Yes, this is a very strange topic.
The past few days I have been binge watching a Korean drama with my roommates. Never before have I felt this many emotions in an hour special. The drama is a romantic comedy between Oh Ha Ni, a childish and clumsy 19 year old girl and Baek Seung Jo, a rude and cold 19 year old boy who is a high school prodigy as well as Oh Ha Ni’s love interest. During a 2.0 scale earthquake, Oh Ha Ni’s house crumbles to the ground and has to relocate to a family friend’s home. There she coincidentally encounters her crush Baek Seung Jo as he is the son of their family friend. Let the chaos ensue. One of the interesting aspects of Oh Ha Ni’s character revolves around her daydreaming and I want to highlight a correlation to Hobbes’ statements on imagination and memory.
By the end of episode 11, Oh Ha Ni sits on a bench admiring nature. She quickly dozes off and daydreams of Baek Seung Jo coming to her side, confessing his love and kissing her on the lips. She awakes and realizes it was just a daydream, but odd enough explains that she feels a familiar sensation on her lips. The camera then slowly pans to the right where we see Baek Seung Jo’s little brother hiding behind a tree in shock. Here is the question, did Baek Seung Jo actually kiss Oh Ha Ni during her slumber or was it just her imagination? (It is vital here to note that Oh Ha Ni and Baek Seung Jo have locked lips in a previous episode so she has experience regarding the sensation)
According to Hobbes’ Leviathan, imagination is equivalent to memory. Imagination is the “decaying sense” of the sensations we experience day to day (88). Imagination is an abstraction to the images we retain once our eyes our closed. This account of sensation also defines memory. The “memory of many things, is called experience” (89). If imagination is memory and memory is experience then imagination is experience. Due to this transitive property, imagination is “only of those things which have been formerly perceived” (89).
If we take the scene with Oh Ha Ni for example, her acknowledgement of the familiarity on her lips would mean that the imagined kiss is based on the experience she has had before. To imagine such an instance is the same as regarding a memory because the senses that perceive the kiss have been imitated. By Hobbes’ theory, I can confidently say that Oh Ha Ni was actually kissed by Baek Seung Jo. Even though she was imagining it, the sensation in her dream was simply a retained image of what truly happened. This would also explain the shocked look on the little brother’s face since he would have seen his older brother kiss Oh Ha Ni.
This concludes my segment. I can without a doubt say that this might be one of the strangest correlation I have ever drawn.
^ Oh Ha Ni contemplating