anyone else here have false memories?

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i have very vivid dreams and they mess up my memories i honastly have problems knowing whether some of my memories are real are if they are memories of dreams especially when it comes to cases of past bullying some of my memories are so distorted that im rememboring additional things that were never done to me but i know they are false because they just dont make sense in terms of timelines and other reasons

yeah, it can be quite confusing

Yeah. I'll be talking to someone about something and they'll be like "when the heck did that happen?" and I'm like, "you were there!" And then a long, awkward silence ensues until I realize that, oh, it must've been a dream.

I get this a lot, especially when it comes to movies. Like for example I will watch a movie a couple of times and remember something in the movie and after years of not seeing the movie when I go to watch it again I will find that either the scene doesn't play out exactly like it does in my head or I will remember stuff that never happened in the film at all.

I also tend to have false memories about events in my childhood which when I talk about them people swear never happened. I think the human mind is probably the most unrelible thing in our body.

I have an excellent memory for places, but my concept of time is notoriously poor. I will often have precise memories of things but sometimes I will not remember when they happened. For example I may not remember if it was 2 or 3 days ago and when I talk to someone I usually just say "a while ago" and then someone will respond "that was yesterday".

I don't know if I do or not, but I'm constantly suspecting that I do.

There is no such thing as a false memory because it really happened in a parallel universe.

I have many false memories and have had them for as long as I can remember.... or at least, I think I remember (if my memories of my false memories are also false then I don't know what is real).

I don't remember more than maybe 8 different specific memories prior to age 19, I also cannot always differentiate between my dreams and actual memories, I'll be talking to my dad and out of nowhere be like, "Hey, did this happen?" and it's generally 50/50 in regards to real or not. Also, I cannot remember days, or their numbers. I generally just live by, I work this many days, I go to a movie in this many days, etc. It works well enough for me, does get confusing though.

I can't help but feel that way too. Sometimes it does kinda suck having false memories though I'm pretty good at distinguishing real from made up but the fact that a lot of them are happier than reality disturbs me. In order to not become suicidally insane I spend a lot of time lost in my own little world trying to hold onto the memories of what happens there instead of here. A lot of my real memories bother me. Most of them are filled with childhood rejection and neglect. I like my childhood memories of imaginary worlds I made up to play in when people were ignoring me or bulling me. I feel more alive in my own imagination like I'm loved and I can be myself.

Like the one where I was running a temporal physics lab, and my assistant Leonard Vincente and his girlfriend Lisa Moana stole my prototype time machine, went back about 500 years, set up housekeeping as Leonard daVinci and Mona Lisa, and disrupted the timeline such that the Temporal Physics Institute never existed and I stayed in my Engineering profession instead of pursuing my PhD?

That kind of false memory?

No I think more like the kind where you can't completely remember an event and so your mind fills in the blanks with possible outcomes. For instance I could have had mean girls in school call me ugly I'd try to forget it and think they weren't talking about me. The next day the same girls would start throwing erasers at my head. Something like that maybe, but I eventually started taking it too far, by imagining beating those girls with a baseball bat. I didn't of course but when I think about my childhood the false memory of being aggressive is more prominent than the fact that I did nothing about it because I couldn't bring myself to harm someone even if I fantasized about it. There are times when I've had to ask my parents what I was like as a kid.

Last edited by Angel_ryan on 28 Nov 2011, 11:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always imagined engineering to be fun. which is why I'd like to be one, one day.

Usually the false memories only happen to me during the twilight zone of sleeping and waking up. But sometimes the false memories are so real that I cling on to them for 30 minutes until after I wake up. If the false memories are about a job I guess I could look at my tax returns to find out if I ever worked that job.

I have them all the time so it may seem like I am lying.

Yes, and it's weird. I seem to have this memory of simply sitting at my desk at a youth group meeting and somehow I said something and everyone started visibly moving to the other side of the room. It seems so realistic for me (I mean, the "everyone moves away from me" concept has definitely happened before in the past although a bit more subtly and more predictably) but, then again, it seems so bizarre that'd it be SOOO... "obvious"/"awkward" as my memory suggests. It's almost dream-like in its kafka-esque weirdness that I can't decide if it's a dream or something that actually happened.