I couldn't get any sleep last night. For no reason, I just couldn't seem to clock out. My mind was - is - filled with thoughts. My ever worrying mind sometimes just does not know when to stop, you know? So I found myself wanting to watch a movie, though I was not quite certain which one. I ended up rewatching Michel Gondry's 'The science of sleep', a movie I think I'd only seen the once before. It's one of those very.... hmm... quirky and idiosyncratic kind of movies that'd really hard to describe, and after I first saw it I wasn't sure if I had liked it or not. I certainly enjoyed parts of it, but the whole? Tough to say. What I know is that if I ever saw it again, then there would have to be a lengthy period of time between viewings. And even now, though I saw it almost twenty years ago, I'm not entirely sure that enough time went by. Because I still don't get just everything it tries to say, and that's ok, what matters is that at the end of the day, it's for sure a pretty good and unique movie. It's funny, because something that I'd been thinking about for some months now comes from that movie, and I didn't even remember. Then, last night as I watched that scene in particular, I had one of those 'aha moments'. I was going to try and explain what the concept behind Parallel Synchronized Ramdomness, but Stéphane (played by Gael García Bernal) does it perfectly :
P. S. R. - Parallel Synchronized Randomness: An interesting brain rarity and our subject for today. Two people walk in opposite directions at the same time and then they make the same decision at the same time. Then they correct it, and then they correct it, and then they correct it, and then they correct it, and then they correct it. Basically, in a mathematical world these two little guys will stay looped for the end of time. The brain is the most complex thing in the universe and it's right behind the nose. -ba dum tss- Fascinating!
Which leads me to think that here are certain movies in my life that I haven't seen many times because of how that initial viewing affected me. I'd name movies like 'Closer' and 'Lost in translation' among those. They are movies that moved me then, moved me to think about life, and myself. I watched them a couple of times only, and in a sense that's more than enough for me. I'm not closing the door on ever watching them again, of course, but at this moment of time and space I don't need to. One other such movie was 'Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind'. I'm fairly certain I only watched it some three times : the first, not long after it had come out, and because my friend Monica recommended it to me. Then, and though it was maybe a couple of years later, in some ways it feels like there was a whole lifetime between viewings, I watched it again when I was dating Silvia. I think we saw it as prep for his then upcoming movie, the aforementioned 'The science of sleep'. Then, and if memory serves me well, I saw it with Sofia. I never revisited it since then - along with a a couple of others.
But I'd be lying if I said that in these past many years I've not read many quotes from the movie, as well as captioned stills from certain scenes. It's remained in my mind all these years, and though every now and again I felt the temptation to watch it once more, I never did. And one thing that has always remained in my mind from that movie is the machine that erases memories. For a long, long time I wished such a machine existed in the real world. I wished that I could forget the pain I felt after Sofia, and if that meant forgetting her, I would have been happy. But that only happens in the movies, right? Real life is not science fiction. What I needed was time, and I got it in spades, and with enough time and patience, I worked through all the pain. I learned how to live with the memories. Memories don't haunt me these days, dreams do. And my dreams have become both recurrent and vivid. Although they are never quite the same, they end up sharing the same DNA. I dream of you, but you don't dream of me. And I wish I couldn't dream. I wish to god there was a machine that removed the ability to dream from a person. You'd just go to bed, spend a few hours in a blissful void, then we jerked back to waking when the alarm goes off. No dreams, I'd give anything not to dream again.
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