Memories Are Also Dreams

The most dreamlike memories, I’ve found, are not necessarily the ones involving the dreamiest activities. I can’t see any unifying theme to those memories of mine that most feel like something I didn’t actually live, only dreamed. They cluster together in time, but they are neither the most dramatic nor most mysterious episodes of my life. Some more unusual adventures remain sharp-edged and hard in mind, tied to a local habitation and a date, but these moony memories may be of relatively ordinary activities that feel, now, dislocated somehow. Their defining feature is that I know I lived them but they still feel detached from the rest of my life around them. Often, I simply can’t place them, the where or when of them. You may be old enough by now to have memories like this of your own, although I’m thinking more of the memories from when I was grown. Almost all childhood memories feel weirdly dreamlike after enough time.

I was thinking of this the other day, driving through central Utah alone. There’s a town somewhere in the west of the state that I suddenly remembered driving through one afternoon and that I was trying to more clearly remember, but I couldn’t recall the exact details. It was small, scruffy, and well up in the mountains, and it felt like it was dying, with its boarded store fronts and sagging walls. But it was a pretty place as well, for all its melancholy, and it reminded me of other half-dead western towns I’d passed through in Nevada and the Dakotas. In fact, it could have been one of those, and I could be mistaken about it being in Utah at all. 

I have another floating memory of a day spent wandering around a community of cabins and vacation homes somewhere in the New England woods. It was late winter or early spring, raw and grey weather with piles of old snow in the shadows. I was a young man and accompanied by a girlfriend that day, but weirdly I can’t remember who. Was it Sylvia in 1991? Pam in 1982?  We were fantasizing together about owning one of those homes and pretending to pick one to buy. Why? I don’t know. I don’t remember the rest.

Then there was the time at twilight when I was traveling with my first wife, again in the New England countryside, looking for an inn for the night. It was early summer and the late, low light was green with a few gold spars through the trees, making us feel almost as if we were swimming underwater. We pulled up to a tavern with a motel, a low white building with a green-shingled roof almost melting into the trees, one neon beer sign glowing blue-and-gold in a dark picture window. And then? Nothing more that I can recall.

Perhaps there are themes to these, or at least correlated components. All of them, as I mentioned, are hard to place or date precisely, even though I have a minor gift for remembering exact or near-exact dates, and many of them come from times when I was traveling. And although nothing special happens in any of them, they all have an unreasonably haunting emotional aura attached to them. It’s probably that latter, emotive characteristic more than anything else that makes them feel like dreams. We tend to play up the weirdness of the crazy events in our dreams, and it’s true that sometimes in dreams we die or fly, but the intensity of dreams comes from the atmosphere of some powerful emotion clinging to what, recounted in daylight, is often an emotionally unexceptional scene.

And these memories can be multiple, like a stack of slides or similar pictures piled in a box in their frames. The sharper pictures can blur in mind when compiled with the fuzzier, unrelated snaps. That’s how a clear memory of mine, of being with your own six-year old self late last summer at the smoky lake has acquired a tinge of the unreal in just the several months since then.

You were playing in the water near the shore. There was no one else down at the bay that day. The summer neighbors from Vancouver and their granddaughter were away. The handsome mountains were fuzzed by a fine haze drifting in from fires far to the northwest. I swam out to the center of the bay and turned to look back at you. You gave me a wave. The waters were unusually clear, even for that pellucid lake, an effect perhaps exaggerated by the contrasting haze in the air. I looked down into the green deep, as I often do, then around at the quiet, empty surface.

My heart jumped like a fish when two spooky, half-dream memories surfaced simultaneously. One was a real memory of a fictional scene. I had watched a movie once—can’t remember the name, the actors, the plot, or exactly when—that had haunted me with a drowning scene. A man had been alone on a large, clear lake in the pines on a sunny summer day, in a rowboat, I think. Somehow he ended up in the water and, just before he drowned, a panorama of the lovely scene was shown from his point of view, head just above the waves. The view I was looking at, it seemed, was identical to his. There was, as I remembered it, as a sense of malice in the lake.

And then, or simultaneously, I also remembered visiting an eastern reservoir, perhaps in Pennsylvania or New York State, with my father during a cold spring. I was a young man. It was probably the last time I did any sort of fishing or camping trip with him. He told me about a town he used to visit on fishing trips with his father that was now drowned under that very reservoir. That memory, too, I felt overlapping, decades later, with this entirely different, British-Colombian lake. 

Now, all three of those dreamlike memories have stacked together for me: the movie in which the man was somehow seized by the lovely lake, my father telling me about the drowned town of his youth underneath us, and me suspended over the calm abyss on that hazy day, waving to you playing in the shallows and bobbing your blonde head. 

There are more, many more. An eerie encounter with a great, colorful heap of vegetables piled on an empty desert road at twilight, my car having just come up behind an overturned truck. An autumn graveyard in the Alleghenies where I thought surely I would find some meaningful name on a headstone because my lover had (literally) dreamed that I would. The free-floating memory of watching a thunderstorm’s slow approach from across a vast, flat valley. Those sorts of things, nothing really in common but the heavy, sometimes blissful sense of portent in them despite their insignificance as events, plus the detachment from any surrounding memories to anchor them.

I want to modify what I wrote earlier about almost all childhood memories feeling dreamlike after enough time. I should add that I suspect that’s also true of every adult memory, and real dreams are just our nightly rehearsal for the emotion-freighted years of increasingly distorted remembering we experience throughout our slow forgetting. Either that or all our episodic memories are squares and patches in a well-worn quilt we wrap around our tossing feelings, believing our warmth or chill is their fault.