Earliest Memories

[stonedog2]

Wow! I'm a bee fan but.......
Kath

 

[markbellis]

Wow! I'm a bee fan but.......
Kath

Well, you have to learn about the birds and the bees sometimes...
They were engaged in action for at least an hour....I'm not sure how it actually works with bees - if the drone has anything like a penis - online it just says "penis valve" so probably they just put their abdomens together and wait for the sperm to seep across.

 

[LeapingEri]

Re: Three Half-Memories from Childhood

2. Crawling around among our strawberry plants, I very suddenly came upon one strawberry which was so much larger than normal that I darted away to mommy, crying. (Probably just a regular strawberry.)

Part of what makes some of my childhood memories seem weird now is how ordinary things like this would upset me. The world was brand new to me, so it was reasonable to think ANYTHING might happen. When I got used to established patterns in life, I didn't want to be reminded that I didn't really know what was going to happen next. So I suppose anything unusual would trigger that usually-suppressed anxiety, even a large strawberry.

 

[BuckeyeJones]

Greetings,

...so probably they just put their abdomens together and wait for the sperm to seep across.

This might explain why I never had offspring

Hornets are very aggressive, stay clear of them!

I remember when I was a child, while visiting my Grand Parents in Florida I picked up a Coral Snake :shock:
Seems I had no fears as a child.
I guess ignorance can be bliss.

PEACE!
=^..^=217

 

[amarok2005]

Upon turning around one of the flowers, I discovered a gigantic bee! In my estimation, it was at least 3 inches long. I ran away terrified and never again picked those flowers or even touched them.

Maybe it was a realistic fake bee put there to keep certain naughty children from mucking about with the flowers.

Worked, didn't it?

 

[Lottee]

Once, when I was a child (younger than 10 definitely), it was summer and I ran out to play in the garden early evening after my tea and was confronted by what I thought was a giant dragonfly - to my child's eye it looked like it was about 20cm long and in "camouflage" colours. As far as I was concerned it had chased me back down the garden path and I legged it back inside. I told my mum there was "a monster in the garden"

I was also convinced that I had seen a tarantula in our garden on another occasion (most probably just a great big ordinary spider)

 

[jouweleen]

Maybe it was a realistic fake bee put there to keep certain naughty children from mucking about with the flowers.

That is a TOTALLY brilliant insight!! You could be right about that one.

 

[_Cobh_]

I was one of those kids who was fascinated with drains, and used to spend hours poking around the grid with long sticks until my Mum scared me witless by telling me that snogs lived down grids, and they could smell children - their favourite food, and if I wasn't careful, a snog would leap up out of the grid and take me down the drain and eat me. Maybe she wasn't so graphic, but that's what I lived in dread of, though it didn't stop me poking the grid with long sticks....

Anyway, still a young child, I was taken on a trip to the wilds of Derbyshire (the Cat and Fiddle Pass) with the family, wearing a brand new pair of blue sandals that I thought were the business. We often went for walks out in the country, but hadn't ever come across the bogs of Derbyshire before, and I wandered off and suddenly my right foot started sinking into this bog.... Naturally, I was convinced this was snog territory, and that I was being sucked into the earth by the largest snog known to mankind. I screamed suitably, and the family between them managed to pull me out of the bog, but the b%$£"d kept one of my lovely blue sandals. Unforgiveable! Snogs became my mortal enemy for life, and if you doubt they exist, just watch the first Star Wars film...remember the scene in the waste disposal unit when R2 was trying to save Luke et al from being crushed? And they were also being sucked under the dirty water by what? A giant, intergalactic SNOG!

 

[_Cobh_]

Oh and there was also a snog in Lord of the Rings that came out of the sea and almost ate Frodo ..he's called The Watcher in the Water, apparently. Perhaps Tolkein had a mother like mine!

 

[nyarlathotepsub2]

I had always attributed the Watcher in the Water as a nod to H.P. Lovecraft.

 

[baracine]

Your false memories are all so lackluster, I suspect all you guys are replicants and those memories are really implants...

Seriously, try this one on for size: I have a very vivid and detailed memory of these events: I was about four years old. I was the youngest of four brothers visiting with my family at a lakeside in summer (probably Lake Magog, where we had relatives, or nearby Lake Memphremagog, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada). On the pine-covered beach, I stepped barefoot on hot charcoals that were left from a beach fire. This was afternoon and I remember the faces of strange children (not my family) looking at me in disbelief and laughing at first at my stupidity and then being worried and calling for help. My father right away took me to a motor boat in which we crossed the lake to get to an Indian reservation where the medicine man was supposed to stop the burn pain. I remember the feathered Indian man dancing in front of me and the pain going away.

My father has told me at least twice in his lifetime that THIS NEVER HAPPENED, as I never burned my feet on any beach fire and there are no Indian reservations around Lakes Magog or Memphremagog. It is possible, though, that I might have taken a motor boat ride at that time and that we have visited an Indian reservation at one time during my childhood.

 

[baracine]

Four more, two dreams and two "realities"...

I had two repeating dreams during my childhood. The foremost was the Dupont and Dupond brothers from the Adventures of Tintin driving up in their jeep to our semi-isolated house on the outskirts of Sherbrooke, Quebec (which looked like the Sahara desert in my dream) and asking that my parents surrender me. My parents oblige and I am taken away screaming, in the jeep, in broad daylight. I had gone through the Tintin books before I could read and it is possible that I saw the Thomson twins (as they're called in English, I believe) as evil. After all, they were always arresting Tintin on false charges.

Other dream: I am standing during a late summer or fall afternoon looking west on heavily sloping King Street in Sherbrooke, Quebec. I am looking at the hill on the other side of the river valley, the East side, where the sunset makes everything luminous and resplendent (including the hospital where I was born) while the West side where I am is in the shadows. There is a crowd around me looking at a giant crane on rails on the hillside (possibly where the hospital should be). It goes one way and then abrubtly the other way on a seemingly elliptical track and it is "asking" for me in some mysterious way. I hide in the crowd but I know the people will eventually surrender me. Interesting variant after we had moved to St-Lambert, Québec, across the St.Lawrence River from Montreal: The sun is setting behind Mount-Royal in Montreal, visible from the bathroom window at the end of the corridor that leads to the bedroom where I stand. Over the mountain and in the rays of the sunset a giant disembodied arm is beating a giant hammer down on a giant anvil as in the Arm & Hammer soda label.

I know the "arm" is "asking" for me in order to destroy me. After the sun has set, my brothers and I make believe we are sleeping on any piece of furniture we happen to be near in order to fool the intruder. I remember I was shocked when I saw my first film, "The Wizard of Oz", at age five, in a school hall, when the Wicked Witch circled Emerald City and spelled out "Surrender Dorothy" in smoke coming out of her broom. I felt the idea was somehow "stolen" from those last two recurring dreams.

The "real" half-memories... Our family is in a car parked in stark sunshine in front of an isolated two-story wooden house in the poorer, dustier outskirtst of Sherbrooke. It is noon in summer. My mother, in the front passenger seat (the right side), is talking to a dissheveled middle-aged housewife at her car window. Suddenly, this woman rushes back to the house as heavy smoke pours out of the house's chimney, as if she had left something burning on the stove. I feel like this is the end of the world. Everyone in my family agrees this never happened but I disagree.

I feel that on the same day, which has become ominously cloudy, we park our family car alongside many other cars on a cliff overlooking a rushing river, in order to watch something. Being little and looking head-on at the parked cars on the sloping grounds, I am convinced that the cars will slide and all fall in the river. I have a kind of dizziness and try to alert everyone to the impending disaster. I am taken away crying. I'm sure this one really happened.

 

[amarok2005]

A couple of interesting entries since my comment on the Big Bee. It pays to dig through the old reports!

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but it was one of the freakiest memories of my childhood.

Many, many years ago the Walt Disney program showed "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh," about a Robin-Hood-type played by Patrick McGoohan in a ragged Scarecrow costume. I would have been five years old at the time. I somehow got a 45 rpm record with the "Scarecrow" ballad, and if you've ever heard it, you know that the Scarecrow's laugh on the record is a loud, totally insane cackle.

Well, I was often dumped at my grandparent's place for the weekend as a kid, and during one such time my granny (we called her Mee-maw; go and figure) drove us out to visit a friend of hers in the country. Being incredibly shy, I opted to stay in the yard, where I proceeded to chase little baby chicks around.

I remember the rather plain white-washed wooden house, with a high porch you could crawl under (and where the chicks kept running). I remember the dusty country road, running downhill to flat farmland, with grain of some sort growing on either side of the road. No forest around as such, just lone trees, and small trees lining the road (where they sort of served as fenceposts, i.e., three or four posts then a tree holding the barbed wire).

Anyway, I was running back and forth after the chickies when, echoing LOUDLY down the dirt road, came a crazed, cackling laugh exactly like the Scarecrow laugh on my record! I jumped up, chicks forgotten, and scanned the area. The sound came, I was sure, from the road downslope, but there seemed to be no place for a jokester to hide.

I believe the laugh came again, because then I dashed for the porch and hid under it, peeking out between the plank steps of the short stairway at the road. (I was so painfully shy that even now I didn't want to enter the house of a stranger, even if it was Mee-maw's friend.) I lay in the cool dirt under the porch for an hour, it seemed, waiting for my gran to come out again. Needless to say, I clung to her skirts until we were in the car and gone.

I had never heard of fortean phenomena at that time; heck, I was 7 before I read C. B. Colby's STRANGELY ENOUGH, and I was astounded to learn that people seriously reported seeing ghosts. I was also a born atheist, with no belief at all in demons and devils. But that day I fully expected a scarecrow to come loping out of some field toward me!

The only explanation I ever came up with for myself was, 1) assorted other relatives and neighbors popped in and out of Mee-maw's house fairly often; 2) one of them might have lived in the house in the country (a son of Mee-maw's friend, maybe); 3) I had no doubt been playing the Scarecrow record to death and/or babbling about how great the Disney show was, so 4) hypothetical son, seeing 5-year-old Scarecrow-obsessed kid alone in the wide country yard, decided to give out a crazy Scarecrow laugh.

Still don't know where the hypothetical prankster could have been hiding, though. Sure sounded like "it" was right in the middle of the country lane.

 

[decipheringscars]

I recently found out something I always assumed was a bit of an early childhood dream I was for some reason remembering, was actually a real memory!

Nothing exciting. My memory was simply me at a table, presumably with my mom & sisters, and me looking at what seemed to me a rather creepy lady who was looking back at me. Just that little flash. But it came with the sense that it was a lady on our street where I lived until the age of 4.

So I asked my family recently when we were all together - turns out it was a real memory! My mom was confused by my description of the lady as "creepy," but my older sister described her as frail and a little unsteady - which my very young brain must've known was odd and interpreted it as "creepy."

And here I always figured it had been a dream - which would be surprising, come to think of it, since I had so many nightmares and much creepier dreams through childhood, why would that one stand out?

It does make me wonder why the particular memory I have stuck with me. I can no longer see her face very clearly - it's more of a memory of a memory. But all those years, I only had that fairly static image, no memory of her house, or any other bits of our visit (or other visits we likely also made).

The plasticity of the human mind is fascinating, though - especially when you throw dreams and memories into the mix. My sister & I who are very close often conflated each other's memories, because if one of us told the other of something that happened to us, the other could imagine it so vividly, that later we couldn't remember - did this happen to me, or to her?

 

[escargot]

Memories are not always reliable, as we have discussed on here many times.
More discussion is always nice though.

'We can implant entirely false memories'

You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past

Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine.

In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened.

Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times.

More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it.

So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby.

Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.

"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."

She has persuaded people to adopt false but plausible memories - for instance, that at the age of five or six they had the distressing experience of being lost in a shopping mall - as well as implausible ones: memories of witnessing demonic possession, or an encounter with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. ...

The idea of doctors having the power to wipe the memory clean sends shivers down many people's spines. False memories could safely be erased, perhaps, assuming there was a reliable way of differentiating them from true ones.

Although brain-imaging techniques highlight some differences in patterns of brain activation when a person recalls a true as opposed to a false memory, these are statistical differences only. "We are so far away from being able to use these techniques to reliably classify a single memory as being real or not real," says Loftus, "Yet that is what the courts have to do."

True memories, too, can get out of control and become destructive, leading to PTSD and other anxiety disorders. But they start out as an important self-defence mechanism - teaching you, for instance, that too many hard-boiled eggs are bad for you. Erasing them completely could be dangerous.

In the end, says Loftus, it will come down to personal choice. "What would you rather be in the world, sadder but wiser, all too well remembering the horrors of your past and feeling depressed, or perhaps not remembering them very much and being a little happier?"

 

[RedQueenWildBoy]

Other dream: I am standing during a late summer or fall afternoon looking west on heavily sloping King Street in Sherbrooke, Quebec. I am looking at the hill on the other side of the river valley, the East side, where the sunset makes everything luminous and resplendent (including the hospital where I was born) while the West side where I am is in the shadows. There is a crowd around me looking at a giant crane on rails on the hillside (possibly where the hospital should be). It goes one way and then abrubtly the other way on a seemingly elliptical track and it is "asking" for me in some mysterious way. I hide in the crowd but I know the people will eventually surrender me.

This reminds me of something indirectly similar: I have a memory of my mother, when I was very young, describing to someone else how she'd had a dream about a crowd of people who had gathered in the night to watch a giant crane/arm contraption. In the confusion, she realises she has lost her young children (my brother and myself, who at the time would have been around 1 and 4 years old). I remember it sounding as if this dream caused her a lot of distress, as she was always rather protective of us two.

I also recall remembering her retelling of the dream, and even picking up on the atmosphere she was describing, too. I'm sure, though, that I remember asking her to tell me about it again later on in my childhood, only to have her say she didn't know what I was talking about.

Perhaps crowds or cranes symbolise the fear of separation from close family.

 

[borubryan]

I have a distant memory of what is either a real event or a dream (I still don't have a clue which it was) from when when I was very young, I'd say under 6 or 7 years old. I recall being at a camp ground with my parents and then baby sister, and while my parents were putting the camper together, I'd wandered off down the gravel road that snaked thru the campground. As I got farther and farther down the road, there were less and less campers and tents set up and it looked like either fields or marshland on either side of the gravel road. Suddenly, I heard a load roaring noise down the road nearing me at a rapid pace. I noticed that the grass off the side of the road was flooded with brownish water and as the noise got closer I could see it was a huge truck barreling down the road. I remember falling down onto the gravel, putting my hands over my ears, and then suddenly the sunshine disappeared and I felt the truck driving over me, and smelled the heat and oil from the vehicle and got the dust from the white gravel in my nose and mouth. Just as soon as the truck appeared it was nearly out of sight flying at a great speed down that road. I got up and felt a sharp pain in my right knee and saw a little fragment of gravel got shoved into my skin and was bleeding. Oddly enough, and quite uncharacteristically of me at that age, I didn't cry or get hysterical, I just brushed some of the white dust off my shorts and shirt and walked back down the gravel road until I got back to my parents campsite. I recall my mom putting Bactine and a bandaid on the knee but also being uncharacteristically of her unconcerned as to where I'd been or how I cut my knee open. The odd thing is that I do have a scar on that knee to this day about a quarter inch long that I never can recall how it got there.

 

[PeniG]

When I was three and maybe a little bit of four, we lived in a suburb of Anchorage. Some of the roads were still unpaved, large tracts of vacant land were nearby, and a moose once wandered down our partly-unpaved street; when the quake happened, the major damage in the vicinity was to the single sidewalk. This probably happened, if it happened, when I was four, because my brother would then have been five and going to kindergarten.

The memory has the dim quality of an Alaskan autumn afternoon. I was playing, by myself, in a large tract of vacant land when I met another little girl. I don't remember how I was dressed, but she had nice clothes on, white blouse and shoes and a skirt. We played together for awhile, and then she said she would take me to see her father at school. I think she said he was the principal. I assumed there was only one school, and in that neighborhood that should have been true. She took me to a large building at the edge of the field and into a classroom where I saw a large American flag at the front of the room and a large number of children with their heads on their desks. Some grownup, presumably her father, told us we couldn't be here and should go home, so I went home. By myself.

Now, I did have a surprising amount of freedom in that neighborhood. I remember, and everyone else remembers too, that I once wandered off on my own to the end of the street, got lost, and was rescued by an older girl who, when I cried too hard to answer her, walked me to each house on the block until she met my mother coming to look for me. But I was afraid of getting lost again after that, and shouldn't have been out wandering around; nor, would you think, should I have been sent home alone after popping up in the school like that. Nor did I ever see that little girl again.

But - my brother believed me at the time. He thought I must have been to his school and said that you put your head on your desk when you were bad or when the teacher needed the classroom to be quiet. I had never been in a school at that time, but the images I got were dead-on for a new school in the early 60s. If I'm right that my little girl said her father was the principal, that would weigh in the "true" side, too, because I didn't know what a principal was. But I might have confabulated that afterward.

Nobody else remembers me talking about this now, but that doesn't signify, because I'm always remembering things other people don't, and being able to prove them, too. Most people forget things because they're not paying attention. I pay attention, so I remember things for years. I also learned the difference between "dream" and "real" early on; I remember the dreams that helped me sort it out. The quality of memory on this one is "real," not "dream."

But there's no denying that I confabulate. And the dreams that helped me sort it out occurred after this incident, after we transferred to a different base but before I started kindergarten myself. So I don't know what happened. I wonder if there's someone in Alaska right now, remembering the little girl she met in a field, took to see her father, and never saw again?

 

[EnolaGaia]

I can remember a variety of isolated scenes from baby-hood (being swaddled in my baby blanket; my crib; being carried). By the time I was maybe 3 the memory 'record' becomes more continuous.

My earliest demonstrable memory is the following ...

I remembered being carried into a bedroom in which there was an imposing dark antique bed. In the bed was a large old man with a thick handlebar moustache, sitting up. There was a large cane leaning against the bed. As I was carried into the room the old man began smiling broadly and reached out for me. He took me and hugged me close.

Sometime during my teen years this memory resurfaced for the umpteenth time, and I decided to ask my mother about it. I noted that the bed looked like a particular family heirloom (then used by my grandfather), and that I was confident the bedroom was a certain one in a nearby uncle's house.

She told me she knew what I was talking about, but also that I couldn't possibly remember it. She searched out an old photograph I'd never seen before, in which the same old gentleman (complete with the big old cane) appeared. The old man was my great-grandfather, who'd died when I was 1.5 years old. His final residence had been at the aforementioned uncle's home, and he stayed in the very bedroom I'd identified.

 

[shiner]

I recounted a memory to my mother, she was really shocked and as it was just her and I there and she confirmed I recounted everything 100% accurately.

I was about 16-18 months old and mother was ironing. I kept wanting to touch the flat metal plate of the iron, thinking it was cool (no flames therefore not hot). I kept on reaching right up for it as it was perched on the ironing board and being told, no - it's HOT. Mother turned away briefly to do something and I took advantage of the lapse of attention and put the palm of my hand straight onto the iron... and promptly screamed the house down in agony! I also remember my pushchair, a wooden bead necklace, certain clothes, playschool, yellow potty, being in a cot, wearing rubber pants & terry nappy and the height of objects (things like furtniture and the ironing board which towered above me, but is really hip-height. I still have the same board!) all from around the same age.

 

[CHIPMUNK1974]

I have a very strong recollection of standing in my cot crying and my sister opening my bedroom door and telling me to be quiet! I can picture the room like it was yesterday. My cot was along the wall with the door at the end and it was painted purple (I was a child of the 70's so you can forgive my parents for that).

I must have been under 2 years old at the time and my sister is 10 years older that me.

I also remember standing in the kitchen with my Grandma, who died when I was 3 years old. I was standing on a chair helping her wash the dishes.

Love this thread by the way. Some of these stories are great.

 

[poozler]

I'm impressed by people who remember things from when they were babies. I've never had a really REALLY early memory. One woman told me that it was IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to remember things from before they were 4 or 5. I disagree, even though that is probably when I had my earliest memory

My very earliest memory was as follows. My older sisters were being taken to see the new movie Toby Tyler (released in the US 1960, but I doubt I was THAT young--it was probably released later in Canada). I was not permitted to go because I was too young. I remember standing at the picture window with my grandmother, crying and waving goodbye to my sisters and my mother as they set happily off in the car.

I still remind them of this occasionally, but noone acts terribly guilty.

The other early memory, about the same time, was genuinely unpleasant. My father had died shortly after I was born and I have no memory of him. My middle sister (a year older) found out one day that on the day in question it was my father's birthday. She stood at the top of the stairs and sang happy birthday to him. I remember my mother crying and telling her to stop and my sister just singing at the top of her lungs. I cried and screamed at her to stop, too. I have reminded my sister of this but she claims not to remember.

(You will notice a crying theme here.)

 

[MsQkxyz]

^Aw, sad

I have heaps of early childhood memories including from when I was a baby and beyond 8) I can remember nappy changes and not being able to lift my head. I was sitting up by 5 months of age so this must have been before then. I also remember hating being bathed in tepid water which was the style of the time. I was small enough still be be placed on my mums forearm with my head in her hand after the bath in order to have my hair washed and I remember screaming at having that bloody tepid water poured over my head after the horrible experience of being placed in barely warm water to gegin with! I remember knowing that the hair washing came next too.
My mum was really upset when I told her a couple of decades later! I still hate water that is anything less than hot on my skin to this day!

 

[sherbetbizarre]

‘Shrooms Prove Previous Lives

Don’t try this at home! Researchers in Boston have been conducting controlled experiments using volunteers and the fairy-tail red and white mushroom, the Fly Agaric.

Given in small quantities, many of those interviewed experienced memories they had forgotten about, usually associated with their early childhood. Playground incidents, seeing a steam train for the first time, a Christmas unwrapping… Many of those interviewed swore that these were genuine memories unlocked by the ‘shroom.

The next stage of the experiment was to increase the amount of the mushroom given to the volunteers. This had to be undertaken under strict medical supervision because too much Fly Agaric and the mouth and throat could become numb, and close due to anaphalactic shock. A proportion of those who had the higher dose of mushroom reported memories that were not of their childhood, and were not of their existing lives at all. They wrote down what they had “remembered” and were then interviewed by psycho-analysts to test the veracity of their memories. They all appeared to be genuine and not manufactured.

Researchers are preparing a report to publish but have already claimed that the mushroom has unlocked memories of previous existences that were locked and retained in some immortal part of the soul- it could not be the brain because the brain and body dies and rots. However the theory is that like a cloud-based IT application, upon being re-born, your characteristics from previous lives are re-loaded into your body as you develop in the womb. However the memories from previous lives are not normally accessible and are screened out. But the Fly Agaric mushroom stimulates a small part of the brain where these past-life memories are normally concealed.

Could this be evidence that we are immortal and have lived previous lives? The research is being peer-reviewed before publishing, and a number of volunteers are repeating the experiment to confirm the results.

But don’t try this yourselves. The Fly Agaric is a poisonous mushroom, and this experiment was conducted under strictly controlled medical conditions.

http://www.noeticscience.co.uk/shrooms- ... qZ1Zd.gbpl

 

[escargot]

How fascinating! I'm not convinced though.

One notices for a start the statement that

Many of those interviewed swore that these were genuine memories unlocked by the ‘shroom.

Many? How many?

More interestingly, what did the rest say? They said their 'shroom-elicited memories were false. How could they tell? Were the 'memories' just too bizarre to be real, or did the subjects dismiss everything they 'remembered' while under the influence as false?

To the subjects who did believe they'd remembered incidents - even if the incidents were hallucinations - it was all real. That's how memory works. It is unreliable. The only way a subject could be sure a memory wasn't real would be if it were clearly impossible, as when they unwrapped a real gun at xmas or saw the steam train flying above them.

This applies to both types of memories evoked by the 'shrooms, i.e. the normal ones (with the steam trains and gift unwrapping) and the 'past lives' ones.

Without verifying the normal memories externally, e.g. by interviewing a subject's mother to ask if the subject really did receive that particular gift or wave at that train, we can't be sure how reliable the normal memories are, never mind the 'past lives' ones, and I don't see any triangulation going on here.

Source of cynicism about research methods and findings: MA in criminology research.

 

[dream_decoder]

I have a brief memory from when I was very young, I'm not sure why it has stayed with me for so long but it replays like a loop as I unsuccessfully try to extract more data.
I'm in a drab hotel room with my parents, I can see the sea out of the window, I have an 'Action Man Armoured Car Radio' (circa 1968) which I am using as a pretend walkie talkie. Then I'm in, what I have always believed to be, a show on a pier; Sooty and Sweep are singing Happy Birthday to me, I recall reading Sooty's name on the stage, which is miles away, I am overjoyed.
I think I was about 3, I'd love to unlock more.

 

[bugmum]

There are a couple of early memories that I can retrieve, although not baby-early. One is being in my grandparents' kitchen in Northampton, with a birthday cake being put in front of me. The cake had a couple of little china hedgehogs on it, which later lived in our dolls' house - I thought they were mine, from my third birthday, but my sister swore they were hers. Perhaps the birthday cake was actually for my sister, although the quality of the light that I recall would suggest not - her birthday is March, mine is May, and the light seemed more summery. My grandparents were rehoused in a different part of Northampton when I was maybe 4 to 5, so it's definitely a contender for 'oldest'.

The other memory is being woken up to go on holiday; in the 70s my parents would take a house in Guernsey, so we would drive from Peterborough to one of the south coast ports to catch the ferry across. I remember that it was still dark; our living room light was on but the dining room behind it was pitch black. My mother was dressing me in one of those pettikilts - a kilted skirt attached to a vest - with a jumper on top. Then I was eating something at our dining room table, still in the dark, whilst my parents finished packing in the living room. Finally I was in our car - my dad liked Austin Maxis back then - with the back seat down, and being covered with a blanket and told to go to sleep. I could see the stars through the back window, so it must have been very early. Based on the pettikilt, I reckon I was no older than 4 at the time.

 

[Jepra Peld]

I think my earliest memory is of my friend falling out of her pushchair, making a silly noise and getting a sticking plaster on her knee. I remember finding the noise she made quite funny. We were on holiday or a day trip at the time and there is a photograph taken shortly after which shows us both in our pushchairs and my friend is looking miserable and has a plaster on her knee. It's dated a month before my third birthday. I now wonder if I had seen the picture first and filled in the gaps and the memory isn't real.
My earliest memory not associated with a picture is of being in my high chair and my mum giving me a bowl of tinned fruit to eat and I stuck my hand in it and cried because my hand was now wet and cold.

 

[pandacracker]

I have a memory of lying on my back, looking up at my mother's face while, on the left, a wall of green (privet hedge) moves past. I interpret this to be me being pushed in the pram The feelings attached to this memory are fascination with the moving wall of green and that my mother didn't like me (this may be a later projection)

For a couple of years my parents fostered two mixed race boys (they were brothers). I have a memory of my mother shouting at the elder of my foster brothers, accusing him of breaking a milk bottle outside the front door and him sobbing saying "I didn't Aunty, I didn't" ( he was a bit of a tearaway) I would have been between 2 to 4 yrs old.

The elder foster brother would have been about 8 or 9 and my mother often told a tale of how he would come and, although I was a big baby, lift me out of my cot (where I had been standing 'asking' to be taken out) She'd hear him call "I've got him Aunty, I've got him" and he'd stand proudly at the top of the steep stairs, awkwardly holding me, my mother terrified that we'd both come tumbling down.

I have no memory of this myself but wonder if my attraction to dark skin/hair/ eyes is due to this experience of a need being met by someone mixed race.

 

[Moth Twiceborn]

My father left home when I was 18 months old, and I have two memories of him. One where he had set up a circular trainset on a plain chipboard and was running it around as I watched. The second was opening 'his' drawer in a chest of drawers (feeling trepidation because I wasn't supposed to look in there) and finding... half a packet of Tunes.