Viscerally reliving a moment from your own distant past

[jamiefairlie]

I'll try to put this feeling into words. I was listening to some music tonight and The Old Men by The Wake came on. As I listened to the intro I felt the strangest sensation of being drawn back into a winter's night in 1982. It wasn't just a memory but a sensory experience of the smell, the sounds, my feelings, hopes and fears and the presence of the people who surrounded me at that time, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. It was truly immersive in a way I've never experienced before.

It lasted for the rest of the song and as it ended I felt the strongest sense of loss, a visceral sadness of knowing that that time was completely cut off from now, there was no way back to even experience a later version as my parents, aunts, uncles and even some of my siblings and friends are now dead and the house redeveloped. It's now as much history as world war 2 and all that remained of it were my memories and when I go so will they, a complete loss.

A fairly unique experience for me anyway. Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

[TrenterPercenter]

I was talking about this in the Avatars thread.  It's a kind of internal emotional resonance linked to memories.  I have lots of these for example one about about a neon, very orange street lamp in that evokes a very strong memory of me being at my nans house sat in her window with the light coming in through it, I doesn't just bring back the narrative memory but the sensory memory, I can smell the house and feel the carpet, I can also for some reason recall quite specific elements like the wall paper pattern (despite not being able to tell you what the wallpaper was in my old house 5 years ago).

I think it is something to do with emotional development and it's early mapping into our other senses.

[chutnut]

I get this all the time, I even used to have it when I was like 16 for things that had only happened a year earlier. I've always just thought of it as really strong nostalgia tbh

[studpuppet]

I get those 'blood thumping in the ears' moments of pure fear coming back to me occasionally. Things that really should have been put to bed years ago. Case in point:

School play, playing Higgins in Pygmalion at 17 years old. On stage with Eliza and realised that the handkerchief that I needed to throw at her in three or four lines' time hadn't been put back into the pocket of my suit after the previous night's performance by the props people.

The lines go like this, so without it there's about 30secs of dialogue to discard:

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two fathers to you. Here [he offers her his silk handkerchief]!

LIZA. What's this for?

HIGGINS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your face that feels moist. Remember: that's your handkerchief; and that's your sleeve. Don't mistake the one for the other if you wish to become a lady in a shop.

Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.

MRS. PEARCE. It's no use talking to her like that, Mr. Higgins: she doesn't understand you. Besides, you're quite wrong: she doesn't do it that way at all [she takes the handkerchief].

LIZA [snatching it] Here! You give me that handkerchief. He give it to me, not to you.

PICKERING [laughing] He did. I think it must be regarded as her property, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE [resigning herself] Serve you right, Mr. Higgins.

I can still feel the rising panic as I considered (while delivering lines) trying to tug the pocket lining out of my trousers, just so I had something to throw at her, otherwise it was going to trip up not just me but three other people. Got to the line and instead of, 'If I decide to teach you...' I let out an exasperated groan, threw my hands in the air and stomped upstage.

Thankfully the guy playing Pickering had the sense to jump forward and save the day, but I can feel that prickly heat in my face of being absolutely fucked to this day.

[TrenterPercenter]

I get this all the time, I even used to have it when I was like 16 for things that had only happened a year earlier. I've always just thought of it as really strong nostalgia tbh

I think it's different from nostalgia as when I was looking into this nostalgia implies positive recall  but it isn't always positive or negative, it can just be sensations so it's a bit different.

[canadagoose]

That Albumist account posted about the 20th anniversary of the release of Emma Bunton's "Free Me", which I honestly hadn't thought about in ages, and just the mention of the song took me back to 4th year of high school, specifically when I was lying in bed ill one day with the radio on. Things were so different then. Pretty crap, really, but my health wasn't as bad. Ach, you can't rewind it, can you?

Edit: is a bit of a crap song, listening back to it. Thought one of the lyrics was "how I long to set you sure", but it's "how I long to seduce you, oh". Feels kind of hacky and shoved-in.

[bgmnts]

Sounds like you recherched du temps perdu.

Lucky bastard. My memories are all cut off from me, so sights or sounds or smells set anything off. Anything that happened in my past is almost like a silent film.

Why do some people have more vivid memories that involve all the senses, and some don't? Brainwrong?

[Minami Minegishi]

I'm a hobbyist perfume maker and there is this concept of an 'accord' which is basically how various scents mix together to form one, unified scent. Rather like how instruments harmonise in a song.

I find that if I get the right accord of music and a smell, and preferably also something visual, then I'm basically Everything, Everywhere All At Once.

Woosh!

[TrenterPercenter]

I'm a hobbyist perfume maker

that sounds like a bangin' hobby.  Might look into this.

[Minami Minegishi]

that sounds like a bangin' hobby.  Might look into this.

My wife and I went on a course and now we experiment in the unlikely hope of starting a business. I'm obsessed with scents and how we receive, process and understand chemicals. I'm also quite good at mixing oils to make accords, which surprised me more than anyone.

It's hard work, and the oils are messy, but one you're up and running it's a really cool rainy Sunday thing to do.

They also make for AMAZING presents for people.

[TrenterPercenter]

They also make for AMAZING presents for people.

This is what I was thinking and feeling a serious cool dude if someone asks you what's that lovely scent you are wearing? and you go "Oh this? oh this is just a little thing I threw together myself".  Also the names you could give things is fun I'm guessing.

[Minami Minegishi]

This is what I was thinking and feeling a serious cool dude if someone asks you what's that lovely scent you are wearing? and you go "Oh this? oh this is just a little thing I threw together myself".  Also the names you could give things is fun I'm guessing.

Yep, all of that. Blokes don't tend to ask other blokes what that nice smell is, but women do and it's often nice but awkward explaining the scent. I usually point them towards Aesop who have a small but really quite amazing range of scents that I regularly recreate. If you get into it drop me a PM.

[oggyraiding]

I get this a lot around Christmas. Certain songs and carols send me back to primary school. Stage set up in the main hall so the dinner tables were more tightly packed to accomodate it. Big Christmas tree, ugly decorations, very old. Think about sitting with my class on the floor by the stage, performing in the nativity play. Singing "The First Nowell". Fuck knows why this memory and setting is so vivid in my head, it was like 25 years ago, but I can basically remember everything about those nativity performances.

[TrenterPercenter]

Yep, all of that. Blokes don't tend to ask other blokes what that nice smell is, but women do and it's often nice but awkward explaining the scent. I usually point them towards Aesop who have a small but really quite amazing range of scents that I regularly recreate. If you get into it drop me a PM.

Nice one I'm currently fighting for time to anything at the moment but if I do I will : )

[studpuppet]

Yep, all of that. Blokes don't tend to ask other blokes what that nice smell is, but women do and it's often nice but awkward explaining the scent. I usually point them towards Aesop who have a small but really quite amazing range of scents that I regularly recreate. If you get into it drop me a PM, and I'll come and murder you so I can harvest your pituitary gland for my olfactory experiments.

FTFY

[TrenterPercenter]

TrenterPerScenter^TM by Minami Minegishi

[jamiefairlie]

reflecting on this a bit more this morning and I think there's maybe an age related thing going on. I'm going to be 58 this year and I was the youngest of a very large family (double digits, good catholics etc). I wonder if it's related to a fear of needing to retain the reality of the lived past because others who were also around at the time are now dead. Like I didn't have bother because my parents, siblings, friends also lived that experience so I didn't wasn't the only one. Now that that lots of them are gone, their are fewer who can fulfill that role and perhaps that's were being the youngest comes in as it's likely I'll be the last one around.

I was always really moved by documentaries of really old people talking about the past and it hitting me that once they were gone so was any first hand knowledge of how life truly was, like that raft of shows about the last WW1 veterans.

There's a feeling about how your own past is devalued by later retellings, like the 70s being just Slade, Flares and big ties, and the 80s yuppies, shoulder pads and massive phones. It wasn't like that, it felt different to live then that it does now and it feels sad that knowledge will disappear to be replaced by an insulting facsimile.