Or maybe your parents were playing a joke on you? Adults do lie to children - I know only too well, after asking a pro-Basketball player how he got so tall... he paused and then picked up a coconut ring biscuit (as we were next to a table with coffee and biscuits etc.) and said "I eat LOTS of these!". Now, my parents would have realised that this was a joke, but I didn't (I was only 7 at the time!)... I must have eaten 20 packs of coconut rings before I realised that he had lied to me
I used to have some things I couldn't explain, but am now convinced that these memories were not of real events but were actually memories of dreams... but perhaps the most clear example of this was from when my sister and I were talking about our school days with our Mum one night. I recalled a traumatic experience when a car screetched to a halt beside me, and I thought I was going to be kidnapped - I ran home (only about 200 yards away!) and the car sped off. My Dad promptly jumped in his car and chased them, and confronted them about what they were doing... it turned out they were just a bunch of teenage lads asking for directions
My Mum and Dad comforted me anyway, but now it is a particularly funny story that we all remember clearly!
This prompted my sister to recall a traumatic episode from her childhood, when a lorry deliberately mounted the pavement and tried to knock her off her bike
Similarly, she arrived home in floods of tears and in a total panic... the only difference is, no-one else has any recollection of that ever happening. Bemused and a little put out by this, my sister said, "How can you not remember
that?", to which my Mum replied, somewhat bluntly "If that had actually happened, I'm pretty sure I would remember it!". I don't remember it either, but then again, I may not have even known about it even if it had happened. There are two possible explanations here: 1) My Mum's memory of the event has disappeared or 2) My sister's memory of the event is false... but either way, someone's memory is incorrect. But given that my Mum can seemingly (still) remember the most minute of details, and that I know for a fact that children (including myself) can form false memories (even false memories regarding real events), then I am inclined to believe my Mum is not losing her marbles and that this incident never occured. There is also the small fact that what my sister describes is effectively the attempted murder of a little girl!
What has become increasingly apparent over the years is that some of my earliest memories are clearly not "real", but cobbled together from joint recollections, or even simply from old photographs etc. My hunch is that my sister's "memory" of this traumatic event is a mixture of a real memory of a similar event (i.e. my "kidnap" trauma) and a real memory/anxiety of those big trucks that used to deliver soft drinks on our estate and really did pose an extra risk to children on their bikes, but embellished and expanded by her imagination (possibly as a dream) to form a sincerely held belief that someone really did try to kill her when she was a child...
