It has been already 5 months since I came to UBC in September, when I was still so confused and panicking everyday for the new university environment in a new country. I still clearly remember myself, not knowing what I am doing here, anxiously staring at other classmates to learn how to act in a North American classroom, which made me even more scared realizing that I have nothing that makes me fit in this classroom. After 5 months, I still have much to improve, while things have become much better by meeting awesome people, learning how to deal with things around me, and getting use to the environment, which all together has keep on changing my perception every day.

Of course, this ASTU class is no exception of what has changed me. This term, we started to look at psychological theories about memory and mind, which made me think about the concept of what we remember or think and what we don’t. We looked at William James, who argues that our mind is like a stream of consciousness that constantly changes by your experiences, which makes everyone’s thoughts different, while we also focused on Sigmund Freud, who argued that we unconsciously repress the desire of pleasure by “reality”, and instead we repeat and project the desire which we have oppressed in the past. Indeed, these are not all of the ideas which they generated, and some have been criticized in by others then and now, while I believe these ideas about memory and thought are in the bases of what we believe about us today too.

When I first encountered these two different types of ideas, I felt stronger connection with James’ theory, especially that it says our perception constantly changes through our own experiences. In our sociology class, we have been discussing how our knowledge are produced by culture, being influenced by the social spaces which we live in. As I mentioned earlier, I literally realize how my perception has been changing every day through completely new experiences which I would have never experienced if I hadn’t come here. This also reminds me my first blog post, comparing my restless brain in the new environment to the sluggish “muddy stream of memories and thoughts”, which fortunately have become much smoother now. Yes, the stream has changed through learning, talking and adapting in this new environment, whereas, the stream itself hasn’t been completely overthrown, and indeed I still struggle converting my conservative ideas and habits which I have constructed in my 19 years in Japan.

While James’ theory easily fit to my experience, I couldn’t immediately agree to Freud’s explanation that we repeat unconscious desire from the past. Though we could say that he also argued the continuity of memory as James do, the difference of whether everything is new or from the past seemed incompatible. Well, but after all, unconscious things are unconscious, and we can’t really capture it. I might be acting out what I repressed in my past, which I will never know since it is unconscious. Moreover, the process of culturally constructing our knowledge and thoughts is unconscious most of the time – then, how much are we actually aware of what we think?

This was one of the questions for the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf, which depicts a day in London after the World War Ⅰ, focusing on PTSD (shell-shock) from the war and how different people experienced the post-war era. Woolf uses “free indirect speech”, which jumps around multiple character’s consciousness continuously, which enables readers to jump between different people’s experiences. While this narrative style shows the character’s stream of thoughts, I wonder whether these characters are aware of what they are thinking as clear as it is written in text, or rather it is a narrative by an observer that can read their minds clearer than themselves. When I compare this with the documentary film “Stories We Tell” (I have written this in my first blog post as well), which we discussed about in class previously, both seems to incorporate the different people’s different experience towards the same event, which can be also explained by William James’ theory. However, I feel that the biggest difference between these two pieces is whether a person is trying to convey the story that they want to or not. In “Stories We Tell”, what each person who were interviewed said were what they chose to say, not what they just thought. As we choose what to say when we talk, I feel we choose what to believe that we think as well. If we conducted an interview to the characters of “Mrs. Dalloway” about what they thought that day, I feel the story would have become a completely different one.

After all, I feel like no one owned the story that day. Even though the title is “Mrs. Dalloway”, and it was the day which she held her party, Septimus killed himself, Rezia lost her husband, and Peter came back to London for the first time in a while, no one doesn’t actually own the story, because no one knows even what they are thinking – we constantly change by a force of experience, as William James says, and we don’t know what past makes us do or think in our conscious, as Sigmund Freud says.

This is the same thing in our lives too. We never have access to what others’ think in reality as we do when we read “Mrs. Dalloway”, while we even don’t know all of the things that we think ourselves. Then, I wonder why there is any force from outside to make us fit in a certain shape, tell us what to do as if they know what the best is, as if they own the story. Or, is there actually no forces, but our society which is constructed by our thoughts constrains our beliefs, that we don’t even understand? When I think this, I eventually just come to the thought that I never know where my thought comes from. This blog itself is a stream of consciousness which presumably relates from the unconscious part of me, making me constantly feel something is not right, but I don’t know what it is. I guess I have to keep on thinking the question of what I do own and where my memories come from for the coming years in UBC, and in my life.