I see this claim repeated all the time that a person does not remember what they did while drunk or on drugs sometimes across months or years of time. For myself, for the few times in my life when I was really inebriated those memories are fairly distinct and what I did while seriously drunk is pretty clear and vivid to this day. Being super drunk was an utterly weird experience, it would be hard to forget.
Is this unusual? Do people really have “lost time” and not remember what they did while seriously drunk or is it more of an excuse not to have to face your behavior? Are there other people like me that can remember pretty clearly what they did the night before while seriously intoxicated?
Some people really do have blackouts and it isn’t just hard-core alcoholics either. It depends on the person, how much they drink and for how long. I have witnessed it from people ranging from college girls that had just a few more than usual to middle aged men that woke up with someone that they couldn’t even remember meeting after a bender. There have been real cases of people that blacked out so badly that they woke up in another state or country.
I almost never blacked out even when I was drinking a lot but it happened once through a combination of extreme sleep deprivation and intoxication after final exams were over my senior year of college. I woke up on a stranger’s porch covered in mud from head to toe miles away from anywhere I should have been. I still have no idea how I got there although I later recalled that the mud was due to me hallucinating that I was in the Vietnam War and I had to hunker down in a foxhole that I attempted to dig with my hands earlier the previous night.
I have also seen people wake up from some pretty nasty wounds that they have no explanation for. In short, yes, blackouts can be real but some people are much more prone to them than others.
I got really wasted on Weller 107 when I was just out of high school. I had been to a friend’s house and still semi-funtional, I didn’t remember even going there until he filled me in later. I had done a lot of things that night, didn’t remember any of it. It’s never happened again, but it does happen and it’s damn disconcerting.
I’ve done it a few times in my younger years. It isn’t fun. The stories I hear from others about those few times are even worse. I’ve learned to ease off the craziness over the years.
It’s real. And it’s scary. It happened to me a couple times back in my drinking days, waking up with no memory, just a vague feeling of dread. Id look at my phone and cringe at the numbers I dialed (and apparently the convos I had) when I was blacked out.
I’ve had memory lapses simply due to lack of sleep-you hit that 72 hr mark and your brain stops functioning. It’s scary. I think the memory lapses from drink/drug are quite real. Your body was walking around doing stuff without you on board.
I have been wasted and remembered everything and on other occasions wasted and remembered nothing. I have woke up in cities that I had no idea how I got to and lost my car on several occasions.
I decided to quit drinking over 25 years ago and it hasn’t happened since.
When I was young I was alternately blessed and cursed with an almost perfect memory. It was surprising, after big nights out, how often I could remember every embarrassing thing I had said or done while others had only vague recollections, often insisting, “No, I didn’t do that. Did I?”
I blacked out twice in my 20’s. Jack Daniels was involved both times. While I’m apparently very entertaining in that state, I stayed away from whisky/bourbon/scotch for a good 10 years after that. Nowadays I enjoy bourbon in my coffee or light mixer, might sip one serving of good stuff in a bar or friend’s house, but I’ll never have more than a couple ounces in a day. Also tequila - again a couple ounces in an evening maybe, but I won’t get drunk off it - no blacking out, but a lot of crying.
That is really a philosophical argument. I have always walked, talked and done simple tasks in my sleep due to numerous sleep disorders that I have had since I was a small child. I can promise you that I have no memory of anything I do during those periods and I can act out dreams or even do simple tasks and confront people that try to intervene so they just learn to ignore and laugh. Everyone close to me knows about it. It isn’t true that waking up a sleepwalking person will cause instant mayhem but it is very disorienting and serves no good purpose. I don’t think that is conscious in any way and that is why it is so disturbing.
Your argument isn’t going to play very well with the people that claim that intoxicated women (never men for some reason) cannot be held accountable for their choices because they are incapable of making rational ones by (some) definitions. I can see both sides. It is a drug after all but I think there is a big difference between having a few glasses of wine versus becoming nearly passed out on the couch after a hard night of partying but still superficially willing to take on any comers just because they are intoxicated.
In the Spanish legal system and in most of our former colonies, it depends on whether the intoxication itself was intentional.
If you purposefully set out to get blind drunk or to seek courage inside a bottle and do something illegal, it’s considered worse.
If you didn’t have enough experience to realize it when you should have stopped, or if you had an unexpectedly large effect (like that friend of mine who absolutely could not drink on certain days of the month*), then whatever illegal thing you do is not considered worse and may even be considered less bad, but you can still get the “public intoxication” fine. And depending on what it was, people with you who weren’t so drunk can still get hit as accesories too (“friends don’t let friends drive drunk” can carry actual penalties).
My brother used to be known to our local medical establishment as “the unofficial ambulance”: he was coming of age at the time when getting blind drunk was becoming fashionable (my own peer group considered it despicable) and carried many drunk-blind or drunk-unconscious people to the ER, usually for an ICU stay. The first time he drank he didn’t realize he needed to stop until the world was swaying heavily; the combination scared him so much that he was an absolute teetotaler for almost 30 years. Now he drinks a little bit of wine occasionally.
The first two times it took us by surprise. Once we figured out what the issue was, we kept her from drinking on those days.
I had a recent memory blackout of going on a hike in the mountains with my sister. I remember part of the trail, but have absolutely no memory at all of arriving at the trailhead and certain other parts of the hike. I know they have to have happened, and there is a total blank space where the memories should be.
(I’m guessing it may be due to heat and exhaustion. It’s a steep trail.)
I woke up in a hospital with a badly broken femur and have no memory of the accident or the trip to the hospital even though I have been told I was conscious and talking. Five years downstream I still cannot remember anything about it.