It's fascinating how memory is transmuted - dreams and stories we're told can become real, even vivid, memories, while the memories of things we've actually done blend, shift, and tangle together. What a perfect memory to end the project.
The oldest real memory I have - the only one from before my little brother came along that isn't just a visual flash or a feeling - is of standing just inside the living room of the graduate-ghetto semi-detached my parents had when they first moved to Princeton, before they found the house where I would grow up. There isn't much furniture - a slim, dark dining-room set behind me; hard-wood floors; a fuzzy blue carpet; the old maroon sofa. I am clutching a teddy bear as big as I am, with a red ribbon around his neck. My father is standing on the other side of the living room, and we're about to begin a game, perhaps hide-and-seek: I can only remember the delicious tension that comes before the game.
Thanks; it was tough to choose a subject to end the LJ portion of the project with.
Lovely memory. I never saw your old house but I can picture it, and you with the enormous red-ribboned teddy bear, ready to play.
It's fascinating how memory is transmuted - dreams and stories we're told can become real, even vivid, memories, while the memories of things we've actually done blend, shift, and tangle together.It is fascinating, in a bunch of ways. Some -- I might even say most -- of my earliest memories are of dreams that are still very clear
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That's a really good question. Sometimes I wake up with such a vivid sense that I've felt exactly what it's like to touch a particular person, or to be shot in the neck (a numb, cold seizing-up, like taking in a sudden breath you can't exhale), or to be lifted off the ground by the waves of heat streaming off a raging urban fire, that I wonder whether our subconscious minds don't have some strangely accurate way of taking scraps of sensation from our actual experience and assembling "new" sensory memories. It would make sense - you know what it feels like to touch someone's jawline, you know what it feels like to cut through something resistant, so the experience your mind manufactures is probably pretty accurate, because it's a blend of those remembered sensations. But then, since I've never ACTUALLY been shot in the neck (touch wood), I have no way of knowing whether my dream about it was accurate or only persuasively vivid
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If Wild Boy is the same story they turned into the movie by Francois Truffaut, then we studied it in a Nature of Language class in high school. It was a fascinating case of the extent to which a person could acquire language that late in life. (It's hard to test something like that, since it requires isolating children from all forms of human language.) I would like to read the book some day.
And if our subconscious can recombine sensory memories to form new ones, as you've said, then what is the difference between a new dream-memory and a new real-memory other than the fact that one occurred only in our heads without our conscious control and another occurred in the external world? We could get philosophical here and go on to say that since all we know of the world is what we ourselves experience through our senses, that argument means that there is, in effect, no difference between the two (other than the people around us denying that the event happened). And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our
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Wow, and that was when you were two? Pretty impressive to have that clear a memory from that age. Although if you thought your mother had eaten something that big, I can see where it would stay with you. Lol.
Married? Does that mean you're permanently relocating to Reading? Next you'll tell me you're planning to swallow watermelons. Will be online tonight for details.
Hi Michelle! I knew Stephanie a little when we were all in London together, and now I'm back in London and I hear you're marrying a Reading boy. We'll have to look each other up sometime, as it sometimes gets tres lonely on this side of the pond!
I have pretty clear flashes from I was 2, but the first detailed one is from the day I turned three. I had this toy, little wooden, round figures that sat in a car. They were perhaps half an inch in diameter and two inches long. I tried to use them to "skate" on and fell, hit my head on the doorframe and knocked one of my front teath so it turned blue. Result was spending the day at the dentist. I lied to my mother and said I'd fallen on them since I knew she'd scold me for trying something as stupid as skating like that. To this day she believes what I told her then and I've stopped trying to convince her I lied *G*
And this has been a great experience :-) I'll be posting all of my memories in a journal entry soon.
Indeed *G* It's a really funny story, especially the part about my mother.
I hope so too. And now I will go congratulate michelle_nine since that's only fitting, even if I don't know her. Incidentally, I have made and received a mostly for fun marriage proposal yesterday *G*
michelle_nine was abroad with us in London and rescued my lonely self on many an occasion.
My earliest memory is very very early - I was probably about five months old. I was born in May, and in this memory, I'm wearing fleece pyjamas, but I wasn't yet able to sit up on my own, so I'm putting it somewhere around October, probably.
Maybe I should change your prize to "Earliest Memory"!
I remember waving up at it and batting my hand towards it, accidentally making contact with one of the pigs.Excellent -- I'm right there with you in the perspective
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Oh, THAT Michele! You know, if I have one regret about London it's that I was too zonked and stressed-out when we met in the queue outside Manson Place to fully appreciate and remember the coolness of you. We could have had such happy times ...
Instead, we sat around Boston during senior year and told each other about the things we'd done, which was fun and all, but not as cool as it could have been.
This only goes to show that you have to eventually move back here (and bring Nichole), and you and me and Catherine and Nichole will start up a Bohemian expat society and offer Sam a visa-marriage (to Catherine, as she's the only one with citizenship) to come and join us.
That wrenching sound you hear is Margaret tumbling back into reality.
I can only imagine what the three of us might have got up to that semester. I don't know if I was ready for the powah that is you at that time. But as it was, we did have a fine Easter dinner and a good trip to Leeds Castle/Canterbury. Mm, evensong.
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The oldest real memory I have - the only one from before my little brother came along that isn't just a visual flash or a feeling - is of standing just inside the living room of the graduate-ghetto semi-detached my parents had when they first moved to Princeton, before they found the house where I would grow up. There isn't much furniture - a slim, dark dining-room set behind me; hard-wood floors; a fuzzy blue carpet; the old maroon sofa. I am clutching a teddy bear as big as I am, with a red ribbon around his neck. My father is standing on the other side of the living room, and we're about to begin a game, perhaps hide-and-seek: I can only remember the delicious tension that comes before the game.
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Lovely memory. I never saw your old house but I can picture it, and you with the enormous red-ribboned teddy bear, ready to play.
It's fascinating how memory is transmuted - dreams and stories we're told can become real, even vivid, memories, while the memories of things we've actually done blend, shift, and tangle together.It is fascinating, in a bunch of ways. Some -- I might even say most -- of my earliest memories are of dreams that are still very clear ( ... )
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And if our subconscious can recombine sensory memories to form new ones, as you've said, then what is the difference between a new dream-memory and a new real-memory other than the fact that one occurred only in our heads without our conscious control and another occurred in the external world? We could get philosophical here and go on to say that since all we know of the world is what we ourselves experience through our senses, that argument means that there is, in effect, no difference between the two (other than the people around us denying that the event happened). And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our ( ... )
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Married? Does that mean you're permanently relocating to Reading? Next you'll tell me you're planning to swallow watermelons. Will be online tonight for details.
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Congratulations! :-D
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Hi Michelle! I knew Stephanie a little when we were all in London together, and now I'm back in London and I hear you're marrying a Reading boy. We'll have to look each other up sometime, as it sometimes gets tres lonely on this side of the pond!
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I have pretty clear flashes from I was 2, but the first detailed one is from the day I turned three.
I had this toy, little wooden, round figures that sat in a car. They were perhaps half an inch in diameter and two inches long. I tried to use them to "skate" on and fell, hit my head on the doorframe and knocked one of my front teath so it turned blue. Result was spending the day at the dentist.
I lied to my mother and said I'd fallen on them since I knew she'd scold me for trying something as stupid as skating like that.
To this day she believes what I told her then and I've stopped trying to convince her I lied *G*
And this has been a great experience :-) I'll be posting all of my memories in a journal entry soon.
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I'm so glad you enjoyed it too, and I hope your flist enjoys the collection when you post it to your journal.
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I hope so too. And now I will go congratulate michelle_nine since that's only fitting, even if I don't know her.
Incidentally, I have made and received a mostly for fun marriage proposal yesterday *G*
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My earliest memory is very very early - I was probably about five months old. I was born in May, and in this memory, I'm wearing fleece pyjamas, but I wasn't yet able to sit up on my own, so I'm putting it somewhere around October, probably.
Maybe I should change your prize to "Earliest Memory"!
I remember waving up at it and batting my hand towards it, accidentally making contact with one of the pigs.Excellent -- I'm right there with you in the perspective ( ... )
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Instead, we sat around Boston during senior year and told each other about the things we'd done, which was fun and all, but not as cool as it could have been.
This only goes to show that you have to eventually move back here (and bring Nichole), and you and me and Catherine and Nichole will start up a Bohemian expat society and offer Sam a visa-marriage (to Catherine, as she's the only one with citizenship) to come and join us.
That wrenching sound you hear is Margaret tumbling back into reality.
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