At what point do reality and dreamland intersect? There are always those moments between wakefulness and sleep, but what about in the remembrance of the past?
I have had a few adventures. One included a long trek in a foreign country with many sights, challenges and people along the way, but sometimes I wonder what was real. I have memories, certainly. I have journal entries as well, though written half in English and half in Japanese as they are, I wonder how well I would decipher them today. But occasionally a memory will strike me. The smell of a cup of tea, when I am rolling a sleeping bag, or even wet socks will bring something drifting up to engulf me.
I remember hiding under the eves of an abandoned business, a car dealer, spreading wet bedrolls on the dusty ground to try to get them even slightly drier as the rain poured down a few feet away. I think I remember anyway. What if that part was actually something I had in a dream once? What if I my mind only categorized it as a memory of that time because the subject matter was consistent with what I saw then, while I was a world away? A sort of miss-filing of the memory. I wonder about this frequently, as with time and distance, true clear memories seem to become as hazy as any dream becomes after morning coffee.
In fact, I’ve had some dreams that still stick more vividly than some actual events. For example, I remember the sheer joy and elation of my first lucid dream better than yesterday’s breakfast. Emotional impact dictates clarity, not ‘reality’ in the sense of observable events. I wonder and think about how much of our past we dream up, either as we sleep, or through the distorted lens of recollection, or even moreso, nostalgia. It seems to me that the weight of things that we re-imagine is likely greater than the things we recollect accurately.
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