memories

I was thinking a lot about memory, because today is memorial day (soldiers chase me around my daydreams all the time, so I don't have to have a holiday for them - I'm already terrified). I think they should actually change the holiday to "aren't memories strange and intense? day." I think it could happen...

Well, I guess I was just thinking about memory because I went up to Bard College where I went to school for my brother's graduation and to drink and dance a lot. I love dancing the most and my brothers and their girlfriends do too. I have to say - I love my brothers so fucking much. And their girlfriends too. But the campus does somehow haunt me - the people who I used to know quite well, and the people who aren't around anymore get pushed up against me. I don't believe in ghosts, but I sure do believe in getting haunted. I was thinking how I've changed and how I've stayed the same, and I think the most powerfully disturbing haunting was by the ghost of my former self. By which I mean that brains are net-shaped patterns that change in detail and connection and pathway strength. The unused paths slowly fade out and become mostly dead, or at least as dead as background static is. When there is an overwhelming amount of input, these ghostly paths light up again, and my mind is possessed by a low-power, low-fidelity replica of myself as I was before. This replica is not of me at any time, but is a collage of my past selves, each part triggered by some strong sensation associated with a memory - the smell of local summer flowers, the quality of the shadows in a certain place, the evidence of my passing on the walls of buildings, a certain tree I loved and painted, an old aquaintance's verbal mannerisms. But especially the land and the paths through it trigger me, perhaps it is because the resemblance to the neural pathways creates some kind of amplification through feedback?

Anyway, this is not an altered state, but it is like being occupied by a different person. It's all about content. Because the contents of your mind at any one moment - that is one way of saying who you are.

And the feeling resembles the overwhelming feelings of deja-vu and petite panic attacks I used to get in Osaka in 2001-2. And those were partially triggered by the dream diary I was keeping intensely while working a swing shift twice a week. My bed was surrounded on three sides by my drawings, notes, and dream diaries taped to the wall, and it was pretty intense, especially since I was having trouble making friends. So I started having difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality - not all the time, just when I was sleep-deprived or spacey or sometimes while meditating. In zen these distracting hallucinations are called makyo - 魔境 - which uses 魔 - the kanji with the most strokes that I can write which can mean "magic." Anyway, I was able to overcome these by making good choices (i.e. stopping the dream diary and taking the drawings down and not drinking genki-drinks and sudafed pills to stay awake) and with a little help from my friends.

But the thing is - these makyo resembled the strange feeling of being haunted or possessed by memories. And I always described them as intense deja-vu, which is a kind of false memory. So what does this have to do with remembering dreams by using a dream diary?

So, dear readers, have you ever writ your dreams down? Regularly? What was it like? Was it intense?