Persistence of Memory

[asakiyume]

In the wee hours last night, I woke with vivid images of a dream I'd just disentangled myself from--which I won't record here, except to say that in one part, I was wandering narrow, low-ceilinged, hot corridors and stairwells in a huge, brutalist building complex,and people--all men--were filing up and down the stairs. Is this a prison?, I began to wonder, and so I asked one of the men, who laughed and said, "No, this is ___ ___ ___"--a three-syllable name.

In my drowsy, newly awake state, I quickly told the whole dream to Wakanomori (who was even less awake than I was), knowing that if I didn't, I wouldn't remember it at all. "I'm not sure about that place name, though," I said. "I'm not sure it isn't actually a prison, after all. I'll have to check in the morning. It's either a prison or a neighborhood in, like, Chicago, or Brooklyn."

And even as I said that, I had a suspicion I'd forget the name by morning. I really should write this down, I thought. But I didn't, and sure enough, by morning, it was gone.

Wakanomori couldn't remember it either.

So, finally, when the day was pretty nearly over, I did a couple of Web searches. Prisons, first. No, it wasn't Angola or Marion or San Quentin--But was it Leavenworth? Possibly. But I had a hazy sense that Leavenworth was a name that had come into my head after I forgot the real name, a similar-but-not-quite-right name.

So then I searched neighborhoods in Chicago. Nothing looked or felt right. Next, neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Bensonhurst seemed possible--the right number of syllables, and it sounded rather like Leavenworth.

I described this whole process to Wakanomori, through the part about Leavenworth, and then the part about Bensonhurst. "Yes, that's it!" he exclaimed. "It was Bensonhurst--that's what you said last night."

The thing is, I didn't even know that I knew that Bensonhurst was a neighborhood in Brooklyn. I've never been there. No one I know lives there. As far as I know, it's never come under my radar at all. But somewhere, somehow, it lodged itself in my head, and although I gather (reading up on it) that it's a perfectly reasonable place, somehow my brain decided that as names went, it sounded prisonlike.

Comments

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

And after all, Ben rhymes with pen.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes it does--funny the connections the brain makes!

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sure is!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You knew this, but still: brains are weird.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yep, that they most certainly are.

[inspirethoughts.livejournal.com]

very interesting that you could find out what you had dreamt. I have so many lucid dreams that sometimes I fear I live in them than reality...and so it gets difficult for me to pen down what is dream and what is reality. :)

May be your previous life was in that place and somehow your dreams tok you there. Who knows.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Who knows indeed!

I remember your saying that about your dreams--that must be very unsettling!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I've never heard of it by name, but looking at wikipedia, I have watched movies and tv shows set there. And I've bought pizza from Sbarro, which was apparently founded there.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I saw that too, about Sbarro, when I looked it up!

[duccio.livejournal.com]

Go to google and look up Bensonhurst in the news. Maybe something is happening there that you have heard about, or should hear about. Or the Wiki entry about Bensonhurst. Happy travels.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I thought it might have come up in the week-long (and very powerful) story of Dasani and her family (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1), which I read a while back, but I searched through it, and no, not there. But probably, yeah, I heard something recently….

[duccio.livejournal.com]

It seems to me I might have heard a story on PBS the last few weeks ago that mentioned Bensonhurst... maybe about the schools, or the regeneration and gentrification of the area. Maybe a human interest story, some reference like that.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to figure one of those obscure dream-sentences that hit you just before waking as well. It was incredibly hard to keep in mind, because the spelling and grammar were unlike something I'd remember:

"Remember to take seriously the Chatelaine when you cross over the emport."

What's an emport? A shorthand for Import/Export? Something empirically important? Feh!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I like both your possible parsings of "emport." Dreams are kind of like LSD trips (or what I imagine LDS trips must be like, heh)--they seem very meaningful when you're in them, but when you examine their messages by the cold light of morning, some of the meaning sublimates away. One of my favorites from just-before-waking was "The Literal Guide to Metaphorical Sayings." I liked that so much that I started trying to write some entries for the guide… but then I lost interest.

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

A more felicitious variation for "entry port"? The Chatelaine might be a governing entity.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I like this theory.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

Oh, also there was a film called Spike of Bensonhurst, which is the only reference to Bensonhurst I can remember. Never saw the film.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Never even **heard** of the film, though it's a pretty nifty title.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

You have such a cool subconscious mind.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I feel like really it's kind of bland, or dry! Some of the dreams I read on LJ that some people have are really astounding.

[dudeshoes.livejournal.com]

OK. Any associations to the word benson or hurst?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

"Hurst" seems Germanic to me. Otherwise, not really. I think it did remind me of Leavenworth, though.

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

Bensonhurst does "sound" like an institution. Could be a place of learning, a monastary, or a penitentiary...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It was definitely a punishing sort of place in my dream. (Sorry, real-life Bensonhurst!)