You can't go back...

When I was a kid we went to visit my grandparents on their farm in Iowa every summre. My mom would drive and we'd usually pick up my aunt and cousins in PA on the way. Whether or not she had another adult to spell her, my mom would try to drive straight through, getting the cross country drive with a car full of kids over with as soon as possible. We'd sleep sprawled all over the back of the car and sometime's I'd wake up in the middle of the night and have the oddest sensation -- (it should have been carsickness but it wasn't...)

I felt like nothing could be pinned down; everything was shifting, in flux. I couldn't say for certain what time it was, except that it was the middle of the night. I couldn't say for certain where we were, other than in the car, driving -- we could have been anywhere (I used to sleep on the floor of the old 4-door sedan we drove in, so the fact that all I saw as we drove was dark sky, and perhaps the moon, rather than any landmarks added to the sensation of placelessness). I didn't even feel 100 percent sure that I was myself, with everyone else sleeping and no-one to address me by name. It was disconcerting -- it left me feeling like something important had shifted slightly and changed reality (maybe I was just a weird kid).

I saw a movie years ago that evoked that same sort of feeling for me, but with an eerie, slightly threatening edge to it. I had worked an overnight, come home and succumbed to a stomach bug. I woke up after a fitful few hours sleep and parked myself on the couch. J kept the kids off of me, so I wound up with control of the TV and I lighted on a Japanese movie whose name I didn't catch. It was an anthology of ghost stories, very stylized and dreamlike, and they sucked me right in. J came by at one point to ask "what are you watching," to which I could only reply "I don't know." But the stories stuck in my head for a long time and I wanted a chance to see them again. So fast-forward a couple of years, and J did some searching based on what I remembered and we found it -- Kwaidan -- filmed in the 60's and based on traditional Japanese ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn. And I got it for Christmas this year. I couldn't wait to play it and see if it would get me back to that odd in-between place, but so far it's not working. I've been watching the stories one at a time and out of order, and I talked them up so much to J that I'm winding up slightly disappointed while watching them. I'm going to have to stay up late and watch them straight through by myself and see what happens.

There's another movie, too, that I found fascinating in that same sort of way, though this one was not as spooky -- but now I don't know if I want to try and track it down. It was called Lovers of the Arctic Circle. I don't know, maybe I will try to find it -- though I don't suppose it'll be at the local Blockbusters.