Oh boy ... (implanted?) memories?

My neighbor insists that I did not put an engine in his milk truck in 1977. In my mind I am absolutely 100% sure I did. One of us is right. He is getting ready to pass and I am considering buying it. I would use it as a shop on wheels for bow building classes.

I had one happen to me just yesterday.

A particular rural restaurant came up in a talk with a friend. He said we’d been there 15-20 years ago. We rode our motorcycles there, and got caught in a heavy rain on the way home.

I did not remember it at all, but after being reminded I can picture it now. The event is starting to come back to me. I can even picture the inside of the bar now.

Or I’ve completely recreated it. I know what the roads in the area look like, I know the people who were reported to have gone, and I know what bikes we were riding. I’m viewing the restaurant as having rustic wood furniture, everything is coated with a layer of grease, and there are license plates and things on the walls. I expect that describes half? more? of biker bars on the shores of a rural lake.

I assume I did go, as it sounds like something I would do. This friend is not likely to lie to me about it, unless he is mistaken about who went with him on that trip.

I have a distinct memory of drinking a bunch of Mountain Dew shortly before bed time as a kid, and then predictably complaining that I couldn’t fall asleep. I was old enough to know that some sodas contained caffeine and that caffeine would keep you awake, but I assumed Mountain Dew was a caffeine free soda, like Sprite. I didn’t know it contained a large dose of caffeine.

At least, that’s how I remember it. My parents insist my younger sister was the one who drank the Mountain Dew and couldn’t get to sleep. And that makes me doubt that really happened to me. Maybe I’m remembering what she did and somehow ended up putting myself in her place when I remember it.

I learned from a prestigious institution (SDMB) that basically every time you recall a memory, it gets altered by the current state of your self and stored in its slightly altered form.

So, the biker-bar and Mountain Dew examples fit this rationale quite well … you (implicitly or explicitly) store new info with you old memory and it becomes somewhat of a mixture of old and new.

I recalled this scene vividly as a dog taking the dump and the movie transitioning over to the icecream scene … it was the dog, not Jim!!!

fascinating, indeed!

Here’s another reconstructed memory: I remember my parent’s bringing me along to the airport to pick up visitors, back when you could go meet people at the gate. And I’m pretty sure my dad took me to the airport a few times just to look at the planes. I was an observant enough kid to notice that some of the planes had the engines mounted on the wings, and others had engines on the tail. And that some of them had 2, 3, or 4 engines. But I had no idea what kinds of planes they were.

Now I know that the most common planes at the Charlotte airport in the mid 1980s were probably the 727, 737, and DC-9. But I’m pretty sure I saw something with 4 engines. I don’t think any major US airline was still flying 707s at that time, but I know United and Delta were still flying DC-8s in the 1980s. So I now I can totally picture going to the airport when I was 5 years old and seeing a bunch of Piedmont Airlines 727s and 737s, Eastern Airlines DC-9s, and a United Airlines DC-8 parked at the end of the concourse. Of course that’s pretty much all reconstructed based on what I know now, and almost certainly isn’t exactly what I saw, but it’s plausibly what I might have seen at CLT in 1985.

I often write stories about things from my past. I always embellish and sometimes go back and add to them. I will often send a copy to the person or persons who may have been involved in those stories. There are a few of them that I really have no idea anymore what was embellished or not embellished because when we talk about it the story tends to become mostly reality. Writing one right now and I find myself fighting for the reality of the story. I call it Dog Alley" , just a commercial alley way with a bunch of free ranging dogs. Pretty friendly in the day time but less so at night. I might get 20 stories out of it.

I have a clear memory of passing an old house whose door was open and banging due to the wind. I was just a kid and I thought “Oh, I’ll just run up the front porch stairs and close that.” And, climbing the stairs, I thought “This almost looks like a haunted house (it was two stories and a tower, all very weathered). What if someone comes out?” By the time I got to the porch, I was picturing an old lady in rags with a shotgun.

I never made it to the front door; jumped off the porch and ran as fast as I could around the corner.

Visiting the old neighborhood years later, I noticed that there was no old house like that. All the houses on that block were ranch homes built in the '60s.

I always wondered if I was going crazy until years later, when I was looking back through some of my old books and… there was that scene!

I’d pictured a literary house so vividly that it “became a memory”!

I am a longterm clinical depressive. I take Lexamil/Lexapro ( Escitalopram ) and Welbutrin ( Bupropion ) - selective serotonin uptake inhibitor and dopamine agonist, respectively.

I often dream of incredibly real situations which I need to fact check against actual reality when I have memories that don’t quite fit. The extraordinarily can be easily dismissed but the more mundane - did I buy milk? - are harder to dismiss without looking into the fridge.

Serotonin is a really interesting brain chemical.

(Also dreams can be a bit boring)