Alas. I haven't written in here yet, but I plan to. I am, in fact, right now. I have been reading old blogs and decided that it's time to get back on that horse. Even if it only serves as a kind of diary, it's better than nothing.
So the thing that's disturbed me all day is a dream I had this morning. Incidentally, Jamison also reported an odd dream about the same time...
At any rate, I dream all the time about Morgantown, WV, where I spent approximately five years of my early life. In all honesty, I hardly think about it or anyone from there, but for some reason, it's been haunting me lately. And in ways I wouldn't expect. I still remember my phone number, my full address, and the names of nearly all the people I knew there, despite the fact that I left when I was twelve and have never even so much as driven through the town since. Funnier still is that I can't tell you what I ate for breakfast today, but I can recite a phone number from more than 25 years ago at a whim. Memories are funny things - sometimes we cannot for the life of us remember the things we so desperately want to, like entire poems, or lines from movies, but our brains select for us what they think is important, and apparently several things from Morgantown are distinctly important.
I dreamed that I had gone back there because my parents had purchased my friend Lisa's house. I should mention that Lisa's house has some sort of particular significance for my mind that I cannot comprehend. I remember every detail of the house, from the colors of the walls, to the furniture, to the particular smells and textures of it. In nearly every book I read (including Harry Potter just by the way), this is the stand-in house in my brain for all such events. It's Tom Riddle's house and Harry Potter's house; the house in The Memory Keeper's Daughter...you get the idea. I don't recall that I especially liked the house or that there was anything particularly important about it; nothing significant happened there (that is, neither happiness nor trauma) and I never kept in contact with Lisa after I moved away. It's strange to me.
So in my dream I was visiting the house and pointing out all of the things that had been changed. My favorite room was always the attic master bedroom, because it had slanted ceilings and little nooks, hardwood floors, a big closet, and a cute little bathroom. In my dream, it had been walled off and I kept insisting that the room was in the house but no one would believe me. When I approached the place where it was walled up, I got a distinct chill - an energy sensation of something evil and I was terrified. Something lurked behind that wall and it still makes me feel funny to recall it even now. But then I went through the rest of the house recalling what it used to be and how rooms had been moved, as if committing its original state to memory was of the highest importance.
And this was the gist of my dream in general; I was walking around the town with some people who claimed to be old friends but whom I never did recognize. The town was surrounded by water, which I insisted was not the case when I lived there and my father kept insisting I was wrong. But in my mind, there is a map of the town, and I know where everything is and I recall the roads and where they lead. I had a similar dream a few weeks ago, and when I woke, I got up and checked Google maps to see if I had any basis in reality. It did. I remember the roads and where they lead and exactly how to get to certain places there (again, haven't been there since I was twelve). In my dream, I always have to recite directions to locations, recall not the names of roads there but their patterns and the landmarks I recall along the way.
I can't help wondering why this is suddenly so important inside my head. Why the perpetual recitations of memory of Morgantown, WV? What is so crucial to my memory about Lisa's house? Why must I continue to revisit these locations that have no concrete significance to me, nothing obvious? It's puzzling, but something I want to explore further. There is something my brain knows that I do not - some reason why this information, this constant committing to memory of details that seem unimportant - is necessary to my imaginative life. I feel like I will eventually find out why...
