Um, I don’t quite know how to even approach this. By definition, writing about what I don’t remember is… tricky. I don’t remember my first steps. I don’t remember much about my time at infant school or junior school. I have pockets of memories, including one from a playgroup near home, an image of being in the group, but it’s fleeting and vague. There’s a memory of a fire alarm going off at school, possibly infant school, and of being on the school field, whilst the little group that was making cakes came out.
It’s entirely possible that every last thought, every last memory, is fully intact, in some strand of my grey matter, but it’s not accessible. We’re talking about decades, not years, and time blurs things. I may even be misremembering, or blending memories together, distorting the picture of what I think I recall.
Our memories are fleeting, and back when I was growing up, we didn’t have smartphones, or cameras in every pocket, to record every moment. We can now capture absolutely everything, which can be good and bad. There is no escaping what we do, but equally, it’s harder to forget when we have visual and written cues, all around us. The drawback is that we maybe don’t think for ourselves, and remember for ourselves, as much as we should.
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Memories can be dangerous things. Or to clarify, what we think are memories.
We may have something which is vivid, but we can’t be certain in some cases if those events did actually happen in the way we thought they did. This is a subject much beloved by those who work in the area of law and ‘The Witness’ testimony.
One extreme example I experienced was having this ‘memory’ of a colleague telling us about a tv programme he had recently seen, fair enough. But my memory insisted he was telling us this in an office I had worked in 20 years ago. Now I knew this to be false, but could I rid myself of that image? Only after several years of muttering ‘wrong, wrong, wrong,’ to myself and grafting the what was correct office scene onto the event…..
Freaky things ‘memories’. Most are fairly correct, but some?????
You’re absolutely right. The brain’s ability to create vivid, ‘real’ events that never happened is remarkable. I had a dream once, where myself and a school friend were on holiday in Florida. It was late in the evening, the stars were out, palm trees wafted in a gentle breeze, and we had cocktails whilst we chatted about any random topic. When I woke up, I had to remind myself that never happened, because the dream was so real, so vivid, that for a moment, I honestly wasn’t sure.
Indeed. Ultra vivid dreams can hang around for quite some time.
Sounds a spell binding one too.