Do you have childhood memories that you now know as an adult are impossible?

In My Humble Opinion
61

When my dad came home from a business trip, sometimes it was pretty late at night. I’d hear his key in the door, and I’d run out of my bedroom in my nightgown. As I reached the corner of the wall where the stairs started, I’d grab the drywall with my left hand, left arm locked and extended, and sort of swing around the corner. If I let go at just the right spot, I’d float down the stairs in a swoop, the hem of my nightgown skimming the corners of each carpeted stair down to the bottom, where he’d catch me in a hug.

Not me, but a good friend: She grew up in a terribly abusive family. One day during early adolescence, she decided to end her life down at the local creek. As she was sitting on the bank gathering her nerve, a woman sat down next to her. She sat there and talked to my friend for some time, telling her that her life sucked now, but it *would *get better, she just had to get through the next few years. She got her through the suicidal crisis, and then gave her a big hug and walked away. My friend thought of the woman often, and her words came to mind several times over the next few years when she started to think life wasn’t worth it. She told me about this woman once when we were talking about the “it takes a village” theory of communal child rearing. This stranger who lived in her town cared enough to see the suffering of a young girl and knew just how much to get involved without making things worse for her at home. She credited that stranger with saving her life.

Years later, my friend realized that the woman was her. As in, she looked in the mirror one day and recognized the very outfit and hairstyle the woman was wearing that day. (woah) She decided to complete the loop and went back to her younger self in a trance/meditation piece that was just as powerful for her adult self.

Heh. I wonder if my daughter will be posting to this thread someday, swearing up and down that there was once a water bottle bigger than her! :smiley:

62

I have several impossible memories.

First one is from when I was 6. I distinctly remember seeing myself jump right at the instance sheet lightning happened. In my memory it’s like there’s a sheet of light in the front yard of this apartment, and my body is hanging suspended in this sheet, and I’m seeing it from the back. I’ve had this memory since the day of that thunderstorm.

Same day, after the storm. I distinctly remember an indy race car barreling down the street that was beside that apartment. This couldn’t have happened, as that road had multiple speedbumps that would destroy an indy car, if it didn’t just get stuck altogether. Plus none of the roads near that house would be empty enough for an indy car to get up a good speed. Back in those days you’d be lucky to get any vehicle up to 15 before having to stop again.

This one takes place shortly after Clinton was elected. One afternoon the local news interrupted Ducktales to announce that aliens were indeed real, and they cut to a shot of the White House, with Clinton and the typical grey alien standing on the White House lawn doing interviews with various media outlets.

Another similar one, again the local news interrupting a cartoon I was watching to announce that Elvis did indeed fake his death, and he’d been found living on a tropical island. I remember talking for weeks about this with friends, family, teachers, etc. Then suddenly no one else remembered it, not even people who had previously been as excited about this as I was.

I remember Ronald Reagan being assassinated shortly after being elected. Which is impossible on 2 fronts, since he wasn’t assassinated, and I wasn’t until a year after he was elected.

I remember buying vhs tapes for under $20 in the 80s, and renting movies without being charged a fortune or having a credit card. After reading this board, I have doubts about that memory.

I remember OJ Simpson being found Guilty of the murder of his ex-wife.

There’s probably more, but I can’t recall them at the moment.

63

You were assassinated a year after he was elected? :smiley:

64

Yup. Let me tell ya, it took years to figure out how to use a computer when you don’t have a physical body anymore. :frowning:

Seriously though, that should have read that I was born a year after he was elected. Another case of my fingers not keeping up with my brain.

65

I have a similar one, as well. Our front yard had an old concrete slab where an old building had once stood. It was level, but set in uneven ground, so that the front side of it was even with the ground but the back side was about 4" above ground.
I have a memory of running in circles on this slab, faster and faster, until I ran right off the edge, but I did not touch the ground until I was well past a tree that was probably 20’ away from the slab.
That ‘memory’ is still pretty vivid, but when I was a kid, it was so real that I spent several afternoons outside trying to repeat it, but always failing.

66

Is it not possible that someone gave you a pillow case or something that was made up to look like a giant M&M bag? Hell, maybe they had giant novelty M&M bags at some point.

67

I have some weird childhood memories too. I remember very clearly walking along the tarmac at an airport at night, but that the tarmac was still a bit warm under my feet. I get the sense it was somewhere I wasn’t really supposed to be, but that it was worth any risk I was taking, because something important was going on. Ahead of me was a huge military cargo plane, maybe a c-5 or Russian equivalent(the nose had swung open) and It was all lit up with floodlights.

It has some attachment to Germany in my mind(I don’t know if that means that this was IN Germany). I have been to Germany only once in my life, and that was just a brief layover at an airport this looks nothing like this one. On a whim I googled “airport Germany” and Ramstien airbase reminds of this a lot. I have spent a lot of time around many FBOs, but this one is different than any I have been to at night.

I talked to my parents and friends, and they don’t know of any time when this could have happened. Maybe I was a Pilot in a past life too:D

68

When I was 7 or 8, the house we lived in back then backed onto a field. You could jump over the back fence into the field, or you could go out the front, run down the terrace for a few houses and run into an alleyway to get into the field.
When I took my wife there to show her around where I grew up recently, I discovered that the terrace along there was complete - there was no alleyway, and nowhere an alleyway could possibly have been.

69

That is a case of 42 oz smaller bags, not one huge bag.

70

For as long as I can remember, my “oldest memory” has been of me climbing out of my brown wooden crib, getting my foot caught in one of the wooden side slats, and hanging trapped and terrified for a few seconds before getting free. I remember, clearly, that the crib was in front of my bedroom window in my childhood home.

For years, my mother insisted that it was impossible, I’d never had that crib in that house, and would be too young to remember anyways. Recently, I mentioned that memory again and she told me, oh, yeah, I did have that crib in that room for a little while. But I was a little too old for a crib at that point. :smack:

71

As a little kid, swimming in a swimming pool with powerlines/towers over it. Damned if I can figure out where this would’ve happened.

72

The big hands thing might have been a fever (just like two balloons) my daughter used to say her hands were big when she was sick.

I vividly remember finding a book on the shelf in my dad’s study that was called How To Fly. The book had step by step instructions that totally worked and when I followed them I could fly with no problem at all. A few days later I went back to find the book again and realized the shelf was actually in a completely different part of the room than I’d remembered and it couldn’t have actually happened. SUCH a bummer.

73

I had one of these, but it was chocolate chips. Very confusing at first- if I hadn’t kept the pillow I would have a memory of a real giant bag of chocolate chips.

74

Maybe you grew up in the Soviet Union? Somehow I picture happy Russian children frolicking in the tanks of cooling water adjacent to the local nuclear power plant.

75

When you had a childhood as weird as mine, you doubt nothing.

76

I vividly remember a plane flying over our house so low that I could see the passengers in the plane, but we didn’t live near an airport and were in the suburbs.

77

My earliest memory of a TV show was of a talking train engine. Not Thomas the train but an actual talking engine. Saw the program again when I was 5 and it was a guy with a train on his head. It seamed so obvious at 5 what it was but so real at age 2.

78

I “remember” being out with my mother and sister one night as a kid, and on the drive home, stopping in front of a blazing house.

Of course I know this would have been impossible…if there really were a house on fire, we wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near it. But it remained in my mind for ages.

79

I’ve got two:

I was 7 when Skylab came down and it was a big event in the news, stuff at school etc. My dad was a huge space buff and his work at the time involved a lot of contact with NASA/JPL guys in the US. On the last few nights before Skylab’s final orbit we went outside to see it pass over-head. I swear it was low enough to see that distinctive X-shaped solar array and the side shade.

The other, I must have been about 6, my dad had made me a ‘catapult’ - a length of wood like a ruler with a plactic bottle cap glued to one end, you put a small rock in the cap, place the wood over a fulcrum and smack the other end down and launch the rock.

We were at some sort of function or family picnic and a friend and I were using the catapult to launch rocks out over this big, paved area and even if we didn’t see them land we could always hear them. So I launched a rock and… nothing :eek: didn’t see it, no noise… never came down :smiley:

80

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.