Speaking of tunnels....

The other day my younger son asked me why we can’t remember being born.

I didn’t have a particularly good answer to that one, but we did spend some time talking about what our earliest memories were and reminiscing about his early childhood.

Ever since then, though, I keep having this Groundhog Day-esque dream where I am driving through the Armstrong Tunnel at night and I am just about to emerge from it and I have this incredibly strong feeling of impending… something.

Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Kind of like right before that final volley of fireworks goes off.

Or right before that head finally pops out after hours and hours and hours of hard labor and the rest of that slippery little body slides out and you hear a baby crying its lungs out and you feel such incredible joy and happiness and relief that you start crying, too.

Or right before other things that shall remain nameless that you were thinking of right off the bat.

The feeling in my dream is not the boom! My dream never goes that far.

But rather that feeling right before the boom.

That impending, built up, suspenseful feeling.

With no boom, no release, no fireworks, no relief, no crying baby.

It gets kind of disturbing after a while.

And I do not think that I am – or can! -- remember my birth.

I am not sure why we remember what we remember.

Or how we remember.

Or why we forget certain things.

Or how.

Or why an old photo or a smell or a song can suddenly bring a long forgotten memory to the startling forefront.

I just know that they do.

I have this theory, though.

(Which is completely unscientific and not based on anything in particular but my own thoughts.)

I have this theory that we actually have the memories of everything that ever happened to us stored inside our brains. Somewhere. We can’t always remember them, but they are there. And sometimes, since they are there all along, something will happen to trigger us to find them again, even if only briefly or fleetingly.

I think that we have inside of us far more than we are actually capable of remembering.

That every thing we have ever seen, heard, said, thought, or read is in there, somewhere, but that our computer software is incapable of dealing with or processing or using it all because we would just be totally and completely overwhelmed.

But, theoretically, we could be hypnotized (or something) and a scene could be related in extreme detail, in far more detail than we could ever really consciously remember or recount.

And I think all this… stuff… or a lot of it… ends up in our dreams.

I am always astounded at the degree of detail in my dreams. Sometimes it is like watching a really suspenseful movie. Other times it is very detailed and seems quite real while I am dreaming it, but then later, looking back, it makes no sense at all. I mean, logically or realistically or plot-wise.

I guess it is my poor, tired, stressed-out mind trying to solve some problem or another, or deal with some issue, or just blow off steam or something. But clearly the brain has to draw from somewhere to create these dreams… these movies.

Of course, when I was a little kid, I also thought that all of our memories were put in folders and then into filing cabinets in our brains. And there were tons of filing cabinets with folders spilling out and stacks of folders in corners, etc., in room after room inside our brains. And the reason we couldn’t remember everything was because 1) we didn’t have a proper system for filing them, 2) we didn’t remember the system we used to file them, or 3) we couldn’t figure out the system we had originally used.

Do you ever have someone’s name or a certain word “on the tip of your tongue”?

You can feel it, sense it, you almost, almost have it.

It’s coming, it’s coming.

It is almost there.

And then, all of a sudden, sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days or weeks later, it finally comes.

How does that work exactly?

What processes are going on in your brain?

What does it mean if you are “trying to remember something”?

What is actually going on inside your head, in that organ with all those little wrinkles and folds?

Where exactly are these memories stored? And what are memories?

How are you trying to find them?

And what does it mean if you “feel” like you are almost remembering something?

It is “coming to you”?

It is “almost there”?

And then – poof! – it is there.

Last summer while on vacation with friends I have known since elementary and middle school, I was trying to remember the title and author of a book we had read in a high school English course. I could tell them what the book was about – a brother and sister who had an incredibly unhealthy relationship -- and that it was by a French author. I could envision the cover of the book in my head. I could picture the entire book in my mind and the simple line drawing illustrations. I could remember our English teacher telling us that we probably shouldn’t leave the book lying around the house because our parents might find it and think it was… inappropriate. But for the life of me, I could not remember either the title of the book or the author’s name.

My friends had not been in the same class and had not read the same book, but they kept trying to help me figure out what the title and author were. We were on an island in the middle of a bay in Canada, without Internet, so we could not simply Google and figure out the book’s title that way.

Which would have been very simple indeed.

And which made me realize how much I rely on Google to figure things out and remember words and how to spell them, etc.

Anyway, I forgot all about this book until one day just recently I was walking through the stacks of the library on my way to yet another meeting, and the title of one of the books on the shelf happened to catch my eye. I cannot tell you why this one book leapt out at me from the midst of all the others.

All I know is that all of a sudden I saw the title: “The Holy Terrors.”

And it clicked.

That was it!

That was the book we had read in high school English.

The Holy Terrors.

Les Enfant Terribles.

By Jean Cocteau.

It was as clear as a bell.

A quick check on Google confirmed this.

In fact, the cover illustration on Amazon.com was the same exact black and white line drawing cover that I had so well remembered in my mind’s eye.

So, why was I unable to remember the title and author of the book, but pretty much everything else about it?

And why, months later, after I had completely forgotten about this book, did I suddenly spy the title in the middle of the library stacks, out of hundreds of thousands of other books, and instantaneously know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was, in fact, the title of that elusive book?

I do not know.

All I can say is that it happened.

Frankly, I think there was a tiny part of my brain that had continued to work on – had still been working on -- that book title and author. Even though, consciously, I had long ago forgotten that I wanted to know this and moved on.

There was a part of my brain that had kept figuring out the title of this long ago read book on a back burner, or a “to do” list of sorts. Part of my brain was still on the lookout for clues or signals. And that part of my brain noticed "The Holy Terrors" on the bookshelf, not coincidentally, but with cognition.

Or recognition.

And had then alerted the conscious me to take notice and… see.

And voilà!

I had not had to tunnel down into the depths of my brain to figure this book title out; the title had risen to the surface. Or popped out. Or, more accurately, appeared right there before my very eyes. The memory of the title was somewhere in my brain. And seeing the title spelled out in front of me, even randomly, was all that I needed to make the conscious connection.