Persistence of Memory
Jan. 5th, 2014 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeIn 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.
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.
