As I watched the clouds drift by near sunset a short while ago, I found myself remembering how I stood on a beach overlooking the city across the water; late afternoon sunlight reflected in golden tones on the glass and metal of modern skyscrapers.
It was a warm summer evening and even though the city of millions was perhaps no more than a half mile across the bay, in front of me laid a clean beach with a wooden jetty, and the scent of jasmine and roses hung in the summer air.
Behind me, a stone wall some four feet tall; beyond, a belt of beach roses, and beyond that a treed lawn with a small older white cottage-like house... home. This was where I lived. My wife was in the house, getting something from the kitchen. I can see her clearly in my mind's eye; she looked like a young Naomi Watts, except with freckles.
I never actually stood on that beach. I've never seen that house. I've never seen or known that woman.
In fact I don't even know where it is. I've tried to find it; tried to logic my way into it where it might be but I have never succeeded. Maybe it does exist somewhere, maybe it doesn't.
I call such things "phantom memories."
They seem real, but yet they're not. They feel real, but yet they're not. They repeat, are consistently the same, and I'm "triggered" into having them by certain situations just like the ones that trigger other memories from my life that I know for sure did happen.
Yet I have no idea where these "phantoms" come from. Why does my brain play this fragment of a moment of life that never actually happened, but I feel like I am the protagonist in them? It almost feels like I mistakenly received a video clip from somebody else’s life, and somehow it got deposited into my brain by mistake.
The thing that is even crazier is that I sincerely miss that beach and that house in that moment, even though it never happened.
For a while, I theorized that perhaps I had seen that moment in a movie or on a TV program and had merely transposed myself into it because I related so deeply. But a lot of very dull and boring research later, I determined that it was clearly not the case.
I pored over my dream journals, thinking that perhaps the "memory" had actually been a dream, but no luck there, either. I suppose I should be grateful that I keep a dream journal...
Author John Koenig — creator of “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” — uses the word “Anemoia” to describe something very much like this particular memory fragment.
It is not the only such "memory" I have. There are at least three others, each of them from somewhere I have never been, and have no idea where is. But they feel undeniably real.
I'm not too worried about someone calling the people in the white van with padded walls and the straitjacket... after all, these memories are perfectly harmless, just puzzling. Because even though they feel like mine, they are not mine.
The human experience has some occasionally mysterious and wondrous parts to it... and perhaps they don't need to be explained; perhaps simply experiencing is enough. What is actually "real," and what is not?
I remember a conversation I had many many years ago, with a former girlfriend. She was rather astute and once asked if I could explain the "vague sadness" that always hung around me. In that moment (my cautious facade loosened by a few beers), I said "I'm mourning the loss of something that never existed," without thinking twice. I had been thinking about that very memory, when I gave that answer.
Maybe it's something we all experience...
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the remainder of your weekend!
How about you? Have you ever experienced having a memory of something that didn't actually happen? Did it leave you feeling slightly strange and puzzled? Or am I just mildly insane? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220812 23:52 PDT
0630/1876
