AsleepInYorkshire wrote:Recently I have many many more dreams than I ever had in the past. And quite often they involve people from my very distant past. It's not the same as deja vu but it 's weird to say the least. I think it must be my brain working on old memories that never quite got "filed" correctly
I don't think the brain ever stops working on old memories, really. It picks up an old puzzle and shakes it about for a bit, to see whether thirty years of life's experiences have added any new accents or insights that might make sense of things. Only the other day, I was thinking about a university friend who failed to thrive and was eventually kicked out of college, and who (much later) found peace after he came out as gay. And suddenly the connections all made sense.
For my own part, I had a time, more than forty years ago, when life was one long succession of police cars and ambulances - some of the latter coming for me!
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
I was living with somebody else's severe mental illness, and at that time I was too busy coping with day-to-day survival to be able to look at things in big-picture reasoned detail. But four decades on, the pieces are starting to fall into place and I can see why things got that bad, and why I did the only thing possible by exiting that situation as soon as the medical profession was able to take over the situation. (It did, and with long-term success for that person, who at least has some stability now, although she'll never be well.)
But every three or four years, the memories still return and shake me about for a week or two, and each time I learn a little bit more. I've read a fair bit about delayed onset PTSD recently, and I think I'm probably on the less extreme levels of that phenomenon. Credit, too, to the BBC's remarkable mental health series from 2018. David Harewood's hugely courageous Psychosis and Me (
https://vimeo.com/336875652) was like somebody opening the curtains on a room that I'd always supposed would remain dark for ever. I suppose my mind is still slowly adjusting to the light? Might take a while longer, but hey, the brain is still working on it.
But heck, I'm wandering off the subject. Thanks to everyone.
BJ