Things We Clearly Remember, Though They Never Happened

In My Humble Opinion
21

I lived in Japan in high school, and had a vivid memory of seeing a Christmas display in a department store featuring Santa Claus on the cross. I mentioned it in a thread here once, and someone showed me the Snopes article debunking it. I stuck to my guns in the thread (I can be stubborn that way), but the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d imagined it. I think now that someone told me the story while I lived there, and over the years I came to think I’d actually seen it.

I find this strange and somewhat disturbing, considering it’s only been 16 years since I lived there (I’m 31). I mean I was certain I’d seen it.

22

Something happened to one of the cats when I was in high school (so between 1992-5 since he was an adult when it happened) which caused him to lose a front fang. I remember this:

The cat ran off into the woods while I called after him, and came back a few hours later after tangling with some sort of woodland creature. My parents then brought him to the vet.

But my mother swears:

My friend Dawn called me all upset because she’d seen the cat in the road, hurt, but her step-father wouldn’t stop so she could get him. Someone jogging picked him up and brought him to the house. They then brought him to the vet.

Now, to this day I have no idea what really happened to the cat. I swear I saw him run off and spent an hour calling him, but my mother insists he was hit by a car. How would the jogger know he was ours? Why would I not remember the phone call? She’s “misremembered” other events, so I doubt the validity of it, but I still can’t be entirely sure I’m right and she’s not. The cat himself offers no explaination.

23

Gunslinger insists we went to a go-kart place in town once when I was visiting him. We’ve been since then, but I have no memory of ever having been to that go-kart track before our subsequent visit (which we undertook in hopes that I would remember the track once I was driving on it - I did not).

24

When I was three, I remember vividly thinking my Dad had gotten lost and I went out to look for him. I remember a wider street than the one we lived on with bright streetlights. About six blocks from home, I went into a mom-and-pop store (actually brother-and-brother as it turned out) and I went toward the back, looking for my Dad. I remember the dark, wide, wooden floorboards and two or three short aisles. The clerk and his register were on the left as I went in.

At the back of the store I noticed some bread and decided we could use a loaf. I remember that it was nearly as big as me. When I tried to walk out the store with it, the clerk stopped me and nicely told me I had to pay for that before I could go out. After that, I remember my Dad coming in to get me. I’d always assumed that the clerk had called him.

Over 40 years since then I moved back to the same area and decided to seek out that store. I found it right where I expected it on a wider street than the others and as I walked in, it was like two transparencies of the same interior being laid over one another. One being what I remembered and the other being what I was seeing right then.

It was a strange experience. I’d even bet that the clerk was the same guy, just older. I’m certain he was one of the brothers who had owned it. One had died some years earlier and the other closed up the store and retired about a year after my visit I’m glad I had the chance to see it before then.

Later, I told my Dad about how the store hadn’t changed a bit and about my childhood search for him. He didn’t remember anything like that happening, something that I was sure of until then. He said also that we never went to that store and that we would go to another one about two blocks from our home and in another direction. He even took me by that one (it’s closed and boarded up) and I don’t remember ever being there.

Now, I know I was 3 then because we only lived in that house for about 9 months before moving about 10 miles south and I know how I felt when I saw that store again. But if we didn’t frequent that store, how would the clerk know whom to call, if indeed he did, since we weren’t regulars? Otherwise, how would my Dad know where to find me? Most of all, how could my Dad not remember coming in to get his lost kid?

Though it still seems so real, I can only figure it never happened. All these years of remembering it though…it’s strange. We must have stopped at that store at least once to make such an impression on me. I remember a little about the house we lived in but not as much as that store!

25

There was some stuff in New Scientist about this recently. It’s due to the way memory works.

Every time you remember anything, it gets moved - not copied - from “long-term” storage into “short-term” storage. As you run it through your mind it gets re-written fresh, in the same way as an event currently occurring does. So any modification that happens to the memory as you remember it (such as it changing from being a dream to having actually happened, or that it happened to you rather than being told to you) gets written back into the memory exactly as if it originally happened that way.

There is no way for you to distinguish in your mind between an event that actually happened to you, and one you have come to remember as having happened to you. They will seem identically as crisp and clear to you. It’s only clues about impossible things that occur in the memory that mean you can work out if a memory is false.

26

I can vividly remember standing in my crib, looking out the window and seeing a blue jay on the wooden fence behind our house. There are several problems with this story, but the most telling one is this: the bedroom my sister and I shared had only one window, and there was a big old steam radiator right underneath it. My crib couldn’t have been where it would have to be for this to work.

On the other hand, I had assumed that a memory of what I thought of as the “chocolate milk river” had to be false, too. I mentioned it in passing to my mother this summer - a river the color of chocolate milk flowing past our back door! And she said, No, that’s real - that was during Hurricane Agnes. Some neighbors used to have a big vegetable garden in a lot behind (and uphill from) our house. The “chocolate milk” was the rain washing away their topsoil! :eek:

27

aryk29: I’m sorry to be so late in responding, but it is only now that I checked this thread again and saw that you had posted to it after my last reading.

In hindsight, I guess I should have been more explicit in drescribing how friend’s daughter “remembers” the time when she was the parent and my friend was the child. There is nothing in the way the little girl says it that suggests that this was in another life. Rather, the little girl remembers that “a long time ago” (that is, we gather, a few years back), she and her mother’s roles were reversed, but they were otherwise the same people, living in the same house. Whether the little girl was supposed to be married to her father at the time, I don’t know.

My friend is named Carla. Her daughter is named Peyton. Back when she was about three or four Peyton got into a habit of telling her mother that if she was the mommy and her mommy was the little girl, she would let her do various things which Carla was forbidding–having ice cream as the main course at dinner, for instance. My guess is that Peyton liked thinking about some of these scenarios so much that they became conflated with her actual memories, so now she thinks she actually remembers having been the mommy and having let Carla have all the ice cream she wanted, whenever she wanted.

I suspect this accounts for a lot of reincarnation stories too.

28

I read a book when I was about 8 about a little kid getting sent up in orbit in a Mercury-type rocket. The story resonated with me sto strongly that in the back of my mind, I thought it had actually happened to me and I was about 30 before I consciously realized it hadn’t.

I’m a comic book collector. I wrote an article recently about the Filipino artists who suddenly started drawing American comics en masse in 1972. Every vividly-remembered Nestor Redondo story I intended to cite wound up being drawn by somebody else, to the point that I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen the guy’s work. I mean, that sounds trivial, but it’s like a sports fan discovering upon research that all the clearly-remembered 1969 Mets games he refers to in conversation all the time were actually some other team entirely. Or a Columbo fan who writes about how brilliantly Dennis Weaver portrayed the character. Kinda devastating, in a small way.

29

When I was a young fellow, my parents and I would sometimes drive to Montana or Washington for a few days. On one visit when I way maybe 8 or 9, we arrived in a town in late afternoon and drove to the motel. There was a Black Angus restaurant around a corner, with a large open field on the corner. You could see one from the other.

We walked to dinner at the restaurant. On the way back, I decided I was going to “take a shortcut” and cut across the field. My parents said “OK” since they could see me the whole time. I got to the sidewalk near the motel and looked around for my folks, but couldn’t see them. I stayed on the sidewalk for a little bit waiting for them, but they never came and it was becoming twilight. I continued to the motel and went to the door to our room. I knocked and Mom answered and yelled at me because I’d disappeared and had been gone for half an hour.

Mom says nothing even remotely approaching this story ever happened. Yet I remember it.

I believe her that it never happened, but the memory becomes no less real because of it.

30

I have vivid memories of being able to fly when I was young. I would run along the hallway in the house and kick my legs backwards (basically kneeling in mid-air). At first, I would only be able to travel a little distance before settling gently to the ground, but with practice I eventually was able to zip around the house floating a foot or so off the ground.

At some point I realized that this couldn’t have really happened, but even into my teenage years I would catch myself having fond “memories” of my days spent flying as a child.

Barry

31

But I was lost in a shopping mall!

My family corroborates this. I was paged to the escalator because I was obsessed with them. My brother remembers being irritated with me because I wouldn’t go back with him until I got the ride the escalator up and down. :smiley:

But I do “remember” lots of things that my brothers and sisters did to me that they don’t remember. They’re all at least 9 years older than me. I don’t know whether they’re real memories or not. (I’d never admit that to them, though.)

32

Maybe it does, slipster. But the subject was bound to come up sooner or later in a thread like this! :smiley:

From what you’ve told me it does sound like a kid’s overactive imagination but also doesn’t rule out the alternative. I suggested the name because sometimes the kid will name a deceased relative.

I wonder where the percentages of Dopers stand on the issue.

33

I remember posting to a thread about Grandparents last night but apparently I didn’t because the thread doesn’t seem to exist.

34

I’m not sure if my “earliest memory” is real. It involves being bathed in a blue plastic baby bathtub (kind of like this, except that I don’t remember any other support except for my head), and feeling extremely insecure because my head was precariously propped up on the little ledge and the water was very near my face. I also remember being more than a little distrustful of the person bathing me, and his/her ability to keep my head above the water.

Another memory involves passing by a certain stop sign on our way home, and it always being knocked over. My father would get out each time and try to set it upright again, until one day we discovered it was completely torn to shreds, so he couldn’t fix it. The odd thing about that one is I have repeated memories, of it happening again and again, until the final time. And I remembered the intersection years later when we passed it.

The first one might be partially real, but my parents swear the second one never happened.

35

I sometimes have very vivid dreams that I think are real, several times I’ve woken up convinced I was married, but I’m not, on one occassion I didn’t go on a sponsored walk because I’d been phoned and told it was cancelled - nope just me dreaming! Another time I didn’t speak to a friend for a couple of months becuase we’d had a blazing arguement and she’d thrown me out of her house and told me never to come back - yep, that was a dream too!

36

When I was about three or so, I remember taking an exit off the interstate that goes past a runoff pond for what used to be an FMC plant. In the middle of it was a tiny gazebo floating on the water, and there were little elves having a wedding. Tiny people, wedding dress, the whole deal. Of course that didn’t happen, but to this day I remember it.

I have the problem of remembering my best friend’s memories as my own. We were together alot of the time as teenagers, and some of the stuff happened when I was there, but it wasn’t me doing it (i.e. her bumping a red truck when trying to park and driving off. No damage to the truck, but we were scared.) I swear I thought it was me driving, but it wasn’t. Maybe I just find her memories more exciting. hehe.

37

Wow, want to know something weird:

That did happen to me and my dad. At least I assume it did… I need to ask my parents to make sure…

I’ve had a couple weird things that I ‘remember’. One of them was that the sky was very bright even though it was far past when it should have been getting dark, but I’m very sure that was just a weird random memory leak.

The other one was me and my parents visiting a guy selling a lawn mower and me sitting on a fence shooting a little mcDonalds happy meal toy in the air while they were talking about the lawn mower. Very strange, I swear it happened, but my parents disagree.

38

Years ago I had a dream about a particular place I felt like I’d been to before but never actually had.

Then more recently I met somebody online (we’ve never seen each other face to face) and told about the dream. So I sketched the place I dreamt of.

Then I got a reply saying that the drawing was of a building my friend owns.

39

I “remember” seeing a news report about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. For years, I assumed that it happened when I was maybe four years old. While idly flipping through a desk almanac about ten years ago, I discovered that the eruption took place in 1980. I was born in 1978; I wasn’t even two yet. There’s no way I could remember the actual at the time news reports. I can only think I saw a documentary that included news footage and decided that it was actually happening at that moment.

40

I’m not sure whether or not this did happened, but I suppose that’s in the vein of this thread. (all references to remembering should be in quotes)

When I was in kindergarten, I remember there was this large sheet of paper with different shapes with the name of a color in them. We were supposed to go up and color them in with our crayons. For some reason, I believe that in that process I somehow got to hold hands with this blond, blue-eyed girl walking back to my seat after I finished (I colored in a circle with orange).

How this occurred, whether or not it occurred, and why it occurred are beyond me.