or activate preventing me from sending the crucial message of love and urgent efforts to reconnect. It’s so common I even recognize it in the dream—here I am again! Unable to communicate.
That feeling is powerful but evasive. What made the dream last night slightly different is at one point the device just turned into a small stone. I was holding it in my hand, gripping it trying to talk or text through it to my husband and daughter. And even now, as I sit here, I can feel the stone in my hand. I can feel the weight, size, shape—the rough surface is not a hallucinatory sensation but a tactile facet under my searching thumb. I have thought about it all day, my mind focused in on the feeling of it sitting in my hand, and from that feeling, the rest of the nocturnal saga unfolds, all unfurling from the small stone.
As I promised, this isn’t actually about that dream, and so it isn’t. What it is actually about is how that dream made me think about the strangeness of how we make memories. Just like in a dream, a memory’s series of events convey very little. Instead, what makes a memory powerful are the feelings draped around those events. And what recalls them are deep touchstones, much like the stone in my dream-self’s hand, that anchor all the swirling and shifting around it. When I remember the struggles of childhood, like petty bullies and playground fights, I remember the feeling of sitting on tanbark underneath a tree at the edge of the yard. That sensation unlocks a flood of everything else from those days. Similar with happy memories or cherished ones. Going with my grandmother to beach, I remember touching her delicate gold seashell bracelet, then I remember the steps we walked together down to the sand, the cold water washing our feet clean, and then the sense of safety she brought me. It amazes me how something perceived as only mental—a memory that lives in my mind, is really fervently attached to the physical world. Without the instant recall of the way a dress fit as a child or trying to itch a scratch underneath a cast with a chopstick, I don’t know if I could form the memories of sitting in church or waiting for my broken thumb to heal over summer before school started.
Moving so quickly and living so virtually now, all remote work and social media drenched, it feels very normal to have fewer real recallable moments throughout my day or weeks. Someone may ask what I’ve been up to recently and it’s troublingly hard to remember. Is it because all those actions and events take place in the same physical place, with the same physical objects? To my hand holding it, my phone is my phone no matter what it displays so anything that happens all washes away in an indistinguishable tide. I have found that one way to combat this is to actively have a quiet moment with the physical world. What am I holding in my hand? What smells or sounds surround me? Somehow creating that little anchor and throwing it out into the fabric of time does snag and stop everything, even briefly. When I hug my daughter I try to record the physical feeling of holding her body in my arms, pleading that I will never forget all the memories of her.
It gives me a little respite to combat the onslaught of time. Thinking I can change or control it even a little bit buoys me above the constantly moving river and helps me experience glimmering cherished moments as much as possible. Even if all of these moments will someday feel faded and distant, I think there will be comfort in knowing they happened, and having proof I was there, evidence swiftly presented though those undeniable sensations that somehow persist through it all.