In my childhood memories, I rediscover facts (places, events) that appear to me to be marked by the "sacred" -- in which I seem to have felt the impression of the "sacred." This could simply be because of the sacred character that today I attribute to my childhood memories, because of the sacred attitude that I automatically adopt as soon as I evoke one of these memories, it could be that this attitude pushes me to introduce the sacred there where it never existed.
If I have experienced the sense of the sacred while participating in rituals of religions that were not my own (Catholicism, by which I remain marked due to my education), it's doubtless for reasons of exoticism. That is to say, there may always be something of the "exotic" operating in the sacred: idea of a different world, of a realm without compare, of a radically faraway land.
The sacred character attached to childhood memories could be explained by the same reasoning of exoticism, if we consider that archaism is in time what exoticism is in space: my memories are sacred to me insofar as they are faraway from me.
The prestige of dreams is also, in large part, based in exoticism. A large part of their emotive value is doubtless due to the emotion that intervenes in the act of remembering them, and the difficulty in remembering them: the effort made to apprehend them so that they become less faraway. The most moving dream will always be the one that keeps something irreducible, that is to say, something irreducibly sacred or faraway.
Role of nostalgia: to leave things in the distance, in order to feel desire or regret. Weakness: one doesn't dare to seize, one only desires, and must -- without putting oneself in danger -- conserve desire. It is a man of whims who dreams of unheard-of lands.
Michel Leiris, from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"
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