I have a distinct memory of the first time I heard the song “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child. I was riding home from school in my friend’s car when I was in high school and heard it on the radio. Recently, I decided to look up which year it came out. It turns out that it came out a few years after I graduated high school so I couldn’t possibly have heard it when I thought I did.
Have you ever discovered that something you remember couldn’t have happened in the way you thought?
I have several very distinctive memories of a house we lived in when I was 3-5 years old. A few years ago I was talking to my mom and mentioned something about the house layout and she told me that no, that wasn’t the way the rooms were arranged. We talked about it some more and apparently everything I remember is wrong. The layout of the dining room, the way the bedroom closets were arranged (they were back to back but there was no back wall separating the two, so you could literally walk from one bedroom into the other through the closets), the distinctive front gate made from sheep fencing… everything I remembered simply did not exist. I described everything that I remembered and she told me that didn’t match any of the houses we lived in when I was a kid, nor did it match any of our friends’ houses.
So I have no idea what I’m remembering.
Lots - the first one that comes to mind is a concert I went to in college. According to my memory, it was Stevie Nicks ( or possibly Fleetwood Mac) at Madison Square Garden somewhere between 1981 and 1982 and I went with a particular person. Except as far as I can tell, neither had a concert at MSG in that timeframe and that’s the only timeframe when I would have gone with that person. So my memory has at least one detail wrong - maybe more.
In college, I took a really interesting Learning Theories class. One day, we were discussing how tricky memory can be, and that even for important events, we often misremember the details. The prof joked, “So most married people have at least one big detail about their wedding day that they’re remembering incorrectly… hopefully, it’s not whom they married.”
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, I remembered that class discussion and decided to write down every detail I could remember of that day, then re-read it later to see how much my memory had changed. When I reviewed it a year later, there were some small details that had changed in my brain (such as which shirt I was wearing), but it was mostly the same.
The thing that weirded me out and blew my entire conception of memory was something I hadn’t written down, though. You know how I said that my Learning Theories class was what prompted me to write down my memories? I didn’t take Learning Theories until the spring semester of 2002.
My guess is that I’d conflated memory discussions from different psych classes I’d taken. But I have this weirdly clear memory of remembering the sentence about weddings specifically when I started to write.
A lot of times when I recall watching a music video, I’ll picture the time I watched it on MTV in the house we lived in when we first got that channel, only to find out the song didn’t come out until years later. But I remember it, man!
One of my key childhood memories involved an earthquake (a small one, this being Cleveland, but enough that most people felt it) that happened while I was at school. Part of my memory involves my sister being at the same school as me. But there was only one year when we were at the same school, and there’s no historical record of an earthquake in Cleveland in that year.
When I saw the movie Rocky, the scene where Rocky’s eye is swollen and he says, “cut me Mick” freaked me the fuck out. It left me shaking, and remembering the time my mom used a knife on my eye.
I described to my mom what I remembered. I was running down a hallway and ran into a wall/door. Then my mom used a knife to cut me to relieve the swelling.
Turns out I was only about 3. My mom held a butter knife against the swollen area and put several more butter knives into the freezer so she could “ice” the swelling.
What a weird memory and what an odd experience to cause recall.
In my mind, I continuously get the Dallas and Houston houses of my childhood mixed up. For instance, I will recall having run across the living room to the kitchen when we were in Dallas, but that house layout was Houston.
I remembered an album cover for the band Bob Moses that had a young couple who looked like they had just showered together and had their fingers hooked over their mouths, like they had been caught doing something naughty but didn’t care.
I looked through their album covers online earlier today and didn’t see that image. Maybe another band did it, but Google hasn’t turned up anything that matches.
I can’t remember any.
I "remember"the infamous wardrobe malfunction happen at a house I didn’t live at yet on a TV I didn’t own yet.
The act of writing it down may have helped to fix the memory.
I’m going to take a guess that you didn’t write down what prompted you to write down the memories.
– I remembered distinctly, for years, sitting alone in the living room waiting up for my parents to come back from the vet. the night the cat died who was my companion when I was an infant. I mentioned this years later to my mother, who told me it hadn’t happened; I had been in my bedroom and my father had taken the cat to the vet. on his own; my mother had stayed home. She said she wouldn’t have left me home without an adult (I was three.) I said my older sisters would have been home (the older was 13.)
Then I realized something: the memory was physically very clear. I was sitting on the couch: my back against the back of the couch, my legs bent at the knees so my lower legs went down – the way I would sit on a couch when I was a teenager or adult. I couldn’t have sat in that position as a three year old. My legs weren’t long enough. My mother was right – it hadn’t happened.
(Something like it might have happened, though. My mother thought I was asleep in my bed. I wonder whether I might not have woken up, at least enough to realize something was wrong and that it involved the cat, and stayed awake at least long enough to remember waiting for someone to come back home with her.)
I think I’ve posted about this before.
I watched a plane crash. I was on a military base and saw it from the parking lot. I was actually interviewed by the investigators and told them what I had seen.
The pilots ejected, but were too low for survival and perished near a road I travel frequently. I have a distinct memory of seeing the paramedics and emergency vehicles gathered in an open area there as I drove past.
Old news stories verify all the facts, except my visual memory is completely wrong. I couldn’t have seen the paramedics as they weren’t visible from the road. The crash site is too far away.
Two very mundane examples.
1 - When my ex-wife and I started talking about divorcing in early 2018, I realized that I didn’t have a personal email address. I distinctly remember creating a hotmail account in my office. Except I only started using that office in late 2019. I was using a different one at the time.
2 - I remember asking a very specific question online around the same time. Out of curiosity, I tried finding it again a couple of years ago. And I did find it, but it was actually two years older than I would have sworn.
Mundane, as I said, but these examples alarmed me because I had always prided myself on having an excellent memory for dates, sometimes down to the day of the week. Perhaps they were all false memories.
Which led me down an unpleasant path of wondering about the real reason some of my past relationships ended. Maybe my various partners and I had completely different memories of certain events…
You call that mundane? Here’s how you do mundane:
At Christmas a few years ago, my sisters and I were reminiscing about past Christmases. As kids we had several Christmas wind-up toys my mom would put out for the season, that played various Christmasy tunes-- except one, a teeter-totter with two elves. When you wound it up, the elves would go up and down, and the thing would play a mystery tune… it was no Christmas tune I had ever heard. I remembered the tune exactly, and I even whistled it to my sisters and they confirmed it was correct, but they had no idea what the tune might be.
A few days later one of my sisters emailed me-- she had looked online and found an exact copy of the teeter-totter windup toy on eBay or someplace – but, the description said it played Jingle Bells.
So, we called my mom. I whistled the tune to her. She said, yes, that was the exact tune, but it was a wind-up nutcracker toy that played the tune, not the teeter-totter elves, which she confirmed played Jingle Bells. She even brought the nutcracker to Christmas II a week or so later to prove it (we did two Christmas dinners every year due to my parents divorcing). But I had a very clear, strong memory of the teeter-totter elf toy playing the tune. So weirdly, I remembered the tune note-for-note after all those years, but had a completely false memory of where the tune came from. Still, to this day, I have no idea what the tune is.
The first concert I ever attended was Pat Benatar in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November of 1982. I was 15 years old. The opening band was Survivor. I distinctly remember them playing Eye of the Tiger. Or at least that’s what I’ve thought all these years. Last year I looked up Pat Benatar’s concert schedule for 1982, and found the concert I attended. I guess I was wrong… it was the band Saga that opened for her, not Survivor.
For reference I am now in my late 40s.
One thing I found about my childhood memories is I occasionally confuse dreams I have had with actual memories from my childhood.
Like I went to a live WWF show as a child and I had dreams afterward about being at WWF shows.
And then now trying to recall the ACTUAL show I was AT-- I remember matches between wrestlers that were NOT at the event(and not even working for WWF at the time). Then I realized I only DREAMED watching those matches.
It is very confusing,
I bow to your superior mundaneness.
I am the maestro of mundane.
This reminds me of a type of false memory I’ve had in the past: I am a very visual reader-- meaning I tend to vividly picture the scenes and characters I read about in books. These imaginings are so vivid, sometimes I think I’ve seen the movie that a book was based on, when I only read the book and am just remembering my imaginings.
Several times over the years I’ve asked my brother if he remembers a specific event. He will think but come up empty, which puzzles him because he is sure he’d remember.
Then he asks me my age at the time and I’ll tell him I was 6. Ahhh, he was a newborn.