Every so often (like maybe twice a month) I get really vivid memories of places I’ve been in the past, that just pop into my head for no reason at all.
They’re never of emotions or people, or anything like that, just places. More often than not, they’re travelling-related. For example, I might have a very strong sense of a traffic junction in England that I drove through 10 years ago, or a roadside drinks stall I stopped at in Vietnam, or a corridor I walked down when I was at school. They’re so vivid that I can almost close my eyes and see them, and it feels like I was only there yesterday.
Sometimes it was a place I went to on vacation, but I’ll also get obscure places—places I’ve been to once when I was a kid, or something.
Just the other day I had a “flash” of a house where we used to meet when I was a Camp Fire Girl. I am sure I went to that house not that many times, and I was probably under 12 at the time. It’s been a long time since I was 12 and I know I haven’t thought of that house if a very, very long time.
I get those sometimes too. I’ll be sitting at my desk, or driving, or whatever, and suddenly “flash” very vividly on a place I’ve been. The house/neighborhood where I grew up comes up most often, but as yosemitebabe says, sometimes it’s a more obscure place I’ve been to that I haven’t consciously thought about in years.
I get this. But only in association with smells - a smell will suddenly remind me of something incredibly powerfully. Are you sure you haven’t smelled something evocative when you get these sudden flashes?
There are at least three variations on this theme as far as I am concerned:
Out of the blue a bright picture of a real place I have been, complete with sounds and smells and other sense-memory features, will suddenly appear for no obvious reason. It won’t last long, but the mood of that place and the time I was there will carry over for a while after the image has faded. Sometimes, there will be a stream of these that relate in some way (usually by way of mood). They go all the way back to childhood and come to the present as close as the past year.
In dreams, places I have never been, but composties of those places I have been, will form an elaborate “map” of a city with roads, alleys, houses, and all the associated scenes one would expect. These images are as close to a support I might be able to come up with for a “past life” experience, but I prefer to think it’s just some clever “fusion” going on in my dream state.
Being in a place for the first time and having this overwhelming sense that I have been there before. The lastest of these was in Beaufort SC when another couple went with my wife and me for a two-week tour of Savannah and Charleston last year. Something about Beaufort seemed very familiar and “homey” to me at the time. Later on, months later in fact, as I was doing some family tree research, I found evidence that some of my earliest ancestors on USA soil were in the Beaufort area. It made me shudder to think back to that feeling when I was there.
jjimm, what you’ve got going on there is called your memory. Every now and then it’ll kick in and show you something from ‘before’.
But seriously.
I have a miserable memory. That’s a whole other post, believe me.
They (The National Institute of Them) say that the human brain only has so much capacity. If you think about it, we mentally absorb everything that we ever experience, every single moment we’re here. The sights and smells and thoughts and feelings, the dreams. It’s a lot of stuff.
They also say that senility is simply a prosess of the mind holding on to what it thinks is important and letting the rest go. And if that letting go includes things like where the bathroom is and how to use it, well, so be it.
I find that even now in my current ‘not old’ state my mind seems to practice selective remembering. There are plenty of things I remember but they’re not always the most relavent things that I should be remembering. They are, quite often things that, I believe, I subconciously think are important and therefore hold on to.
I do get these same flashes from time to time and I wonder if it’s not the mind doing some house cleaning. Like going through a box of old photos and saying 'Hey! remember this one?" prior to throwing them out or storing them away for good.
Of course since part of your memory conjoured it up, your short-term memory will hold onto it for a time. Round and round.
I get this too, like everyone else in this thread. I usually enjoy it.
However, every once in a while I get a flash of this parking lot near a mall and in front of a big computer discount warehouse type place. This is bothersome because I can’t identify this place. I know I was there, but I don’t know where there was… It may have been Greensboro, NC, but everytime I try to connect my trip there with that place it doesn’t feel right. ARGH!
I tend to get flashes to places when I am listening to music that was out around the time that I had been in that area. I am not expressing what I mean very well, but sometimes it’s a little bit creepy.