The Cloudy Crystal
Memory is a cloudy crystal that preserves weak ripples of distant events. Like prehistoric bugs captive in amber, memories are blurry ghosts from the past.
The only thing that links us to our dreams is memory. Our recollection of the past is presented to us by memory as well; the difference with dreams is that in the case of past events there is a traceable relationship between those memories and the now. This creates a resonance between them and the now which reinforces and makes them stronger than our recollection of dreams.
When we throw a pebble in a pond, the waves gently dissolve as they go further away from the point of impact. In the same way, as memories grow old their resonance weakens and they become more like dreams.
When we dream we don’t know we are dreaming; dreams are as real as our distant past. However, we confer reality to the memories of our childhood and disregard our dreams as hallucinations.
The source of this misconception is the imperfection of our means to recall dreams. Most of their sharpness and details are lost when we look at them through the cloudy crystal of memory.
