I wrote this yesterday, but I was too high to remember to post it by the time I finished. Instead I went up to the roof and listened to an old man tell me stories.
On today, the day of my birth 39 years ago, I have decided to finally make a list of things about myself which I've suspected for a long time are not normal, so that I can start to turn this weird sort of sketch that I've been working on in my mind into something a little more focused. An inward guide, I guess you could say.
Fuck you. My midlife crisis is MINE and no one else's. At least mine's about hash and introspection and not fast cars and loose women.
Hmm.
Anyway, here:
1. I exclusively think in pictures and sounds, never words or numbers or anything else. When I think of disliking someone, I imagine a tincture of sewage and mud spread out through my mind, flies buzzing over it, and occasionally a bubble or two rising to the surface and popping disgustingly, or something at least in symbol reminiscent of that. I've talked to a lot of people who tell me that they think in language or a combination of language and pictures, sometimes sounds, but I've not met anyone yet who thinks entirely without language. I'm very interested in why this is, and where the probably millions of people are who think in the same fashion.
2. My dreams are four dimensional. I used to think everyone's were, but when I go into a lot of detail about a dream to someone else, I have to explain to them that while I'm moving around from place to place in my dream I'm also going backwards and forwards and sideways in time too. Sometimes there's no time at all in one of my dreams, and I experience all of it simultaneously. I never tell anyone about those, because I can never explain them without frustrating myself.
3. My memory is compartmentalized and associated with emotion and geography. There are quite a few things that I can never recall unless I'm feeling the same way I was when I wrote them to my short-term memory, or unless (slighly less often) I'm physically in the same place as I was when it was pushed to short-term memory. I've gotten very good at dropping myself into different emotional states briefly in order to retrieve an important memory (where my keys are, when I paid my cell bill, stuff like that) and then jumping back out again into whatever my natural state is at the time. However, I've never looked in a mirror while doing this and I'm beginning to think my face might do something a bit untoward during a memory retrieval done this way. I get asked what the matter is a lot when I do it in front of someone.
These things are of course only very interesting to me, which is why I've made this post. I feel like I'm showing off a couple of exquisite examples from an enormous collection of glass telephone pole insulators, apologies to E. G. on that one. Still, I have a cold, cracked feeling about my impending midlife crisis, and my aim is to study the map (which I'm currently drawing) carefully before I take even one step forward.
as to that...
ReplyDeletehow's this for weird. i serially dream of the same house. it's very large, and there are a lot of areas to it, but i've "been" there many times and it's always the way it is as if it had factual reality.
go figure.
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ReplyDeleteI have the same thing going on, except with a great, empty desert under a washed-out orange sky, fine, dull yellow sand, and with a huge structure in it, sort of like a temple, but not religious...I never see the inside of the structure, but I know it's great halls and chambers are all completely empty and only collecting sand...
ReplyDeleteThe front of the structure is pillared and blue-veined alabaster, and faces directly an even more enormous cliff-face, less than 20 yards away, where there feels like at one point there had been some kind of opening or doorway into the mountain.
I have no idea, but I've dreamt about it since I was a little kid.
Actually thats not true, I have some idea that it might be a symbolic conglomeration of safe, amazing places from the literature I packed into my head when I was a little kid. The doors to the hall of the Old Ones in "The Dark is Rising" maybe, the alabaster stones from a classic lullaby, the great majesty of egyptian slab-architecture as I imagined it when I read "Ozymandias", the desert and cliff face from "Dune", etc.
Even the smell of in my mind is like a mix of lavender and myrrh, both heavily laden with symbol to me, the combination of which is capable of stopping my heart for about 1.5 seconds.