Dreaming, Memories of the Past

I tell you what, my dreams of late have been a series of faces… people from my past and quite a few of them from my school days.

The worst bit is while I have perfect recall for the people and their faces, I have a terrible time remembering their names.

One guy I’ve been dreaming of was my friend at Penrith Primary School, which is the first school I attended when we moved to Penrith from Mt Druitt. The school was a long way from home and there were two schools between us and that one, but for some reason the department advised my mum that it was the school my younger brother and I were to attend.

Looking back I see that the school was pretty small and was probably struggling to maintain a population, it was in the middle of the city of Penrith and most of the outter areas had developed schools that were closer to their people.

So anyway, I digress as bloggers often do, I rember this one person with perfect clarity, why? all of a sudden I don’t know, but Erik Verginhil (I know there is no way I spelt that right, but that’s how you say it). The funny thing with Erik and the reason he is probably so memorable is his being colour-blind. We’d do art projects in class and Erik would colour the weirdest colours and think it was a masterpiece.

Some of the other kids would laugh at him, I’m sure he had that all his life, but for me it was a learning experience like nothing else. It was at this time, in fifth grade at Penrith Public school that I learnt about perception… and how the way we see the world as individuals really is very different for everyone else. For instance, when Erik looked at people, he didn’t see skin-tones the way others do, for him we were all very different looking. For a long while it was something that was hard to understand.

Then my older brother, Brian, told me something he had learnt in science (he was in year 7). He had learnt that a blue chair is not actually a blue chair at all… the chair is every other color BUT blue. It sucks in all the other colours and rejects particular wavelenghts of the spectrum… in this case a certain tone of blue.

And in the case of Erik I think that’s where is struck home, because you see, we don’t really see colours at all, we see wavelengths and our brain interprets them as colours. So for practically everyone colours are different, because all of our interpreters (our brains) are different.

Of course the biggest revelation only began with colours, the fifth grade was probably also around the time I became truly aware that every facet of everybody’s life is about perception. It is how you view and the experience you take from something is potentially very very different to how I may do so.

I’m not sure where this all going… last night I dreamt of another guy from fifth grade, I can’t for the life of me remember his first name, but is his last name was Jensen. Hmmm we’ll see where this all goes in time I’m sure… maybe this is my life “flashing” before my eyes.

Or maybe there is just something about the big picture I’ve missed and the universe is trying to bring me back to the small detail to sort out my perception of the larger picture again.