Forest Fires and Lost Memories

Stinging tears blur my vision. The heal of my thumb presses against my left eye to push out the pain and the tears. I lower my hand and tightly squeeze my eyes shut to try and blink away the smoke. None of this really seems to help but I do it anyway. I think it’s just instinct whenever something is irritating your eyes. But after several minutes of blinking and rubbing, my vision begins to clear. With each blink, the watery shroud that is distorting my sight fades and I see why my eyes are burning. I’m standing in the middle of a forest fire.

The sky is a hazy orange. A thin but irritating smoke hangs in the calm air. And even though there are fires raging all around me, everything is eerily quiet. Roaring fires that should be deafening are as quiet as a small campfire. The snapping and popping would be relaxing if I wasn’t surrounded by fire. And being surrounded by fire, one would think I’d be burning up. I’m hot but not exceedingly so. It’s more like being in a dry sauna. The heat presses on me from all directions and I’m sweating like crazy, but I’m not burning up. The warm glow of the fire flickering through the trees would also be soothing… if I wasn’t standing in the middle of a forest fire.

My footsteps make a squeaky, crunching sound as I walk across the charred remains of forest flora. Puffs of black soot and smoke punctuate each step. Scattered through the piles of ash are the smoldering remains of trees consumed by the fire. Glowing embers of ash twinkle in the sky like fireflies on a warm summer evening. In this case, an extremely warm summer evening. From behind me I hear the loud crack of someone stepping on a large branch, snapping it under their weight. I quickly spin my head to look and see nothing but burning trees and bushes. My gaze is drawn to a particular grouping of trees. I can sense something there, but I cannot see it. I continue staring at those trees, straining my eyesight to see through the shadows but there is nothing but ash, fire, and smoke. Then another loud crack and I wake with a start.

Not surprisingly, a dream about being in a forest fire is not relaxing. But it wasn’t necessarily frightening either. I wouldn’t put it in the nightmare category. It was, however, unsettling. The fire seemed to press on me from all sides and certainly made me feel anxious. There was an overarching feeling of malevolence that I wanted to escape, except there was nowhere to escape to. But more than anything, there was a sense of remembrance. I don’t know how to truly explain it other than I was on the brink of remembering something especially important. Then I woke up.

Immediately upon waking up, I realized that parts of this dream were fading fast. To prevent them from being lost forever, I close my eyes and do my best to visualize the dream. I literally have seconds to do this, maybe 10 seconds at the most. Whatever I visualize gets transferred from my short-term to long-term memory, which gives me enough time to document it. But whatever I can’t visualize is lost. When I’m doing my dream recall, I can almost physically feel the memories I can’t visualize. I know there is something to remember but I just can’t see it. It’s right there, just out of reach and if I can picture anything about it, I’ll remember it all. But in the end, it all just, fades away. It is one of the most curiously frustrating experiences.

A similar memory recall phenomenon exists in my non-dreaming life. I can’t remember anything from before I was 5 or 6. I’ve been told that it’s normal not to be able to remember things from my youth but I’m saying absolutely nothing. Not one, single, memory. There’s no way that’s normal. My parents will talk about things from when I was young, but it still never triggers any memories. However, there are times when I get the feeling that there is something right on the edge of my memory. It’s remarkably like the lost memories in my dream recall sessions. These moments come out of nowhere. I’ll start feeling that I need to remember something and just like with my dream recall, I’ll close my eyes and try to visualize whatever I feel I’m supposed to remember. And just like my dreams, the moment is lost within seconds. One of these times, I know I’m going to remember something. I just need to keep trying.