Flashbacks are those painful reminders of yesterday that sometimes come back to haunt us. They are memories, thoughts, ideas, and how we reacted to one particular situation with the implicit critique of today. In some ways they are attached to our contemporary identity, yet in others they are disconnected.

A flashback can be so powerful, so sudden that it almost knocks you off your feet. You can be taken aback, forced to full consider who you are. They represent something important to us, be it a previous mistake or one that we want o learn from. We ask, being unknown, and then find ourselves having to critique our actions.

All too often flashbacks are stereotyped as being a dramatic reminder of a traumatic event. Pathological flashbacks fit this definition, but these are more then the ordinary flashbacks we experience everyday. Most of the time what we see in the past is not so dramatic context, but as question of looking back and trying to make sense of the world through past context.

You could say that such flashbacks are at best taken out of context. Most often they are taken so far from the experience that they serve only to provide another critique of your current experience. You can not remember all of the details of what you were experiencing then, but only what you experience currently. In that sense, remembering yesterday can be frightening as you have no control of past memories.

Maybe some flashbacks are the result of mind-altering substances consumed at some earlier part of life. Or maybe they are a symbol of a psychological pathology. Yet, whatever might create such flashbacks they do serve as an important reminder of who we were, and where we are going as an individual.