Unconscious re-interpretation of stories?
Lucas
Have you ever thought you remembered a book/movie/story that you saw a
few years ago, but when you examine it again you discover that one of
the parts you particularly remember NEVER happened?
I'll give an example of what I'm talking about.
The movie "Battlestar Galactica" doesn't seem, on the face of it,
something that could bring about much introspection, but bear with me
and I'll explain the circumstances.
I found an old tattered copy of "Battlestar Galactica" (the book based
on the movie) and read it. A few years later I rented the movie. I
kept waiting for the part where, after the bug queen is killed by the
cylons, the queen's grief-maddened lieutenant turns against the cylons
and helps the crew of the Galactica to escape. I was disappointed when
they didn't show that in the movie, so eventually I went back to the
book to re-read that passage.
Guess what? Not only did that not happen in the movie, it didn't
happen in the book. It just plain never happened.
I was very surprised to discover this.
Apparently I fabricated the entire scene. It seemed to make great
story sense, and perhaps it filled some emotional need I had to see the
bugs make a final act of defiance. The lieutenant didn't like the way
the cylons ordered her queen around, the cylons eventually betrayed
them, so of course the lieutenant would (in an act of revenge before
she died of injuries/grief) help the Galactica crew to escape.
It felt right. Honor, love, tragedy, revenge, it was all there,
except that it didn't really happen. The lieutenant died without
revenging her queen. Bizarre.
(I read that this is one of the marks of a writer; making a habit of
not only telling your friends how a given movie *will* end before
you've finished watching it, but also confusing them further by telling
them how it *should have* ended.)
So, has anyone else had a similar experience? Especially one where
you (without your knowledge) have mentally rewritten a story so that
animal/nonhuman figures in it took on more significance than they
really had? Possibly to the extent of (as I did) inventing entirely
new scenes in your memory for the story without realizing it?
Lucas
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Claviarm
similar...
Art Bell (Late night radio talk show host, www.artbell.com) remembers
a newspaper headline detailing an event (I forget what) which
apparently never happened. What makes this noteworthy is that some of
his listeners called in reporting that they remember the same
headline.
(Granted, this is Art Bell, and his callers can convince themselves of
anything...)
If you look at the news as the story of our lives, I suppose this
could fall under the same category.
In any case, I'm sure it's a fairly common (more so than one would
think, at least) occurrence.
Now that I think about it, I actually have experienced this
phenomenon... memories are hazy, but I definitely recall being
surprised to find one of my favorite scenes missing from a book. It
was only a few weeks ago...
--
Claviarm
The greatest gift I ever recieved
was knowledge of my own weakness.
clavi...@netzero.net
ICQ 16521227
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Allen Kitchen
Lucas wrote:
> I found an old tattered copy of "Battlestar Galactica" (the book based
> on the movie) and read it. A few years later I rented the movie. I
> kept waiting for the part where, after the bug queen is killed by the
> cylons, the queen's grief-maddened lieutenant turns against the cylons
> and helps the crew of the Galactica to escape.
Umm...
The queen's right hand aide who secretly fancied her died with
her queen. The insect race never rose up against the Cylons, and the
aide died in the queen's arms.
Soon after, the whole planet exploded as all the solinium (sp? it's been
decades) mines all ignited and exploded.
I love reviewing old SF stuff :) Boom! Blammo! Zoom! And the guy
gets the green chick by the end of the story...
Allen Kitchen (shockwave)
http://www.blkbox.com/~osprey/
Lucas
<CAE40712791C9DBE.E4055860...@lp.airnews.net>:
> The queen's right hand aide who secretly fancied her died with
> her queen. The insect race never rose up against the Cylons,
> and the aide died in the queen's arms.
I know. I had made up the entire sequence in my own head without
realizing it. It never happened.
That is the point I made in the post that started this thread. I had
been remarking on how odd it was that, for quite some time, I vividly
remembered the event completely different from how it really happened.
I think this may have been a case of something I read about in one of
Bruno Bettelheim's books about fairy tales. He said that a person
sometimes rewrites a story in his own head (without being aware of it)
to fulfill some particular emotional need he has.
I brought up the subject hoping to discover if anyone else here had
experienced something like this.
Rorschach
> So, has anyone else had a similar experience? Especially one where
> you (without your knowledge) have mentally rewritten a story so that
> animal/nonhuman figures in it took on more significance than they
> really had? Possibly to the extent of (as I did) inventing entirely
> new scenes in your memory for the story without realizing it?
A quite possibly related phenomenon that I have had and several of my
friends have had.
Doing a double take when you see a person on TV or in a movie that you
KNOW is dead. A friend of mine utterly swears that he saw an obituary
for the spooky little woman that played the psychic in the horror movie
about a little girl that gets sucked to the 'other side' ("Don't go in
to the light...", sorry I can't remember the title). Yet this women has
been in movies and I have seen her in commercials even just recently.
I can't remember who it was, but it has happened to me as well.
--
. . Rors (Rorschach)
| \ / |
|/ """ \? A simple pattern of Black and White?
//,\ /,\\ Within you can find images, reflections, maybe balance.
\ |_| / We walk a risky path: alone, yet not: whole, yet fractured.
`=' "Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling"
The Rennegadde
>
>> So, has anyone else had a similar experience?
Not with fiction, but with reality. I vividly recall beating up a bully in
grade school after he talked crap to me and shoved me for the LAST time...
...others say this never happened.
Supposedly the truth was that I took it...took it like a dog. Looking at who I
am now, I cannot see myself ever submitting to some bully, esp. since I know
everone hated him and I had way more friends.
Or did I remember that wrong too?
Bah- who cares? I was 8.
~Rennegadde
"And lo, the sky did open, and out fell the Rennegadde, to the earth plummeted
he. Heaven did not want him. The ground swiftly and eagerly swallowed him, but
shortly after did it spit him out again. Hell was afraid he'd take over."
Mooncat
news:3BDED52C...@coyotes.org...
> about a little girl that gets sucked to the 'other side' ("Don't go in
> to the light...", sorry I can't remember the title).
Zelda Rubenstein, I think her name is. She does the narration, now,
for that 'Scariest Places on Earth' tv show.
Movie was Poltergeist.
--
Mooncat ICQ-13507974 http://www.furnation.com/mooncat
"There's a face that we hide till the nighttime appears
and what's hiding inside, behind all of our fears, is our
true self, locked inside the Facade." (Jeckyll and Hyde)
Mr. Cougar
> A friend of mine utterly swears that he saw an obituary
>for the spooky little woman that played the psychic in the horror movie
>about a little girl that gets sucked to the 'other side'
If I can can recall correctly it wasnt the lil 'ol lady who died but the little
girl who kept getting sucked into the TV.
-Cougar-
===========================================================
Dont touch tigers with sticks, they just dont like it.
OnzaQueen
In a word, yes. I'm not in any state of mind at the moment to write about
anything, but it has happened to me, and not only with books and movies. It
can happen with actual events, too. Weird thing, fabrication is.
And Claviarm, you said
>Art Bell (Late night radio talk show host, www.artbell.com) remembers
>a newspaper headline detailing an event (I forget what) which
>apparently never happened. What makes this noteworthy is that some of
>his listeners called in reporting that they remember the same
>headline.
!!!!!!!!!!
>(Granted, this is Art Bell, and his callers can convince themselves of
>anything...)
This reminds me of "the Missing Phototgraph" in cryptozoology.
Cryptozoology is the search for undiscovered animal species, large ones like
ape men and lake mosnters, not tiny things like insects. Cryptozoologists vary
in their angles of study from the most unconventional to the strictly
scientific. Anyway, the Missing Photograph...
I think i first read about it in a book by Daniel Cohen (Flep, we've
talked about him!) who, btw, is quite unconventional, therefore unreliable.
Unless I fabricated this memory, he described a newspaper article decades ago
showing a large thunderbird creature that had been shot. He had searched for
the records of the photo and never found it. Yet he remembers seeing it, and
many people who he had talked to also vaguely remember it.
Accounts vary; some remember the animal in the photograph to be an
enormous bird, others remember it to be a giant pterodacdyl. Some remember
that there were several men lined up holding the dead creature, others remember
that it was nailed to the side of a barn by its wings. All remember its
astonishing wingspan. I remember hearing this Missing Photograph and its
failure to be retreived from the records described in other sources as well.
My theory is that the photo, and the creature, never existed. I can
picture it easily, but I know I have never seen it. I believe that, upon
hearing about it, many other people picture it as well, and mistake the mental
image for a vague memory of something they actually had seen. The more people
searched for it and asked people about it, the more the fabrication was planted
into the minds of others. Perhaps Daniel Cohen unintentionally started the
whole thing himself, or whoever had told it to him.
~ Onza
>~<*>=============================ooo
FDShm6asA+C-D-H-MPR+++T++WSf-RLUa19c---e+f+h+i+jpsf+
Mr. Cougar
>Unless I fabricated this memory, he described a newspaper article decades ago
>showing a large thunderbird creature that had been shot. He had searched for
>the records of the photo and never found it.
OOOooo sorta like the beast of bosnia?
*laughs*
That bad boy scares this 'ol cougar!
cat
maioued:
>Yes. I was quite suprised to discover that in 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John
>Steinbeck, no-one actually went to Venus.
>
>Similarly, I was quite sure that in 'Lord of the Rings', Gandalf rode a
>Harley, and said "Oh, fuck this" quite a lot. But I might be getting it
>mixed up with "The King of Elfland's Daughter"
>
>Indeed! For instance, in my recollection of 'Treasure Island', the main
>character is an Ocelot called Diane, and when I re-read "Sons and Lovers"
>by D.H. Lawrence, I was amazed to find no reference to the Water Buffalo
>which dominated my recolelction of the book.
>
Quick! Grab 'im. He's gone off it, again. Mating season in
Tasmania will do it every time.
cat
Elizabeth Johnson
Avenging_Lioness
--
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OnzaQueen
>>the records of the photo and never found it.
>
>OOOooo sorta like the beast of bosnia?
>
No, that photo exists. Would you like to see it again? :P
Woggle
(in message <9rkrjf$59o$1...@raccoon.fur.com>):
> Hi,
>
> Have you ever thought you remembered a book/movie/story that you saw a
> few years ago, but when you examine it again you discover that one of
> the parts you particularly remember NEVER happened?
>
Hmm, to some degree. I'm a ravenous reader, tons and tons of stuff, I
guestimate that I read more in a month than the average American reads in a
year. With that in mind, its entirely possible that my memory is off, but
sometimes I wonder. I'm of the mind that reality is defined by humanity as a
whole, what we believe is true is, so what happens if enough people's minds
are changed, or enough people are taken out of the loop?
> Lucas
>
>
>
>
--
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Woggle greyscale foxtaur and hack writer ta...@furworld.org
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"Live people usually ignore the strange and unusual, I my self am strange and
unusual."-- Lydia, Beetlejuice
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Cerulean
details. There have been studies where a group of people are shown a
series of pictures depicting situations (for instance, an embarassed
guy standing amidst spilled oranges all over the grocery floor) and
then they are told "now we're going to show you more pictures, and we
want you to tell us when you see a picture you know you remember
seeing before." There weren't really any repeats, but when they saw a
picture that could have been _implied_ by the story suggested by
another picture (like a guy about to take a orange from the bottom of
a neatly stacked pyramid), they always said they had seen that exact
picture.
There is a strong tendency for people to remember having seen things
that they "know" happened, even if they were not witnesses. Lots of
people remember the video footage for news events for which there was
no video footage. I saw an example of that in AFF today, in fact.
--
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David Formosa (aka ? the Platypus)
> The nature of memory is often very tricky that way; it fills in
> details.
The classic case of this is a woman who identified her rapest from a
photo line up. To this day she sees this mans face in her memory on
the attacker. However DNA showed that the man was innocent and the
memory had been created falsely by poor interview techneeks.
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http://dformosa.zeta.org.au/~dformosa/Spelling.html to find out more.
Free the Memes.
Claviarm
*snip the whole thing*
I think that this phenomenon can be at least partially attributable to
the human desire to relate to others. When two people concur on
something, even a trivial thing, it creates rapport. I myself have
probably subconsciously created false memories in order to agree with
someone.
All it takes is a vague glimmer of the subject--this can be a fragment
from an unrelated incident, or something made entirely from our own
imagination--for us to be able to say, "Yeah, I remember that too...
that sure is strange."
*shrug* Just something that occured to me.