I had a dream that I took a plane to Iceland. When I got there the country was in a perpetual twilight, the sky an interesting pale red. There was a huge army surplus store right outside the airport so all the idiot tourists, who hadn’t realised that “Ice Land” would be cold, could buy warm clothes. The owners of the surplus store thought every visitor to Iceland was an idiot, including me, but were very pleased about it as they made a tidy profit from them. The dream was set in the near future and there were no children around - some kind of atomic accident had rendered all the people infertile, no new people had been born for over twenty years in Reykjavik and only a few fools, mostly old people, and fearless explorers ever visited the country.
Anyway, back in the army surplus store, the shopkeepers became interested in me when they noticed I wasn’t looking at the woolly clothing like all the others but checking out some curious little devices they’d always assumed no one had any use for. They were nothing too special, pen torches, flares and glow sticks mostly, but I needed them as the final components for a larger device I’d made to rid Iceland of radiation poisoning. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but by the end of the dream I had hundreds of followers waving me off as I set out across the snow to plant my device somewhere on high and transmit some kind of cleansing signals that would cure everyone of their infertility.
After walking for a while I recognized that my progress stopped; I couldn’t move anymore. However hard I tried, I couldn’t make a step. Suddenly I started to hear some strange repetative noise coming out from somewhere. I realized it was my snoring, and as soon as I realized it, I heard these words: “When you are snoring, you are not dreaming”. I tried to approach the source of the voice, but couldn’t. “You have to be able to animate ALL the bones in your foot before you can use it”, - said the voice. And suddenly I could move. I went in the voice’s direction and there was a man. I asked him: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”, and he claimed to be my teacher. I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that he wasn’t somebody I know. So I told him: “I AM dreaming!”. He said “Congratulations” in a calm voice, fell backwards and disinegrated. Then I woke up.
flyingsquirrel
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Right, I know it’s not exactly a memory. It’s not even a dream, but rather a requiem for one. I used to think that we live in infinite Universe. I do not have any scientific background to come up with theories or statements, but as a human being I reserve my rights for beliefs. Be it belief in Jesus Christ the Savour, spirit of improvisation, Santa Claus, infinity of space and time, or belief in myself, belief is an integral part of any sentient self-reflecting being.
This belief in infinite Universe was simply based on the fact that we can’t measure it.
Of course, we have data that our Universe is 13,73 billion years old (as of the last week 
). So we can imagine a ball 13,73 billion years in radius (given the speed of light 299 792 458 m/s and length of 1 year as 31 556 926 seconds it will give us approx. radius of 13 730 000 000 x 299 792 458 x 31 556 926 = 129893055103132202840000000 meters… so you know). But, as it took me about 2 min. to come up with this calculation, this radius became roughly 3597509496 m bigger.
We reached the point there I got bored myself. The numbers are just too big too mean anything. If you go shopping and see something cost 3 pounds 99 pence you’ll think it’s 4 pounds, right? This is what called approximation. So 129893055103132202840000000 + 3597509496 and counting… is a number I can’t imagine. It’s something like Bill Gate’s fortune, numbers beyond my grasp. I think that approximation of 129893055103132202840000000 + 3597509496 is infinity. There’s no need for me to operate with such numbers. I remember reading some anthropological reports about some aboriginal tribes in Papua New Guinea. They had numbers 1 to 5, and then groups: 1 to 5 too, so everything could be shown on 2 hands.
20 would be 4 times 5; 25 - 5 times 5 . Everything that was over 25 was “many-many”, uncountable, infinity.
Continue reading ‘Requiem for a dream, or Quantum future of Humankind in Infinite Universe’
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When this happened I was about 10 or 11. We lived together, one big family: my parents lived downstairs with me and my grandparents upstairs. I spent a lot of time upstairs talking to my grandparents, as my parents were busy working. Once I had a weird dream. I dreamt that I was going over a hanging bridge which was strung over a rocky canyon with some other people I don’t know. I had never in my life seen such a bridge or a canyon. So I remember I was surprised even in my dream. Far underneath me there was a river. The bridge was made out of ropes to hold at and little planks which were tied with ropes too. I decided to cross it. When I almost reached the other bank the bridge burst. I managed to hold on to the rope and get to the bank. It was very difficult, and all the other people who were with me perished. They fell into the canyon, and I woke up, went upstairs and told it to my grandparents. Upstairs was the only TV in the house. Granddad had bought it and there we all sat together watching it in the evenings.
That day we sat together to watch a film. We didn’t have many channels. All the films we saw were from the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service and were old. At least my age. They also repeated films often, but that film I have not seen before. It was about a dancer and I think it was set somewhere in South America. The girl was about to go over a bridge and suddenly I recognized that was the bridge from my dream! She was the last to go on the bridge which was over a rocky canyon. All the other people had gone on the bridge already, walking it and she was the last one to step on it. Suddenly bridge broke, all the people fell into the canyon but she could make it back, as she held on the rope.
This was so strange. I remember everything in details, even now, many years later. I don’t know the films name, alas, and never saw it again.
Seung-Hyun Park
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I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html A quote from there:
…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.
What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’
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