Suspicious Memories
Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 4:09 am
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."
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."