Here’s something that happens to me from time to time, and I wonder if this is an identified phenomenon. It’s a bit like deja-vu, but only in my mind. What happens is, I will start to have a memory or image develop in my mind, and I will start to think that I had this image in my mind before, or that I am starting to remember an actual thing from the past, but the memory will not fully form or I will start to question if it is a real memory. Usually, I will quickly forget about it.
I don’t know if my explanation above is clear, but I actually have an example, specifically the first time I recall this happening, and it may help to illustrate what I’m talking about. I was around 10-12, and may have been lying in bed at night. I remembered reading a Sesame Street magazine in my after-school daycare when I was about 7, and I associated the following unrelated images with that magazine: a boy and a girl talking to each other, and a sort of shower of sunlight in a kind of pixelated bubble pattern, through which (I think) I could see a man on a sailboard. Now, I think I know what the image of the boy and girl may have come from. I do recall reading a story in the magazine taken from the Sesame Street movie “Follow That Bird”, which among other things had a screenshot where I think a girl was calling Sesame Street to let them know that Big Bird was imprisoned by some showmen. In the story, a boy was with the girl, but I don’t think he was talking to the girl in the picture (so perhaps my mind associated them with some other image of a boy and girl?) and I can’t say whether the shower of sunlight and the man on the sailboard were also inspired by something from those magazines I read, so I don’t know why I imagined those further images as having apperared in it.
Is there a name for this phenomenon, where you start thinking you remember something, and then the memory immediately fades and you’re not sure if you’re remembering an earlier thought or memory or if it’s just a new image in your mind that you’re perhaps associating with an earlier but separate thought, memory, image, idea, etc? I should note that this normally happens to me when I’m groggy, so maybe it’s somehow related to dreaming?
This is an example of incomplete or conflated episodic recall. The issue occurs when you are not able to make a spatio-temporal reference for an episodic memory, and so the brain perceptually adds details or conflates separate memories to try to root it in mental constructs of time and space. This isn’t quite the same thing as a constructed (false) memory, although it is suspected that the underlying mechanisms are similar, i.e. the brain is trying to make ‘predictions’ to fill in gaps between details (real or imagined).
Why and how we forget memories is an extremely interesting question to which no one really seems to have any answer despite much research. Memories themselves seem quite resilient once formed, sometimes to an unfortunate degree in the case of traumatic episodes albeit often repressed and being the cause of emotional disturbance generalized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD or C-PTSD). While anterograde amnesia (inability to form new episodic memory) is quite common with people suffering dementia and they have difficulty controlling recall of memories or putting them in the correct context they are generally still able to recall people and events from decades past with great fidelity, albeit often not able to understand the passing of time or intermediate events, like people dying. Spontaneous retrograde amnesia (a wholesale forgetting of past episodes) is actually pretty rare, and despite temporary amnesia being a common narrative trope most permanent retrograde amnesia can be attributed to traumatic brain injury, neurological damage due to infection, surgical alteration, or nutritional deficiency, or electroconvulsive therapy.
So, it isn’t clear why memories “fade” or exactly how the mind conflates together disconnected, poorly recalled episodic memories. There is the oft-repeated assertion that dreaming (generally rapid eye movement (REM) sleep but sometimes extended to “daydreaming” or the kind of free-association you do when drifting to sleep or dozing) is some kind of back-end processing of memories to organize memories, “clear out” older memories, or deal with repressed emotions but despite the fact that this claim is widely accepted among the psychology and psychiatric community there is almost no real evidence to support it. In fact, while dreams often utilize personalities and locales from your experience they rarely form coherent or accurate recollections of events, and don’t seem to have much of an affect on processing repressed trauma or unresolved emotional conflicts, and in fact can serve as reinforcement of adverse emotional states. There is an underlying assumption that dreams have some kind of functional purpose but my suspicion is that they are purely an artifact of undirected ‘conscious’ processes, likely with deep evolutionary roots to the affective neural systems, not unlike the hallucinations that people experience when using psychedelic substances but with less intensity, and don’t have any particular role to play in cognitive maintenance or adjustment.
Is also to normal to confuse memories of dreams you had with memories of actual events you have experienced? because it has happened to me a few times.
I’ve never personally experienced that but I know that some people have emotional responses from dreams that the bring into their waking life, or conflate things that occurred in dreams with reality. Memories from dreams seem less persistent and often less substantive than either direct experience or consciously ‘constructed’ memories (daydreams or fictions) but I don’t know if there is a good thesis as to why.
I think that it can happen. Particularly, for example, with memories from early childhood.
My memory goes back a long way. I know people who say that they remember nothing from before they were 4 or 5, or even that their general memory of their childhood is murky. For me this is difficult to imagine: I have a few memories from when I would have been no older than 2 (minor things like sitting on my high chair in the kitchen) and in fact remember my toilet training, which I completed successfully when I was 2 1/2. I distinctly remember lying on my parents’ bed (at that age I slept with my parents in their room; I even remember the designs on my crib) and telling my mother my diaper wasn’t comfortable (shortly after, I started definitively using the toilet). All these memories are clear and logical enough that I am sure they are real memories, not dreams. Basically, at the time of my toilet training, I started developing a long-term memory, which was fully developed by the time I was 3. From then on, I consistently remember a lot. However, I have an even earlier “memory”, from when I was 1 1/2 years old. It is very vague but it’s of something I know happened. Namely, for about four months at that age, my family lived in an apartment in a house where a man called Jack would come and mow the lawn. I have this very simplistic image in my mind of being on the balcony (or maybe at a window) with my mother and looking down at Jack. Again, I know he existed (and even recall once meeting him later at a mall) and that he would come to mow the lawn, but I don’t know if the image I have in my mind is the one that was imprinted when I saw him at that early age, or whether it comes from a later dream that I may have had when I was, say, 3, perhaps based on a description of my mother’s of Jack coming to cut the grass at that house.
I have a memory of a day around Christmas from when I was 13. With that day, I associate an image of a severe-looking woman like Queen Elizabeth I of England with her teased-up hairdo. I have no idea whether that image comes from a dream I had at that time, an image I saw on TV or in a book, or of a case of “incomplete or conflated episodic recall” (to use Stranger_On_A_Train’s expression) that I had on that day. I simply don’t remember. I just associate that image with that day.
The ‘misinformation effect’ is well known in eyewitness testimony.
Memory distortions can occur in different ways. Most distortions involve some form of explicit or covert misleading information. One form of this phenomenon, the ‘misinformation effect’, has been thoroughly studied for the last 30 years. This effect refers to a distortion in an original memory after being exposed to misleading information related to that memory, e.g. an impairment in the memory of the face of a perpetrator after being exposed to a photo of a police suspect who was not the true perpetrator. This ‘misinformation’ is considered misleading in that in distracts from the original memory, not because it is purposefully deceitful. Laboratory studies have shown that it is possible to induce memories in a participant that are entirely false, such as a special hospital visit at age 4 when no such visit happened.
Maybe getting off topic, I’m not very knowledgeable on dreams but I thought there has been fairly consistent evidence of deleterious mental effects from prolonged periods in which you are not allowed to fall into REM sleep. Wouldn’t that suggest there is some form of physiological maintenance going on from REM sleep cycles?
I had a dream a year or two or so ago that I was in the audience at an indy pro wrestling show (which is something I’ve done multiple times in the past) where one of the wrestlers had to cancel at the last minute so the promoter asked for someone to volunteer as a jobber (I.e. a guy who gets paid to lose and make the other guy look good) for the night. I volunteered and I got picked, and they brought me backstage, had me put on a costume, make my entrance to thunderous boos at the beginning of the show, throw one punch at my opponent, then get manhandled and quickly pinned in about 60 seconds or so.
I’ve had several conversations about wrestling with friends/co-workers since then where I’ve found myself about to say “I actually wrestled in a match once”, only to stop and question whether that really happened to me before I remember that it was a dream I had.