Tuesday 15th May

Sometimes when I am not aware that I am thinking at all, in some un-selfconscious moment I find myself back in another time and another place.  Usually this is quite unrelated to the here and now situation I am in, so removed in fact that I have no idea what should have triggered these little moments of recollection at all.  It is as if for a moment I am transported and an episode, a little scene which I had no reason to have remembered consciously at the time is replayed in sometimes crystal clear, but sometimes a dream like hazy state.  And then it is gone, and I can sometimes concentrate and bring it back, or if my thoughts are disturbed and I have to attend to something else, I have lost it completely and all I am left with is the vague feeling of unease that for a moment I was back in time, not merely thinking about the past but actually there in it.

Does this happen to everyone?  Is it some sort of short-circuit in our memories filing system, or is it a memory dying to be relived, maybe something I need to be reminded of, something I should never have filed away under ‘useless knowledge – do not disturb’, something I am missing in my life?  Or worse still, did it ever really happen, is it just my imagination playing tricks again.  And because I wasn’t consciously thinking when the time-slip happened, for the life of me I cannot really remember the remembered memory I just had, only that it was real and vivid and I was there reliving it again, if only for a moment before real life, or the life that we call real, the here and now, overtakes me again, and my usual routine is re-established.  Pity, because I think I might actually prefer it if I lived always in those little moments of recollected reflection.