I think just about everyone has certain colors, sounds, smells or sensations that for some reason trigger a very distinct emotional response. I think they’re usually caused by some earlier emotional event that also occurred together with the smell, sound, etc. so that now one conjures up memories of the other. We may not remember how these triggers were formed or even be aware that they exist at all.
Two of mine that caught me off-guard until I realized what had caused them:
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There’s a piece of classical music, which I don’t know the name of, that used to make me feel extremely tense. When I did my first performance in front of a crowd, the venue had that piece of music on an endless loop for the half-hour or so before the event when I was stressing over my lines and wondering if I could still call everything off and make a break for the door. I couple of years later, with a few hundred performances under my belt, I went back to that same venue and during the preparations my heart started beating faster and I was tensing up over everything. Finally, I realized I was feeling like I did on my first show and that it was the music that was doing it to me (since that was the only thing about this venue that was different from any of the others). Since then, I still feel it, but now I can just smile and laugh at it.
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The other one’s a bit odd, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one. The smell of mothballs gets me turned on. I’d get these sudden rushes of a ‘forbidden sex’ kind of feeling at seemingly random moments (random, since the kind of people who smell like mothballs aren’t usually the ones who turn me on), until I noticed the feeling was always in conjunction with that smell. Once I realized that, it was easy to piece together: old Penthouse magazines found in the attic. I was in my early teens, heavily into puberty, and without cable TV or Internet porn, when I found some mid-70’s Penthouse/Playboy magazines under a pile of old blankets and clothes that were covered in mothballs. The magazines had the same smell, and I ended up with a powerful mental imprint.
So what are yours?