I remember swimming along a dark tube, and there were all these white colored tad poles swimming alongside me. Can’t quite put a date to it though…
There are two memories so old I can’t even assign a reliable age to them:
I had been to the shopping mall and ridden an escalator for the first time. Moving stairs! I thought it was magic! Then I was lying on a table covered with white vinyl patterned with gold fleur-de-lys.
I was riding in the car through streets of a big city. The buildings were immensely tall (at least five stories!) of gray stone and very old. The car radio was playing “Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.
I remember my crib. One side of it slid down in order to convert it to a regular bed (albeit a little high off the ground for a little tyke.) I used to pull up the side and pretend I was a zoo animal in a cage, to the amusement of my older brother. I was still in diapers at the time. I have many early memories- potty training & how proud my parents were when I succeeded, studying pictures in books before I could read, and seeing Star Wars in the theatre when I was 4- and loving every minute of it.
I had a memory which I thought was from when I was at least 3.
I was in a car and someone was knocking at the window. It was winter. Next thing I know I’m in a large room with a large bell on a pedestal. My mom was sitting next to it. Strangely my sister (who was born when I was 2) was not there.
I asked my parents about this just because my sister not being there seemed odd and I was wondering why people were knocking at the window of the car.
My parents were amazed that I remembered something like that. They hadn’t mentioned it since I was 2 or so.
It happened just before my first birthday. My dad had accidently locked me in the running car, outside in a parkinglot. The person knocking on the window was either him or the locksmith. My mom was in the townhall of the town we were in (which was just across the street), and the bell is still there (for the first time since then I visited the town a year ago, and I do remember the room, so for anyone who thinks this was a suggested dream from when it was last mentioned when I was 2, I do remember the room). My sister wasn’t there because it was more than a year before she was born.
I thought for sure I must’ve been at least three when that happened, but my parents informed me otherwise.
When I went to the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago for what I thought was the first time, I had the most bizarre sense of deja vu and I knew my way around most of it. I even described to other people what would be in the next room before we’d go in there. It actually freaked me out quite a bit. My parents said that I had never been there before. I definetly had very clear memories of full-sized planes hanging from the ceiling, a red trolley car, and a bunch of other things in the museum.
I finally found out that when my parents had to go out of state for the funeral of an elderly aunt, they left me with my aunt & uncle in chicago. They took me there. I had just turned 2 when that happened.
I was wearing a purple dress with a kite on it. It was Easter, I must have been almost three. My whole family was in the family room trying to pick me up and hug me or show affection, but I was just too busy. Too busy doing what? exploring and showing off my new baby sister. That year my Grandpa killed a rattlesnake that jumped out of the pool vent thingies with his pocket-knife. I remember the dress and running around the best.
I have no memories before the age of about 6. It frustrates me to no end not to have any memories before that time. And what I do remember after that time is pretty sparse until I reached my teens.
Is this a no-no? I suppose I’ll find out. Because we harbor many a non-clicker here, I’m just c&p’n’ my post from ftg’s previously linked thread:
Somebody made the point earlier that generally people may not have memories before age four and that a thread like this would naturally bring out all of us statistical deviants, and I think he or she was probably right as many of my acquaintance have few memories befor elementary school.
I have several, and it’s late and I’ve not got much time before the eyes get off work for the night. I can clearly remember the grandfather clock I liked to watch in the house we lived in from the time I was 1 until I was almost 2. My mother mentioned last night, when I recalled this, that I was bad about taking the rocks out of the counterweights.
And I remember the view from my crib out of the plate glass window in my room in the next house. The layout of that one is still with me, too. I described it to my mother last night and she confirmed it. As well, I remember crawling out of my crib and down the backstairs of the house, and heading out of the garage. I could not speak yet, but my aunt was watching me that night and I remember her yelling, “Where’s the baby!?! Where’s the baby!?!” and turning around to crawl back toward her.
As someone else above’s post notes, kids can understand spoken language before they can speak it.
We lived in Hawaii the year I was three (1956) and I remember much of that. The house, my third birthday, the daycare on the beach with weird little cages we crawled into to nap, the pineapple fields, why you don’t play in pineapple fields, the day we found mice in my sister’s teddybear (“Pinky”).
There’s too much there for me to believe these are somehow “restored” memories from other sources. Man, wasn’t it nice to know so little about credit cards?
I’ve got you all beat: I was past-life regressed three years ago and I remember my previous life.
Thanks to the cool dude who did the regression, I also remember images and scenes that took place long before my original first memory, at four. It was bizarre because when we moved back through time, I recalled a house that I had never imagined or remembered before. Later, when I mentioned it to my mom, I was able to recall the exact layout of the house, though we moved when I was 2 and a half. The clearest memory I had during that stage of the regression was of being outside, waiting for my father to come home, while a huge storm was brewing. I was about 20 months when that happened, according to my mom (she remembered because the storm was so bad it blew out our electricity, and we went without for nearly three days.)
From my past life, I have a very clear memory of washing linens in a stream, and someone calling out my name, Sister Helena. I turned around and saw a beautiful stone, one-level building surrounded by gardens and a field.
So, you remember something from before you were born?
How about that! There was a thread with the EXACT same name a few months ago and I missed it!
Hummm. I wonder how many others have blanks in their memories. Like I recall the first place we lived when we got here, but do not recall the small house my Mom and Dad rented a year or so later to get us out of the over crowded main house of the motel we co-owned. My Mom showed it to me this year as we were driving around town and I found that I have no memory of the year we stayed there, but I have a memory of the next place. I must have been about 3 when we moved there and 4 when we got to the next place. I remember being in a crib in the next place and sitting in the shoulder high grass outside off of the sidewalk. I really start recalling the house we bought after that when I was about 4 or 5.
It was a new home in a new subdivision, one of the first subdivisions to be built in the area. (House and lot cost, I found out later, all of $5,000 and phone service had not reached that area yet and would not for a little bit.)
I remember getting up at night to look at my copy of The Three Bears that I had stashed on top of the dresser next to my crib, I was about 2. I then remember being made to come in from making mudpies to watch really grainy TV, it was the moon landing. I was two months shy of my 3rd birthday.
Wow…I’m amazed at some of these memories. Like how would you know you were listening to Earth, Wind and Fire and Stevie Wonder? It’s possible you have a great musical memory and then years after the fact were able to assign these bands to the music, but for some reason I don’t think one would know those bands at the time. But I can be wrong.
My earliest memory is 3.5 - 4. I remember several times going over to my cousins house. I don’t remember my parent’s old house (we moved out when I was 3), but I remember my cousins house, who moved out a few months later. Although I do occassionally have dreams of a house I’ve never known, and I’m curious as to whether that was the old house I lived in.
Now, the thing is I’m not saying that just because I can’t remember earlier than nobody else can. That would be too egocentric of me. I’m am certain many people do have memories prior to 3 or 3.5. I am very skeptical that anyone can remember as far back as 1.5, but who knows; we’re all different.
What I do know, though, is the brains amazing power to misremember events or to chronologically misplace significant events in one’s life. Of course, everyone here will believe their memories are real. There’s an interesting article on this subject here, and in particular the section on flashbulb memory and the Challenger explosion. I’ve had many experiences with myself and others where we’d combine events from two separate experiences or misplace events in our life history by up to 5 years. And we’d all swear we were absolutely correct until provided with photographic or video evidence to show us otherwise. And even then it was difficult to convince us of our incorrect memories.
Just some thoughts. I don’t mean to hijack this into a debate on memory.
3–moving from Jacksonville to S. Florida.
3 1/2–my baby brother being born.
I must have not even been two years old when this happened, but I remember my mom getting up in the middle of the night and taking me out of my crib and carrying me out to the front room to calm me down after I had been crying (perhaps I had a scary dream or something). I distinctly remember a street light outside shining into the otherwise dark living room through the large picture window with the drapes drawn. This light seemed to make things even more comforting. Between the ages of 2 and 4 I have various memories of playing with my toys, lying in my bed, getting into fights with my two older sisters, etc. I can remember my birthdays all the way back to my fourth birthday. I also remember my Mom playing her Fifth Dimension and Carpenters records while I played out in the front room. When I wasn’t watching Sesame Street my Mom would have the Price is Right or some other game show on the TV.
I can remember going on a train to NY (from Baltimore) with my father when I was 3. My mother was scheduled to have a C-section, so they shipped me off for a few weeks to relatives in Brooklyn.
I remembered another one, but this one is considerably more hazy. I have a vague memory of a scary earthquake; I seem to recall me being walking-around age, and my parents snatching up my younger brother from the crib and getting us into a doorframe. The problem is, the dates don’t quite line up. There’s a San Fernando quake in 1971 that measured 6.6, which is certainly strong enough, but my brother wasn’t born yet. And then there’s a similar quake in 1973 that has the proper timeframe, but it wasn’t that strong, only 5.3. Perhaps I’m conflating the events; I may have retained the fear of the stronger quake when I was 2 years old, and combined it with the activities of the weaker quake when I was 4. Memory is indeed a funny thing…
I can remember eating pancakes with my Grandaddy and taking naps with him in his recliner.
He died when I was 2 1/2 (I don’t remember when he died, oddly enough) so I’m guessing my earliest memories are in the 2 to 2 1/2 year range.
I love my Grandaddy 
While we’re on the subject of early memories, perhaps someone can help me put a date to one I have. I remember being at an air show where there was a helicopter crash, this would have been somewhere in the Midwest (most likely Illinois, possibly Indiana or Wisconsin) in the early- to mid-70s.