Memory ….is such a fragile thing…Longer we have come to the present moment, thinner the line of the memory became….then I am not even sure if it happened in reality, or just i was dreaming about it…or my brain has manipulated me conveniently…
my first memory….is just sounds and pictures….i can see only the old wooden framed window. and there is the noise that old window makes. I guess it was in winter. there are some traces of snow on the window. then cracks and sounds.
this is the earliest memory I could remember. I guess I was not even 2 years old since my parents moved to newly renovated house by the time I reached three years old.
But is it true that i was living in such a place???…not sure anymore….or do i really have this memory?…Or my mother talked about it and my brain took as my memory???? dont know….
5th year of me staying in London, my father finally decided to visit me there. Then one of the sightseeing days, I took him to the British Museum which was refurbished recently at that time. As soon as he entered the library which was designed in a circle with full of collective valuable books, he said in amazement.
“This is the place I dreamt when I was a boy! This is the place!.I was only 6 years old when I had this dream. But I still remember, and time to time I was thinking where it could be! This is the place. and This is the reason. ”
It cant be just the manipulated memory since the plan of the library was not even planned when he was young. And the layout of the library is not the usual one.
Since that day every morning (till him leaving London), he walked from the hotel at Baker street to the British Museum. (if you know the map of London, its not a short walk, not even pleasant!!)…I wonder what he has been thinking about with these walks…
Is there any strong connection between my father and the library? I wonder if it was just a key for him to trace back to his memory as a boy???
Mayuko
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My first memory is a long, connected series of dreams- so intense that they most likely wiped out all of the memories beforehand. I was 3 years old.Well, it starts off in a field in front of a large brick house. I am led to believe that my grandmother lives there, yet I cannot be sure because from the outside, this house looks as if it is on the shore of a teeming ocean of horror- not standard horror- but horror that for me has come in the form of textures and slow noises ever since this dream.
Inside this house, my mom and my little brother (and me of course) are led into a large white auditorium which, instead of seats, houses small, faceless ice-cherubs playing with small white balls. At the very end is a large white bed with a polar bear skin on it, and we stay there at th head of the room for awhile, just staring at them.
I am then walking down the front stairs of this house, and the walls are covered with some sort of red, gilded ‘design’. To my right is a large glass case built into the wall, with lion figurines in it. There is a volcano, and I press a red button to make it spout on the lions. It is mirrored; reflected. The lions appear to be covered in lava millions of times over. They melt.
Across the hall is a place I know about immediately, yet both dread and look forward to entering- it’s a secret room with no door that only I can go through- in it is nothing but a small table with my Aunt Connie seated at it, and rows and rows of large, talking rubber plants. My aunt appears very lonely, and I feel as if I could sit at that table with her, but I can’t. There is one chair, and while I feel somewhat capable in this room, the rubber plants scare me. I leave this room knowing i have been irrecoverably changed; in essence, a microcosm of the entire dream. Continue reading ‘My first memory is a long, connected series of dreams’
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I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html A quote from there:
…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.
What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’
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This is my first memory. If I close my eyes, it’s like it happened yesterday.
I was in the 1st grade and found a little bird on the asphalt under a tree. It was all translucent and pink with darker spots where the eyes were. Its little body was trembling and I could see that it needed help. I picked it up and put it in a napkin and carried it carefully to the nurse’s office at school because I thought that she would be able to help it.
I explained to her what I had found and she extended her hand to take it from me. Then she tossed it right in the trash beside her. I peered in over the rim of the container to see it’s little body lying there. And back up at her face that met my gaze, and then dismissed me. My mind was reeling. She didn’t care and she didn’t even bother to conceal it from me. I knew that she would not let me retrieve it from the trash either. I remember walking away very slowly wondering if she had just thought that it was just too small to save.
I also remember wondering if she would think I would be too small to save if I got hurt.
goofyfish
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