Phantom thoughts
Sometimes I find that I've had a very interesting thought. Not just any thought, but an epiphany about myself, or life, that would be really useful to jot down and take action on in the future. I.e. really good stuff.
So I hold it in my head until I'm free, then sit down to make a journal entry or blog post about it. But invariably, once I start trying to write it down, I get confused about how to explain it. I'll then try to break it down into logical parts; this happened, which made me think of this, which made me realize this, which brought me to this conclusion, yada yada.
Then, once I've put these things down, I'll realize they don't match up at all; maybe it makes no sense that I had some realization from some event. Or got some conclusion from some realization. As I do this, I can feel my grip on the thought slowly slipping, and my sense of its importance fading. In the end, I decide that the thought was probably just some feel-good halluciation that wasn't worth noting down in the first place, at the same time that I completely forget about it. That's also why I can't give any specific examplesβI literally can't remember a single one of these phantom thoughts that I've had.
But it always bugs me, why did I have so much confidence in these thoughts if they were just vague ideas that didn't make sense? What if they actually were important, and I spoiled them by trying to think clearly about them before they were ready?
You know that pattern like TV static, that slowly appears on the inside of your eyelids if you close them tight and keep your eyes really, really still? And if you so much as twitch your eyeball it vanishes in an instant? Everytime I've tried to write down one of these thoughts, it feels like I twitched my eyes and made the static disappear.
I wonder if anyone else has this experience. I'd also really like to know if someone's found a way to keep these thoughts from vanishing. Maybe if I reread my notes hard enough, they'll come back...