I was in an elementary school classroom; I don’t know exactly what grade. I suspect it was no more than 2nd grade. The teacher’s desk was at the front of the room, as usual, but I remember the teacher sitting with her back to us, at least in this instance. We the class were supposed to remain quiet while she was doing something at her desk. Of course the whispering amongst ourselves didn’t take long to get started, but then it happened.
The teacher arched backward in her chair so fiercely that she was actually looking at us upside down. One finger was help up in a point, but she was so bent that she was pointing at the floor. Her mouth was wide open, emitting a croaking sound that was alot like “Unh-unh-UHH-unh-UHH!” I had a crazy idea that she was chastising us, but in the weirdest way.
The next clear memory I have is all of us kids huddled in the hall outside the room, shepherded by other adults. I think she had a heart attack, or it might have been some kind of fit. I never learned exactly what happened. But she surely couldn’t have been leaning back in the manner I clearly recall. A heart attack wouldn’t have twisted her up like that, and a seizure doesn’t do that, in my experience. For what it’s worth, I remember the teacher as young (which is to say, she didn’t have gray hair–so still could have been not-young).
I remember this as it was yesterday (i was around 7 or 8 i think) . I was trying to sleep at night, and suddenly “bombs” (bomberman kind of bombs) started appearing all over my room, i freaked out and went to my mothers room, and i remember she trying to give me something with a spoon, but the bed was kind of spinning in the air, and every spin i would try to take the spoon but i would miss, very frustating.
This all happened while i was awake, and i always knew it wasn’t “real”, but only as i got older i realised i was hallucinating because of a fever.
The second thing still kind of freaks me out. I think i was like 10 or something, and i went with my mom to pick my older brother at a friends house, when we pulled over i realized i had dreamed about that house the night before, not a house “like that one” but exactly the same, i clearly remember the street, the fence, the front door and some details from inside the house. I asked my mom when have i been there before… her answer?, never, that was the first time i went there, but i KNOW that house was already in my memory… I have 2 hypothesis about it. First one, i had in fact been there before but my mom didn’t remember, or second, i fabricated that memory, kind of a dejavu thing that i associated with my dream or something.
I have memories from long ago that could be either reality or dreams, but they aren’t clear memories. I have a variety of old, very brief, but clear memories that I can tell are not dreams because they are related to more significant events in life. It’s the fuzzy memories that make me wonder though. Some of them are obviously dreams. But there are ones that could have been real, but I just don’t remember where the memory came from.
Aww…guess that one didn’t happen. Or I was a LOT smaller than I thought!
When I was about 8, I was with my mom, aunt, cousins, and brothers and sisters in the car, a big station wagon, in the McDonald’s parking lot. We were in the car, just getting ready to leave, when my brain kind of disassociated with everything around me and I thought, very clearly, “I think it’d be kind of cool to be in an accident. Not a big one, just a little one, just to see what it feels like.”
Sure enough, as we backed out, we got hit by another car :eek:
Now, I know this happened. What’s open for debate is whether I caused it, or pre-visioned it. :dubious:
When I was 3, my parents and I moved from Michigan to New Jersey. After that, I always imagined the house in Michigan as having multicoloured sloping floors. Eventually we moved back to Michigan and I actually had the opportunity to visit that house. No sloping green and red and blue floors.
When I was very young I remember seeing floating things like letters and numbers in the air when I was sitting on the couch. I believed that was real for years.
I remember some kind of lightning storm that hit the car and made the top part of the windshield turn blue. After that, it was always tinted blue, even in future cars we bought. I was freaked out. Now I have no idea what the “storm” might have been, as I remember it happening during the day when it was sunny. And I know that’s not what causes tinted windows on cars.
When I was young and my mom took me to Kindergarten for the first time (just to register, I think; there weren’t classes), I distinctly remember seeing certain houses on the way. A blue house and a big white house. I never saw those again although I saw other buildings I recognized from that trip. Hmmm. It could have been that she was unfamiliar with the way and turned down some other streets that first time only, or some houses were remodelled before I entered school proper.
In the first Legend of Zelda game, I still think that once I was able to shoot arrows without having the bow (which is actually impossible), but that the arrows looked like spears if you didn’t have the bow. Ever since I found the bow, I haven’t been able to duplicate this feat. Maybe something was wrong with the game cartridge?
I don’t remember if it was here or on the Fortean Times message board, but a number of people seemed to have scary memories of Sesame Street – not just the usual freaky yip-yip-yip monsters, but memories that Bert and Ernie or other muppets were looking out of the TV at the kid, and sort of subconsciously encouraging him or her to come closer to the TV, with a half-hidden, evil air of expectation. As if something had taken over the TV and was pretending to be beloved Sesame Street characters in order to lure the child into its clutches.
I thought it was a tad eerie that so many people seemed to have the same false memory.
When I was little I could make objects disappear. Like gone. Forever. I had to be careful what I wished for because I couldn’t make them come back afterwards. It wasn’t a completely conscious decision, sometimes it just happened.
This ability vanished when I was 5 or so, until… I was about 10 and staying at my uncles house, a nintendo cartridge mysteriously disappeared - it was Yoshi’s Island. It belonged to my cousin and I felt terrible, it was a total accident.
In an unrelated matter a few months later the exact same game cartridge was found at the house of a friend of my cousins. No-one had any idea how it got there, I must have somehow teleported it. I’d never met this friend or been to his house.
I used to think that I remembered being driven to the hospital to be born. I would wonder how I could see things in the car if I were inside my mother, but I figured it was just one of those things that I didn’t understand yet.
After years of this I talked about this memory with my mother, and we figured out that I was actually remembering coming with them for the birth of my sister. I was 2 when that happened.
This used to happen to me a LOT in elementary school. I’d get déjà vu, only I’d remember dreaming it, not experiencing it.
I also have distinct memories of experiencing weird stuff like my hands getting really really big, so that a blanket I was carrying felt like a needle - in hindsight, probably just some weird mental thing, but I remember the feeling very vividly.
I remember being outside in the baby carriage with the fly net over it and looking toward our house. I am sure it is a real memory. I remember the gauzy way the house looked through the fly net.
I remember when John Lennon was killed. I remember my dad coming home and telling us, even remember that it was the first (and one of the VERY few) time I’ve ever heard him swear. He called M.D.C. a “bastard.”
But that couldn’t have happened, he came home from work around 6 pm and it wasn’t announced until much later at night.
For a long time, my clearest memory of living in Toronto (age ~3) was that the winter was so unreasonably cold that water from a garden hose froze instantly as it hit the air, when our dad was making little improvised ice rink in the yard.
Maybe there was a section of ice in the end of the hose that was pushed out when it was turned on?
Koxinga, the evil sesame street reaching out from the screen was the premise of an episode of Whedon’s show Angel. They did a very good, very creepy job. Not in this compilation though, Angel - Smile Time - YouTube
I think most of the posts in this thread are very poetic, in that unique way little kids have. Slanting colorfull floors? Sky whales? A toddler stretching out to the ceiling?
I don’t have one like those. When I was 18 or so, I was sad for a week because I was so sure that Robert Smith of the band The Cure had died. It was almost an anticlimax to find out that had been only a dream. And it is true what was said in that movie Inception: if you want to find out if you are dreaming or not, trace back your steps and see if you can remember how you got there. Or, in my case, where and when I had heard of Smiths demise.
Wow I had no idea common “Impossible memories” are.
It got me to thinking though, what if you were to have one of these FMs with something that had religious overtones? (Like saw or talked to Jesus. Something like that.)
I could easily see how that could change a persons life. So far, the stories given in this thread have all been about silly arbitrary things. So we have the benefit of logic to tell us they didn’t really happen. But if you had a FM with religious connotations; well, now you’ve got a whole centuries old doctrine that would only cement your memories and make them seem more plausible.
This doesn’t exactly qualify, but for a long time, I thought it did.
I was born in 1959. Circa 1969-1970, I had seen a piece on network news that showed a brief clip of Hubert Humphrey addressing a group of young children, declaring that he was in favor of lowering the voting age to eight, to which the children cheered.
Of course, every adult I asked about this said I was crazy.
I’m not sure when I understood politics well enough to realize what I had seen: it was probably an op-ed piece decrying misleading/out-of-context media portrayals, and demonstrated this light-heartedly by truncating a clip of Humphrey expressing support for lowering the voting age to eighteen nationally (which the 26th amendment did, when it was adopted in 1971), and faking the kids’ reaction.
I distinctly remember visiting my “Uncle Harry” when I was a little kid, playing on the side of a hill covered in iceplant.
Problem 1: While I do/did have an Uncle Harry, I never met him.
Problem 2: Even if I had met him, my parents assured me that not only have I never been to his house, but they had and there wasn’t any iceplant there.
I also have this weird memory of sitting in a booth in the back of the local TG&Y store, back in the days when it was bigger before they subdivided it into two stores. My parents assured me that TG&Y (long gone now, of course) never had any booths.
I distinctly remember running up the stairs of my (at the time) new house at age 3, and then falling backwards and hitting my head.
I’m pretty sure if this had actually happened, I would have had some degree of brain damage. And, y’know, my parents would tell other people about it, because my folks LOVE to tell stories about exciting things that happened to us as kids.
I remember stepping off an elevator once at the shopping mall in the city where I grew up and looking down that crack between the elevator doors and the floor and seeing the mall’s Christmas Tree. It wasn’t Christmas so I figured that’s where they stored the tree - decorated and everything - and every time I was on that elevator I’d look down the crack but never saw it again.
When I was three/four I believed and used to tell people that a) I never slept, and b) I could fall down stairs without hurting myself. Looking back it’s clear that I just couldn’t tell the difference between dreams and reality.
Or I was a LOT smaller than I thought!