Complex Numbers

Hello Darkness...

Describe the earliest memory you have.

Anyone who's been following along already knows this one. And you're being inundated with it now. It's all over the internet. I can somewhat understand if you're burned out on it, even though it was not only the greatest achievement in history, but the greatest achievement humankind can ever make.

So I'm not going to talk about the time people first landed on another fucking world and most of the population of the original world, including me, watched.

I've said before that it's my earliest memory. It's definitely the earliest one I can hang a time on. But I have other early memories, ones that may or may not have taken place before July 20, 1969.

All of them are dreams.

I don't mean that I still dream about them; I don't. At least, I don't think so. But the images stayed with me. They might have been earlier, or later; I don't know. But I still think it's odd that I can remember a dream from fifty years ago (give or take) but not what I had for dinner last Tuesday.

The first one involved frogs on lily pads. It's dark, but in the way of dreams, I could see the flora and fauna clearly. The frogs told me something important. I have no idea what it was. Probably "Buy Apple stock in 1984." Stupid dreams.

Another one was of a five-pointed star, glowing in the darkness. Make of that what you will. I no longer see it, but the darkness is a recurring thing in my dreams. It never bothers me there. I move through it just as easily as I move through brightness in the waking world.

The third, but I think maybe the earliest, was of someplace underground - but bright. So bright. White stairs descending to a white hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, filling the hallway, gapes an abyss. The darkness again, black to the hallway's white. I stop at the edge of the pit. And that's all - I don't remember ever crossing it, falling in, or re-ascending.

I'm sure that has great portent, especially since, at three years of age (or thereabouts), I had little if any experience with stairs, and none with bright white hallways with vast yawning abysses in the floor. Much later in life, I made myself revisit the dream, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never make myself leap the abyss, or let myself fall into it. I keep thinking I will fall, one day, as will we all.

Whatever meaning these things have, if any, escapes me. At this point, I have to question even my memories of these dreams. But that's the way these things go, I suppose.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.