I don't know if this means anything. I'm not saying it proves jack, so don't get all skeptical or Shirley MacLaine on me. But as a boy, I used to be bombarded with images of medieval Europe. Germany or the Lowlands, seems like. I was hit by these images without knowing anything about medival Europe at that age.

The sound of medieval music (of which I'm kind of a poor man's aficionado) would cause a flooding of these images. But it wasn't just images. Almost like snatches of memory. For instance, I distinctly remember a recurring image of a woman in a white headdress of medieval fashion--Dutch-like--and she was standing in a doorway of a stone building. She was behind a half-door and the lower half was closed and she was leaning out and emptying a bucket--I now realize it was as likely to be human waste as anything else.

I "remember" standing alone in a stone room with a vaulted ceiling--very Gothic--with a stone colonade all around me. I seemed to be holding a torch and I am hearing string music in a distant room and it seems to me that I was there because it was where I could best hear the bass frequencies, with the other higher-pitched instruments made fainter by the distance. I seemed to have this fascination for bass notes, which I do in fact have now. And it seemed to me that I was a frustrated monk who wanted to be a musician and composer--but I was just a poor, insignificant monk and no one cared about my dream. This "memory" always made me feel unhappy as though the person whose memory I was having was unhappy with his life.

I know how it sounds but I was haunted by these recurring themes as a boy of 4 or 5. When I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts as a boy and saw all these old medieval paintings, the connection was so overwhelming, I stayed in that section of the museum--I didn't care about anything else. The images and sounds were like those you might get when you hear or see something you saw long ago as a child but then never thought about again for decades and suddenly there it is and your mind REELS. Like a time machine, you suddenly remember the first time you heard or saw that and you remember it quite vividly. Well, these recurring themes were sort of like that but they weren't as strong because they were like memories of things I never did nor could have done or even understood at such a young age.

Nowadays, I don't get it as much. Occasionally, it still hits me but most of the time it doesn't. It has faded. But it makes me wonder.