Suspicious Memories

[ManhattanSkyline]

There's some anomalies from my past that I feel are important to share at this time. There's much of my childhood I don't remember, but in the past year or so I've been remembering things that don't make sense. They didn't make sense when they happened, and they don't make sense now, which makes me think that they must not be true memories, that I'm just imagining things that never really happened, but the weird thing is my family remembers these exact same weird things that "never really happened." They are anomalous shared memories of events that don't make logical sense or of places that don't actually physically exist...and yet we all remember them.

The first memory is a truly fantastic one, the recovery of which has been a strange event in and of itself. I first remembered this event when I was a child, a few years after it had happened, and then, curiously, forgot it again. That seems to happen a lot with these memories. They are so hard to hang on to. When you are remembering them and thinking about them, they are so clear and vivid and undoubtedly true and real, but it's like the second you stop thinking about them, you forget them again, and each re-remembering is like a jolt "How could I forget this??!!" and then the next minute you can't remember what you remembered a second ago.

But anyway, here is the original memory: It was a couple of years after my parents' divorce. I was 7 or 8. We had moved into this tiny, white, matchbox house that had a willow sapling growing in the front yard. I really hated that house. I never felt safe in it. I've already posted an abduction-type experience that happened in that house, but for this particular memory it was a late winter afternoon. My eldest sister had suggested that we all get on our jackets and go outside for a walk. We all thought that was a great idea and put on our jackets (I remember a bright red one, I can't remember if I was wearing it or my sister was), and instead of taking the road, we filed out the back door and explored the small area at the back of the house. What's weird is we never did anything like this before or since. I remember we walked through the open gate of a small field adjacent to the back yard. It was a crisp, cold day. All the tall grass was dead and brown and the tree branches were bare. No snow for our Southern winters. Then the memory cuts out until the family suddenly comes upon this strange depression in the ground. I remember it was surrounded by tall trees. And I remember all of us being so excited and shocked and awed because we never knew this big depression was here, and it was just right outside our back door. The depression was soooo odd. It was huge, absolutely huge, and we didn't see it coming. My mom later mentioned she thought it might have been a dried up tank/reservoir, but there were no mounds of earth surrounding the depression. There was no evidence the hole had been dug out. There were the trees and then suddenly the ground dropped off! But the strangest thing was the perfection of its shape. This depression in the ground was huge and perfectly round and even, absolutely precise in its edges and slope. It looked as if this depression was the perfect imprint of an absolutely perfect half-sphere pressed into the ground--again the perimeter was perfectly round and the slope of depression's walls was absolutely perfect and even. What's weird was the inside the depression; there was the usual dead winter grass inside, a few young saplings, and I had the impression that the space was covered uniformly with evenly spaced dark tree stumps. Not only that, there was a perfectly straight narrow trail, like a deer trail or "goat trail" as my mother described it, that precisely bisected the entire depression. This depression appeared at once natural and so strangely unnatural in it's proportions and shape. We entered the depression walking single-file along the narrow trail looking up the sides of it and ooh-ing and awe-ing at its sudden appearance and strangeness.

I remember being in the bottom of the depression and looking around and seeing my family. I remembering seeing the splash of red from the jacket inside this drab scenery. I vaguely remember stumbling upon an abandoned, decayed ooooold roof-less Jeep off to the side of the trail.

Then there's a skip in the memory, and I'm out of the depression. The light outside has changed. It's evening; the sun is suddenly setting, shadows are long. I'm 30-40 feet from the edge, looking back and seeing the rest of my family walk single-file out of the depression, and my heart is racing with excitement like we had just discovered some immense wonderful secret, like a buried treasure or something. I don't remember anything else of that day. We never talked about that day or that place. It's like we suddenly forgot all about it.

As I said before, just a few years after the event I suddenly remembered this event. I asked my mother and sisters about it, and they said that I was imagining it, that nothing like that ever happened. But I just knew it hadn't been a dream. We had actually moved to a mobile home in the very next lot next to the willow house at that time, so I decided to sneak outside and explore that area and see if I could find it again. What's strange is I found the circle of tall trees, but there was no depression! Not even a little dip in the landscape. The land in the middle of the trees was flat, no evidence of there ever having been a tank there or any evidence whatsoever that the ground had ever been disturbed there. Another strange thing was that the space between the trees where the depression should have been was much smaller than I remember. The trees were actually much closer together. When the depression was there, the space had been absolutely huge. I went back home scratching my head, guessing that it had been a dream.

Fast forward to earlier this summer. Out of nowhere this memory came back to me. How could I have ever forgotten something like that?! I asked my mother and sister about the depression again, but this time their response was completely different. Of course they remembered! But their memories were fuzzy too. They remembered the perfectly round depression and the straight little pathway through it and being amazed to find it there, but they couldn't exactly remember where it had happened. They remembered going out for the walk behind the house, but they guessed we had walked all the way past the railroad tracks because we had been gone so long. I didn't think we had. My mothered remembered a ring of trees. My sister remembered the Jeep too (I hadn't mentioned it when I asked them) although she was struggling very hard to remember. Apparently, that day was fuzzy in everybody's memory, which is strange because you would think the excitement of stumbling upon such a wonder would have burned the details into our memory.

A couple of weeks later, I was visiting my mother, and we started talking about it again and another fuzzy memory of a place that I'll describe later. I suggested we drive out to the old place and see if we could find it. As we drove out there, we approached from the opposite side of the railroad tracks and quickly realized that our walk could not have traversed the railroad tracks. There's fences, tall grasses for snakes to hide, and a very steep drop off. Not only that, but the property on this opposite side of the railroad tracks was familiar houses of friends that we knew well. Our walk had to have remained in that small space behind the house, and that particular area is a really small triangle of land as the railroad tracks curve around behind it. It is mostly composed of people's back yards and a small hay field. As we were approaching this area, I noticed the ring of tall cottonwood trees where my search had come up dry when I was young. Suddenly my mother pointed to those cottonwood trees, and said, "I think those are the trees." I knew that had been the spot! I was excited to see that she had independently identified the same spot for the depression that I had. But as we got closer and looked in, we could see the same thing that I saw when I searched that spot after I had first remembered: The space was absolutely flat and small with no evidence of the ground being disturbed there. Also, no sign of a ruined Jeep anywhere in the area. We scratched our heads in puzzlement. My mother and I separately remembered the same large depression and identified the same spot where we thought it had been, and it simply was not there. My mother suggested that someone must've filled it in in recent years, but I knew from my childhood search that it had actually never been there. How could we all remember something that was never really there? I wonder if something more happened that day than what we actually remembered. I wonder if the depression was a shared screen memory of an unusual event.

Finally, let me back track a little and add another tid-bit of anomalous memory. Also, this past summer, I suddenly remembered something else I had re-remembered and re-forgotten countless times before from my childhood--the memory of a ruined brick wall. This is the memory: I come upon this ruined red-brick wall. It's actually three walls of a very small ruined building or room. There's no longer any roof, only three walls and a crumbled fourth. We enter through the gap in the fourth wall. I say "we" because I know I was with someone, but I can't quite remember who. It was someone small like me, someone I considered a really good friend that I played with a lot. He was a boy, I think, but I can't remember seeing his face, (maybe he had blonde hair?) and as I search through my memories of the kids in the neighborhood where I grew up, I know of no such friend (I always played by myself, preferred it that way, didn't really have any friends outside of school. If I did play with someone, it was usually my sisters). Anyway, in this memory I walk into this ruin. I have the impression that I come here with this boy all the time. It's a very familiar place. I have the placement of every brick memorized. I could draw it for you. There's trees close around that kind of canopy the place. It's lunch time, and I've brought a sack lunch--a sandwich, and I was so excited because we traded, and I got his Cheetos. We were poor, and my mother never splurged by buying something so frivolous as Cheetos.

I remember this next part very vividly. I was sitting high on top of the back wall, licking my cheesy fingers, when it was like I suddenly came to my senses. I realized how high the wall was that I was sitting on, and I suddenly wondered how I had gotten up there. I remember wondering, "Had I flown?" Suddenly this realization of this paradox washed over me--I was sitting on the top of this wall with no way or no memory of having gotten up there. Instantly, I went from cheesy bliss (maybe there was something in those cheetos?) to a feeling that something was absolutely fundamentally wrong with reality. I remember looking down at my "friend," and this is the weirdest part. He's just a smudge, like a shadow or a dark heat-wave smudge; it's like I can't focus and see what or who he is, but suddenly I realize he's not who he seems to be, and I am filled with the absolute terror and dread that have become familiar with "abduction" experiences over the past couple of years. At this point the memory abruptly ends.

Just like the depression, I have driven to the spot in the community where I grew up many times where I felt this ruined building had been, only to find absolutely nothing there, just an empty lot. I know this wasn't a dream, because on the day my mother and I went to search for the depression, I asked her if she remembered such a place, and she did! The strange thing was she had enormous difficulty remembering it, even just picturing it in her head. I told her I had played there many times and that it was such a familiar place, and she was like "Yeah, I know what you're talking about, but I just can't hold the image in my mind. I can't remember where it was. Didn't we discover it when we went on that walk and found the depression?" (!) That's when I knew these "mis-memories" had to be real. And her placing the ruined building in the same space and time as the mysterious walk makes me wonder if the ruin is a part of the same reality-bending experience. I was shocked at how little my mothered remembered of that day we went for a walk to those places. I chalked up my lack of memory to general childhood memory fuzziness, but she was a grown woman then and still couldn't remember hardly anything. Her explanation for her lack of memory was "That was a hard, emotional time for all of us."

[Headsup7up]

I hope you can recover your memories. It seems with memories like this there is a lot of strange emotions involved. Maybe journaling would help and I've heard of hypnosis working for some people.
I would think there is definitely something too that if both you and your mother had the same or similar memories about the trees. I have a few memories myself that don't make any sense but I haven't shared them all yet. Thank you for posting this.

[Tess]

ManhatenSkyline....they are notorious for making us forget!!!!!!.
For everything I have been through since I was a child shall I say.. the icing on the cake came recently when I saw two U.F.O's in the span of two weeks moving at an enormous speed.From my perspective one seem to be heading towards the moon,they could not have been airplanes for these do not cross the sky in a few seconds.
Tess.

[ManhattanSkyline]

Headsup & Tess,

Yes, they do have a way of making us forget, and my family forgets/remembers at different times too so it's frustrating. When I was young I would get so hurt at my mom because it seemed like she worked so hard to change the subject or ignore all the weird stuff I was experiencing.

I am keeping a journal. I want to remember. I feel like I MUST remember. I know there's something that happened, a visitation I think, when I was a toddler. I keep having similar dreams, very vivid. It was at night, spring time, in the backyard of my father's place where I grew up. I'm always standing between the greenhouse and the pond. There's a pilot who comes down from the sky in a funny looking plane and he doesn't look right. He always wears a coverall flight suit (sometimes orange, sometimes tan) and an oxygen mask. Sometimes the plane looks like a WWII fighter jet and sometimes it looks like a funny-looking, glowing sleigh. Sometimes government/military people come to investigate, and we hide him. I know I'm not supposed to tell. Sometimes I am myself, the toddler, and other times it's like I'm watching things happen, and I've got a knife, and I'm trying to protect the little girl (me) who's hiding in the greenhouse. In one dream, I kill a guy, but his face is smudged out, and I can't tell who it is, but his clothes look familiar. Sometimes I just despair of ever finding out the truth.

Incidentally, my sister and I drove out to my childhood town to check on my dad because we had heard there was a grass fire nearby. By the time we got there, there was no sign of fire. We ended up driving around the back roads where we used to live. We stopped on the street by the church where we used to play. It was along the alleyway where the ruined brick wall was supposed to be. I started walking down the alleyway because I wanted to see if it was there! As I was exploring, I asked my sister if she remembered that building and she did, but when we walked to the place where it was supposed to be, it wasn't there, not even the remnants of a foundation or one stray brick. Still scratching my head.

[ManhattanSkyline]

I wanted to post this here because I'm discovering some more glitches and problems with some of my childhood memories. Recently my eldest sister has been confiding in me. She's starting to realize that something strange happened to us when we were kids. She's even said the word "aliens" as a possible explanation, but I can tell that she's not quite ready to accept something like that. She's afraid to remember, but she knows something unusual happened.

I've always been close to this sister. We shared the same bedroom when we had the shadow man and white lion experiences. We share a lot of the same feelings about our childhood that my other sister doesn't share, and we feel different for it. We've asked each other "Do other families have this feeling about their childhoods and their childhood home?" I'm not sure they do. We've always confirmed for each other that we feel our childhoods were simultaneously magical and horrific at the same time but we can't remember why, just the feeling. We have both expressed to each other that it feels like there's something we are not remembering, and if we could just remember back far enough, our lives would suddenly make sense. We both have a strong tie to the land where we grew up (my fathers land). Both of us have this aching feeling that the place is the center of the universe, and if it was ever sold or we lost access to it, we would lose our very identities and our souls would be lost and adrift in the universe for ever. That's sounds a little over-dramatic but it's honest; it's an intense feeling. I'm sure a lot of people feel a strong connection to the place they grew up, but it seems our feelings about the place are more intense. That land is alive. It knows us. And we know it. We can sense it like a close friend when we visit as if it senses us and welcomes us. Maybe it has to do with the visitations and the dreams of the people under the land and those camped out in the field that I've talked about in other posts. Maybe they are or were really there, just under the surface.

For several days, my sister and I talked and drove around the small community where we grew up. As we did, there were a few discrepancies in what we both remembered and what the town actually looks like now, which makes me wonder if some of the places we remembered were really there or if they were part of visitation experiences. We will remember the places, but they just aren't there, just like the incidents in the above post. For example, as my sister and I were driving through town. We drove by a street corner and my sister pointed out a small house on the corner and told a story about how she never noticed that corner or the house for years until she was in high school even though it was very near where we lived and drove past it all the time. As she pointed out the corner and the house, I couldn't believe my eyes. The corner didn't look right and that was the wrong house! All my life I have vividly remembered that corner and there was a different house on that lot, a big white house with a wrap-around porch, with a small wire fence around it, and the front of the house faced the corner of the lot. What was there now was nothing of the kind. There was a very small house, no porch, off to the side of the lot and facing a straight edge of one of the streets. I was shocked! My brain couldn't process it. I remember driving by and walking by that white house for years and now it's suddenly not there! My sister said no such house had ever been there. I was really freaking out. Long story short, we saw my other sister that night, and I asked her if she remembered the house that sat on that lot. She described the house I remembered! I wasn't crazy! We thought that maybe someone had literally moved the house away, but if you look at the lot now, I don't see how there was ever any room for that house. There's a storage house back behind the small house that's there now. The storage house would have been where the white house would have been and there's several large oak trees on the property where the white house should have been. If the white house had been there, some of those trees would have been growing in the middle of the house or porch! They were not young trees as if they had sprouted there just in my lifetime. There's no trace of the wire fence anymore. I'm scratching my head.

What makes me more suspicious is this very fuzzy, dream-like memory of the place. I remember being very young when the road outside our house was still red brick (my sister was surprised I remembered back that far; the brick had been paved over with asphalt when I was still very young.) I remember it being night time and my sisters and I and the Smith girls! decided to walk down the street a bit and talk. I was the youngest and always tagged along. I remember when we got to the point in the road where that corner was, I remember the memory starting to feel more like a dream. I have a vague recollection of a child in a red cardigan sweater walking into the house (I used to have one, I remember the red sweater/jacket in the depression in the post above), but I can't remember if it's me or one of us or someone else. I remember looking across the road from the house and seeing a big gray UFO flying saucer hovering low over the alleyway and feeling an electric buzzing feeling throughout my whole body. (This was the alleyway where I thought the ruined brick building had been in the above post but could never find again). There's simultaneously a festive, holiday feeling to the experience and a feeling of dread-mostly from the buzzing, electricity feeling which is never a pleasant feeling. I remember seeing a window and the silhouette of a man's profile, but I don't know if it was in the UFO or in the small rock house directly below it. I remember feeling excited like "It's happening again!" But I don't remember anything else after seeing that UFO. I haven't told my sister about the UFO memory. I don't think she's ready. She's still really afraid to remember stuff.

There's another missing house we noticed in our driving around town. There used to be a largish house (white again) on what we called "dead man's curve". It had a silver wire fence around it as well but it had distinctive decorative metal wagon wheels between each post. We both remembered that house perfectly, drove by it every day of our lives for years, it being on our way to our dad's house and the trailer houses we would live at for many years afterwards. When we recently drove by there, it's not there! The wire fence is gone and the house is gone. Again there's another small house to the side of the lot, but there's not enough room for the house we remember being there. The drive way is still there, but there's nothing, just over-grown brush and trees and again no room for the size of house we both remember being there. Both of the houses were white clapboard which reminds me of the white clapboard house I always dream of in connection with my visitation experiences, where I would meet my 'secret father' and where one of the tall lanky alien people showed me one and said, "This is yours." Could these houses that were never really there, could they really be camouflaged craft of some kind? Just like I remember the camp being set up in my father's field for a time, could these houses be camouflaged camps of some kind that were there as watch posts and connection places as we grew up? I remember reading a report this summer of a rectangular white house popping up in a field in Arizona, and by the evening had completely vanished. It had been reported as a UFO sighting because the people that reported it who lived across the street had lived there for ages and never saw or heard any equipment bringing the house in or taking it away, it being a small, quiet country road.

A lot of this reminds me of a dream I had a few years back. It was so vivid and emotional that I never forgot it. In the dream, I was out in the country near the town where I grew up by a river bed. The river bed was dry, but there was a construction crew that was building a huge bridge across the dry bed. They were a group of foreigners (which makes me wonder if that isn't dream code for the visitors) who had been called in to construct the bridge. There was a young boy in a red cardigan there who explained he was Dutch and who's family was working on the bridge. He brought out a child's picture book and showed it to me (I can guess that this part of the dream is trying to suggest the dream is about my childhood). I asked him why they were building a bridge over a river with no water in it. He explained that years ago, the original river had been dammed up and re-routed. His family were building the bridge because the dam was about to be torn down and the river would flow in its original course again. In a few days, the dry river bed would be a rushing torrent. In the next frame of the dream, it is night time and I am at staring at an archeological sight with big lights focused on the dig. I was at the base of a hill and I could see the lights of my current home town spread out not too far away in the distance. I could see that the archaeological site was a square dig that had dug down several feet maybe 20ft of mud and at the bottom of the mud layers was a red brick road. In the dream, I was coherent and understood that this was all symbolic of my childhood memories. I understood that the river had been my childhood memories and the emotions associated with them. I understood that the damming of the river had been the visitors' attempt to erase my memories and mute the emotions that went with them. Those original buried memories were represented by the buried brick road (the same brick road that was at the end of our childhood home's driveway and had been paved over when I was extremely young) that had been covered in flood silt when the river (my memories) had re-routed after being dammed. The Dutch boy was one of the visitors explaining to me those few years ago when I had the dream, that it would be time for me to remember. The dam would be removed, and I would be allowed to remember again; however, when released those pent up memories would come with a lot of emotion (a torrent). They were building a bridge to make crossing the river safe. In other words, I felt they were in charge of restoring my memories, bit by bit, stage by stage, especially through dreams and discussions with my family so that it would not be overwhelming but manageable. In the last phase of this same dream, I was on the hill where I currently work. Both my parents had worked there, so I grew up on that hill. I've also had other dreams where these visitors had an underground base under this hill. This was the same hill where one of the tall lanky aliens walked me up to the top to show me the white clapboard house and told me "This is yours." In the dream, I was in the band hall of one of the buildings talking with some of my father's old drama students that I remember playing with as a child. We were digging through boxes of old sheet music. In one of the files, they dug up a piece of music that one of the students there had composed. I took a look at it. It was a song. The song was sung on a single pedal tone while the chords changed around it. We decided to read it and "decode" it. I sang the line. I don't remember now the complete lyric, but I remember it was about a boy (me) searching "under the mountain." Again, in the dream I was aware and interpreted the scene: I was searching "under the mountain" (my subconscious) for lost memories of my childhood. I've also dreamed about the visitors having an underground base under that hill, so the song could be referencing trying to remember the visitors and their underground environment.

I had this dream a few years ago, and it certainly seems to have been prophetic. Since that time, I have been remembering stuff like crazy, and I think I'm supposed to. I think it's time. And I think they are helping me to remember. Why? Not sure. Just have the feeling that something is going to happen. Or perhaps like the bridge in my dream, remembering will serve as a transition to a new phase of my life. Now outward, physical confirmation of some of this stuff is happening with my family to help cement some of these memories into reality. I finally feel like some of the puzzle pieces are finally coming together, and I'm starting to see a piece of the picture. It's still incomplete, but some questions have been answered. I am feeling some sense of relief finally. I feel more calm inside. I've been having dreams again like crazy that have been bringing more puzzle pieces together. There's too many to talk about. But I am more settled as a result and am waiting for the rest of the answers to come.