A Glitch in the Matrix (or, My Brother is Stealing My Stories)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When something odd happens once, I usually chalk it up to a freak coincidence. But when it happens twice, it makes me go huh

Let me explain. I’m seven years older than my younger brother. When I was in college, he was in middle school, maybe high school. I probably told him a lot of stories about my adventures living away from home for the first time. This would have been the period from 1975 to 1981.

Fast forward to a few years ago, and I’m remembering a college buddy who recently passed away, telling my brother about a time we went to the horse races in Portland, Oregon. So my brother, who I will call Sam, says yeah, I remember that, I was visiting you in Oregon and I went to the races with you. That made me do a double take, because I had no recollection of Sam going to the races with us. But, he had visited me from California one time when I lived in Oregon, and it was over 40 years ago, so I shrugged and chalked it up to age and the fog of time.

Then, two years ago, during the height of the pandemic, Sam was in town visiting, and we got to reminiscing about that period in our lives, and he brings up a ski trip in Oregon with my college posse. He said he was along for that trip too, which also made me say wut, because once again, I had no recollection of him being there for that trip either. The odd thing was, he got some of the details wrong, like the name of the ski resort (Badger instead of Mt. Bachelor) and the hot tubs after skiing, which weren’t really hot tubs, but rustic hot springs in unimproved pools next to a mountain stream.

So now I’m really confused, and I’m wondering, is it me or is it him that is misremembering these long ago anecdotes? It started nagging at me in the back of my head, causing me to construct endless mental timelines to work out when these events occurred, and when he actually visited me in Oregon. Over a period of weeks and months, I kept coming back to it.

What I concluded was, he could not have been present for either story. The horse race incident occurred in late 1976 or early 1977, so Sam would have been 15 or 16 years old, living in Southern California, a thousand miles from where I was going to college in Oregon. I was pretty sure he didn’t drive all that way at that age; I don’t even think he had a car at that time. Plus, I recalled where me and my buddies were living at the time, and I am certain Sam never visited when I was living at that address.

He did visit at roughly the same time as the ski trip in 1978 or 1979, and I remember him at the house I was renting around that time. But, there was me, Jackson, the Indian and Mr. P along for the ski trip, all crammed in my standard cab Toyota pickup. In fact, the Indian rode in the back of the pickup with all our ski gear and a keg of beer. There was just no way Sam went with us.

So, what’s going on? Have I spaced out the timeline of my life? Is Sam living in a separate but no less real timeline, that has somehow touched mine? Or is Sam stealing my stories and living vicariously through me? Does he regale others with adventures he never had?

It’s not really important, and I don’t think I want to embarrass both of us by confronting Sam about it. He never went to college, so maybe he envies me, I don’t know. But I would like to know what is going on, if only to silence my obsessive brain that has been poking at this for two years like a tongue persistently exploring a missing tooth. Not to mention that I half expect next time we get together, a third shoe will fall, and I will find out he was there for more of my wild and crazy youth.

2

He’s probably just built up false memories over time conflating memories of your trips, as recounted by you, with memories of his visits to you. It’s a well known psychological phenomenon.

3

Memory is very weird. The more we learn about how the brain works, the more we know that our recollections are simply not trustworthy. We don’t remember events, we remember fragments of events and our brains fill in the gaps. Either of your hypotheses is entirely plausible, considered solely on the basis of “the way we remember it.” Your subsequent detective work tips the scale a bit, of course.

4

Of course, my detective work is based entirely on my memory. D’oh!

5

A similar thing sometimes happens with my wife. She might tell a story about something that happened to us on a trip to London. Except, it happened to me on a trip I took before we met.

Or maybe not. Perhaps it’s my memory that is messed up or is conflating events from multiple trips.

Memory is weird. Recently I was searching my old email to try and figure out when I bought a thing. By chance, my keyword search brought up emails with somebody I’d briefly dated 20 or so years ago. I have absolutely no recollection of this person. Reading the emails I can reconstruct being disappointed when something came up and one of our dates was cancelled, but that’s just a reconstruction. Maybe at the time I was actually relieved, I don’t know.

6

I went to my 20th high school reunion awhile back, and one of the guys asked if I could give him a lift home (since we both still lived on the west side of L.A. near our high school, and the reunion committee put the reunion inAnaheim). It was funny, because he had the same name as an-ex of mine with just one character difference in the spelling of the name. I had no memory of him from high school at all. And he had been in my homeroom! He remembered me though, and that was kinda weird for me.

7

I enjoyed telling anecdotes about my life when living at home as a teenager.
I would often slightly exaggerate to make the story funnier.

My blessed Mum would promptly dive in with “That’s not precisely how it happened!”

8

I’m also seven years older than my little bother (sic).

A few times I’ve discussed things that I clearly remember from my childhood, and yet my brother has no memory of it. Then he asks how old I was and I tell him I was 7.

9

I remember this plot (vaguely). He’s gradually taking over your life piece by piece. You’d be wise to be more suspicious. Soon he’ll be dressing like you, parting his hair (you do have hair, don’t you?), the same way, same body spray, same mannerisms. Very suspicious. /s

10

My daughter does this. She claims stories for herself that actually happened to her brothers. When called on it, she says “Well, it happened to me, too!” They’ve learned to ignore it.

11

If I remember this concept correctly, if it happens a third time it’s enemy action.

12

I was once in the room when one of my friends, really one of my dearest friends, related a humorous story of something that had happened to her. Except, I had told her that same story like a decade before that, as happening to me. ( I really thought I might have confused my past memory, but my wife instantly afterwards asked me, “did she just tell your story?”).

I don’t think my friend meant anything by it, but I do think funny things happen with memory when stories are told.