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Dream emotions
Oct. 17th, 2017 12:04 amOne of my dreams last night evoked a feeling that I have been trying all day to remember, with very little success.
I don't remember the imagery from the dream -- something about coming home after a war, something about the I-character being a prince -- but it's not the imagery I care about. It's the emotion. I can't remember. It was partly like -- oh, I don't know, like a newly crowned (and mostly still school aged) King Peter coming howm to Narnia after his first battle as king; it had elements of Harry returning to Hogwaets after winning some external tournament for Gryffindor (why Gryff in particular and not Hogwarta as a whole I don't know, and the not that sticks out was people back at the castle waiting, like in a Greek myth, to see which color sails adorn the ship, so someone could run back with news of the winner, which makes no sense in a world with magic, but again the visuals don't matter.
And I can't quite remember the emotion.
I think -- in the way you can sometimes remember the shape of a word without remembering the word itself -- it had the shape of a sort of nostalgia, like coming back as an adult to places you frequented as a kid (and things are so much more small and ordinary when you see them with adult eyes). But also a bit of ... deliberate loss? Of having gone to do the thing knowing you'd be changed by it and knowing that you'd never get innocence back, watching kids be kids and being unable to join in because you know too much. And some element of disconnect, like you've been off fighting a battle in Faerie and return triumphant to find that a hundred years have passed overnight and they're really quite happy that you won but you don't know them because they're the great-grandchildren of your baby brother or whatever, and you can't get the missing years back.
Those are the pieces I can remember, but ... echoes, not the source. It's more than that and *I don't remember*. And the more I try, the less I grasp.
I don't remember the imagery from the dream -- something about coming home after a war, something about the I-character being a prince -- but it's not the imagery I care about. It's the emotion. I can't remember. It was partly like -- oh, I don't know, like a newly crowned (and mostly still school aged) King Peter coming howm to Narnia after his first battle as king; it had elements of Harry returning to Hogwaets after winning some external tournament for Gryffindor (why Gryff in particular and not Hogwarta as a whole I don't know, and the not that sticks out was people back at the castle waiting, like in a Greek myth, to see which color sails adorn the ship, so someone could run back with news of the winner, which makes no sense in a world with magic, but again the visuals don't matter.
And I can't quite remember the emotion.
I think -- in the way you can sometimes remember the shape of a word without remembering the word itself -- it had the shape of a sort of nostalgia, like coming back as an adult to places you frequented as a kid (and things are so much more small and ordinary when you see them with adult eyes). But also a bit of ... deliberate loss? Of having gone to do the thing knowing you'd be changed by it and knowing that you'd never get innocence back, watching kids be kids and being unable to join in because you know too much. And some element of disconnect, like you've been off fighting a battle in Faerie and return triumphant to find that a hundred years have passed overnight and they're really quite happy that you won but you don't know them because they're the great-grandchildren of your baby brother or whatever, and you can't get the missing years back.
Those are the pieces I can remember, but ... echoes, not the source. It's more than that and *I don't remember*. And the more I try, the less I grasp.