Strands

I had a dream in which I was at a seminar of some sort, similar to one I just attended in Dearborn Michigan a few weeks back. There were hundreds of attendees, and presenters spoke to us from an elevated dais while twinned images were projected onto large screens on either side of the dais. My friends from work were seated around me.

And you -- and you -- and you -- and you were there. But you couldn’t have been, could you?

The speaker was explaining to us that using a new type of spectrographic imaging shot with recently designed cameras, one could see that as people walk they leave traces of themselves behind. An image of people walking on a crowded New York City sidewalk appeared on the screen, oddly translucent, and a glowing white line could be seen emanating from the top of each person’s head and extending back from the direction they’d walked into the frame.

“In zis way,” he said in thick, Israeli accent, “Ve can see zat a person leaves a trace of zemselves everywhere zey have been.” He went on to explain that this ethereal discharge was a small portion of a person’s daily thoughts and dreams—in a secular sense, a trace of their soul.

“I postulate,” he continued, “Zat in ze future we may be able to develop a mechanism to capture zese thoughts and know just vat a suspect vas thinking at ze time zey were in ze place. Certainly you all know zat if you visit a place you have not been for a long time, memories will instantly resurface which you had at ze time but have long zince forgotten. Zat is because currently you alone have ze ability to recapture your own strands, but technology vill change zat!”

A funny dream, and pretty scary if you're a defense attorney. But I digress.

I think somehow my brain had combined the lectures given by the brilliant Werner Spitz about homicide investigation with the recent news buzz about Apple and Android phones tracking people’s movements. It is always amusing to me the way our brains will slice, dice, puree and blend things we see and hear into new and bizarre stories, and I remain fascinated at how the you that exists in the dream can believe this contrived scenario without reservation.

Then you wake up. But unlike Dorothy, you feel no need to try to convince Auntie Em that the dream was real. Reality’s teeth, once set back into your flesh, allow little room for speculation.

This time though I have to admit I liked the idea. I pictured an aerial view of a map showing all the places we have lived as warm, glowing blotches of light, with thin strands traveling off in all directions showing the trips we’ve taken. All the places in the world that I’ve visited have given my soul something to bring back with me; have I in turn left something of myself behind at each location? And therefore, are there much deeper concentrations of my former self at places where I lived for long periods of time?

So, having a day off, a full tank of gas, a full aluminum bottle of iced green tea, and an iPhone full of old and new music, I set out to snag the strands of my past self left floating in and around my former homes in the greater Columbus area. I set off for the first place I lived in town—good old Schaaf Hall at 2199 E. Main Street, better known as Capital University. Mike Stern’s “Upside Downside” and then Michael Brecker’s “Sea Glass” set the mood as I drove: two songs I listened to incessantly while living at Capital.

Although much of the campus area has changed significantly since my time there in the ‘80s, Schaaf Hall dormitory looked exactly the same—as futuristic to those who built it as it is dated now—a C-shaped, brick behemoth that could easily have doubled as a set piece for any of the later Planet Of The Apes films.

They say that smell is the strongest sense, meaning that an aroma can trigger memories you thought you’d lost decades earlier, but I must admit in just seeing Schaaf’s steel side doors made to withstand any blast the Red Menace might send our way (duck & cover, kids!), I had a flood of memories that I had most definitely lost track of easily twenty years earlier.

The memories just kept flooding back as I continued on with my tour, playing songs on the iPhone that were from whatever particular era that I lived in each subsequent place. On and on I drove, listened and looked: Village Creek Drive (Nine Inch Nails), Broadmoor Avenue (Vinyl), Parklane Avenue (Stevie Ray Vaughn), Faymeadow Avenue (Dave Matthews Band), Broad Meadows Boulevard (Soul Coughing). At each site, a thick freshet of remembrance cascading through my head.

Just as the dream-doppelganger of Dr. Spitz suggested, the thoughts, hopes and beliefs that were in my head had seemed to have seeped out around those places and were still there, waiting for me to come by again and let them back in for a romp in my psyche. I’ll leave the question of whether or not those strands of my soul can metaphysically interact with those who lived in those houses later to better philosophers and Syfy screenplay writers, but I can’t deny I’m looking at my house now and wondering what strands have been left here by others to waft across my subconscious.

Did I discover any lost truths about myself? No, not really.

Did I uncover some valuable midlife advice to share with all of you? Not so much.

Do I plan to reference Wizard of Oz for a third time as the denouement of this blog entry? Yeah, probably.

Dorothy figured out there was no place like home. I learned today that home is inside you no matter where you are. Revisiting old landmarks can indeed make memories resurface to remind you who you were then, but far more importantly, how far you’ve come since then.