The Past is so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

Its all about stories.  How else could the brain remember what happened 20 or 30 years ago?  The brain compresses all those electrical impulses constituting memories and fashions them together into a more or less coherent pattern of images, voices, smells (if we are lucky) and emotional sensations. Some stories are complex.  Some are simple.   Some we repeat all the time.   Some stories we just tell ourselves.   The good ones (or at least the ones that make us look good), we tell others.  Some stories stay the same.  Some are ever changing.

Dreams are nothing more than stories.  Except we have less control on how they turn out.  Much less control.  But both memories and dreams constitute the brain trying to establish coherence to a series of events or thoughts.

It gets really interesting when you dream about your past.   More specifically while you are in your dream, you are remembering your past.  Sort of a story within a story.  In this state, you can't tell if the past has any actual historical accuracy.   When you wake up, because the past is nothing but a story, it can be difficult for you to separate the past as dream from the past as story.

Let me give you a "real" example...lol

In my "real" past, I lived in University City, Missouri on Leland Street right off of Delmar in the late 1980s. Currently, its a very cool place to live.  Blueberry Hill, Cicero's, the Pageant, and a ton of other restaurants, bars, and trendy shops.  Even back in the 1980s it was pretty cool, with Blueberry Hill, Cicero's (a much smaller venue with a basement bar across the street from where it is now) and a smattering of bars and restaurants up and down the block.

In my dream, I was in a restaurant in the University City Loop called Bangkok Gardens,   It was a Thai restaurant and I felt I had been there many times before.   The owner was an actor who employed other members of the troupe to serve as the staff.  His name was Wallace Sheen and in my dream he had long waiving white hair--something like Albert Einstein would have sported.  The food was excellent.   I remember commenting to someone sitting in the table next to me that I was so sad to see the restaurant go, but in the future, this place would be a Paneras.  They laughed and didn't seem to mind that the table they were sitting at morphed into the sleekly homogeneous counter at Paneras.

I saw the picture of owner Wallace at the bar change back to what he must have looked like in his younger days with long brown hair, and then the scene changed back from present day gourmet bread peddler back to what Bangkok Gardens must have looked like when it first opened.  My father was there and we were eating on one of his many business trips he used to take while he was in St. Louis.

Then I began to wake up from my dream and there was a lengthy period where I tried to remember if there really was a Bangkok Gardens on Delmar street, or if it was just a story I had imagined.   Of course, there is only one way to be sure, don't you know.....