A Flashing Forward Flashback

The dream this morning was a stream of images in black and white. What I observed was old newsreel footage from the early twentieth century, I think they were images from the 1930's, perhaps. I can't remember everything I saw, but two moments from within this stream do stand out, the first image being soldiers heading in convoy to a war front. The soldiers were riding on motorcycles with sidecars and were kicking up a lot of dust. They wore those wide brim steel helmets that the Brits and Americans wore during world war one. Both armies were wearing the same sort of helmet during this time period. I believe these soldiers were heading off to a desert battle.

The second image that stands out is a scene from Hollywood. It is a posh 1930's Hollywood  theatre filled with film stars and other very important people. I see a man dressed in a tuxedo and a dark haired woman in a long white silk dress. The man has introduced the woman and she is about to sing for the audience. I do not know who she is but she looks very beautiful. The dream continues in a flash forward of other images and I wake up.

The dream was like watching a DVD that was in fast forward mode and it stops at these two scenes and reverts to play mode and then continues to fast forward. It is a odd juxtaposition of the old and the new isn't it? It makes me smile for some reason. I am 51 years old. I grew up watching a black and white television for almost all my childhood. My grandparents had a colour television. I remember as a kid walking over to their house to see it and being mesmerized by it.

I made a visit with my brother the other day and remember seeing DVDs sitting out and this triggered some feelings of nostalgia in me. I had a sudden desire to want to watch old black and white movies. I used to watch the old Republic serials like Commander Cody or the Flash Gordon serials when they appeared on TV. I have always had a fascination with this time and era, and wonder what it must have been like to have lived in the years when my grandparents were young. The 1920's through the 1950's was a time of rapid growth and change in America, and the world.

I suppose I really must be an odd ball in my generation. Hardly no one wants to watch the old shows anymore and will laugh at the special effects. In my opinion today's, generation has lost an appreciation for good story telling and would not know it if it reached up and bit them in the butt.  

Apparently, from what I have read from dream research, only people of a certain generation dream in black and white.  Black and white television and movies have left their mark on this cohort and I must be one of them. My dreams are often go back and forth between these colour schemes. I should endeavour to pay attention more closely to this aspect of my dreams to make these dream blogs more accurate and complete.

So what does this dream mean for us? It certainly reflects something about the yearnings buried deep inside me. Why am I so fascinated by this time before my birth? I don't know. I think it is some latent desire to connect directly with my grandparents and to better understand what made them tick and who they were. I barely got to know them before they passed away. My parents attitudes and behaviours were shaped and formed by what came before them as well. I have always wanted to know how and why they became the people that they were. I wish that I could know all the stories of my all my ancestors back to the beginning of time.

I envy the cultures that preserve their oral histories like the Australian Aborigines or Native Americans. Sadly, most modern cultures do not know much beyond their grandparents or how they got to where they are now, which I think is a horrible tragedy. How can you know where you are going, if you do not know where you have been? Today, we have so much technology to record our lives and stories, I sometimes wonder if any of my descendants will bother to uncover this blog or track down anything I ever did online? Will they even have any interest in this? We have technological advantages over our ancestors they never dreamed about but as I look at the young self absorbed people of today I wonder if anyone in the future will care about anything but their own immediate selfish desires. Well, life operates in cycles, someday I hope, a generation of Americans, if there still is an America, will have the desire to discover who we were and who they are.