Have you ever looked at an old, black-and-white photo and wished you could have been in the room when it was taken? Have you ever gotten so lost in the imaginary world of a book that you felt like you could inhabit it like a real place and, when the story was over, you longed to return?

I’m a deeply nostalgic person, but my nostalgia is not just limited to places and people from my past. While I enjoy reliving treasured memories, sometimes I get wistful for things I cannot even remember, wishing I could fill in the gaps. And it goes beyond that. I often find myself missing lives I never lived—wondering what it would have been like to grow up closer to my extended family Back East or to have experienced the momentous change of the early 20th century. In the same way, I feel a pang of nostalgia for distant futures I will never see and for fictional worlds that never existed at all. It’s a strange emotion, but I suspect it’s one we’ve all had at one point or another.

The author John Koenig has a word for this. In his Tumblr-turned-book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Koenig set out to create words for emotions and concepts we’ve all experienced, but that English doesn’t have the language to express. One such word is anemoia: nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known. His invented etymology draws from Ancient Greek, combining the words εμος (ánemos, “wind”) and νόος (nóos, “mind”), with a reference to anemosis, the warping of a tree by strong, persistent winds “until it seems to bend backward.”¹

I love this word, because it gives a name to this peculiar feeling that has dogged me for most of my life. Something doesn’t have to have a name to be real, but knowing one exists means that someone else has felt this way, too. And I enjoy the image of a tree being blown backward by the wind because I know how that feels in a visceral way.

Perhaps my persistent anemoia is why I’ve always been drawn to stories. By immersing myself in a fictional world or creating one of my own, I can scratch that itch to know what it’s like to live beyond the realm of my own experience. I can go to the past, to the future, to alternate realities through books and movies. Maybe that’s why fiction exists in the first place—to satisfy our innate hunger as human beings wired for story to inhabit other times and places.

Maybe by recognizing the feeling and giving it a name, anemoia, we can better notice it when it shows up into our daily lives and know that we’re not the only ones who dream.

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Jonny Eberle is a writer who lives in Tacoma, WA with his family, a dog, and three adorable typewriters. His writing has been published in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can listen to his audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, and his writing podcast, Dispatches with Jonny Eberle, wherever you enjoy podcasts.

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Footnotes

[1] From the Wiktionary entry for anemoia. Another great word coined by Koenig is sonder (noun): the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own … an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

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