Dreams I Can't Remember
I'm not sure how it happened, but as I was writing this essay about some of my dreams last night, I found myself thinking about what my dreams were like when I was a child. Surely, these memories were buried somewhere deep in my subconscious. After all, dreaming up memories from the past is a fairly common phenomenon for adults.
Two hours later, though, I still couldn't remember any of them. Not one detail at all - not even the color scheme of your bedroom or the shape of your father's face around his eyes and mouth. And yet I knew that these memories were a part of me. They had to be.
Maybe I wasn't dreaming at all. Maybe they weren't vivid enough, or they didn't mean anything in particular, or I simply forgot them because there were too many memories during my childhood. But maybe dreams are like photographs, and the memories were somehow transferred onto the blank canvas of dreams.
Whether you remember your dreams or not, they're still a part of you. They give you a glimpse into what was going on inside your head at the time. They're recordings of your experiences and your feelings. You can't know that kind of information without retaining it in some way - picture or memory, or in this case, dream.
We all have them: those memories we can't recall no matter how hard we try. Maybe they weren't so important to us as children; maybe they were forgotten because we forgot about them ourselves. Or maybe they were just too painful to hold on to because of the way they made us feel or what we'd lost.
Either way, it's important to remember those things that hurt us. They're the ones that define who we are and what happened to us. I've had many experiences in my life that have made me who I am today, but none have been more profound than those memories of what it was like to be a child. And although some may not seem so important, maybe they're the ones that give you a different perspective on life and what it means to be a part of something greater than yourself.
I think it's important to remember the good memories, too. When you realize that something has died inside you, it's usually the negative experiences that take precedence in your life. This puts you in a position to have fewer positive ones. But the memories of what it was like to be a child can help you appreciate time and life and your experience as an individual - how lucky we are to be alive and how quickly everything goes by. I'm grateful that I can remember being a child, even though I don't remember many of the specifics.
Maybe they're all just dreams. Maybe it's just a part of growing up - the memories that we choose to keep or forget. And maybe it's that simple. Whatever the reason, I'm thankful for my dreams, my memories and everything in between.
Title: Curious Look
Author: Gitte Speiler (http://www.gittespeiler.com)
Original Publication: Issue #20, November 2006 (Published on gittespeiler.com)
"Can you tell me what happened?" is always a frustrating question to hear when you're not sure yourself. Hearing it makes you question your own memory and the reality of what actually happened around you.
"I don't know, I can't remember. What do you want me to say?" Great answer.
This is how it starts. You have a near death experience, a car crash or similar or maybe you just were present when someone was killed close by. The questions are the same: "What happened?" And you don't know how to explain it, because how do you explain something that should not be explained? How do you describe the look in a person's eyes as they die in your arms?
To make things worse, when people ask questions like these, they usually think they already know the answer; like they are just giving you an opportunity to confirm what happened and acknowledge it as part of reality. Humans like to name things, to make them real and grounded. It's a natural thing, we relate things to other things we've experienced and that makes us more comfortable in situations we don't understand.
A patient once told me about his near death experience that had him hovering above himself for a few minutes during which he observed the nurses working on him, called in a doctor who took his pulse and started CPR. Experiencing all this gave him new insight into life and the human condition, he said. He then told me he felt like the eye of a hurricane, safe and protected in the center while everything around him blew apart.
The first question that came to my mind was: "What were you doing in a hospital?"
The second question was: "What did you do before this? Was it something bad?"
He also said he met a being of light. Okay, I can accept that. Are there any more details?…oh, okay. How did it feel? Alright, but then they brought me back and put a tube down my throat and I couldn't breathe so they had to put a tube up my nose. Stupid questions! And now I've talked to myself for far too long about it.
And someone else told me it was "just a dream." Funny, because I feel as though it was so real that I could touch the presence of the person, but then it turned out to be "just a dream" and fell apart like everything else. Apparently, we can only remember events that are "real" or vivid, which I assume is because we tend to believe them and make them real. We don't believe in unexplainable things. Except for those people who claim to have seen things like angels or ghosts or the Virgin Mary in their dreams; they are not uncommon.
This is how terrible I am at trying to understand and explain things that you can't explain.
I was scared of death. Not when I was alive. But after I died, their were two questions that kept coming up: "Why did he die?" and "What happened?" It is a bit crazy, the way they want us to keep track of what happened while we were still alive, but it's kind of neat at the same time. It's like a thought experiment; to test science against something unusual and not easily explained. And I guess that's what science does best: using thought experiments as tools to prove ideas through observing again and again how reality behaves under different conditions.
Conclusion: I guess they don't understand the human mind and how difficult it is to sort through what's real from what is not.
I guess when you have such powerful feelings, you make them real. You believe them so strongly that you make them happen in your memory. And most of the time, when people ask questions like this, they're just trying to calm their souls as much as yours are. It's safer to think that something incredible happened than accept that everything is woven together in a meaningless way of giving birth to a new little piece of life with no meaning yet attached. Having a conversation about death is the same thing as talking about sex.
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Dreams I Can't Remember