I have bizarre memory in the sense that I can recall the tiniest, minute details. Moments that have no bearing on the plot line. Words that should mean nothing.
A few things I can remember, for no discernible reason:
The moment I learned that “Sean” was pronounced “Shawn,” after reading the description of an episode of Degrassi and then only hearing the latter throughout the episode.
A classmate, in maybe first grade, telling the class her favorite color was red. I never once heard her mention the color red again, I don’t even really recall her wearing the color red outside of red being our school’s color. She’s a teacher now, which I can imagine she’s great at, and I’m pretty sure she recently moved in with her boyfriend, and I really hope she’s happy because she’s a good person and she deserves to feel good and I still think of the color red when I think of her.
The exact lyrics I wrote to a song I decided I was going to perform in elementary school, stuffed animals I positioned at the bottom of the hill as an audience, how blue the sky was, my mom chuckling as she watched me strum a left-guitar clumsily with my right hand and sing: Lizzy’s going, Lizzy’s going, Lizzy’s going wild/She’s jumping, she’s singing, she’s dancing around.
The first time I heard my parents yell at each other. I was in first grade and my backpack that I needed was in my mom’s car and my dad came in and apologized to me after they stopped fighting. I also remember the dream I had a few weeks later, when I was in the throes of convincing myself my parents were going to split up. Picture by Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock played throughout the dream like a dramatic closing scene from a CW teen drama. That was the first time but not the last time in my life that I couldn’t listen to a song because of the emotional memories it brought back.
*
I can remember my dreams from the night before nearly every morning I wake up. They are incredibly vivid, tangible, and intensely emotionally affective.
Some dreams that have stuck with me throughout the years:
The first nightmare I ever had would have been when I was in Kindergarten. I was in a basement that was supposed to be my grandparents’ but wasn’t. The basement was filled with arcade games and I stood on the back of one of those racecar simulators while an old man was driving. I did not know who he was and he kept yelling at me to get off his seat, but I couldn't because he was actually driving and the pavement was racing by and I didn’t want to get hurt. He morphed into an actual face and stood up and grabbed my hands and swung me around the room like Miss Trunchbull swinging Amanda by her pigtails in Matilda. For weeks after this dream,to reasons still a mystery to me, I could not eat a chocolate pudding Snak-Pak without feeling nauseous. Although now that I write that, it seems it may have to do with the forced chocolate-eating scene in the same movie.
(Months later, I would freeze in a bone-deep fear as I saw the old man from this dream sitting in a van in front of my family’s garage sale, as real as I was. It turned out he was the patriarch of a large family in my hometown, with several grandchildren who went to school with my siblings, and I had probably seen him many times without realizing it.)
In high school and early college, I regularly dreamed that all of my teeth fell out. A few times, they would disintegrate to bits and pieces, and I’d physically feel the bone fragments poke my gums, and the unbridled urge to spit them all out as quickly as I could. Other times it’d be just a few teeth popping out of place and I’d fill with intense dread, knowing I’d suddenly be the person with missing teeth when I woke up. I occasionally have these dreams now and recently convinced myself mid-dream that I still had a few baby teeth at age 25 and nature was just finally catching up to me.
I dream that I’m in high school or college again, and I keep forgetting to attend one class, as if it was hidden from me on my schedule, only to really remember when it's the end of the semester and too late to save my grade.
(This once happened to me in real life, sort of, on a less-catastrophic-but-still-anxiety-inducing level. I had a one-credit astronomy lab my freshman year of college, the only science class I had to take my entire college career. It was on Mondays, and because I didn’t have to take the lecture portion of the course, I never had any homework or tests. I remembered I was supposed to be there halfway through doing my laundry. I got a B because of that one class I missed.)
Just a few weeks ago, after reading a book that mentioned an infested New York City apartment, I dreamt a cockroach skittered across my pillow, right in front of my face. I sprang from my sleeping position, ram-rod straight, smacking my pillow and hoping to god I would make the dream roach go away. My boyfriend was still awake and questioned me, confused, until I mumbled something about a bug and gingerly laid back down.
In her essay collection, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esmé Weijun Wang describes dreams as working within the liminal, a space beyond what we know as reality.
“Dreams are the most common expression of liminality – more common than, say, seeing or feeling the presence of saints, angels, or God, which are all liminal experiences. To work with the liminal is to probe the notion of what is real versus imaginary, or even psychotic,” she writes.
To dream is to enter some sort of in-between, an existence outside of the binary of real and unreal, a space where you conversing with no one and everyone and searching for an answer you cannot ever know but cannot ever stop searching for. My bones hear the messages from the ether of my liminal dreams, yet they live within me in the same way as the secret my best friend confided in me underneath her walnut tree in third grade.
*
I look online for information about why some people remember their dreams, and some don’t. The research cited is spare, sort of expected when we’re working within an intangible world, and focuses more on why people don’t remember their dreams.
An article on Healthline posits a few theories, one of which is that dreams occur when our brain is processing information, filing away the important stuff and getting rid of the junk. So the brains of those of us who remember our dreams believe everything that happens during the night may be important later.
Another article claims people who remember their dreams tend to be more creative, introspective, often anxious. Maybe my subconscious has been keeping a catalogue of information to draw on for material later. I am a writer by blood.
*
Aging doesn’t scare me as much as my memory warping in front of me does. When I uncover a memory long buried under heaps of grass and dirt, it feels like I’ve been betrayed by something that is simultaneously me and not me. I am so used to pulling up the minutiae that I feel lost when a memory seems out of my grasp.
It’s even worse when I realize I misremembered something. I feel an intense embarrassment about this incredibly human thing. Human memory is one of the least reliable forms of evidence, but not mine, could never be mine.
My mind has always been the strongest and weakest thing about me.
*
The idea that I remember my dreams because I have anxiety makes the most sense.
I have so many miniscule memories from nearly every stage of my life, but anxiety feels like just one big, long memory set in the background.
A day in third grade I walked around the playground going from person to person to see if they’d let me play with them, continuously walking because if I stood still I’d be faced with the fact of loneliness, feeling my stomach crumple a little more when I couldn’t find a place to belong.
In tenth grade, I spent the entire day trying not to throw up, crying in the bathroom a couple of times, because I was going to find out at the end of the day if the position on the softball team I wanted, believed I needed, would be mine, and everyone knowing I did not earn it would mean everyone knowing that I was falling behind.
My freshman year of college, a group of girls on my dorm room floor were going out for a girl’s birthday, a girl that was not very kind and I did not particularly like. I should have not cared but I cried anyway because I had nothing else to do and I felt like they were my only access to acceptance and even bad acceptance was better than none at all, and it seemed like I’d have no chance of finding a group of friends within the next three and a half years if I could not establish one right then and there.
When I have anxiety now, which is often but not quite as disastrous as it once felt (shout out to you, Prozac), and I can’t pinpoint an exact reason why I have it, which is also often, I always wonder if I am forgetting something. I live my life in to-do lists. I keep them both physically and mentally and constantly and yet somehow I do not trust them. A task is a fickle little guy, sliding right off the page and running to hide. An alarm to set, a question I wanted to look up, an event that I am supposed to be anxious about but has suddenly slipped my mind.
*
I find it fascinating to talk to someone who rarely remembers their dreams. There are many days where my emotions are deeply affected by my dreams.
I recently apologized to my boyfriend for cheating on him in my dream, because even though I knew it wasn’t real, I still felt consumed by that guilt.
I’ve dreamt of snakes that can jump, that can sense my fear, that taunt me, swiping and pouncing at me as I run past a row of trees, and I spend the entire next day nauseous.
The worst dreams are when someone I love it livid with me, screaming at me, dismissing me, telling me what a piece of shit I am. I wake up feeling marooned and beaten and confused. My loved ones take on another persona in my dreams and in those moments directly after my alarm blares and I immediately hit snooze, I find it nearly impossible to separate the two.
Weijun Wang considers the way memories from her psychotic episodes live inside her physical body.
“I consider those photographs to be a peculiar example of what memory can, and cannot, accomplish. I look at those images of the Christmas tree farm, and am immediately thrust back into that place and that time. The anxiety that pervaded those days returns.”
When I recall my dreams, I feel that same lack of physicality, I am somehow here and within the night before at the same time. Perhaps this is the liminal.
I find it fascinating that people who do not dream have not had their lives altered by an unreality and then I realize they must find it fascinating that I do.
*
Aging, to me, means I am a little bit closer to understanding the world in some way. That excitement in learning new things is sometimes the only thing keeping me present and willing to exist.
I worry if I cannot remember yesterday then I cannot properly learn about tomorrow. Forgetting is a thief of protection. Everything I learn informs everything I will encounter, foundation building on itself. My experience matters to me and has built me into this person who is excited and mostly in love with being a human.
And yet.
*
I know that many people who have been traumatized experience memory loss. I also know that many people would do anything to forget about the horrific things that happen to them.
I also know that I experience both memories of things that objectively occurred in this reality and memories of things that objectively did not, but these are events I still felt and witnessed in the exact same way, which is to say that my past and my present seem to fuse together in a way that renders me liminal, void of location and everywhere at once, remembering everything to the point of loss.