Its body resembles a rhesus macaque with long and dangling limbs, but its face is that of a primordial Olmec stone head. This alien-like creature appears out of nowhere behind my brother and me as we trek through the Monadnock Hill in the sprawling jungle. One cursory glance at this creature is all it takes for us to make a run for it. It snorts with a macaque’s wheezing noise, like the friction of a horsehair brush rubbing back and forth against a pair of men’s dress shoes. Its grating voice distinguishes it from other monkeys. Non-macaque monkeys make a screeching voice instead of a wheezing one, more like the sound of fingernails on sandpaper. The macaque-stone head chases us through the Jumanji-esque jungle and down the rocks, where we spot what seems to be an industrial building. Dashing into the building, I spot an elevator and yank my brother inside just as the door closes. We pant in relief. The elevator ascends, and the doors open on the nineteenth floor when we see four macaque-stone heads awaiting us. I hit pause. What does this narrative convey about the state of my unconscious mind? Contemplating whether this is another warning or a hodgepodge of events my brain patched together into a dream, I press the red record button to finish discussing the machinations of my thoughts. 

Every morning, I pick up my voice recorder from the bedside table to record my wide-ranging dreams from the night before. Dreams are the “royal road into the unconscious,” or so declares Sigmund Freud. If this is true, my unconscious thoughts range from running in the Amazon rainforest to swimming through the tidal waves of the Pacific Ocean to taking the rope-and-pulley hoist from the fifth floor of my freshman dorm to arrive at the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. Every night is a new adventure. In these dreams, I am often under the impression that I am consciously making decisions, but my agency is comparable to the autonomy of a nine-year-old girl flipping through the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Though she feels a sense of free will when choosing to either run away from the three-headed dragon by turning to page four or confronting it by turning to page six, she nevertheless understands that the ending to each choice is prewritten by the author. Similarly, my conscious decisions deceive me with a false sense of freedom when the ending to each dream seems to be predetermined by my unconscious mind. Unlike the web of the intricate but definitive endings in these books, the ending of one dream seeps into the beginning of another, changing the setting and subject almost instantaneously. 

It was only after conversing with others that I realized I have exceptionally vivid dreams. When talking to family or close friends about dreams, my natural next question is: “Have you ever dreamt about me?” In middle school, my brother used to tell me about a recurring dream of his where I was swimming away from sharks while my mother and him stood there laughing. I have yet to know if this was a real recurring dream of his or something he made up to get on my nerves. That’s the thing about dreams; you don’t know when someone is lying or telling the truth. In eighth grade, one of my friends said she dreamt of me running away from a lion while trying to catch the school bus. When I make a guest appearance in people’s dreams, it seems like I’m usually running away from something. Most of the time, I’m running away from animals in an eccentric manner. On that matter, I’ve had countless dreams myself of running away from tigers, wolves, vultures, and ostriches. Although running away is not the only thing I dream about, it certainly represents some of the more memorable one-to-two-minute recordings housed in my Sony ICD-PX370. 

Released in 2016, the Sony ICD-PX370 is a sleek, jet-black voice recorder that looks like either a condensed Amazon Voice Remote or an enlarged walkie-talkie, if you squint hard enough. As I reach for it, the device settles perfectly into my right palm, and “SONY” in the Clarendon Bold white font at the top never fails to catch my attention. The microscopic screen beneath it is no larger than a handheld Pac-Man player from the 1990s and rests above four familiar faded encircled buttons: Stop, Record/Pause, and Play. I stop to look at the internal speaker at the very bottom that replays previous recordings, imagining how this portable device can transport dreams, ideas, and fleeting thoughts from moments in time into a permanent record. Moving my fingers onto the left side, I find the slide switch and run my fingers down to power on and off the recorder. Meanwhile, my left thumb finds the volume button on the right side, equidistant to the slide switch, where it fluctuates up and down to adjust to the cadence of my voice in the recording. Though not used as often as the record or pause buttons, the back, t-mark, and option buttons still exist in the periphery of my mind when the need to search and categorize recordings arises. These buttons are rarely clicked, however, as I often never find the inclination to file away my thoughts; I always saw the purpose of recording my thoughts as a form of catharsis while also preserving a moment in time. 

The desire to immortalize one’s voice did not begin with the portable voice recorder resting at my bedside. The urge to pause time and memorialize fleeting thoughts is inherent to the human condition. Just like my desire to capture dreams and the machinations of my thoughts, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had the desire in 1857 to visually map sound waves through the invention of the phonautograph. Voice begins to travel through a cylindrical horn attached to a diaphragm, which in turn moves the stylus across a surface to etch up and down the oscillating sound waves. Though sound could not be replayed yet, these engraved lines were the visual proof of sound’s existence, therefore immortalizing the human voice. “Au Clair de la Lune” were the first words recorded on the phonautograph in 1860 by Martinville himself. The phrase translates to “by the light of the moon” and is in reference to the eponymous 18th-century French folk song. Lubin, the narrator of the song, knocks on Pierrot’s door, asking for a candle and a quill to write a note. When attempting to read the series of quatrains in French, I found myself reading it like a narrative or a supplication. Listening to the song for the first time, however, made me quickly realize that “Au Clair de la Lune” was not a regular folk song but rather a melodic and serene lullaby. Though I did not understand the meaning of the words initially, it was the soothing voice that transported me into my own dreams that might later be recalled on my voice recorder. Hearing a voice attached to something is a lot more intimate than the written word; a voice recording almost guides you as if the speaker were directly present, whispering into your ear. 

Au Clair de la Lune                                               Prête-moi ta plume 

                                           Mon ami Pierrot                                               Pour écrire un mot 

Using Lubin’s quill, I write my own stories through voice recordings. An impulsive Amazon purchase from 2023, my voice recorder initially served as an object to capture my freshman year of college through the recorded recollection of my most memorable moments. From insights on books I had read for class to the people I had met to the day-to-day thoughts that had occupied my mind, my voice recorder housed it all. It was only a few months prior that I was writing down all of these things in my journal, but college enforced this new need to find my own voice and distinguish it from others, and this is the desire that my voice recorder satisfied. Not solely constrained to preserving thoughts, its functionality slowly expanded as it started to serve as my very own dreamcatcher. Contrary to its original purpose, it did not obstruct the bad or uncanny dreams from occurring. Rather, it served as a venue for housing a repertoire of them. 

As I now read through these old journals, they bring back vague memories of my dreams. Listening to the recorded dreams makes me almost relive them as I feel the rush of emotions in my voice, making me feel as if I had just experienced them. One could argue that this is just recency bias, as older dreams are more prone to being forgotten. Nevertheless, it is not the recency that makes these dreams more memorable, but rather the attachment of my voice that makes them unforgettable. When I first got my voice recorder, many of my friends used to ask, “Why don’t you record on your phone or your computer?” while claiming that I was attempting to go “analog” to appear contrarian to the average teenager. Though their character assessment of me was partially true in this instance, little did they know that I was a technological contrarian all throughout my childhood. I was fifteen and already a junior in high school when I got my phone. It was not that my parents were against giving my brother and me phones or staving us away from technology; my brother actually received his phone in seventh grade. Rather, it was social media that they wanted us to stay away from. They did not have to persuade me much, as I never really had the desire for it growing up.

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The newly released iPhone XS rests on the marble kitchen countertop as my eyes peer at the nearly untouched display screen. My “first” phone signaled a wave of independence and freedom that made me feel like a full-grown adult even though I was only in eighth grade. Though many of my friends had already been habituated to their phones and I had received mine after them, I was still appreciative of my parents for giving me a phone. Subduing the excitement that came along with owning my very own device composed of aluminum and rare earth elements, I went into my room and calmly opened Google Chat to message my three closest friends about this spontaneous new development and subsequently texted them my very own phone number. After hitting send, I walked back into my living room to ensure that my phone was still in pristine condition, free from my brother’s fingerprints. This is when I heard a soft sound, followed by another. In an irregular rhythm with constant pauses, a pattern of  Ding!    Ding!    Ding!    Ding! emerged and overtook the living room. I was instantly bombarded with notifications that flooded my screen faster than I could read them. DING!DING!DING!DING! continued in rapid succession, and I was quickly overloaded. A ding was just a small chime, but the repeated pattern without a rhythm turned into noise. In a world where people find comfort in constant notifications to occupy their minds and prevent their boredom, I was easily overwhelmed by it. 

That night I gave my phone away and asked my parents to return it. It might sound absurd that I willingly gave away my “first” phone because of being blasted with the notifications when I could have just turned them off. Looking back, it was not a moment of being buried by the sound of the notifications but a moment of being buried with noise that made me run away from it. The distance only widened in high school as I shied away from creating any social media accounts along with the rest of my peers. Now I realize that unlike the noise of the notifications, my voice recorder gives me a space where the only thing that exists is the sound of my voice. Perhaps that is why I bought it in the first place: to hear my own voice amidst all of the constantly evolving noise. 

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My left thumb holds down the slide switch to turn on the recorder, and I click through the buttons to find the main menu. At the main menu, I press play on the recorded files and select “Search by REC Date” and find a plethora of stored recordings. I scroll through hundreds of recordings until I find a file labeled 02/25/2024 Sun 4:21pm. Pressing on the button, I find myself transported into a completely different world. 

Listening back, the uneven sentences and the urgency of my voice signify my hurried attempt to capture a revelation about a dream from the prior night quickly before it faded away forever. Capturing a fleeting thought or a dream is my attempt to preserve a moment of time that would otherwise be forgotten or regarded as unimportant. My dreams and innermost thoughts slowly begin to blur as I move between recordings from different time periods. Though the setting and the subject of the dream shift from time to time, one thing remains constant: my voice. Sometimes calm and stable and other times rushed and unstable, the sound of my voice brings a sense of familiarity that makes me believe it is uniquely mine. The cadence and intonation of my voice are easily recognizable in each recording. Whether I am speaking quickly to preserve a fading memory or slowing down to meditate on a thought before I can find the words to finish it, these recordings give me a sense of self and remind me that while my dreams change, the voice narrating them doesn’t. 

The intimacy of these recordings is created not solely from hearing my own evolving voice throughout the years, but also from the ability to repeatedly replay them. Audio changed from being mostly mapped visually to being stored permanently in 1877 with the invention of the phonograph by the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” twenty years after Martinville’s phonautograph. As Thomas Edison was attempting to improve the way to transcribe messages from the telegraph and telephone, he noticed that sound could be traced through a diaphragm attached to a stylus. Since the vibrations were inscribed on a tinfoil cylinder and traced again by a needle, they proved their ability to reproduce and store the sound. The preservation of sound, although temporarily in the case of tinfoils at the time, changed the history of voice recording forever, allowing voices to be captured and played beyond their initial recording. The transformation from tin foil to wax to magnetic tape is what reconstructed temporary recordings into permanent ones. 

Before the permanent preservation of sound, ideas were transported through oral storytelling and the written word. Samuel Pepys cannot be brought back from the dead to tell us about his experience witnessing the Great Fire of London in 1666, but his diary entries certainly can. Likewise, you and I cannot travel back to 79 AD to witness the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but reading the accounts of Pliny the Younger directs our attention to the first-hand account of what it would feel like to witness it unfold. In a similar vein, one of the oldest discovered books, The Epic of Gilgamesh, explores themes of love, lust, friendship, and mortality, themes that are all strikingly similar to today’s world. Despite the thousands of years that separate us, people from 2100 BC are more like us than we might initially believe, particularly in our shared desire for the expression of thoughts and feelings through the art of storytelling. Reading these accounts makes me feel like I am recounting an event from the past. Yet, imagining how these people sounded and attaching voices to them brings them to life and makes me feel more intimately connected to them, something reading solely their diary entries or books does not do. Like hitting the pause on my voice recorder, it stops a moment in time and makes me live through it for the first time. Just like fingerprints, everyone has a unique and different voice that distinguishes them from others, accounted for through the variation of larynx size and vocal cord thickness. Hearing your own voice and replaying it makes you realize what distinguishes you amidst a crowd and brings you one step closer to truly knowing yourself.

Voiceless Voice. Monotonous. Robotic. Mechanical. These are the adjectives people often used to describe my voice throughout high school. This distinct vocal identity had only been reached during my middle adolescence stage and has carried on to this day. Rewatching videos filmed in middle school, I see a younger version of myself speaking with a voice that almost carries a vocal fry and is habituated to elongating words. My voice, one of the many things that changed through adolescence, had transformed from an unstable and high-pitched voice into a deeper and more stable voice. For a while, I used to contemplate whether my “deep” voice was a result of the natural evolution of my larynx and vocal cords or something that I deliberately deepened to sound more serious and distinctive during a stage in my life when I was trying to find the answers to the universe. I am no Elizabeth Holmes, far from it, but the thought that I fabricated a distinctive and deep voice still gnaws at the back of my head. To this day, some say that my voice is steady, resonant, and confident, a tone that signifies a grounding presence in the room. Others, often people that are close to me and unafraid of hurting my feelings, describe my voice as mechanically flat and utterly monotonous. 

My voice exists in a strange contradiction where it is simultaneously commanding and flat, resonant and steady. This juxtaposition challenged me to consider the true meaning of one’s voice and its role in the formation of one’s identity. Flat or resonant, voices are not only defined by their pitch but also by accents, intonation, rhythm, and depth that all shape how one’s voice is heard and interpreted. Though the monotony used to appear as a flaw, I now view my voice as integral to my identity. Whether people view it as artificial or authoritative, the steadiness and the cadence of my voice are what make it undoubtedly mine and mine only. It is through my voice recorder that I feel a sense of reminder about the constancy of my voice throughout time. People continue to ask me to this day why I still use a portable voice recorder when my phone is readily available. This is a good question and one that I still often think about. My affinity towards using a voice recorder in this day and age could probably be attributed all the way back to when I got my first phone or why I’m always running away from strange creatures in my dreams. It is the desire to hear my own distinctive voice amidst all the noise. In the midst of a macaque-stone head chasing us for attention and endlessly snorting out its noise, there is a deep desire to hear my own voice and transform a fleeting thought into a permanent one. Satisfied with this reason, I hit stop.