Of course, maybe I just remember the memory me replaying the memory to myself. Is there a meaningful difference even? Maybe all our memories after some time become blended with our re-narrating them and re-interpreting them.
There's no meaningful difference on how you experience it as "real" even if its just a "re-enaction" of such reality, but it might help explain why so many humans remember things from their past slightly differently than they actually happened.
This can also serve as a trauma-recovery mechanism, allowing one to not remember stuff too traumatizing etc, the brain blocks it out or rewrites it as a dream, or whatever
I do remember a dog sticker from my crib. I know this because when I was 10, I visited a faraway aunt and asked my dad about the sticker on their bathroom wall. "I have seen this one before! Where did I see it?" He said they both bought a sticker pack when I was just born, and she put it in her bathroom and he put it on my bed.
I remember an absurd amount of things from 3 onwards, like not liking it how I was occasionally the last one to be picked up from Kindergarten, or that there were two parallel glass tunnels connecting buildings in my kindergarten, and I always wondered how to get to the other one (it was just for staff).
I do remember the first time I got brought to kindergarten, and how later I wished to go on my own and my mother was against it.
I do remember being told by my dad that I will lose most of my memories of this age, and it made me sad: how can I just erase all these wonderful memories of my friends and all the toys and things we have here? I wished for my last birthday, as I was turning towards 6, be remembered by me like it is, for the rest of my life.
I remember the way to my kindergarten from the flat we lived in, I remember the layout of the place, I remember a lot of the toys, I remember a climbing rack, I remember the carpets and other floor covering, I remember every room, including the long table they set up for birthdays with you sitting on one end.
All rooms are empty of people. I don't remember a single face.
I told my mom about it decades ago, and she said there was a clown that jumped over the fence. Then I spent the rest of the party running around the house holding the balloons.
There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.
I kinda suspect this is true for a lot of people, but since memories aren't time-stamped, they don't realize how early they are.
If there was a helicopter in the movie, then we can confidently exclude Saving Private Ryan.
That must've been traumatic! He's lucky to have survived this! Oh, the helicopter was in the film? Perhaps choose a different idiom...
I hope that English is not the native tongue of this blogger, because its poor writing quality (as a "blog carnival" entry, no less!) makes me pine for polished LLM-speak!
Remember how "grammar flames" and "grammar nazis" used to be extremely rude, but by the same token, many literate/educated people cannot stand to see writing like this, because of the way it grates on our nerves, and bogs down our cognition trying to understand what the hell ideas this person is trying to convey.
Elegant writing and good grammar are simply table stakes now in the age of LLMs, although I could also understand that there is a certain deliberate regression to these sorts of amateur "mistakes" just to try and "prove" we're not using LLM assistance!
I visited places I lived in the past and it feels like a place somebody else lived, who were close to me, but still not "me".