The recent thread about whether a red object, more than ten times the size of the Moon, appeared in the night sky in the late 1950s got me to thinking.
I know that some of my most vivid childhood recollections are of things I know, logically, could not have occured. For instance, I remember that around 1962–I was six then–an all-black choir came down my block on Christmas Eve. At the time, my neighborhood was all-white aside from a few Asians. Hearing the choir upset my older brother and sister terribly, and they asked our dad if we could call the police. He was very disappointed with them and told them they were being silly.
If there really had been a choir like that, this is how the people in my family would probably have reacted. I am sure this event never took place, yet I recall it distinctly. I suspect I am just remembering a dream.
Talking to friends, I suspect these kind of false memories are a fairly common experience. An old friend from college remembers the time in his early childhood when there were eight days in one week because Saturday was repeated.
A friend of mine tells me that her daughter, now six, dimly “remembers” when she was an adult and my friend was a child. The child seems perfectly rational otherwise, and is quite intelligent.
Do any Dopers have similar impossible memories? If so, would they share them?
I swear my Mom left me in a supermarket when I was 4. I remember running out to the parking lot and getting into the car as she was pulling away. I think it’s pretty impossible, but it is so real.
For more, see The formation of false memories. This is an older paper, but the internet seems to have misfiled Loftus & Pickrell’s latest work. It does however address the “lost at the mall” memory.
It’d be interesting to see this sort of scientific approach applied to, for example, the red scare of the 1950’s, or the widely remembered link between bin Laden and Saddam.
The thing that really bugs me is that I KNOW there are a couple of things that I used to SWEAR happened, that no-one else can vouch for, yet I can’t remember them NOW!
The only one I can remember is - I remember one of the first books I ever enjoyed. It was green and had the word ‘gooseberries’ in the title. I thought it was a roald dahl book. I asked everyone and searched everywhere, apparently this book never existed.
Do a search in GD for the term “confabulation” – it was about two years ago that the discussion came up. David B. presented some remarkable background on the topic, which is well worth reading.
(I’m not going to tax the hamsters by searching for it now, but it would be nice if the first person to find that thread posted a link to the thread, to avoid further rodent abuse.)
This happens to me after I have a converation sometimes. I think of something that I should of said, and then a couple weeks later, I can’t remember if I actually said it to them or not.
When I was about 8, I was half convinced that there had been a church picnic in my backyard about 2 weeks back, but when I asked one of the highschoolers from church about it, he had no idea what I was talking about, even though he “had been there.”
My mother left me with my grandparents when I was 8 days old to “look for work” Until 5 years ago I “remembered” hiding in a closet with my aunt,at age 4, hearing my mother’s voice in the living room, saying she’d come to pick me up after 4 years. I didn’t want to go with her, but I wanted to look at her. I couldn’t remember what she looked like.
I’d lost touch with that aunt over the years and reestablished contact 5 years ago. When I brought the story up, her version was radically different. She did hide me in the closet, but my mother only called on the phone. Only my grandfather heard her voice. My aunt over heard him telling her to come on, but He expected me to stay right where I was. She said she’d be there in 2 hours, so off to the closet we went. She never came. The rest was just a little girl’s wishful imagining.
It stayed with me as a memory for 45 years!
You might want to take it with a grain of salt when people tell you “it must have been a dream.” What’s memorable to you may not be memorable to the other people who were there.
I have always remembered quite distinctly a visit to a park when I was about 6 years old. My mother, brother, sister and I were at a state park, went through a hole in a fence, and walked partway across a footbridge high above a ravine. When I mentioned it years later, all three of them tried to convince me it was just a dream. Several years after that I happened across a picture of the bridge and showed it to my mother, and she finally remembered. My brother and sister still don’t remember, but I know they were there.
My memory of the event was not perfect. It turned out to be a different state park from the one I thought it was.
My wife swears up and down that I played through a certain series of computer games with her. I am certain that I never heard of this series before she told me of this memory, so much so that I can’t even think of the name of it at the moment. I am a big gamer, so it’s not likely that I would forget every detail of a game series I played through.
I SWEAR!! i remember getting my leg amputated when i was about 5…now sometimes i walk with this weird limp whenever it flashes in my mind…i mean i have my leg but i just remember laying on the operating table and i saw this huge saw like instrument in the air, then it went down, i blacked out, and woke up with no leg…i know it never happened but i’s just soo vivid and real to me.
I have two memeories that stayed with me for close to ten years that were recently debunked by my family.
1)I used to have one of those things kids push like a vacuum cleaner called “poppers” or some such–the kind that look like they have multi-colored bubblegum balls in a plastic orb. I remember pushing it down the hall of our first house until my mom grabs it from me, saying that I’m too old to play with it and she’s giving it to the Salvation Army. I cried.
2)My mom was out for the morning, so my dad was supposed to babysit me. However, he decided to go to a nearby music store, leaving me home alone. I remember being upset because I wanted orange juice but the container was too big and heavy for me to pour.
Actually, I have a big problem with this. I often can’t distinguish between what I dreamed and what happened in real life, even months later. Not in the sense of “that dream was so vivid!”, but in the way I’ll mention something to someone, and I can tell by their face that it never happened.
You would not believe how often this exact same situation comes up in message boards under the subject of reincarnation. Just for the hell of it, ask the kid what her name used to be!
