Xanga Post 1: The Trigger

I finally started going through my Xanga. I don't write in it anymore, but I still like to re-read things every now and then. At one point, I deleted my account out of anger, but then I realized that was a big mistake. I thought it was lost forever, all 3-4 years that I'd written down (even though it was full of so many pointless entries).

I was able to contact someone who works for Xanga and asked them if they could restore my online journal -- which they did. They can only do it once, so I won't try to delete it again.

So here is the first dream that I typed out, a few months after I started using the site.

1.5.2005 __saturday____
Did you ever get that feeling when you do something like smell a certain spray or perfume, or you see something in the light of a sunset… like nostalgia..? Well, that happened to me a few days ago, when I smelled something sweet in the breeze (when it was still warm outside), and I had a flashback. It’s like it’s not my memory, but someone else’s, because I don’t remember it happening. What I saw in my mind was this:

I was in a building that had walls and pillars of white marble, and the ceiling was domed. A boy around my age was standing next to me, aaand – that’s all I remember….

I wish I could just pull out pictures from my mind.

I was 14 when I wrote that, so please excuse my poor sentence structure or writing techniques. I promise, you'll see that I get better over time (or so I hope I have).

I know that what I wrote about was a dream I had when I was younger, but I couldn't remember all of it. Up until now, I can't recall the entire dream -- but I know, now, that some of these memories of dreams are triggered by things I perceive with my other senses. Which is interesting, don't you think? That anyone should be able to recall a dream based on something they smell?

That just means I can experience dreams other than by seeing, hearing, or feeling. For some reason, I find that fascinating. I think of taste and smell as unimportant or even absent in a dream, and if ever I notice that I have the ability to taste or smell anything, it comes across as out of place. Or real. It really stands out to me.

Actually, I had a dream this morning that ended with me feeling itchy. Mosquito bites riddled my face and hands as I crawled my way through and around bushes in an open conservatory. I scratched at one, and then two of them as I listened to a man who urged me to leave.

I blinked (which I hate to do in dreams, because most of the time it just means I was thinking that my eyes were dry. That makes me conscious about my state, and then I too quickly realize I'm dreaming.) -- and I woke up in bed still scratching at my hands and face.

I still felt itchy when I woke up scratching, but I stopped, and the sensation faded. When I scratched my skin again, it was gone. I even looked for a sign of a small bug bite, but there was nothing.

I think that's one of the few times I've held on to something in a dream that wasn't a sentence or a song; it wasn't someone's face I remembered, or even a scent. That feeling lingered longer than anything else when I woke up. After it subsided, I had to really exercise my brain to remember why I was scratching myself in the first place, until the memory of the dream finally came back to me.

So what would happen if I woke up in the middle of eating cake in a dream, or catching the scent of honeysuckle flowers?

Would I wake up sensing those things, too?