I've Just Seen a Face.


Last night, I dreamt I was having a chat with a musician who, as far as I know, doesn’t really exist. When I woke up, I started thinking how incredible it is that the brain will make up faces.

That’s if you believe it does. A quick Google search brings up plenty of websites suggesting it doesn't. One popular theory is that everyone featured in dreams are people we’ve seen in real life, however briefly, and then subconsciously stored away to play the bit parts in the soap operas that form in our minds while we're in a comatose state.

That seems unlikely to me. If we can invent places and situations, both consciously and subconsciously, what’s to say we can’t do faces? Or is everything that enters our head based on personal experience? That would suggest it’s impossible to have an original thought.

But then the brain is an incredible and unfathomable thing. I’m often surprised when memories that were long forgotten suddenly pop back into my head. A place or a smell - or even a smelly place - can entice recollections that had been suppressed. That’s why I’ve not visited ‘Nam since the 70s.

Maybe everybody I've ever met or seen in a photograph is locked away beneath my cranium. If so, this might explain why I still remember Louise Nurding's October '97 edition of FHM so vividly.

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