My dream has freshly informed me that perhaps dreams bring on this sense of nostalgia. It was quite lucid as if I were really there and in that time period, and I woke up with that yearning. This caused a brief melancholy signifying that those were happier times. But my return to Japan has shown me that those time were not really happier times. Perhaps I have misplaced my yearning to be with my family to being at another place in time.
The good news is that I don't feel depressed. I just feel busy...in isolation. I'm discovering a few things about myself. The most important lesson is that I shouldn't really act on my nostalgia. I should just enjoy the dream or fantasy of nostalgia and then move on to living the present moment. Nostalgia was one reason for returning to Japan, but I'm getting nothing out of it. My final test of getting something out of it will be when I walk around Takasaki, where I lived for 2 years.
Another thing I am learning about myself is that my brain finds significance in 10 years gone by. When I was in high school, I had a strong nostalgia for my early childhood. I was 18 dreaming about being 8. When I was in Korea, I was hit for a few months of a strong wave of nostalgia for Beloit College. Those periods of my life were separated by 10 years. And now it's Japan and I'm in Japan, and I'm really staring straight down this nostalgia.
However, I believe I've been nostalgic about Japan more than any other country I have visited. But I am coming to understand that it's not about Japan. It's about the last days of my youth. Japan was the last place I lived before marriage, before a graduate degree, and just before I decided to make my current job my career. Basically, I was the most independent I ever was in my life. Now I'm the most responsible I have ever been in my life, but with no regrets. It helps me see more clearly the relation between responsibility and anxiety.
The best thing about nostalgia is that informs me that I have lived a full and enjoyable life, and I am only 35 years old. Nostalgia also does a great job of erasing the bad memories from days gone by. "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra" - Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor.
For the science & psychology of nostalgia:
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