So one time, I was on a bus and this guy next to me was very bored and said "When the bell rings, the time will be 10:30 am...DING!", "When the bell rings, the time will be 10:31 am...DING!", in a robotic voice.
At first I was confused. I didn't know what he was talking about. Then I stared at him and I could just feel a wave of nostalgia. A very distant memory almost forgotten came back. I'm 7 years old, bored at home with nothing to do pre-internet. I call a landline number that has a service that tells you the time and just listen in... that's exactly what the telephone lady would say. OMG he's imitating the landline time service lol
It felt very satisfying too. It's like a eureka moment but for memory rather than thought.
I recently found a candle that smells just like my childhood friend's house. Instantly took me back to playing SNES emulators and staying over for dinner.
I can still remember the smell of the gravel paths in my gradparent's garden when it was raining. Oddly specific memory, innit? No other smells that I "remember".
When my grandfather died 25 years ago I snagged his bottle of cologne when we cleaned out his house. Every now and then I pull out that bottle and it’s like being whooshed backwards through time and space.
I have a small candy tin that i brought around to keep small toys when we travelled across countries with my family. Every couple or so years I open it and it still smells of strawberry after 15+ years, and I immediately run through my childhood travels
Not exactly memories but dreams. Sometimes I'll have the same exact nonsense dreams I've had years ago. Other times I'll randomly remember those dreams when I'm wide awake. But the thing is that I never remember what they're about!
all the time, and some pretty amazing stuff too. like the time i was 16 and went with a friend to grab some weed—at a biker house. one of the bikers asked me if id read “the satanic bible” and i said no. so he picked it up from the coffee table and said here, check it out. i read some. he asked what i thought. “it looks more like “the materialist bible to me” i said, mentally kickin* myself as i said it. shit, is he gonna get mad? i remembered thinking. fortunately, he just laughed. i was dying to leave, which we did not long after.
i had totally forgotten this till one day it just popped into my head.
I did. At one point, i was determined to find the name of this weird xbox era game where your MC learns magic and travels through time, becoming old and crusty along the way.
I did at one point find it, and made a mental note to emulate it, but now its lost again... Maybe I'll find it again, who knows.
Hey hey, I found it again! The game was "Nightcaster: Defeat the Darkness". Looking over the summary on wikipedia, I think why I always had trouble finding it was because the timetravel situation is more of a suspended animation sort of thing, rather than explicit time travel.
Happens fairly often to me with very specific smells. I’ll get a whiff of something and it will smell familiar but it’ll confuse me for like an hour, and then all of a sudden I’ll remember what it’s from
Often yes, it's (partially) how repressed memories work. And yes, those are real, it's similar to why doctors always mention amnesiacs from accidents recovering memories little by little (usually takes a week, the mind is amazing). On the downside, it's the main reason why, when describing past events, I've noticed something I mention about my past might say one thing while another thing I've said elsewhere seems to have the potential to indirectly challenge that, because the pedantic aspects (not the memories themselves) shift.
"Repressed" memories aren't a thing. I would suggest that you read up on the body of work by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. On the other hand, people forget thing, and certain things--smells, sounds--can trigger those memories. But these aren't deeply traumatic memories that your unconscious mind is repressing to protect you, you're just forgetting things.
Dr. Loftus has also authored a number of papers about the formation of false memories, and how people can be led to believe that they remember things that are absolutely, 100% false. Almost all of the cases of "repressed" memories from the 70s-90s, particularly during the Satanic Panic, are actually false memories created by the person asking questions. Unfortunately, much like the nonsense idea of multiple personalities, it's one of those alluring concepts that simply won't die, even among clinicians, despite the dearth of supporting evidence.
Interestingly, every time you recall a memory, it's wiped out, and then has to be re-encoded. So recalling and rehearsing a memory makes it more likely that details will change and be lost. Even things that should be hugely significant--like where you were on 11 September 2001 (...for the people in their 30s and older...)--often get misremembered, and sometimes very strikingly.
I didn't mean it in the trauma sense if that's what you meant, just that people can have memories that are unusable some days and vivid the next, with a few causes possibly at play.
I suggest you read up on dissociative disorders. "Multiple personalities" is absolutely a thing, it just doesn't match the sensationalized portrayals found in popular media. These disorders (and non-pathological plurality as well) can feature "repressed memories" in the sense that members of a system may not have access to memories that are held by other members. In fact, the experience of "lost time" is a common indicator of plurality.
The fact that memories can be falsely implanted, and often were during a particular period of media-induced mass panic, is not proof that memories can't also be repressed.
I have an online journal that predates Facebook and other conventional social media, it's abandoned now but the account still sits there. It was the free therapy of the early aughts. Anyway I read it over recently; I consider myself a person with a really very good memory, I even have some memories from toddlerhood, but there's some serious trauma shit that I forgot about.
My unusual associations that bring up memories from the most random things (because this happens all the time to me) is one of the reasons I sought a doctor to diagnose any mental illnesses I might have had. Turns out I'm on the spectrum. 😩