Surreality of Time

Many of you have experienced going out one night and partying to find yourself the next morning not remembering how you got to your bed. Or someone else’s if you were lucky. Or unlucky, depending on what you see upon wakening. I have not. However… my entire experience has that type of feeling. As if I just partied too hard, fell asleep, and I’ve only just awaken, when I have hours to myself to sit and reflect upon what has happened. It doesn’t feel like the experiences were my own, but rather like I cannot remember what has happened to me, or when it was I fell asleep, but my dreams were filled with these experiences. A fellow traveler I met commented that while traveling is a great experience, in the end, when you return, it is never really the most exciting… more so it makes you want to travel more and continue… a drug in its own way that forges a powerful addiction.

I’ve often felt this surreality of time… as if I’ve just woken and the life I’ve led is not mine, but one that I’ve observed in close detail. And then you begin to forget details… some are recalled later on as you try to entrance listeners with your experiences, some are recalled at random times as you turn a corner that fires a flashback of a corner turned in a past time.. but some you just forget. Even people you can forget (the trick of being unforgettable… deserves an entry of its own :) ). So then what are the experiences for? Actually living in a different cultures, seeing things with your own eyes, many crave it, need it, desire it.. but if in the end it feels as if you’ve observed someone else seeing it… is it as real as you think? Who’s to say that you aren’t dreaming right now, that everything you think and feel are figments of your imagination that you will soon wake from to realize that it was all just a dream… though if that were true, I would not want to be you, wasting my dreams on reading a blog. :)

When your life does not feel like your own, what do you do? How do you preserve those memories, those details? Some choose to blog regularly or keep a journal of some sort so they can return to their musings and thoughts at a later time. As you can tell by my delay in postings, this is not something I’m so good at. And this is summer. Videography, photography, scrapbooking, collecting souvenirs… all attempts to remember a past time. To keep your life from being forgotten… for if you forget it, who will remember it? But then perhaps that is the trick. Perhaps it’s not your own experiences that make the difference, but the experiences others have because of you. Men and women of power built pyramids and palaces to go down in the history books… a mode of immortality, a way to make sure that your life is remembered, a way to make sure that your life was not merely a fleeting speck in a galaxy of lifetimes. But I digress.

Returning to my main point.. if you wake up one morning with no recollection of the night before, did it actually happen? Of course. But what if you wake up alone and noone else remembers what happened either… yes, but then does it actually matter? If noone remembers what happened, are the drunken exploits of the previous night of any consequence? As long as you don’t pop out a being in 9 months or discover a nasty looking rash (which a friend pointed out could be covered up by claiming to have been thrown into the Charles River) what does it matter. To relate it to an age-old question: if noone hears a tree fall in the forest, did it actually make a sound?