Some months ago, I asked about imperfect recall of memories, which led to an interesting discussion. Now I would like to ask about a situation where I seem to have conflated two different memories; I am wondering if the situations I will describe before are likely to have been dreams based on memories or conflatedly-remembered waking memories, and whether there is a name for this phenomenon.
From when I was 18 or so, I have a strange memory of a moment in time when I was in the car with my parents, driving westward on Finch Avenue in Toronto. We had just passed the famous Jane and Finch intersection (near which we lived for four years when I was small, but which we no longer frequented so often) and were passing a strip mall well known to us. On the roof of the westernmost part of the plaza, I saw a row of Dutch flags (in other words, each flag had three horizontal stripes, red, white and blue from top to bottom). This struck me as odd, for I knew very well that this plaza had no flagpoles on it - and it surely never has since. Many years later, going down Finch Avenue, I saw something that made me realize what had caused the recall: several kilometers further East, there was a car store which had a row of “USED CARS” flags on the roof. These could be described as Dutch flags defaced with said phrase written across the white stripe. Now, I remember that in 1997, when I was 18, we drove down that street in the same direction in order to do Boxing Week shopping. I actually took a camera and photographed from the car a cafe near the more eastward location mentioned above for sentimental purposes. We likely drove further West past the aforesaid strip mall. Could it be that I saw both the used car store and the strip mall and then dreamed about them (or perhaps was half asleep in the car as we drove past the strip mall and recalled the flags in my “dream”)? Or did I simply forge both images in my memory and rememember it as wondering in real time why the flags were there (where they actually weren’t)?
This second example will sound an awful lot like the first one, but somewhere during probably my early or mid-teens, we were driving in Toronto and we passed by a cafe which was called “Dutch Master Donuts.” Its sign had a distinctive design, with a bunch of Dutchmen as from a famous old master’s (Rembrandt’s?) painting, only their faces were shaped like donuts. At some point in time, I thought I had seen this cafe on a well-known concrete office building again on Finch Avenue, near Keele Street. However, there was no such cafe there. Many years later, I rediscovered the Dutch Master cafe, but found that it was on Don Mills Road at a location far from Finch Avenue.
Consider these two instances first. What do you think happened here? Did I conflate the two memories in each case during waking hours, or am I likely to be remembering a dreamed version of them?
Now consider this even earlier memory. Again it concerns a car ride. I was about 6 and my parents were driving me to school (or in the direction of my school). It was a dark, cloudy, likely rainy morning. I suddenly noticed that the fire hydrants on the way looked different than they did in that part of town (as a kid, I liked to study the shapes of fire hydrants). The hydrants there never looked that way again. My memory of this is, or was quite vivid. Could this have been a very vivid dream, or could it again be at least be partly based on a real memory?
I have one more “memory” of this kind about which I am curious, but this one is very early and likely was just a dream (or some kind of hallucination or poor visualization), so will leave it for now and may mention it later.
Is there any scientific evidence or expert opinion that would indicate whether these were likely to have been memory-based dreams or actual memories that I later remembered badly, with two memories merging into one? Is there a scientific term for this phenomenon?