Some time ago, in discussing alleged UFO abductions, I mentioned that so-called abductees have false memories — reminiscences of things that never happened — but I alleged that all people have them.
The psychologists won’t go that far. They say that there are usually two kinds of false memories: those put together by “fantabulators,” personality types who can’t distinguish fantasy from reality; and screen memories.
Screen memories are pleasing remembrances that replace the memories of traumatic episodes. They “screen out” the traumatic memories, which might be too painful to contemplate.
Writer Whitley Strieber claimed to have been abducted by space aliens and to have a screen memory of being on the University of Texas campus in Austin and running for cover when Charles Whitman began his killing spree, shooting people from a tower on campus. He later discovered that the memory wasn’t factual and assumed that it was a screen memory, replacing a memory of alien abduction.
But wouldn’t that “screen memory” have been as traumatic as any memory of an abduction? Surely a screen memory would have been more pleasant.
I have what I think is a better explanation, utilizing Occam’s Razor, a rule of logic that states, in layman’s terms, that whenever there are two or more explanations for a phenomenon, you should believe the simplest one.
First, I won’t deny that there are fantabulators out there. But in terms of people who “fantabulate” all the time (as opposed to most of us, who fantabulate only about episodes that are very important to them), I believe that they are few and that they are mostly identifiable as mentally disturbed.
Also, there must be screen memories. But they are usually available only to those who have been severely traumatized in childhood.
The vast majority of false memories, however, are from early childhood — a time when all of us are fantabulators. Any parent knows how fast a teddy bear can become a real bear in a child’s mind. Very young children have a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and particularly between episodes in real life and those that occur in dreams. I think most false memories have come to us as dreams in early childhood.
Since dreams are made up of fragments of waking experiences, that’s why the false memories nag at us: They have the veneer of reality — but like almost all dreams, there is something about them, some violation of the rules of logic or common sense, that just doesn’t hang together. Dream logic is the twisted logic of the small child who lingers inside all of us.
That’s also why children are notoriously undependable as witnesses in criminal cases (e.g., the Little Rascals Day Care trials) — and why “recovered” memories of child abuse and other crimes committed by parents are also unreliable. They may have been dreamed, or otherwise fantasized, in childhood, and attained the status of “real” memories with the passage of time.
The one case of recovered memory with which I am familiar involved the murder of a woman’s father by her mother. But the memory wasn’t really “recovered.” It was always there, but the woman had long suppressed it, fearing retribution from her mother if she should ever tell.
We are all fantabulators, re-creating our lives to put the most self-favorable spin on episodes that are vitally important to us. Read Erving F. Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” a classic book by a practicing psychologist, for examples. But only the most disturbed among us — schizophrenics, extremely paranoid people and those with severe bipolar conditions — are fantabulators about everyday things and have screen memories. These people are the ones we point to when we say “insane.”
Contact Clark Cox at 693-2478 or via e-mail at ccox@thepilot.com.
