# Do you have childhood memories that you now know as an adult are impossible? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 9, 2012, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284 "2012-03-09T16:05:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![eclectic\_wench](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ac91a4/32.png) [@eclectic\_wench](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eclectic_wench)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2013, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/81 "2013-08-06T22:24:48Z")
> [@Omega\_Glory](#): > > Once when I was about three or four, I ran so fast that my feet lifted a few inches off the ground, allowing me to hover around the house for awhile. If I jumped and flapped my arms hard enough at exactly the right point in the jump, I could break through the gravity barrier and fly. I can still remember exactly how it felt. > [@Draelin](#): > > I have an incredibly vivid memory of finding my own gravestone. I was probably somewhere between four and six, and we were at a family funeral. My parents let me wander just a little, and I found a grave with my full name on it as well as my date of birth, only this little girl had died six days later. I remember not saying anything about it to my parents, but not the reason I decided to keep it to myself. > > It’s only in the last couple years that I’ve started to believe I probably imagined it. Nobody remembers anybody dying around that time, and halfhearted google-searching gets me nothing. I was a pretty imaginative kid, so I’m sure I made it up. Your family was in the Witness Protection programme and you were all using dead people’s identities. ---
**Author:** ![urban1a](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e47c2d/32.png) [@urban1a](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/urban1a)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/82 "2013-08-07T02:16:58Z")
I remember when, as a child, I had a cold, that my mother put me to bed in warm flannel pajamas and rubbed Vicks on my chest. I mentioned it to my mother and she said she had never done that. I remember, in grade school, being taught that Alabama was spelled Alabamba. Many years later, when I spelled it that way (the first time I had ever spelled it) getting laughed at. Bob ---
**Author:** ![Bob\_Blaylock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_blaylock/32/3235_2.png) [@Bob\_Blaylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bob_Blaylock)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/83 "2013-08-07T09:28:56Z")
I have a few very faint memories from early childhood, that I have verified to be false. One involved being with my parents, in the family car, driving through a jungle, stopping, and getting out and petting an animal that I identified as a cat, much, much larger than a normal domestic cat. Another involved my father tinkering with some device with e TV-like screen,and seeing my mother displayed on the screen. That latter memory has a bit of plausibility to it. My father was an electronic technician, and it would have been plausible that he might, at that time, have been in temporary possession of a closed-circuit TV system, have my mother appearing on the camera in one room, while I found my father in the other room watching the image on the screen. But I asked my father, on some much more recent occasion, and he said he never had any such system anywhere around the time of this memory. It was from when I was about two or three years old, and I am now fifty. Even in more recent life, I occasionally find myself with recent memories that seem dubious, and which I can usually easily determine to be false. My theory is that they are fragments of dreams that I’ve recently had, and do not remember as such. For example, just some time within the past day or two, I had a memory of going through my pockets and finding a vial of pond water that I did not remember collecting. When my father passed away a few years ago, I inherited his microscope, and so I occasionally collect bits of pond water,and other interesting things to look at and photograph through it So on remembering this mystery vial of pond water, I thought to put it under my microscope and see what there was to find in it. But there was no vial of pond water. My memory of finding it in my pocket was false. I probably had a dream, some time within the last few nights, in which I dreamed of finding that unknown vial of pond water in my pocket; did not remember having the dream once I awoke, but then later had that fragment of a memory from the dream reappear to impersonate a genuine memory. ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/84 "2013-08-07T17:31:58Z")
I’ve been telling people since 1964 that I honked the horn on the monorail at the New York World’s Fair. We were in the nose of the car, and I pushed the button. Now I’m wondering where the driver was and if the monorail even \*had \*a horn. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/85 "2013-08-07T17:47:05Z")
I seem to have this memory of being in my crib and having a very large older Italian lady with jet black hair and bright red lip stick giving me a kiss. The description very closely resembles my aunt. It never has made sense to me that I remember this. ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/86 "2013-08-07T18:23:35Z")
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t really present at the McKinley assassination. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/87 "2013-08-07T18:43:25Z")
I didn’t really learn how to swim until I was about 12, but not from lack of opportunity. Up until that age, I was so terrified of water that I simply wouldn’t get into water that was more than waist-deep. Throughout my childhood, I blamed this on my mother’s attempts to teach me to swim as a toddler. I had very clear, vivid memories of my mother carrying me to the middle of our apartment complex’s swimming pool and simply dropping me. I would promptly sink straight to the bottom and then frantically walk across the bottom of the pool toward the steps/ladder, trying to get out of the water before I drowned. I remembered this happening over and over. Except that never happened. It wasn’t until I was older that I heard the real story from my dad: when I was 2 years old, I _fell_ into the pool and sank, and he had to jump in to pull me out. My guess is that my “memories” were actually recurring dreams/nightmares based on an actual event that I didn’t remember. ---
**Author:** ![TonySinclair](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/49beb7/32.png) [@TonySinclair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TonySinclair)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/88 "2013-08-07T19:08:55Z")
I have an adult memory that’s impossible. If you follow golf, you know that the most replayed putt in history is Tiger Woods sinking a 60-footer that went three different directions on the island green at the 2001 Players Championship. I remember, as clearly as if it happened yesterday, watching that putt on TV, and then yelling to my dad, who had gone into the kitchen to get a beer, to hurry up and get back so he could watch the replay (he didn’t have a DVR). For several years, whenever they replayed it on TV (which they do dozens of times a year), I used to joke to myself that I should have been smarter, and not told him it was a replay, and bet him ten bucks Tiger would make it. My parents lived in a different state, so I didn’t visit them that often, and hardly ever at that time of year, but that never occurred to me. But a couple of years ago, I was going through some papers for my mom, and I realized that my dad died a month before that tournament. ---
**Author:** ![Dorjan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorjan/32/12440_2.png) [@Dorjan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorjan)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/89 "2013-08-07T20:31:14Z")
For some reason I have a vivid memory of watching the Blue Angels demonstration team perform in [F4Js](http://www.vaq136.com/blueangels/blueangels-026b.jpg). They stopped using those in 1973, two years before i was born! ---
**Author:** ![Labrador\_Deceiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7c8e57/32.png) [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/90 "2013-08-07T20:45:04Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > I am quite certain now that I was not allowed into the engineer’s booth of the monorail at the New York World’s Fair, and even more certain that I was not allowed to drive the thing. > [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](#): > > I’ve been telling people since 1964 that I honked the horn on the monorail at the New York World’s Fair. We were in the nose of the car, and I pushed the button. Now I’m wondering where the driver was and if the monorail even \*had \*a horn. I’m beginning to think they allowed children in the front cab of the monorail at the New York World’s Fair. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2013, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/91 "2013-08-07T23:08:55Z")
> [@Omega\_Glory](#): > > Once when I was about three or four, I ran so fast that my feet lifted a few inches off the ground, allowing me to hover around the house for awhile. As a pre-K kid, I ran so fast I flew up the path, & up the stairs. Also, I started at an illustration of a train signal in a book, & changed the image, moving a signaling flag. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2013, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/92 "2013-08-08T00:28:16Z")
> [@Sattua](#): > > I remember seeing my stuffed Garfield toy blink its eyes, when I was two years old (I can date it by the house we were living in). Its eyes were wide open before, and half closed after. When I was 4 i misplaced my teddy bear. I looked under my bed and there it was just under the edge. I reached under to retrieve it but couldn’t feel it. I looked under again and my teddy bear was standing up against the wall, inching away from me. Remember it clear as day. ---
**Author:** ![Nobody](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/94ad74/32.png) [@Nobody](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nobody)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2013, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/93 "2013-08-08T03:47:44Z")
When I was around six or so, three of us tormented this poor spider. We would push down on the middle and the legs would flip up. It’s hard to describe, but was kind of upside down, but the wrong way. So then we’d flip it over, push down again, and get it right side up. We did this a few times. It wasn’t till years later that I seriously thought about it and realized that a) Spiders don’t work that way, and b) A spider wouldn’t just stand there and take abuse. Also, about kids perceptions; a few years ago I showed my wife where I lived until I was 10. It a house in a row of houses (all rentals). I remember the first house having this huge field in front where I would play with the neighborhood kids. I showed my wife this “huge field”, only it turned out to be a tiny yard maybe around 3’x6’? Something like that. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2013, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/94 "2013-08-08T08:44:50Z")
> [@White SIFL](#): > > When I was 4 i misplaced my teddy bear. I looked under my bed and there it was just under the edge. I reached under to retrieve it but couldn’t feel it. I looked under again and my teddy bear was standing up against the wall, inching away from me. Remember it clear as day. That’s freakin’ terrifying. I remember being able to pass solid objects through other objects. You just had to push hard and fast, and snap your wrists the right way. I demonstrated this power to the other kids on the school bus, who weren’t impressed because they all knew how to do it already. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2013, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284/95 "2013-08-08T10:04:52Z")
None whatsoever. But my memory could fail with details of long ago. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-have-childhood-memories-that-you-now-know-as-an-adult-are-impossible/615284.md?page=4)