Nostalgic Memories of Times and Places I’ve Never Been

Even when I was a kid, many people thought of me as a ”dreamer;” someone whose head was always ”somewhere else,” typically in a place that didn’t even exist.

In time, I grew up, and learned not to say anything about 90% of what was going on inside my head, mostly for fear of being locked up in the nearest institution with white padded walls.

The reason to keep things mostly "well hidden" is that I often thought about places and people and events and experiences that had actually never happened, and yet seemed to reside with crystal clarity inside the same part of my brain that stored the tangible memory of — for example — giving my dog a bath on the back patio during the summer.

It would be easy to jump to some conclusion about having a variation of age-related dementia or amnesia or something other… but for the fact that this has held true since I was no more than maybe 7-8 years old.

One psychologist friend — whose opinions and insights I do respect — submitted that maybe it was a reflection of the fact that I was never able to create a ”here” that felt preferable to the ”there” inside my mind.

Which, I think, is a fancy and convoluted way of saying that my daydreaming is likely a ”trauma response” of some sort. That said, my early life wasn't really that bad... at least not that I remember.

Let's Look Elsewhere for Answers

There are those who postulate that multiple dimensions; existences; coexist at the same time, all the time. And that there may be an infinite number of parallel realities in which our lives might be anywhere from "the same, only different" to completely different.

Science fictions writers like to juggle these sorts of ideas in their writings.

Sometimes I wonder if I am merely experiencing a bit of ”bleed-through” from some other version of my life that actually exists, wherever it might be.

I should add that these ”memories” I had/have aren’t necessarily positive. In fact, some of them are pretty awful… giving me reason to believe that I am not just trying to escape my reality into some fantasy fugue state because things are always better, when I am there.

Sometimes I wonder whether more people have such memory-experiences than we know, but they actively dismiss such things as nonsense, rather than being curious and exploring what they might mean.

I always found it a rather fascinating field of study, because there are so many theories about how the mind and reality work... including the possibility that we are actually creating our perception of reality and thus, memory.

Bottom line, though, is that I still don't know how these things get into my head. And sometimes they are accurate memories of places that I have never visited, but I end up going years later and I have an actual working knowledge of them that only a previous visitor could have.

Maybe what makes me "nuts" is that I put more time and effort into understanding the phenomena, as compared to those who simply say "it feels like I have been here before" and then are basically done.

Yes, my blog is a little nutty today... but I remind myself that it is my blog, after all... so a little cryzy stuff now and then is OK!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

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Created at 2025.03.26 00:30 PDT
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