. . . .that you are seeing the material manifestation of what had faded in your memory to being only a vague dream, and being there does awaken some memories but they don’t quite match up to what you’re actually seeing, and the actuality of being there becomes a kind of waking dream?
This happened to me when I returned to my high school about 10 years ago, which was 20 years after I graduated. It was weird.
It was kind of weird when I went back to Winnipeg, where I had grown up, for a convention in 2001 six years after having moved away. Some things were very familiar, but other things looked so small in comparison to how I remember them (reasonable, I guess, because I was smaller back then, wasn’t I.
I have a feeling it’ll be REALLY weird if I go back to the town where I was born.
Yes. Happened to me about a month ago, near where I had my first real kiss. (I was 16, she was 19, woo whoo for me!). The place has since been renovated into a multi-plex movie theater (it was an arcade at the time), and the surrounding buildings are different, also. I didn’t realize it until I was about to walk into the theater (we ended up going to Hooters instead; again, woo whoo for me!) I felt a little strange, at first, but then it hit me, and I remembered that day from about 8 years ago.
I think the stuff being smaller than they remember thing happens to everyone.
Yes, I’ve had that on returning to old haunts such as schools and previous places of residence - even shopping centres that I hadn’t visited for twenty years.
This seems a good place to mention another somewhat similar feeling I consistently get - whenever I pass a military encampment (and the UK is littered with them), gazing through the tall razor-topped wire fence, across the perimeter road and neatly clipped landscaping, to the orderly and well-kept military buildings - nissen huts, rows of neat, compact brick-built quarters or drab painted wooden dormitories, I get a peculiar feeling that is partly emotional, partly physical - a sort of aching longing desire, as if to return there (even though I’ve never been there and have never served in the military), coupled with a knotty tension all the way down to my guts. I just don’t know where it comes from or why.
When I was a teenager, I helped in the community effort to tear down our old church in order to make room for the new one. From the peak of the roof (which I’d never been up to before), I could see the tops of all of the other buildings of our small town, including the bank, which had a covering of river rocks/smooth rounded pebbles on it.
I had seen this same roof as a small child, while I was having flying dreams where I could float over all of the buildings in town…but could not (in normal terms) possibly know what it really looked like…unless the dreams were real.
I don’t know of anything that would have prompted me to believe that there were rocks on the roof of a building, but that’s what I’d always believed, and that’s what turned out to be there.