Axel's+Memoir

=Memories Outside of My Head= by Axel

I don’t remember any significant memories. I feel all the things I know in my life were experienced not by me, but by someone else, as if my thoughts were put into someone else’s head. I know all these things happened to me, even without people telling me about them, but I don’t really feel like I remember them. One thing that reinforces this memory disconnection is the immense video coverage of my young childhood. My dad’s hand was practically attached to a camera. I’ve watched so many videos of my young self that the videos are embedded in my head. I can’t tell if I actually remember them or just remember the videos. With these sort of memories I know the event happened, but I don’t have any connection to them. No sensory memories are involved. If you can’t really picture this, imagine when you learned about the Civil War or something. You know it happened, but you weren’t there so you don’t remember it. Your knowledge is only really informational and doesn’t have any sensory experience.

For my very early life, the videos were just a documentation. While these types of videos existed past the age of 6 or 7, they were less common and replaced by a new type of movie. They were movies where I created a story and acted it out. I didn’t have access to high-budget special effects, so I had to make do with what I had. It was mostly me running around, using physical acting, making noises, and mostly explaining what was going on. How does all this relate to a memory? I’m going to go back through these, as these movies are the closest thing I have to memories. In fact, they are memories, they just aren’t in my head, they are somewhere else.

As with all things, practice makes perfect, so as these progressed the videos got better and better. At first, there was hardly any explanation and the acting was vague, just like I said before, it was just running around in circles, or running back and forth. Occasionally, I would actually be going somewhere with my dad and something would be happening as we walked there. The noises were mostly explosion noises or similar sounds. Later, you were able to tell what was going on, but it was kind of boring because it felt like me talking, which is fine if you were looking for an audiobook, but of course it didn’t have the detail a book does. Even in between my extensive talking, it was the same vague running-around-noise-making acting. After that, the acting improved, but there was still an excess of talking. Later, I finally found a balance, and they started improving from there.

There are a few examples of the progression. The very first video was about me building some sort of machine, so I would say what part of the machine I was working on, then while running around I was making building clanking noises and saying the occasional part of the machine I was putting in. As I got older and was able to actually look at it from another person’s perspective, I could tell that it was hard to tell what was going on if you weren’t me. In turn, I tried to explain what was going on. One example is one where I was trapped in some sort of maze and I was hardly doing anything. It was pretty much me telling the story of what was going on. That is fine, but not what you’re expecting from a video. After that it wasn’t really me looking at the video and figuring out it was bad, but just naturally getting better.

I have chosen to talk about these movies because they are some of the first creative stories I can look at. To me, my creativity is my most important attribute, so this is very significant for me. I think these movies could end up being a replacement for these missing memories. Not all memories have to be internal. Even though these are external memories, maybe I can treat them as internal.

Where to start? I made many series of videos, but the first one, and the main one, was one of me as a superhero. If I did it over today, it would have been very different. My superpowers were extremely vague and I look back on these somewhat disapprovingly. In addition to having vague powers, there were major plot holes, such as me using some sort of power easily, and not seeming to have it another time, or villains dying and coming back unexplained. Another problem was that the villains lacked any origins. They just kind of came out of nowhere. This same problem applied to many things. Other superheroes who helped me out, who I just seemed to know for some reason, strange gadgets I had for no reason. Perhaps the strangest one was that eventually I made my Dad, the cameraman, a character who happened to have no explanation. So there were a lot of problems with these videos, but then again, you can’t expect a 7-year-old to be the master of story creation.

Perhaps I have focused too much on the negatives. The positives may not outnumber the negatives, but they are much more important. These positives don’t really relate to the quality of the video, but more come back to the memory part. I feel as if they have enriched me in many ways. This was my first time ever acting, and now I feel I am at least decent at taking on different characters, which doesn’t just help acting, you can get into the persona of someone else to understand how they feel. It can help with story writing to get into the head of characters. On that note, it also helped with creativity. You can’t create stories for at least fifty different videos without getting a good sense of story creation. It was a huge contribution to my creativity in general. Lastly, I think it made me not mindless. I feel like some things are very mindless and pointless. Things like this draw you in, and suddenly you spent two hours doing essentially nothing. These activities require no thinking and they don’t result in anything. I never spent my time doing something pointless. It’s so much fun to create! The satisfaction of having a finished product is amazing! It helps to give me a work ethic. So overall, even if the result wasn’t the best thing in the world, making the movies was a great experience for me, enriching me overall.

So let’s talk about this as a memory. These were great because they were experiences that gave me a physical (well, technically it’s virtual, but it’s the same idea) product for me to look back on. I haven’t looked at them recently, but from what I remember they are somewhat immersing. I try to imagine myself there, even though I don’t remember it. It is a strange sensation, to look at yourself in the past and feel no connection to it. I can’t picture it through my own eyes. So even though my connection to it is thin, there must be some sort of connection, for memories are not lost.

To get these memories as my own, the only way is to imagine it. The first thing I think about is my character. How did I think as a little kid? My character who I was acting as wasn’t too different from my real personality. This may have been another problem with my film-making, but the real point here is that I recall being an amazing visualizer (I still am), so I was barely seeing the real world. I looked around and saw my imaginary world of Super-heroes. It was an improvisation. It wasn’t really like I was seeing it instead of the real world, or elements from it on top of the real world, it was like a whole different sense, not experienced in the physical world, that was seeing the world completely separately and extremely vividly. I have always had a world within my head, and I am still able to get lost in it. These movies were a way of accessing this world. As a small child, I practically lived in this world, and I don’t remember when I started to access it, or if there ever was a beginning. The memories are kind of coming back now, but only in my inner world. As if my imaginary self is remembering all this but not the physical me. Which is more real? Perhaps my real soul is in a world of it’s own creating, and my body is just a physical anchor. Or maybe this is all me being crazy. My imagination runs away with me sometimes, which is the whole thing I was talking about.

To create regular sensory memories, I can’t really remember the actual making of the movies, but I remember the story, like they are the memories of the character. It was a sort a superhero show. The main villain was named Galacticia, and I can close my eyes and picture him, a swirling mass of darkness, with pinpoints of light, like stars. Really he was like a vaguely human-shaped slice out of the night sky. Another sensory experience is explosions. There were lots of explosions everywhere. I can feel the pressure blowing me back, unstoppable, uncontrollable. I can hear the bang a huge pop, followed by an overwhelming rumbling, almost a solid noise. As far as smell, there aren’t many of those.

So I have gone through the process of explaining these experiences as a non-memory and then transforming them into “real” memories. It was an interesting exercise, much like transforming someone else’s memories into my own. Sensory experiences are not classical, using the normal 5 senses, using another sense that is separate to view the memory. As for the experiences themselves, I explained earlier why they were important experiences, developing my creative spirit and such. Overall these were very important experiences in my development as a person, whether I remember them or not.


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