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.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You knew this, but still: brains are weird.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

You have such a cool subconscious mind.

[dudeshoes.livejournal.com]

OK. Any associations to the word benson or hurst?

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

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