All my life I’ve lived believing some things were actual memories. Like, when I was 6 there were around 20 green spiders with bodies the size of nickles living under my porch steps. I was scared to death of them, and one day my mom scooped them all into a jar and put them in the dump. Another time, I swallowed a quarter and was rushed to the hospital. Yet another time, my dad accidently started a fire on the stove, and it started to spread really quickly. We all grabbed buckets of water and dumped it on the fire, and soon it was out.
These aren’t exactly forgettable memories, and I’ve always remembered them. But, just yesterdy, I talked to my dad, my mom, and my sister about them and no one remembers them. It’s like they never even happened!!! No one else in my family remembers them, just me.
AM I GOING CRAZY??? Or, were these REALLY realistic dreams that I though were memories??? Help, I don’t want to be going crazy…
Don’t worry, dreams are sure vivid experiences like the ones you can have IWL, and if you have great recall of your dreams as I suppose you do, dreams can occasionally be confused with reality. It happened to me a lot of times, and the ironic thing is, it happened before I came here and started taking interest in my dreams. But there’s an explanation for that: even if dreams are mostly ignored, they are still a big part of our life (our entire nights, in fact), and if one thinks (s)he only remembers real life events, that’s what (s)he will think those dreams were when remembering them.
But there’s sure a cure for that, what are we doing here is essentially learning to distinguish dreams for reality, so that we may get conscious of it during the dream. If we don’t, then we can always draw the line when we write in the morning in our DJ, this way we’re sure it was a dream.
Remember to dream on
Reading this post just helped me realized that i had this experience too when i was a child, lol i thought i was going crazy too when i told my parents, remember when… and they had no clue what i was talking about.
“Memory is a funny thing. Research has consistently found that our memories from when we were kids are either extremely inaccurate, or didn’t happen at all. They are just elaborate constructions of a memory storage system that isn’t very good at distinguishing real memories from fake ones.”
yea, just today i was at the sink when the memory of holding a bouque (howeverspelled) of yellow flowers poped up in my head, then i remembered “oh yea i dreamt that last night at some point”…but i questioned that it was a dream repeatedly untill i decided to leave it alone. but sometimes the line of reality and dreams can get blurred especially if your pursuing LDing.
AHahahah that happens. For a long time when I was a kid I remembered one day seeing this huge hole at the floor in my room. Apparently, there was some kind of under construction work that led into this bottomless pit (I lived in an apartment, mind you) in the middle of my room. For years I thought it had happened, until I realized there was no way - such a pit would lead into the next apartment, not into darkness
Sometimes, the past does appear like a dream, especially if no one else remembers them. You parents and your sister might not have considered the incidents important, but you did. So you remember them well and they have forgotten them. If you remember them as something that really happened, probably they really happened. One hardly remembers ones dreams that vividly, though I guess some people might.
I’ve had the opposite problem - I’ve thought some things from my childhood were dreams but they actually happened. When I went to Disneyland as a teenager, I went on Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin and was amazed to find that the ride actually existed in reality - I spent most of my life believing it was something my four-year-old self had dreamed up. Makes for some intense deja vu at times.
There’s no need to worry, false memories happen all the time to people. Sometimes they are not even connected with dreams.
For example, my mum always believed that when she was young, her father beat her. Recently - about 6 years ago - she discovered that he had never even lay a hand on her! Turns out that she’d been suppressed a lot emotionally by him, and that had left her with a very strong false memory of being beaten. So at times very strong emotions (mostly at younger ages) can take the form of memories.
Let’s see. I remember the thermostat thing being in my room.
My best memory was when we went to the store, and I looked down outside. And we were on a giant floating island. We drove down a spiral road back to ground level.
)
