APFELTRAUM AND THE SHADOWS OF MEMORIES

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Have you ever heard a song or looked at a painting and had this strange feeling come up, as if the work of art came directly out of one of your memories, yet when you try to access the memory you come up with nothing?

As if the painting is a portal to a different place, a place you know well, even though you have no clear memory of it but rather the memory of a memory.

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As if you were there in this place or this event this work of art is all about, maybe in a past life. And you only half drank from the waters of Lethe, enough to erase the actual memory of the event, but not enough that you'd forget there used to be a memory there, resulting in the shadow of a memory still lingering somewhere inside you, dormant until you first hear this song or see this painting that triggers the shadow of a memory.

The kind of memory you desperately try to access.

You reach out, trying to grab the strings of information and follow them to the source, but it's like there's a brick wall between you and the event and you just can't remember.

It feels a lot like when you keep a dream diary and you wake up in the middle of the night from this glorious dream, but you are exhausted so you only write down keywords from the dream that will trigger the full memory of it when you properly wake up in the morning.

Only you can't.

Maybe you picked the wrong words and they aren't enough to trigger the memory of the dream, maybe something else is the problem, but you keep looking at the words trying to remember and nothing comes to you. All you know is that you had this really cool and super-important dream that is now totally lost*.

This is exactly how I feel when I listen to this song called "Apfeltraum" (apple dream) by the German band Renft.

It's a song about a guy who fell asleep under an apple tree and had a kinda trippy dream that may have been more than just a dream, where all the apples suddenly had a face, the apple tree was suffering under the weight of so many apples, Goldmarie (see Brothers Grimm' fairy tale "Frau Holle", "Mother Hulda" or "Old Mother Frost" in English ) and a sick old man who hasn't been able to visit his garden in years. (Here are the lyrics of Apfeltraum from the band's official page, for those of you who speak German).

I have no idea what's the deal with me and this song (this is definitely not a "I discovered the secrets of the universe, here's a manual of instructions" kind of post, it's more of a "share the madness" kind of post).

I'm fairly certain that it has nothing to do with whatever message the band members wanted to convey when they wrote this song.

I know it's not a direct experience from a past life (as in I have never been the man sleeping under the apple tree, the old man who is sick or anything like that) but it feels like a memory of people I used to know.

I feel like I used to know someone who was sick and suffering, maybe the father or grandfather of a friend or lover, and if this song had come out when I knew this mysterious man whose life details are lost to me now, it would immediately make me think of him.

The first little piece of weirdness is that the time period I get as to when the events of these shadows of a memory may have occurred is around the time the song was actually written (beginning of the 70's).

The second weird little titbit is the color of the apples. I never really liked red apples, so whenever someone says apple, I always think green apples, which I am actually fond of. The word apple is connected to green apples in my head, so the image of a red apple never pops up when someone mentions apples, unless they specifically say "red apple". Adam and Eve eating the apple? It's always a green apple in my mind (yeah, I know I'm weird). In this song, however, the apple tree is clearly full of red apples in my mind, despite the fact that the color of the apples isn't mentioned at all in the lyrics.

Is there something that makes you feel in a similar way? A painting, a song or composition or some other work of art that gives you this shadow of a memory feeling? What ways have you found or developed to further delve into this kind of memories to get to their source? Let me know in the comments.

*Putting yourself in a light trance may help with this by the way; research on state-dependent memory shows that memories created in a particular mind state are often fully accessed only when you are in a similar mind state. So don't drink too much while studying for an important exam unless you're prepared to show up drunk to the actual exam. Just sayin'.

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