Do you possess Kodachrome slides in your collection?1
If so, try scanning them.
The results may draw you nearer to your places of “dream-memory” as rendered to us by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space.2
“In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for… We think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability - a being who does not want to melt away, and who… when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to suspend its flight.” (Bachelard)
“…the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us… they insist in us in order to live again… We consider the past, and a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in the old house fills our hearts, comes up from the past, overwhelms us.” (Bachelard)
“The house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all immemorial things are…
“This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (Bachelard)
“…et l’hiver n’augmente-t-il pas la poésie de l’habitation?” ( …and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house?) Baudelaire, Les Paradis artificiels, 1860
“Baudelaire declares that dreamers like a severe winter… In the reign of the imagination alone, a reminder of winter increases the house’s value as a place to live in…” (Bachelard)
“…in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.” (Bachelard)
The images in this piece are scans of Kodachrome slides. A brief history of Kodachrome can be found here: Kodachrome. Paul Simon’s evocative take on the post-war Kodachrome dream can be found here:
For more about Bachelard’s ever-important work, see The Poetics of Space.